The Legacy of Freud in the Approach to the Visual Arts

For many of us, the visual arts have a strong emotional impact. Constantly we read about the high prices paid for a van Gogh or a Picasso, and although we may disparage such material emphasis, crass consumership becomes a further sign of the value which we attribute to the work. Because psychoanalysis is a body of knowledge that takes as its subject matter the central preoccupations of humankind, it is not surprising that some analysts find the study of art fascinating. Certainly during the past century, beginning with Freud's study of Leonardo da Vinci, psychoanalysts have not neglected the field of the plastic arts (Freud, 1910).

A variety of psychoanalytic approaches have proved helpful in understanding the impact of works of art, and I endeavor in this contribution to describe the main currents and to offer examples of each. First, there is the work itself. Although a work can be studied from the perspective of art history, stylistic and technical aspects, patronage, and other such perspectives, many works are of significance because of the psychological impact they produce in the viewer. One approach is to consider this issue in terms of audience response and to highlight the manner that makes a work evocative. The work resonates with certain aspects of the psychology of the viewer. Such depictions in narrative painting as the presence of similar unconscious wishes and conflict, modes of the resolution of conflict, varieties of defense, or mastery are meaningful to a viewer because they offer a visualization of similar internal tendencies expressed through an aesthetic context.

Freud was impressed with this quality of resonance when he pointed out that three of the great works of literature—Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov—have as a central motif, the similar theme of parricide. For Freud and for many psychoanalysts the centrality of the oedipal complex continues to have an emphatic and nodal position