Introduction Part II: “Metapsychological Considerations on Kris, Prinzhorn and Klee”

In this second collection of essays (see American Imago Winter 2000, three art historians interested in psychoanalysis analyze the work of Prinzhorn, Kris, and Freud, and a fourth interprets a work of Klee.

Bettina Brand-Claussen's article, “The Witch's Head Landscape: A Pictorial Illusion from the Prinzhorn Collection,” reevaluates an example from Prinzhorn's collection by August Natterer , a diagnosed schizophrenic. She takes as her starting points Prinzhorn's discussion and the comments of Kris on Prinzhorn. Kris states that Prinzhorn ignored “the representational side” of Natterer's “Landscape”—which he neither reproduced nor discussed—and overinterprets it in order to reveal the presumed poetry and mystery of a psychotic production. To this end he adopted a narrow conceptual framework and viewed the work as paranoid and incoherent, and compared it to a dream. Kris argued that Prinzhorn's choice of examples supported German Expressionist art; but, Kris too, she finds, emphasized Natterer's pathology and the role of the unconscious, ignoring the artist's personal experiences, his demonstrable intention and control in some works. As a consequence of his psychoanalytic theory assigning consciousness and ego to the artist while routinely denying them to the psychotic, Kris misread Natterer's The Witch's Head as paranoid. She demonstrates the conscious control of the artist, a competent technician who constructed a picture-puzzle, “a tapestry of visual quotations” intended as critical comment. She also cites the famous “psychotic” artist Wölfli, who read and demonstrably absorbed current ideas. Dr. Brand-Claussen's