Chapter 6 Freud and Art

We laymen have always been intensely curious to know— like the Cardinal who put a similar question to Ariosto— from what sources that strange being, the creative writer, draws his material, and how he manages to make such an impression on us with it, and to arouse in us emotions of which, perhaps, we had not even thought ourselves capable.

This was the opening sentence of Freud’s paper ‘Creative writers and day-dreaming’, which he wrote in 1907. Freud was always fascinated by art. Strachey lists no fewer than twenty-two papers of Freud dealing directly or indirectly with artists’ individual works of art, themes reflected in literature, or general problems of artistic creativity. And in his books and papers references to works of art abound. This is not surprising. His research is into every manifestation of human nature and he could hardly fail to be fascinated by this uniquely human achievement. It is difficult to do full justice to the contribution which psychoanalysis has made to the understanding of art. Freud’s discovery of unconscious phantasy and symbolism gave a new perspective and new depth to the understanding of the supreme symbolic expression of phantasy which is art. His contribution to aesthetics is incalculable, and it is so despite his own apparent lack of interest in aesthetics. He remarked that he was more drawn to the content of a work of art than to its form, though he understood that to the artist it was the latter that was of predominant interest.

What Freud was predominantly concerned with was the eliciting of unconscious conflicts and phantasies embodied in a work of art. Some of his papers aim at a psychobiography of the artist, using the works of art as revealing of his inner conflicts and psychological history. In his book Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood (Freud 1910), using scant biographical data, a screen childhood memory and two of his paintings, The Mona Lisa and St Anne, St Mary and Jesus, he attempts to