Central Organizing Fantasies and Their Relationship to the Signature Style and Masterworks of Two Artists

Why do artists become known for their original contributions? Rembrandt's powerful portraits, Van Gogh's starry nights and Giacometti's gaunt men and women are all examples of masterworks that convey messages unlike those of other artists of their era. To arrive at such unique images and styles, artists must be impelled by powerful internal forces. Personal psychological issues are at the core of such originality and are usually encoded in what used to be called central organizing fantasies.

As both a clinician and a researcher in art history, I have found that most individuals have a wide variety of internal unconscious fantasies often overlapping and equally often coalescing into predominating and cohesive motivational forces. I am not referring to a single fantasy or to a single unconscious or conscious motivating factor. To impel an artist to create a new mode or formal invention, the fantasies, wishes, or fears must be multiple. And though they may flicker and sometimes appear as separate entities they must be capable of cohesive integration. It is for the purpose of explanation that I will be parsing and separating what should be understood as interrelated elements that dominate the direction of the artistic movement of each artist.

As early as 1895 and 1900, Freud proposed the concept of a “purposive idea,” which, as Laplanche and Pontalis explain, he used when referring to unconscious fantasies. They write:

Whenever one psychical element is linked with another by an objectionable or superficial association, there is also a legitimate and deeper link between them which is subjected to the resistance of the censorship. The term “purposive idea” underscores the fact that in Freud's

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view associations are subordinated to a specific aim. This aim is manifest in the case of attentive, discriminating thought, where selection is governed by the goal being pursued. (1973, pp. 373-374)

In 1985, Arlow posited that:

[A]fter the age of six or seven, after the supposed pas