Cross-Fertilization
between Psychoanalysis and the Visual Arts
It is no accident that
psychoanalysis flourished in Vienna in the early decades of the Twentieth
Century amidst an 
explosion of innovative artistic movements. While
Freud’s contemporaries in Vienna - artists like Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka,
and Egon Schiele - exhibited powerfully emoting expressionistic paintings,
otherEuropean artists such as Paul Cezanne and Wassily Kandinsky gave birth to
Abstract Art. Freud, an avidcollector of antiquities and a connoisseur,
formulated his metapsychological hypotheses at a time and place in the history
of art that coincided with an exploration with abstraction and a drastic
departure from artistic representational conventions. The etymological root of the word ‘abstraction’, from Latin,
means “to draw away from, to separate”. 
Abstract art renounces form to express
essence, and it is an unconscious creative process relevant to psychoanalysis.
Abstraction goes into the making of any work of art, for evena photographic
depiction of nature allows for the artist’s interpretation. Abstract art,
moreover, dwells in the purelysymbolic, on multiplicity of meaning, and
clearly allows for the artistic expression of affect and of the artist’sindividuality. Ernest Hartmann (2000)
emphasized the importance of affects in both psychoanalysis and contemporary art. He stated that both analytic work
and modern artistry “involve the making of new connections guided by affect”
(p. 73). He further perceived contemporary artwork as a contextualization of
emotions.
As psychoanalysis established itself
and evolved throughout Europe and the American continent, its cultural impact
was prominent in the development of Surrealism in Europe, and later, Abstract
Expressionismin the United States. André Breton (1969), the founder of
Surrealism, and other artists such as Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Yves Tanguy,
Salvador Dalí and René Magritte, transformed psychoanalytic concepts into a
pictorial style of dream landscapes and imaginative primary process paintings.
Surrealists tried to reconcile theabstract with the concrete 
(Whitfield 1992)
with their magical hyper-real images giving the viewer the experience of having
a pictorial glimpse at the unconscious. One could also speculate that Abstract
Expressionism, an artistic tradition born in the United States after World War
II, was partly fueled by the Vienna of the early 1900s. The
Abstract Expressionists, exemplified by Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Arshile
Gorky, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko, were a group of American artists who
elaborated on the concept, previously proposed by Kandinsky in Europe, to
completely forsake representation orresemblance to the world and give colorand forceful brushstrokes central importance in the creation of a work of art.Abstract 
Expressionists painted in trance-like states directly pouring affect
on canvas. To quote the observations ofthehistorians H.W. Janson and
A.F. Janson (1992):“(with Abstract Expressionism)…painting became acounterpart to life itself, anongoing process in which artists face comparable
risks and overcome dilemmas confronting them through a series of conscious and
unconscious decisions in response to both internal and external demands” (p.
438).
Freud’s formulations, in
particular the importance of the unconscious, psychic determinism, the concept
of primary process, the technique of free association, and the interpretation
of dreams, are an integral part of the cultural armamentarium of contemporary
artists, aesthetes, critics, and art historians. Psychoanalytic theory
and technique became relevant to the development of artistic traditions in the
Twentieth Century and the fields Psychoanalysis and Aesthetics became
intertwined ever since in a journey of cross-fertilization.
César A. Alfonso
cesaralfonso@mac.com
Breton, A. (1969), Manifesto of Surrealism,
University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.
Hartmann, E. (2000), The psychology and
physiology of dreaming: A new synthesis, in L. Gamwell (Ed.),
Dreams 1900–2000 Science, 
Art and the Unconscious Mind, Cornell University
Press, New York, pp. 61– 76.
Janson, H. W. and Janson, A. F. (1992)
A Basic History of Art, Prentice Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New
Jersey.
Whitfield S. (1992), Magritte, South
Bank Centre, London.