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Erwin Panofsky once said that he had never been interested in Bosch because Bosch is “too psychoanalytic.” 3 And indeed many of Bosch's paintings fairly cry out for a psychoanalytic interpretation. However, until very recently no publication on Bosch could be found in the psychoanalytic literature.
Hieronymus Bosch—also called Jeroen Bosch, or Jeroen van Aken—was a late-15th, early-16th Century Dutch painter. He was born into an artisan's family around 1448 and died in 1516. He lived in's Hertogenbosch, a small Dutch city; married a girl from a patrician family; belonged to an honored fraternity of monks and lay people; was well-off, and became famous while still living. His paintings were commissioned or bought by kings, noblemen, and the clergy. Little more is known about his life. His works now are in the leading museums of the world.
Many of Bosch's most important paintings from the middle and later period of his life are weird, surrealistic, beautiful, and utterly fantastic. Foremost among these are four triptychs: “The Hay-wain “(Madrid), “The Temptations of St. Anthony “(Lisbon), “The Garden of Earthly Delights “(Madrid), and the “Last Judgment “in Vienna. AU four exhibit clear-cut, unveiled expressions of Primary Process.
Bosch paints the non-real, the surreal: people with animal faces; a horse whose belly and hind parts are a pitcher (Fig. 1); a man with a hauntingly handsome face who has the body of