The famous psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud expressed a keen interest in art and artists throughout his entire career. Although his own views on art were quite conservative, he nonetheless managed to inspire and direct generations of radical modernists, including the Surrealists. In many of his writings, Freud dissected the phenomenon of art and artists and its meaning for the human mind. Read on to learn what an artist is according to Sigmund Freud and how we interact with art.
Sigmund Freud and His Interest in Art
Art and artists have always been integral parts of Sigmund Freud’s professional interests and personal preoccupations. He started his art collection in 1896 after his father’s death. Initially, Freud did not have much income to afford expensive art, so he occasionally bought rather cheap plaster casts made from works by Michelangelo or other famous artists. As his theories grew in popularity, Freud started to expand his collection. It was rather eclectic and deeply personal, reflecting the owner’s identity, and included Greek and Roman sculptures and artifacts.
Despite his overwhelming influence on young radical artists of his era, Freud preferred antiquities to modern art. In terms of painting, he preferred Neoclassicism and Renaissance art. From the former category, he had a specific preference for one particular artist, the Neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Freud could hardly afford to buy originals, yet he hung a quality reproduction of the painting Oedipus and The Sphinx by Ingres. According to Freud experts, the choice of painting had a double meaning. One was his theory of the Oedipus complex—the subconscious desire and rivalry of a child with their parents, and the other—Freud’s self-association with Oedipus solving the riddles of his patients’ minds.
Psychoanalysis for Artists
Although Freud was dubbed the father of psychoanalysis, he was not the first professional to apply or develop this method. It was started by Freud’s mentor Josef Breuer, who applied the talking cure to Bertha Pappenheim, an Austrian feminist activist described in Freud’s and Breuer’s writings under the alias Anna O. Pappenheim was diagnosed with hysteria, with her physical symptoms including difficulty to breathe, facial pains, and paralysis. After several years of treatment, which included mostly conversations and light hypnosis, Freud and Breuer announced the case as a success. Other professionals like Carl Gustav Jung, however, believed the results were far-fetched and that the treatment had no real effect.
Still, the idea of diving deep into one’s psyche through verbal and visual exploration became exciting for artists and creatives of all kinds. The artists interested the most in Freud’s writing and ideas were the Surrealists. They actively read Freud’s theories and attended his lectures, applying this knowledge to their works, attempting to untangle one’s minds and desires.
However, that admiration was not shared. Freud did not think much about the Surrealists and even managed to offend Salvador Dali’s hyperinflated ego during their meeting. Obsessed with Freud, Dali tried to impress the psychoanalyst not only with his paintings but with his own musings on the human mind. Freud was impressed, not by Dali’s work, but by his fanaticism, treating them rather like an interesting medical case. Freud’s interest in art was passed on to his family members. His grandson Lucian Freud became one of the most outstanding British modernist painters and the master of portraiture.
What Is an Artist?
Freud left several essays and notes unpacking either specific works of art or oeuvres of particular artists. The most prominent of these was his essay on Leonardo da Vinci, which analyzed his remaining body of work through the prism of the artist’s childhood memories and early traumas. Freud unpacked Leonardo’s childhood memory (or, as he believed, a fantasy) of a vulture landing into his cradle and striking his lips with its tail. Vultures were believed to be only female, and thus Leonardo, as an illegitimate child essentially abandoned by his father, associated himself with a vulture child.
In his introductory lectures on psychoanalysis, Freud frequently referred to art as a bridge between fantasy and reality. Unable to fulfill their subconscious desires of fame, love, and admiration, an artist channels their energy into reconstructing their fantasy in their art. The further intensified conflict between desires and reality results in desperation and anxiety that could lead to the development of neurosis. Still, artists are inherently much more skilled in sublimating their desires and channeling their impulses since, unlike regular people, they have a better understanding of the fantasy and the unconscious.
According to Freud, an artist has the ability to dissect their fantasies and alter them so that they would lose the excessive personal specificity that is repulsive to anyone outside it. By making their fantasy more universal, an artist allows others to enjoy it with them without a sense of confusion or revulsion. Moreover, he describes the ability to shape the artistic material into a faithful, accurate, and impressive embodiment of fantasy as a mystical power. An artist is able to not only extract pleasure from their fantasies for themselves but to share it with others in ways they might possibly never imagine. Through that, an artist often manages to achieve that initial admiration and love they were yearning for before and during the act of creation.
However, due to these extraordinary capabilities of dealing with repressed desires and fantasies, artists frequently fall victim to neurosis. Curiously, another prominent modernist, sculptor Louise Bourgeois, criticized Freud’s ideas on applying psychoanalysis to artists in her essay Freud’s Toys. Deeply emerged into psychoanalytic theories and studies of the human mind, Bourgeois believed that the inner torment of an artist was impossible to address through the talking cure. For Bourgeois, being an artist involves a certain degree of torment. Not a single theoretical musing of Freud’s had any impact on either resolving this problem or at least making it less painful.
Moreover, many critics of Freud’s methods noticed that he seemed to write only about male artists and their mental dynamics, failing to see women and even other male creators who fell out of his doctrine. Many of his claims and ideas could not be tested empirically, remaining entirely in the domain of Freud’s speculation and interpretation. Even some of Freud’s followers and admirers noticed inconsistencies in some of his ideas. Carl Jung, for instance, believed that neurosis was not destructive but a driving force that led a human towards mental and creative development.
Ideational Mimetics: A Theory by Sigmund Freud
In one of his writings, Freud developed a theory of the so-called ideational mimetics. The idea originated from the concept of mimesis—the aesthetical principle according to which art strives to imitate life. The artists of the Renaissance, however, believed that art should imitate perfection and represent the most harmonious ideal. Freud, who was aesthetically much closer to the Renaissance ideas than to those of his own time, wrote that a work of art could trigger a sort of empathy in human beings that would stimulate their mental and cultural development. In other words, from art imitating life, we move to life imitating art, impressed and astonished by its beauty.
Ideational mimetics in Freud’s vision essentially manifests in the exchange of physical and mental energy between an artwork and its audience. This energy is sometimes referred to as the aura of the artwork. Unfortunately, Freud did not develop his theory of ideational mimetics fully, leaving only a short but promising summary of it. The idea of art contributing to social and intellectual transformations was not a new one, and Freud was neither the first nor the last writer to occupy themselves with it. Nonetheless, his ideas would soon be reflected in writings by his contemporaries.
Curiously, the term aura in relation to art would later reappear in the works of another art theoretician. Walter Benjamin, partially inspired by Freud, described an artwork’s aura as its presence in time and space where it was created, as well as everything that happened during its lifespan. Although the term aura includes a unique cultural context, Benjamin nonetheless hinted that this concept was elitist and prevented the larger public from enjoying it. Aura is created by a distance from the work of art—temporal or spatial. Mechanical reproduction devalues the aura by making an artwork, or at least a part of it, readily available for others to enjoy.
