Giorgio de Chirico: Ego States and Artistic Production*

Early psychoanalytic investigation found art to be a formidable vehicle for the expression of unconscious strivings, allowing the fulfillment of some needs of the artist as well as of the audience. Richard Sterba, in his account of Freud's views on art, stressed this function of art as representing the return, expression and fulfillment, of childhood wishes. Art, like wit, is a “reconciliation of the pleasure principle with the reality principle” (1) on the basis of the permeation of the reality principle by the pleasure principle. It was also recognized, that some special characteristics of the ego were necessary to allow such gratification. Freud described the access of id strivings to preconscious cognition in art and wit. This capacity was considered by Freud to be a matter of “flexibility of repression” (2), or to follow a more recent formulation, a matter of ability of “regression of the service of the ego.” (3)

More recently, interest has arisen in the nature of the influence of the artistic product upon the state of the ego, and vice versa. Kris, from his own observations, as well as other authors, felt that in many schizophrenic artists there was a creative spell with conspicuous attempts at object restitution misdirected into art images. The creative spell was intimately related to the psychotic process, by which it could be interrupted or modified. In turn, the psychotic process significantly modified the style of the artist. When the artist was overwhelmed with the autistic ideation representing the psychotic conflict, his expression was so bizzare, magical and filled with clang associations, displacements and condensations that identification was no longer possible for the viewer, and the artistic product became a “picture riddle,” the key to which remains unknown to us. (3) The requirement of a certain degree of ego integrity for artistic production leads one to consider the relation of ego states to artistic expression.