A Global Art History through a Psychoanalytic Iconology (original) (raw)
Related papers
2019
In Plato’s Republic, when Socrates was trying to explain that what painters do, He said that to Glaukon ‘Take a mirror and hold it everywhere. Suddenly you made the sun, the stars, the world, self, the house, plants, all living entities’ Is it really so easy for the artist to reflect the world and the human? The purpose of art is clear despite all its undefinitions. Art wants to understand and explain human being. Because the greatest enigma about human life has always been about itself. It is still another matter that art can fulfill this function. For example, at the point of time killing, why is reading books a much more intellectual action than watching television? Both are fictional, created. However, there are differences between the pleasure a person receives while reading and watching TV. The book is suitable for my communication. It triggers the imagination because there is no visuality. As long as Oguz Atay's doesn't give details about novel’s protagonist, I can describe it in my head. But television gives me a ready product and prevents me from dreaming. Here is the impressive, the most important feature of art is that the reader / viewer can dream. We can come under the influence of the work as we can imagine. Because, as Freud argues, adults make daydreams to satisfy their desires. In this way, the artist reflects the daydreams into his work with free creativity. Freud's psychoanalytic theory is undoubtedly one of the greatest turning points of the 20th century. Of course, its effect has not only survived the 20th century, but it has spread to every aspect of academic life and daily life in the 21st century. In this context, I will consider how Freud deals with art and especially creativity through psychoanalysis.
PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO THE ART HISTORY
The book discusses three grounds, demonstrating how psychology of art remains internally independent from the subject of study in the field of history and theory of art, which can be synthesized like this: 1) presence of art which is defined as psychological and causes a need for disciplinary defining of the "psychological" category in the context of art history; 2) art, which develops in historical synchronicity and symbiosis with a particular psychological school or system and needs historiography of psychology as explanatory context; 3) art, which creates new psychological discourse and includes as a compulsory condition a particular kind of psychological rhetoric. In the end of the day the above-mentioned three grounds are directly related to the potential of art to contain brightly expressed psychological reflexion, to interpret certain psychological problems and topics and to conduct its own psychological experiments. These three grounds oblige the art history to develop its own methodology in addition to the existing psychological models of art and the psychological discourses and categories in them and to confess that they are oriented towards meanings which the other approaches to art cannot find and understand.
Art History and the Mind: questioning the shift from psychoanalysis to neuroscience
This keynote paper for Workshops on Psychoanalysis & Art History raises questions about the ability of neuroscientific theory to replace older psychoanalytic models. On the one hand, scholars in the arts and humanities have raised important doubts about the ability of brain science to offer real insights into such complex cultural phenomena as the history of art. If neuroscience turns out only to offer very limited theoretical tools, then it is likely we are not going to abandon psychoanalysis any time soon. On the other hand, a growing number of art historians, especially new researchers, find neuroscience more robust and ‘of the moment’ than psychoanalysis and are beginning to apply neuroaesthetic ideas to art-historical problems. Concepts such as ‘mirror neurons’ and ‘neuroplasticity’, for example, suggest new ways of understanding behavioural responses to works of art and the importance to artists of the natural environment. This paper, however, urges caution. It is argued that rather than abandoning psychoanalytic approaches to the history of art we should instead review the method. The greatest value of the current excitement about neuroscientific ‘discoveries’ might be to make us question what actually constitutes a psychoanalytic approach and to update the concepts that we all too habitually employ.
Creativity, art, and psychoanalysis
2006
Abstract: Four important themes in self psychology as developed by Heinz Kohut are remarkably congruent with current theoretical constructs in the field of evolutionary (Darwinian) psychology: (1) the concept of narcissism; (2) the claim for the innate human capacity for empathy; (3) the recognition of the importance of group cohesion and (4) the belief that individual psychological distress is produced by a changed environment rather than a dysfunctional self. By recasting Kohut's themes in a Darwinian framework and interpreting them with personal views of the phylogenetic origin and nature of the arts As one who writes about the arts from the Darwinian framework of evolutionary psychology, I have been intrigued to discover interesting and possibly fruitful correspondences between my ideas and selfobject theory as articulated by Heinz Kohut and others who, like him, have antecedents in the British psychological tradition called object relations. In Art and Intimacy (Dissanayak...
Modern and Postmodern Expressions of the Self: Freudian Psychoanalysis of Art
The International Journal of Indian Psychology, 2021
Sigmund Freud's method of psychoanalysis has not only been fundamental for the discipline of psychology, but also for analysing works of art. Freud, beginning with his oft-cited psychobiography of Leonardo da Vinci, introduced the concept of studying an artist and its praxis from a psychic space; a concept that was revolutionary for its society that up until then experienced artworks through a romantic lens. The creation of a work of art was no longer simply the product of an intuitive 'genius,' but also the culmination of psychological factors like suppressed wishes and instinctual desires, familial relationships, childhood experiences, and dream sequences and fantasies, among others. Not only has such psychoanalysis inspired the Surrealist art movement, but also helped scholars in studying works of art, and their artists. In this paper, using Freudian principles, I psychoanalyse eight works of art produced in and beyond the ambit of Surrealism. With such an exercise, my aim here is to examine the creation of the self-portrait (and by extension, the image of an artist's self) as a site of multiplicities. It is a site that is the product of an unconscious that is being constantly shaped, right from the artist's childhood. For every artist, I have provided a small vignette that explains their oeuvre, its influences and aims, and how we can study the subtextual elements of their influential unconscious. With my examination, we can witness the projection of the self in a postmodern world where such sites are by their very nature, deconstructed, transient, and multiple.
The Cultural with The Clinical: On the Relationship between Art and Lacanian Psychoanalysis
MPhil Dissertation, Jadavpur University, 2019
Explores the relationship between the creative arts and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Chapter One contains a critique of the so-called Slovenian School (Zizek, Tomsic, Zupancic, Dolar etc) which privileges philosophy over clinical experience. Chapter Two explores the 'inaugural moment of psychoanalysis and literature' which is in Freud's 1897 letters to Wilhelm Fliess. Lacan's meeting with Chomsky and engagement with the work of Joyce is also referenced. Chapter Three focuses on the relationship between music and psychoanalysis, an area which neither Freud nor Lacan has explored in detail. Special attention is paid to the modernist music of John Cage placing him alongside Marcel Duchamp and Joyce.