{"id":13,"date":"2014-05-20T15:55:00","date_gmt":"2014-05-20T15:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lidaprypchan.org\/?p=13"},"modified":"2015-06-08T22:03:48","modified_gmt":"2015-06-08T22:03:48","slug":"freud-and-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lidaprypchan.org\/?p=13","title":{"rendered":"Freud and Art"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By Lida Prypchan<\/b><\/div>\n
The genesis and content of a number of disciplines or activities outside the scope of medicine has repeatedly been psychoanalyzed. \u00a0In this regard, the attention of psychoanalysts has addressed the history of religions, prehistory, mythology and, especially, literature and art. \u00a0In this task, what psychoanalysts seek is to explain the psychological motivations lurking in the works of an artist.<\/span><\/div>\n
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It is clear that artistic creation reflects the artist’s inner world and, often, his unconscious. \u00a0From this point of view, nothing prevents their work from being analyzed using the same criteria that the therapist uses to decipher the dreams of a patient. \u00a0In literature and contemporary visual arts, there are more or less avant-garde currents, such as Dada and Surrealism \u2013 which propose the incorporation of dream material into the artist’s work. \u00a0Regarding other times, it is known that Freud was inspired by Greek tragedy in naming some of the complexes that he discovered (the Oedipus complex or the Electra complex), and this was because the Greek dramatists showed many of the major conflicts detected by contemporary psychoanalysis in the psychic life of patients. \u00a0Authors such as Dostoyevsky, Stendhal and Flaubert set out an adjoining theme in their novels, almost always the neurosis or psychosis faced daily by the modern psychoanalyst in his clinic. \u00a0Examples are: parricide, with all its oedipal and totemic burden in The Brothers Karamazov; the will to power, in Stendhal\u2019s Red and Black; emotional and sexual frustration in the provincial Madame Bovary who ends up committing suicide.<\/span><\/div>\n
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Psychoanalysis of Artwork:<\/span><\/div>\n
The artist exhibits similar cases that the psychoanalyst attempts to resolve in their clinics and analyzes them carefully, although without a therapeutic purpose, using for this the prevailing literary or plastic techniques in each period of the history of culture.<\/span><\/div>\n
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Psychoanalysis of the Artist:<\/span><\/div>\n
This constitutes in itself an unusual case: Why would a man feel the imperative of artistic vocation, renounce what his peers call “a normal life” and dedicate himself to the task \u2013 difficult, problematic and financially unrewarding \u2013 of creating a work with words, shapes or sounds? \u00a0Freud would say due to sublimation. \u00a0That is to say, channeling the energy of his libido along courses different from the usual, and in this way, discharging the conflictive nature of its psychic contents. \u00a0The artist is, in many cases, a neurotic who self-analyses himself and often obtains true healing through the spirit. \u00a0Or who, at least, compensates and balances the shortcomings of his psyche, avoiding having them lead to the domains of pathology.<\/span><\/div>\n
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Freud and Art:<\/span><\/div>\n
Freud published five brief works dedicated to the psychoanalysis of art. \u00a0They are: “Delirium and Dreams in Jensen\u2019s Gradiva”; “A Childhood Memory of Leonardo da Vinci”; “The Moses of Michelangelo\u201d; “A Childhood Memory of Goethe in Poetry and Truth”; and “Dostoyevsky and Parricide”.<\/span><\/div>\n
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Freud, at the beginning of \u201cThe Moses\u201d, stated that he was ignorant in matters of art, although it attracted him greatly. \u00a0What called his attention the most was that the most impressive artistic creations were beyond our understanding and, in this respect, he concluded that what impressed us could only be the intention of the artist.<\/span><\/div>\n
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Some philosophers before Freud \u2013 Plato among them \u2013 had already studied the role of the unconscious in artistic creation. \u00a0It is often said that artists are dominated by a force beyond their will. \u00a0It is known that many poets write almost in a trance, as if they were hypnotized.<\/span><\/div>\n
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Others turn to alcohol or drugs with the intention of releasing the more profound contents of the unconscious. \u00a0Some scientists have come to consider the artist as crazy, classifying his works among the deliriums brought on by dementia.<\/span><\/div>\n
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According to Freud, the artist is a man who fails to completely satisfy his desires and who finds solace in creative invention. \u00a0In another paragraph he writes: “Artists, like neurotics, flee a reality that is hardly satisfactory to them and take refuge in a fantasy world, but \u2013 unlike the mentally ill \u2013 are able to find their way back.”<\/span><\/div>\n
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Freud, however, recognized that sexuality is not the only source of art and that there are two different aspects of this, on which psychoanalysis does not shed any light: the skills of the artist and the technical means he uses for his work.<\/span><\/div>\n
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\u00a0 By Lida Prypchan The genesis and content of a number of disciplines or activities outside the scope of medicine has repeatedly been psychoanalyzed. \u00a0In this regard, the attention of psychoanalysts has addressed the history of religions, prehistory, mythology and, especially, literature and art. \u00a0In this task, what psychoanalysts seek is to explain the psychological … <\/p>\n

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