Freud 100 years ago: The Moses of Michelangelo (1914)

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To all appearances, Freud starts out quite modestly. His knowledge of art is no more than a layman’s, he tells us. Then, after having made known that works of art have a strong effect upon him, Freud admits to yet another shortcoming. Enjoying art is difficult if he does not know why he enjoys it. In the case of music for instance, Freud (1914a, 1914b) discloses a lack of capacity to obtain any pleasure ― genussunfähig. By posterity, this failing has been taken as signalling a rationalistic turn of mind on Freud’s part.

Apart from the fact that the English translation makes Freud even more rationalistic when referring to this tendency to search for an explanation, it is far more important to measure the weight of this avowal. This inclination of

his brought him “to spend a long time” standing before works of art in order to become more clear about their effect.

“To spend a long time … ”, these words have a familiar ring. In the obituary, Freud (1898) wrote of Charcot, he described Charcot not as a thinker, but a seer, who looked again and again at things he did not understand “till suddenly an understanding of them dawned on him”. The idea of waiting for the phenomenon to appear of its own accord comes to mind when reading Freud’s account of his daily visits to S. Pietro in Rome over a period of 3 weeks, and Cezanne before the mountain St Victoire, as Peter Handke (1980) depicted him. In this manner, Cezanne is not so different from Freud, spending a long time before the Moses of Michelangelo. “For three lonely September weeks in 1913, I stood every day in the church in front of the statue, studied