Mother and Child: A Psychobiographical Portrait of Mary Cassatt*

The 19th-century American impressionist, Mary Cassatt, is noted for her intimate portrayal of women, children, and the mother-child relationship. Considered by critics and art historians to depict the mother-child theme with an artistic and emotional richness rarely encountered, she devoted many of her 82 years to the development of her art. Using a variety of media, she drew her subjects in the most traditional settings and roles. Yet, she challenged the conventions of her day by remaining unmarried and childless and insisting upon a professional career. How can one begin to understand these seemingly contradictory aspects of Mary Cassatt? In this paper I will attempt to shed light on some of the forces impinging upon the artist and to examine her choice of subject matter psychoanalytically, drawing upon biographical material, notes, letters, and Cassatt's art itself. Hopefully, I will be able to present a deeper understanding of the inner life of the artist by examining the role of the unconscious forces at play as well as the synthetic role of the creative process.

A search of the literature revealed that this paper is the first psychobiographical study of Mary Cassatt. As the methodology of such a paper is currently quite controversial, it is important to describe from the outset some of the problems inherent in it. Coltrera follows Freud (1908) in stating that applied psychoanalysis “should be of an analogical rather than a literal order” (Coltrera, 1981, p. 18). As the psychoanalytic biographer has no direct data of the associative processes, transference paradigms, or resistance patterns of his subject, the inferences he can make are, of necessity, more