Intellectual-Cultural History and Psychobiography: The Case of Kandinsky

The contemporary intellectual historian who would use psychoanalytic concepts to help in understanding the genesis and substance of ideas and art faces a different problem from that of some decades ago. The bugaboo of reductionism is not what it used to be. It is no longer acceptable to argue for the autonomy of cultural artifacts as self-contained entities obeying only the rules of their genres, whether those of rationality or of form. Such a notion of “objectivity” or “universality” is widely dismissed as ideology. After Foucault and postmodernism, no one questions that ideas are “constructed,” that “timeless” conceptions of beauty, form, and art itself are context-bound. But the subjectivity that is generally agreed to obtain in conceptual and artistic enterprises is not individual subjectivity. Ideas are held to be socially constructed; the norms, tropes, and forms that define art at any given time are inter subjectively produced and sustained. Explaining in the cultural disciplines involves locating the historical “discourses” out of which individual works are created and the sites of power—the dominant social, economic, ethnic, or gender groupings—that produce and transmit them.

More precisely, then, the grounds on which the accusation of reductionism is made have shifted. Cultural constructions are reduced by psychoanalysis to purely individual psychology, and to an “essentialist” psychology at that. All major contemporary schools of psychoanalysis rest on basically ahistorical theories of personality. This is most obviously the case for ego psychology, which for all its modifications of classic Freudianism is still based on an atemporal biological model. But it holds no less for self-psychology, which assumes the ubiquity of narcissistic selfobject needs. And even the apparently socially based practices of intersubjective and relational psychoanalysis do not escape the taint of ahistoricism in their understanding of motivation.