Sigmund Freud forever changed how people perceive the world—and, more importantly, themselves. Freud’s theories on unconscious desire and dream interpretation particularly influenced the Surrealists, who turned inward to invent a radically new mode of creative expression one hundred years ago. To explore the man and the movement, TheCollector interviewed Margaret Iversen, an international authority on Freud and psychoanalytic art theory. We delved into Freud’s impact on Surrealism and its rippling effects on contemporary culture. Iversen also broke down decades of psychoanalytic art theory, from found objects to feminism to film.
“Freud’s ideas are very much still part of the culture globally, as is the influence of Surrealism. No longer a movement, it is now more muted, underground, and unacknowledged—a diffuse cultural presence.”
Q: Tell us a bit about your academic and professional background. What first inspired you to pursue a career in art history? What inspired your focus on psychoanalytic art theory?
As an undergraduate, I studied Philosophy and wrote my MA dissertation on Immanuel Kant’s aesthetics. I then realized I was not cut out to be a philosopher because I don’t care for confrontational argument. I switched to a theoretical branch of Art History and did my PhD at the University of Essex with Michael Podro on one of the founders of the discipline, Alois Riegl. I got interested in psychoanalysis through a film course I did at Essex with Peter Wollen and through my interest in the work of feminist artist Mary Kelly, who participated in a psychoanalysis reading group with [psychoanalyst] Juliet Mitchel and [feminist film theorist] Laura Mulvey. I had a lot of catching up on Freud to do.
Q: Psychoanalytic theory can be used to consider a work of art from many angles: analyzing the subject and content of the work, considering the artist’s intentions, examining the relationship between the work and its audience, and so on. In your art historical practice, do you favor a particular psychoanalytical approach?
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I’m particularly interested in artists whose work is informed by psychoanalysis. To write about their work, you must be acquainted with the literature. I am also interested in approaches to art criticism which make use of psychoanalytic concepts. Adrian Stokes’s art criticism is a good case in point. His appreciation of art and his key concepts of carving and modeling are colored by Melanie Klein’s theories of “object relations.” I’m wary of psycho-biographical approaches, partly because they tend to reduce art to a symptom. This is the problem with Freud’s famous essay on Leonardo da Vinci: the art is treated as a transparent window on a particular pathology.
Q: As the modern founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud is a household name—as is the Surrealist art movement he famously inspired. What cultural and societal contexts made Freud’s ideas so compelling to the Surrealists and their supporters?
The First World War was the major societal context for the development and dissemination of psychoanalytic theory—which is why trauma is such a key concept. Men who survived the carnage came back psychically damaged, and, at home, the traditional social fabric was rent. These circumstances provided fertile ground for avant-garde movements of all kinds.
The historian and philosopher of science John Forrester has pointed out that, although Freud himself was dubious about avant-garde art, his writing gave prominence to “the readymade, the found object, the bit of detritus.” In effect, he invented “a new theory of objects.” Freud was interested in unnoticed details which he called the “rubbish heap” of our observations. Surrealist artists were attracted to this same rubbish heap.
The Surrealist poet André Breton, who worked as a medical auxiliary during the war, wrote of his habit of visiting the Saint-Ouen flea market on the periphery of Paris to search for old-fashioned, broken, useless, incomprehensible objects. “Search” is not quite the right word for Breton’s receptive attitude. The key to the Surrealist process was “pure psychic automatism,” which, for Breton, involved the “absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” The French term for lost property, objets trouvés, was adopted by him to designate an art object that is found rather than fabricated.
The Surrealist found object, which is also a lost object, remains in close contact with the everyday world of lost umbrellas, gloves, and hats. It disregards traditional conventions of sculpture. In a book beloved by the Surrealists, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), Freud rescued these meager things from sheer meaninglessness by arguing that apparent accidents—such as slips of the tongue, forgetting, and breaking or losing things—are, like dreams or symptoms, unconsciously motivated and meaningful. The found object touches on a permanent psychic trace or a locus of pain. Freud’s new theory of objects is embedded in the wider psychoanalytic theory of (sometimes fantasized) objects that are loved and lost in the gradual and painful formation of the subject as a being separate from the mother.
Q: What forces informed negative reactions to Surrealism?
I think that Surrealism was such a popular movement that the eventual reaction against it was inevitable. Many artists in the 1970s—who wanted to distance themselves from the domination of Abstract Expressionism and its automatist painterly gestures—were profoundly anti-Surrealist. Roland Barthes’s “Death of the Author,” published in 1967, contributed to a negative reception of psychoanalytic theories of the artist’s activity, as he stressed the formal properties of the medium, like language in poetry, and the reader’s role as interpreter.
Q: You have contributed to the field of psychoanalytic art theory for decades. Over the course of your career, how has the field changed?
For a while, in the late 1970s and 80s, feminist film theory was the cutting edge of psychoanalytic approaches to the visual arts. Concepts such as the Oedipal complex, castration anxiety, fetishism, voyeurism, the male gaze, and the “mirror phase” of infantile development dominated discussions of art informed by psychoanalytic thought.
Screen magazine was avidly read by artists, critics, and art historians. Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) still features on the syllabus for critical approaches to visual art, although interest in the kind of critique of popular culture it epitomized has since declined. Now, the syllabus of classic critical texts also includes Barthes’s late work, Camera Lucida (1980), which is imbued with loss and mourning and informed by his reading of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Jacques Lacan, and Donald Winnicott.
From the late 80s, partly owing to Barthes’s little book, Freud’s theory of trauma became focal for me and many others. I published two books which explored the topic of the aesthetic relevance of trauma: Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan and Barthes (2007) and Photography, Trace, and Trauma (2017).
Q: Both the Surrealist movement and Freudian psychoanalysis favored the white, male, heterosexual experience. As such, the merits of Freud’s methodologies have been thoroughly interrogated, particularly by feminist critics. At the same time, contemporary scholars like yourself utilize Freud’s influential foundation to innovate and expand the scope of art history. In your experience, how can psychoanalytic theory be used to challenge, rather than uphold, outdated and otherwise limited ways of looking at art and the world?
Of course, Freud was a man of his time, even if he was also a groundbreaking thinker. He thought of some of his concepts as universally applicable, whereas we would now understand them as determined by patriarchal notions of gender difference. However, a nuanced reading of Freud has been essential for feminists as well as for leading anti-colonial and anti-racist thinkers.
[Literary critic] Homi K. Bhabha, for instance, praised the writing of [psychiatrist and post-colonial theorist] Frantz Fanon, a leading spokesman for the liberation of Algeria from French colonial rule. Fanon, in his effort to understand the Black experience and to resist oppression, invoked the Freudian theory of the ambivalence of the unconscious—that is, the porous border between love and hate, pleasure and pain, fear and desire, mastery and servitude. Artists of color are equally interested in these ambivalences and in the transmission of the trauma of slavery to later generations.
Q: In your view, why do Freud and Surrealism still resonate in the 21st century?
It would be anachronistic for contemporary artists to identify themselves as Surrealists. But Freud’s ideas are very much still part of the culture globally, as is the influence of Surrealism. No longer a movement, it is now more muted, underground, and unacknowledged—a diffuse cultural presence. However, the rise of Holocaust studies and the erection of memorials to the dead has fueled continued interest in psychoanalytical theories of trauma and mourning.
Q: In conclusion, do you have any projects or publications on the horizon that you can tell us about?
My recent relevant publications include “Death and the Found Object: Virginia Woolf, Lucy Skaer and Becky Beasley,” “John Stezaker: Doubles and Shadows,” and “Psychoanalysis and Art: A New Theory of Objects.” I’m currently working on an essay about photography and the Holocaust.
This summer, the Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud was published on behalf of Rowman & Littlefield and commissioned by the Institute of Psychoanalysis. Edited by translator and neuropsychologist Dr. Mark Solms, the 24-volume set was completed over a 30-year period, undertaking the translation of James Strachey’s standard edition in addition to including 56 new notes, essays, letters, and lectures, some of which had not previously been translated into English.
