Art: Three Degrees of Psychoanalytic Involvement

What follows is the substance of a paper Nuccia and I wrote as third-year undergraduates at the University of Milan, Italy. Nuccia was my first wife, and I lost her twelve years ago. So this is, of course, homage to her; but I would not have published it for that reason only. Another reason is that, in the years since, I have not seen anything as clear or concise on the issue, or providing as good a compass for orienting oneself within a messy landscape. Therefore, I offer it for general edification, and, true to its original spirit, I will keep it brief. -Ermanno

A first degree of psychoanalytic involvement with art is with the content of an artistic work. A good example of it comes from Freud’s formative years, when he was (by his admission) engaged in self-analysis and discovering the importance of dreams. In a letter to Wilhelm Fliess of October 15, 1897, after sketching the relevance of the Oedipus complex to his own case and pointing out that “[i]f this is so, we can understand the gripping power of Oedipus Rex” (272),1placeholder he goes on to extend his comments to Hamlet:

“Fleetingly the thought passed through my head that the same thing might be at the bottom of Hamlet as well. I am not thinking of Shakespeare’s conscious intention, but believe, rather, that a real event stimulated the poet to his representation, in that his unconscious understood the unconscious of his hero. How does Hamlet the hysteric justify his words, ‘Thus conscience does make cowards of us all’? How does he explain his irresolution in avenging his father by the murder of his uncle—the same man who sends his courtiers to their death without a scruple and who is positively precipitate in murdering Laertes? [Actually, it’s Polonius, not Laertes.] How better than through the torment he suffers from the obscure memory that he himself had contemplated the same deed against his father out of passion for his mother […]? His conscience is his unconscious sense of guilt. […] And does he not in the end […] bring down punishment on himself by suffering the same fate as his father of being poisoned by the same rival?” (272-273)2placeholder

Because what I am doing is raising issues internal to psychoanalysis, I will not discuss any criticisms of this interpretation, or of any other put forward hereafter. I will focus, rather, on asking one question: how much does the interpretation (assuming it, for present purposes, to be correct) help in understanding Hamlet? The answer is: it can explain its “gripping power,” insofar as the reader or spectator resonates with an unconscious (gripping) content he can also feel within himself; but has nothing to say about the specific artistic qualities of Shakespeare’s play. The same resonance, and the same power, can be at work in Oedipus Rex, in movies about Superman (I hear that he too has an Oedipus complex), and in countless other trifles in popular culture. The involvement of psychoanalysis with art, in this first degree of it, is at the level of a superficial association: it just so happens that something is true of a great work of art that is also true of a zillion other products that are not art at all—great or otherwise.

In moving to the second degree, let us look at Freud’s 1910 Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood.3placeholder Here he begins by detailing a number of the artist’s character traits; the following are illustrations.

“[In Leonardo] it is possible to observe a quite extraordinary profundity, a wealth of possibilities between which a decision can only be reached with hesitation, demands which can hardly be satisfied, and an inhibition in the actual execution which is not in fact to be explained even by the artist inevitably falling short of his ideal. The slowness which had all along been conspicuous in Leonardo’s work is seen to be a symptom of this inhibition and to be the forerunner of his subsequent withdrawal from painting. (68)

“Still constantly following the lead given by the requirements of his painting he was then driven to investigate the painter’s subjects, animals and plants, and the proportions of the human body, and, passing from their exterior, to proceed to gain a knowledge of their internal structure and their vital functions, which indeed also find expression in their appearance and have a claim to be depicted in art. […] Then, when he made the attempt to return from investigation to his starting point, the exercise of his art, he found himself disturbed by the new direction of his interests and the changed nature of his mental activity. What interested him in a picture was above all a problem; and behind the first one he saw countless other problems arising, just as he used to in his endless and inexhaustible investigation of nature. He was no longer able to limit his demands, to see the work of art in isolation and to tear it from the wide context to which he knew it belonged. After the most exhausting efforts to bring to expression in it everything which was connected with it in his thoughts, he was forced to abandon it in an unfinished state or to declare that it was incomplete.” (76-77)

How are these oddities to be understood? The key, according to Freud, is to be found in a childhood memory reported in the Codex Atlanticus:

“It seems that I was always destined to be so deeply concerned with vultures; for I recall as one of my very earliest memories that while I was in my cradle a vulture came down to me, and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me many times with its tail against my lips.” (82)

Based on this slender piece of data, Freud goes on to argue that Leonardo had developed as a kind of repressed passive homosexual, who tried forever to replicate the happy relation he had with his mother:

“[H]is mother and his pupils, the likenesses of his own boyish beauty, had been his sexual objects—so far as the sexual repression which dominated his nature allows us so to describe them.” (106)

On top of that, there was an identification with his father, also caused by the Oedipus complex (“No one who as a child desires his mother can escape wanting to put himself in his father’s place, can fail to identify himself with him in his imagination,” 120), with dire consequences for his relation to his own work:

“There is no doubt that the creative artist feels towards his works like a father. The effect which Leonardo’s identification with his father had on his paintings was a fateful one. He created them and then cared no more about them, just as his father had not cared about him.” (121)

Consistently with the attitude I have adopted here, I will gloss over the fact that Freud was victim of a mistaken translation: the “nibbio” of the original Italian had been rendered in German by “Geier” (vulture) whereas in fact it means “kite”; hence all his further speculations about the significance of vultures in ancient Egypt are misguided. My point is rather: how many repressive passive homosexuals are there who do not develop into anything close to Leonardo? Once again, we are facing a superficial association, often exploited in films about great artists or writers: they provide dramatic enactments of their characters’ various travails, which are only interesting because we take those characters to be great in the first place—they do nothing to explain their greatness, or the quality of any of their works. I cannot deny that, if someone is already fond of Leonardo, she might want to explore the twists and turns of his personality, but this has nothing directly to do with (his) art.

For the third degree of involvement we turn to Freud’s 1905 Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.4placeholder About halfway in the book, we read:

“All through our consideration of the techniques of jokes we have been disturbed by the fact that they were not proper to jokes only; and yet the essence of jokes seemed to depend on them, since when they were got rid of by reduction the characteristics and the pleasure of the joke were lost.” (130)

One joke technique is double meaning, as in: “I wondered why the baseball was getting bigger. Then it hit me.” In and by itself, double meaning has nothing funny about it. When Aldoux Huxley says, in Brave New World, that men scamper “from girl to pneumatic girl,”5placeholder “pneumatic” means both “voluptuous” and “full of air”; but that is no joke—if anything, it is social criticism. And yet, if we took the double meaning away from the earlier joke—if we said, for example “I wondered why I was seeing the baseball bigger and bigger. Then I got pummeled by it”—we would get a serious description of an accident, and no laughable matter.

Freud feels now that he can resolve his problem:

“We now see that what we have described as the techniques of jokes […] are rather the sources from which jokes provide pleasure; and we feel that there is nothing strange in other procedures drawing from the same sources for the same end.” (ibid.)

The compression realized by Huxley with the word “pneumatic” provides intellectual gratification, in economically and effectively summarizing the use of women as insubstantial and commodified sexual objects: it is not a joke but an indictment. But in a joke that very technique obtains the release of gratifications that are not so high-minded:

“The technique which is characteristic of jokes and peculiar to them […] consists in their procedure for safeguarding the use of these methods of providing pleasure against the objections raised by criticism which would put an end to the pleasure.” (ibid.)

The key word here is “safeguarding”: sometimes sources of pleasure are inhibited by contrary, repressive forces (by “criticism”), and joke techniques are ways of protecting them, and unblocking them, by making them evade those forces. In the simplest cases, what we enjoy is the resurrection of the old, childish, joyous play with words, which can be granted new space within an adult life by being delivered with considerable ingenuity: the admiration for the ingenuity is what permits the reveling in that long-lost fun.

“The joke-work […] shows itself in a choice of verbal material and conceptual situations which will allow the old play with words and thoughts to withstand the scrutiny of criticism; and with that end in view every peculiarity of vocabulary and every combination of thought-sequences must be exploited in the most ingenious way.” (ibid.)

But there are less innocent circumstances. By using double meaning in a creative way, we can vent sexual drives:

“How do you embarrass an archeologist? Give him a used tampon and ask him what period it came from.”

Or aggressive ones:

“Did you hear about the elderly man who fell into a well? Apparently, he could not see that well.”

We can straightforwardly extend these remarks to art. A Greek word often translated as “art” is “téchne”, and the connection is instructive. Art is a collection of techniques; but these can serve any number of different ends—propaganda, indoctrination, or the construction of a professional portfolio. Or they can be applied to materials that have gripping power and, when they do, they can make the release of pleasure from such sources viable when it would otherwise not be. The gripping power of the Oedipus complex may occasion flight or disgust; it is Sophocles’ or Shakespeare’s technique in expressing it that makes it acceptable, and makes acceptable enjoying their revelation of it—however displaced and disguised it might be. Someone who lacked the technique and tried to do the same would be scorned; someone who had the technique but could not use it for a gripping revelation would just be boring (or viciously effective in spreading propaganda, or professionally effective in assembling a portfolio). Aesthetic pleasure is perceptual pleasure: pleasure that comes from perceiving something. That pleasure, in a Kantian vein, derives from the free play of our faculties: art, specifically, by manipulating what we perceive, makes us come up with something that is in surprising agreement with our concepts. What Freud adds to this picture is that the “concepts” may be ones that are resisted, and art is what lets us overcome the resistance.

One last quote must be made from the book on jokes:

            “There is little that we can say in general about this procedure.” (ibid.)

Here is the rub. In the third degree of involvement, psychoanalysis can provide a convincing account of the mechanism whereby art does its work—of what the point of art is. But there it must stop. On why it would take Leonardo’s technique to make certain “concepts” acceptable in the Renaissance and Basquiat’s technique to make them acceptable today, on why what is a masterpiece to an era is hogwash to another, psychoanalysis has nothing to say: that is the province of cultural criticism, or intellectual history. Psychoanalysis can tell us that something will be acceptable within a cultural environment only if it falls within the range of what is tasteful, and will be regarded as great if, in addition to being tasteful, it also voices forceful desires. But it is speechless when it comes to how taste is defined or how it evolves. Which may be a reason why, in search of something more insightful and catchy to say, it often delves in matters of content analysis or psychobiography—where, on the other hand, it has nothing to say about art.