Picasso, Cubism and the Eye of the Beholder: Psychoanalysis and Cognitive Psychology

The purpose of this article is to summarize an approach to Picasso that integrates psychoanalytic theory with the scientific methods of cognitive psychology.1 Psychoanalysts have always been especially intrigued by Picasso, as his private biography and public artworks alike are steeped in a notoriously Freudian current of sexuality and aggression. And to make matters more enticing, Picasso's seething content is mirrored in his tumultuous pictorial form—or as he put it: “A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case a picture is a sum of destructions” (Ashton 1972, 8). This content/form correlation, emerging in force with the 1907 Demoiselles d'Avignon, suggests that Cubism might be profitably approached through a psychoanalytic regression-for-progression theory. That is, Cubism, the greatest leap of modernism, may have originated in a psychoanalytic descensus ad infernum—a heroic invocation of primitive conflicts in pursuit of a new aesthetic. Psychoanalytic speculation on the matter dates back to Jung and Ehrenzweig, and continues in the writings of Gedo (1980) and Kuspit (1989).

The present essay, relying on the psychoanalytic tradition, argues that Cubism begins with the eruption of vitalized latent contents, which are disguised and tamed by the art-work (as in dream-work, symptom-work, or joke-work). The translation of the latent into the manifest is enacted in Cubism through classic primary process mechanisms: condensation, displacement, and symbolization. To put this differently, Picasso's vitalized latent contents seem to have fueled the development of an ambiguous pictorial style, capable at once to reveal/conceal or express/suppress the covert message.

In grappling with questions about the audience—or the eye of the beholder—we may turn to cognitive psychology for assistance. The purpose of studying the audience is to tackle the problem of aesthetic communication (e.g., Wollheim 1987),