Art and Psychoanalysis:

The Freudian conception of art and its development

in the psychoanalytic critic by Ernst Kris and Ernst H. Gombrich

by Maria Paola Smorto

Freud had the worth to have first realized the amazing correlations between artistic creation
and psychoanalysis as far to consider them two complementary ambits: The poets and the
philosophers have discovered the unconscious before me, all that I have discovered it is the
scientific method that allows the study of the unconscious1.
The artist, therefore, would express in intuitive form that unconscious processes studied by
psychoanalysis in a scientific way. Particularly, literature constitutes for Freud a sort of generally
unexplored archive of the human psyche; in his study about the Jensens Gradiva, he says: the
poets are our precious allied and their testimony is to take into careful consideration, since they
usually know also a quantity of things between sky and earth that our philosophy doesnt suspect.
Particularly in the knowledge of the spirit by far they surpass us common deadly, because they go to
sources that have not been yet open to science2. Freud felt an affinity with the writers and he
admired their facility to get deep truth from the personal emotions, he considered the artists as
mediators of the unconscious and revealers of soul: probably we go to the same sources, we
work on the same object, each of us with different method; and the coincidence of the results seems
to constitute a guarantee that we have both worked in a correct way3. So it does not have to seem
strange, in my opinion, that the Viennese doctor concentrated his attention on the literary works and
more in general on art.

According to Freud, art is a middle kingdom between the truth that frustrates desires and the
fantasy that satisfy them, a therapy by means of which man can see realized his unconscious,
otherwise inexpressible, requests. In The Interest of Psycho-Analysis from the Point of View of the
Science of Aesthetics he defines art an activity that aims to moderate unsolved desires firstly in
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the same creator artist and secondarily in the spectator or listener4. But, according to his thought,
the unconscious is far away from being introduced so like it is, art begins with veiling the
unconscious. Freud will repeat it continuously: the unconscious gets to being art work only
through a transformation that mitigates its irritating aspect it hides the personal origin of it and
offers to the others, respecting aesthetic rules, pleasure prizes5. In the light of the Freudian theories
the art work surely is not the result of an unconscious thought that upsets deep down the artist and
therefore it is expelled outside through the art, to upset also the mind of the public6, the form is not
a covering for the unconscious contents that consumer in his turn frees from the covering and
discards7.

If such opinion were accepted, the art work would turn out the common place of projection of
the deep and unconscious pulsions of the spectator and the artist: of Eros, the life instinct, and
Thanatos, the dead instinct. In short, in the Freudian conception of art, unconscious does not have
some aesthetic value; as I have already supposed, the artistic creation for Freud is not a mechanical
fact. Task of the artist is to sublimate, that is to bring to preconscious level the unconscious
mechanisms, in order to make them communicable and comprehensible to the spectator. Freud, in
his famous study on the Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), indicates the points
of contact between unconscious fantasies and comic spirit: humour originates from a sort of
functional pleasure of mastery, the pleasure to dominate fear and anguish. But it is through a
Freuds student, Ernst Kris, that the art historical knowledge joins the psychoanalytical. This
student was first to highlight the conscious defence mechanisms compared with the unconscious
forces; humour, in all its forms, is the expression of the Ego satisfaction for successfully being able
to control contents and processes that could be dangerous for the psychical equilibrium or the
interpersonal relationships. Therefore, in the psychoanalytic aesthetic theory, they become
fundamental the Ego and the conscious part of personality for the elaboration and transformation of
the original pulsions and for the formal and typical aspects that they have in the art work.
In the process of artistic creation the unconscious motivation is without a doubt the most
important aspect of the question, but it does not exhaust it. According to the thought of Kris the art
differs from the dream and the psychopathology because its elaboration claims also a conscious
effort of critic and judgment, a sense of the form that is completely different from the unconscious
chaos: the Ego operates on this material a selection, uses a determined technique in order to
transform an unconscious thought in communication, that is to give it social truth. The reader who
will address to the study of the Kris works will find an author who disdains the easy
generalizations, but he will be recompensed discovering the sharpness and the versatility of the
authentically Freudian art concept. More than Ernst Kris, Ernst H. Gombrich insists on the
prevailing formal value of the art work and on the decisive effect code exercised by the linguistic
and expressive structures towards meanings.

The metric forms, the styles in the figurative arts are not a simple and indifferent covering of
a content that develops independently, these formal structures are the same essence of the art work,
that differentiates it from any other communicative content. Gombrich seems to conclude that art
doesnt permit the emerging of all the hidden pulsions; only the unconscious ideas that can be
adapted to the reality of the formal structures shared in a determined society become
communicable.
I think that in the conception of the art of these three authors the genuine artistic creation
reaches to articulate a shapeless content, makes it legible in all its problematic complexity,
reconstructs it in a way that it alludes to other than itself.
Again we return at the beginning of this article, because I think that a veil of similitude
between the artist and the psychoanalyst can newly be noticed: the artist comes to terms with
unconscious, establishes rules; by means of the form of his pictures, of his poetries, he hides it. But
this is the unique way in which he can express some contents. In my opinion, similar contradictions
are just the essence of the Freudian thought that succeeds in approaching irrational to rational. In
the light of my studies, it seems to me that is almost with the passion of an artistic nature that
Freud, in the psychoanalytic therapy, brings back the unconscious pulsions to a symbolic-linguistic
order and to a meaning weft that has its own coherence: just like the artist who creates.

The limited reality that the literary panorama, settling of accounts, offers about this
fascinating field of surveying, induces us to whish that it can stimulate new studies.

Wilhelm Jensens Gradiva8

In brief, the story revolves around Norbert Hanold, an archaeologist who, visiting the Naples
National Archaeological Museum, discovers a so fascinating bas-relief to get a tread in chalk to
carry home and he calls that image Gradiva9.

On this bas-relief is represented a girl in the act of walking with a grace so natural that
seemed to give life to the stone image10. The protagonist of the romance is so spellbound by that so
graced way of walking by the marmoreal figure that he incessantly tries to understand where such
young person had lived. He realizes that previously his attention for female was confined to the
professional interest for the art works, whereas now he inclined to continually observe women of
his own city and, particularly, their way of walking, but without succeeding in finding in any of
them the Gradivas wonderful walk.

One night, Hanold makes a nightmare: he dreams to be in Pompei just the day of the terrible
eruption of Vesuvio and that himself is among the inhabitants which afraid run away in the attempt
to escape the cataclysm, when suddenly Gradiva appears ahead him, he immediately understands
that if the woman had not tried to escape she would undoubtedly have died; he runs to save her but,
when he succeeds in finding her, she appears him extended to earth, immovable as in a sleep,
serene, in composed attitude for eternity!11
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Because of this nightmare, Hanold takes the decision to go on a journey to Italy and there he
often has the occasion to meet sweethearts honeymoon couples; listening to their mawkish
blandishments, he doesn't succeed in being persuaded by such behaviours and reaches the
conclusion that among all the follies marriage is the greatest madness12.
During the visit in Pompei, in a sort of oneiric state, he sees to advance with light step
Gradiva. Hesitant if that is pure imagination or truth, he thinks that she has returned to live.
The woman's figure, share and share alike, disappears but, continuing to cross the streets of
Pompei, he finds again her while she is sitting on a step. Initially he speaks to her in Greek, then in
Latin, but, surprising him, she speaks in German language; when he tries to narrate his earlier vision
and asks her to lie down on earth in the same position in which she had appeared him during the
oneiric state, the young girl, astonished by that behaviour, brusquely leaves him.
The next day, hoping to again meet her, Hanold goes to the same place where he had met the
woman the day before; there, he finds her sitting in the same position and wearing the same dress as
the previous day. This time the young girl is available to listen to the story by Hanold and when he
tells that she has the identical Gradivas way of walking, she reveals him that Zoe is her name, then
he responds her that Zoe, that means life, is a paradox because he had believed her dead
incinerated. The two fall in love with each other and all that helps the protagonist to recover
completely his serenity, besides he become aware that the last name of Zoe, Bertgang, that means
the girl who beams walking, corresponds to Gradiva. Hanold, head over heels in love, appears
finally freed from the strengths of repression and asks Zoe to marry him.

Freuds Delusion and Dream in Jensen's Gradiva

Freud compared the psychoanalysts work to that of the archaeologist, since both operate on
buried materials to bring back to light; het describes the psychical apparatus like something of
stratified, rich in overlapping and hidden material that the time however has not destroyed.
Shortly afterwards his drawing near Freud, Jung signalled him the W. Jensens Gradiva, a
particularly interesting novel because not only it offered singular analogies with the way, distinctive
of psychoanalysis, of representing the deep psychical life but also of applying the therapeutic
technique introduced by it13.
Freud isnt an archaeologist, but a psychoanalyst and he thinks that the legitimacy of an
interpretation must be subordinate to appraisal by the patient. Therefore he sends to Jensen his
writing on the Gradiva and he receives the answer: much amiable14. Then Freud makes itself
more indiscreet: I asked information on the subjective aspect of the poetic work, what was the
origin of the subject, where its character was found and other similar things15. The authors answer
was patchy or incomplete or also obtuse16. Freud tries to force them, poses other questions, but
Jensen is not there; his reticence increases in a directly proportional way to the increasing of the
troublesome indiscretion by Freud. Finally Jensen answers in lapidary way and with illegible
without a lens characters 17.
The Freuds work on the Jensens Gradiva represents his first attempt to interpret
systemically a literary work from a psychoanalytic point of view and, however, that has a
fundamental worth since it contributes to define the aesthetic thought by the founding father of
psychoanalysis18.
One can assert that beside the Jensens Gradiva exists a Freuds Gradiva: somehow,
interpreting it, he has rewritten the novel, adding the unconscious dimensions19.
Previously Freud was interested in aesthetics but limiting itself to inquire into the relationship
between text and user. He had illustrated the psychical mechanisms and dynamics of the spectator
as user of the art work, but he had neglected the mechanism of the artistic fruition in connection
with the psychological dynamics of the author.
Freud wrote his essay on Gradiva in one go in the summer of 1906, while she was in vacation
in Lavarone, South Tirolo, with the view to analyze the origin of the memories and the impressions
that induce the poet to construct its work, and understand the way in which that processes and
contents becomes part of a work. Freud comes to the conclusion that Jensen has a spontaneous
knowledge of the unconscious processes that are studied by psychoanalysis following other
methods; therefore, the Gradiva Freuds analysis bases on a resolute stand: poets, writers, or better,
some of them, like Jensen, by virtue of a sort of endo-psychic perception can draw from the deep
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layers of personality (also without to be aware of it) a some intuitive understanding of the laws of
unconscious (Cesare Musatti)20. From which the Freuds attempt to apply also to the dreams
invented by writer in the romance, like in the Jensens novel, the classic psychoanalytic
interpretative technique. In a note, in 1899, Freud affirmed that the dreams created by poets and
inserted in the body of literary works, was in most cases destined to a symbolic interpretation21;
the Freuds essay on Gradiva shows as even that dreams can be interpreted likewise the real
dreams22.
In relation to the Gradiva, Freud constructs an organic model of psychoanalytic interpretation
concerning the art work (Luigi Russo)23; to that end he analyzes the tale as if its characters were not
creations of the writer but real individuals and as if the mind of the writer was a transparent screen
and not a deforming and blackening means24; from this perspective, somehow, the Freuds essay
takes shape as a true psychiatric study concerning the archaeologist Norbert Hanold.
Also Ernst Jones shares these ideas, he affirms that the characters of a work can be analyzed
only considering them like living people25.
Mario Lavagetto spotlights a paradox in the Freuds thought: on the one hand the author, as
engineer and creator of own work, turns out dispossessed, on the other hand he becomes the
absolute master of it, because everything, by letter o metaphor, says the subject that has signed it.
The text is teeming with signs and those signs postpone to a defined responsibility, to a name and to
a story26.
It is evident that the Freuds conception, at that time, was disrupting in comparison with the
classical idea that psychiatry was exclusive field of medicine and with which poet should not deal;
but, because description of man interiority is poets specific field, it is evident that poet cannot
escape the psychiatrist and psychiatrist the poet; and the poetic treatment of a psychiatric theme can,
without losing its beauty, result right27!

BIBLIOGRAPHY
1

S. Freud, Address to the Society of Bnai Brith (It. tr. in Opere, vol. 10, Boringhieri, Torino 1978).
S. Freud, Delusion and dream in Jensens Gradiva, (It. tr. Opere, vol. 5, Boringhieri, Torino 1972, p. 264).
3
Ibidem, p. 465.
4
S. Freud, The Interest of Psycho-Analysis from the Point of View of the Science of Aesthetics (It. tr. Opere, vol. 7,
Boringhieri, Torino 1975 p. 180).
5
Ibidem.
6
E. H. Gombrich, Freud e la psicologia dellarte, in Freud e la psicologia dellarte. Stile, forma e struttura alla luce
della psicoanalisi, Einaudi, Torino 1967, p. 29.
7
Ibidem.
8
W. Jensen, Gradiva. Una fantasia pompeiana, (It. Tr. Boringhieri, Torino, 1961).
9
S. Freud, Saggi sullArte, la letteratura e il linguaggio, ((It. tr. Bottati-Boringhieri, Torino, 1991, p. 384).
10
Ibidem.
11
Ibidem, p. 389.
12
Ibidem, p. 396.
13
C. L. Musatti, Introduzione a Delirio e sogni nella Gradiva di W. Jensen, (It. Tr. in Freud, Saggi sullarte la
letteratura e il linguaggio, Bollati Boringhieri, 1991).
14
S. Freud, S. - K. G. Jung, Lettere, (It. Tr. Boringhieri, Torino, 1974 p. 57)
15
Ibidem.
16
Ibidem, pp. 110-111.
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Ibidem, p. 116.
L. Russo, La nascita dellestetica di Freud, Il Mulino, Bologna, 1983.
19
B. Fornari e F. Fornari, Psicoanalisi e ricerca letteraria, Principato Ed., Milano, 1974, pag. 175.
20
C. L. Musatti, Introduzione a Delirio e sogni nella Gradiva di W. Jensen, in Freud S., Saggi sullarte la letteratura
e il linguaggio, Bollati Boringhieri, 1991.
21
S. Freud, Linterpretazione dei sogni (It. Tr. in Opere, vol. 3, Boringhieri, Torino, 1966, pg. 101)
22
S. Freud, Autobiografia, (It. Tr. in Opere, vol. 10, Boringhieri, Torino, 1978).
23
L. Russo, La nascita dellestetica di Freud, Il Mulino, Bologna, 1983.
24
S. Freud, Delirio e sogni nella Gradiva di W. Jensen, (It. Tr. in Opere, vol. 5, Boringhieri, Torino, 1972).
25
E. Jones, Amleto e Edipo, ( It. Tr. Il Formichiere, Milano, 1975).
26
M. Lavagetto, Freud la letteratura e altro, Einaudi, Torino, 1985, p. 228.
27
Ibidem, pag. 293.
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September 5, 2007
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