Psycho-Biography Revisited

Traditionally, psychoanalysis and art history have influenced one another in the most sterile and stalemated of fashions. Psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on psychobiography, has used the art object primarily as a way to decipher the personality behind the painting at the cost of neglecting an examination of the art work itself. Curiously enough, this symptomatic reading of art has influenced the art historical field for some time as evidenced by such biographical studies as Mary Gedo's work on Picasso (1982), Danielle Knafo's (1993) study on Schiele, or Lipton's (1986) book on Degas; in other words, studies of painters who had led rather flamboyant and illustrious lives. Conversely, the iconographic method, with its focus on the fixed meanings of a pictorial object and its search for what Rosalind Krauss (1981) has called “an exact historical referent for every pictorial sign” (p. 21), has given renewed credence to the “traditional” psychoanalytic method of attaching univocal and stable meanings to specific symbols. Despite Freud's own misgivings in his 1910 essay on Leonardo da Vinci, that “I have merely written a psychoanalytic novel” (p. 134), the Leonardo essay has remained the cornerstone of psychoanalytic art criticism. Since Freud never presumed to write a psychoanalytic study of Leonardo's works, but only of his character, the post-Freudians' insistence upon using this essay as a model for an aesthetic study has always struck me as a rather curious choice.

Throughout the Leonardo piece, Freud (/1957) emphasizes that “the aim of our works has been to explain the inhibitions in Leonardo's sexual life and in his artistic activity” (p. 131). In other words, the Leonardo monograph is not primarily a study about art. On the contrary, it is the artist's life history, or at least the fragments Freud was able to unearth, that served as an occasion for Freud's demonstration that adult behavior could be ascribed to early infantile development. The study of Leonardo gr