Art and Inner Values

A painter himself, Jung was deeply attuned to the wealth of psycho-logical meaning that could be expressed through artworks, and he pursued a lifelong inquiry into the human purposes served by artistic creation. In many ways, Jung’s theories can facilitate understanding of the essential nature of art. As I undertook this study, Jung served as my partner and adviser.

Jung’s connection to art was profound. In 1902 he went to Paris to study with leading psychologist Pierre Janet, during which time he visited the Louvre frequently. He was particularly attentive to ancient art, Egyptian antiquities, and the works of Renaissance and Baroque-era painters—Fra Angelico, Leonardo da Vinci, Rubens, and Frans Hals. In January 1903, he traveled to London, where he visited the British Museum, viewing the Egyptian, Aztec, and Incan collections.

Jung painted landscapes in 1902–3 and created more abstract and semirepresentational art from 1915 onward (Jung 2009, 196).

Freud was interested in art as well, and he applied his methods of psychoanalysis to the interpretation of artworks, even though

he understood that such analyses were not sufficient to unlock the full meaning of an artwork in its wholeness as art. He did say that the content of artworks mattered more to him than the techniques exhibited, and he cautioned that his methods were not suitable for the interpretation of artistic techniques (Freud 1995, 193–94). In this study I employed Freudian and Jungian theories in coordination with other modes of artistic analysis, and they served as important tools—

in particular by illuminating the value to be found in accessing the unconscious content and by exploring ways in which artists can bring their unconscious into play.

Jung never developed any theories for interpreting artworks. He also said that it would be impossible to formulate a theory about the conscious personality or to create a general theory about dreams. To do so, a person would have to possess an almost divine knowledge of the human mind. Indeed, very little is known about the human mind, and the matters that are not known are categorized as the uncon-scious. In the face of this lack of general knowledge, Jung maintained that each patient presents a new problem and requires an individual-ized approach to treatment (Jung 1968, 124, 204).

Additionally, Freud explained how he arrived at his technique of psychoanalysis. In 1914, while analyzing the Moses of Michelangelo, Freud learned that well before psychoanalysis had been developed, between 1874 and 1876, a “Russian,” Ivan Lermolieff, had caused a crisis in the art galleries by successfully challenging the supposed authorship of many paintings. Lermolieff was in fact the pseudonym of an Italian physician and art connoisseur named Morelli. Freud wrote that Morelli’s method mirrored the technique of psychoanaly-sis, in that Morelli focused on “minor” but significant details and not on the main features of an artwork (Freud 1975, 222; 1995, 206).

As might be expected, as psychiatrists, both Jung and Freud main-tained that art is based on unconscious mental activities. Freud (1995, 95–97) assumed that in the process of making art, artists direct their attention to their inner selves and to their unconscious, and he

under-stood artistic expression to be the result of the interaction of the inner soul and unconscious processing. Many artists work at expanding their access to the unconscious in order to develop new ideas for their artistic expression—instead of smothering ideas with a conscious critique. In this quest, artists are involved in learning to use the laws of the uncon-scious, even though they might not actually admit such a thing out loud.

Furthermore, Jung explained that an artist’s life is full of conflicts.

On the one hand, an artist has the justifiable longing of an ordinary person for happiness, satisfaction, and security. On the other hand, an artist has a ruthless drive to create, which may override every personal desire. Jung also proposed that the creative process is imbued with a feminine quality, and that creative work arises from the unconscious depths (Jung 1966, 102–3). Jung asserted that creative individuals are not free, being ruled by their inner demons (Jung 2001, 377–78). In his seminar of 1925, Jung (1989, 13) also stated that the reason artists in general hate to talk about their artwork is that they lack strong and reflective minds.

In his May 1925 lectures, Jung (1989, 52) described artists as the unwitting mouthpieces of the psychic secrets of their time, and said that they are often just as unconscious as sleepwalkers. “The artist sup-poses that it is he who speaks, but the spirit of the age is his supporter, and whatever this spirit says is proven true by its effects” (Jung 1966, 122–21). Much later, in February 1960, Jung (1984a, 185) stated, in his letter to Eugen Böhler, that art is trying its best to make man acquainted with a world full of darkness, but that the artists them-selves are unconscious of what they are doing. According to Jungian theories an artist mirrors society either unconsciously or consciously.

In his letter to Herbert Read of September 1960, Jung made the fol-lowing point about artists:

They have not yet learned to be objective with their own psyche, i.e., [to discriminate] between the thing which you do and the things that happen to you. When somebody has a happy hunch, he thinks that he

is clever, or that something which he does not know does not exist.

We are still in a shockingly primitive state of mind, and this is the main reason why we cannot become objective in psychic matters . . . . We have simply got to listen to what the psyche spontaneously says to us (Jung 1984a, 194–95).

Artists are visually talented, and quite possibly, many are not verbally talented to the same extent. Personally, I felt that after completing my painting, I had said all that was needed to be said. I had expressed my feelings in the artwork, and further verbal explanation was unneces-sary. Pollock also maintained that he does not want to introduce con-fusion by labeling or explaining his paintings. Hence, Jung’s statement about the quality of artists’ minds might not be accurate, since many artists intentionally refrain from commenting on their art.

Artists might choose to ignore their finished artwork: after the piece is completed, many artists feel that it is enough, and there is nothing more to say. However, if an artist is willing to seek a more objective assessment, the work can be interpreted, either by the artist or by another person. In that case, The Artwork Interpretation Model can serve as a useful guide.

Moreover, Freud (1967, 193–94) believed that a lack of character prevents most writers from being better than they are, inasmuch as sincerity and morality are the source of all genius. I agree with Freud that living an honest life is easier than otherwise. In my artistic pro-duction, my goal was to be as honest and authentic as possible, and this intention helped me create new kinds of artworks.

Freud’s analyses were largely biographical, and he also developed the genre of “psychobiography.” He thought that a work of art is based on repressed infantile wishes and that artistic production is connected to daydreams. Freud allowed that he did not have a psychological theory of aesthetics (Milton, Polmear, and Fabricius 2004, 132). Yet focusing again on the biographical, in 1910, Freud (1962, 63–137) wrote about Leonardo da Vinci; similar writings about Leonardo and Dostoyevsky are collected in Freud’s (1995, 144, 243) book Uni ja isänmurha, kuusi

esseetä taiteesta [freely translated, A Dream and the Murder of the Father:

Six Essays about Art].

Freud, as we have seen, emphasized childhood experiences and proposed that artists’ personalities and behavior were based on such memories. For example, Freud (1959, 225–26) wrote in his article

“Dostoevsky and Parricide” (1928) that Dostoyevsky’s seizures dated to his childhood, and that he became epileptic after a choking experi-ence that occurred when he was eighteen and his father was murdered.

Freud claimed that Dostoyevsky’s unconscious wish to kill his father triggered his traumas and epileptic attacks: they were his self-punish-ment for wishing his own father’s death. Freud (1959, 229) also wrote that parricide is the principal and primal crime of humanity and of the individual (Freud 1995, 243).

Freud believed that Leonardo had sublimated his sexual instincts, converting his passion instead into a thirst for knowledge (Freud 1962, 74). Leonardo’s consuming appetite for research was accom-panied by the atrophy of his sexual life, which was restricted to what was characterized as an ideal, sublimated homosexuality. Moreover, a harmonious and peaceful personality was considered typical of the homosexual personality in Freud’s era. Thus, Freud assigned that sexual orientation to Leonardo, also citing the fact that in his early childhood, Leonardo did not live with his father but with his mother (Freud 1962, 78, 80–81).

Later, in 1959, Erich Neumann (1959, 3–7) corrected some of Freud’s errors, pointing out that Leonardo grew up with his father and stepmother in his grandfather’s house. After his father’s third marriage, Leonardo lived as an only child with his grandmother and stepmother, Neumann added, saying that the family circumstances were very complicated.

It is difficult to establish the facts about what happened in an artist’s past, although it can be asserted that personal history does influence the artist’s work. However, when interpretation is based on secondhand information or on outright misinformation, it can easily

produce erroneous results. Thus, it is crucial that evidence supporting the analysis be carefully examined.

Overall, Freud’s analyses were based on an artist’s personal history.

In contrast, Jung maintained that personal matters have little to do with a work of art. Instead, he emphasized spiritual values and the importance of cultural influences on creativity. Jung (1966, 91–98, 122) divided artistic creation into two modes: the psychological and the visionary. The psychological mode includes materials from the conscious life, and they are easy to interpret. The visionary mode is the opposite; it is more difficult to understand—in fact, it is hard to even believe that it is real. Jung explained that it consists of the imagery of the collective unconscious. The psychic structure follows the tracks of the earlier stages of evolution, just as does anatomical structure. Jung called the primordial images of the visionary mode archetypes, and he characterized an artwork as a message to generations of humankind.

In this study, when personal analyses using data from conscious life were not sufficient, archetypes were employed as additional tools to divine an artwork’s unconscious meaning on the visionary level.

Jung’s idea of spiritual creativity—perhaps it can also be seen as a visionary creation mode—is evidenced by his assertion that a work of art is a living being that uses humanity only as a medium, employ-ing mankind’s capacities accordemploy-ing to its own laws and shapemploy-ing itself for the fulfillment of its own creative purpose. Artists are amazed by the thoughts they never intended to think and the images they never intended to create, and through which their own inner nature reveals itself. Artists can only obey the apparently alien impulse within them-selves and follow where it leads, sensing that their work is greater than themselves and wields a power that is not theirs and that they cannot command. A work of art is not a human being, it is something suprapersonal. It is a thing and not a personality, hence it cannot be judged by personal criteria (Jung 1966, 71–72).

Abstract art is created in this spiritual manner. Consistent with this, Pollock said that painting has its own rules, which he must obey.

Jung (1966, 72–73), however, reminds us that not every work of art originates in this manner. For example, for a literary work, a writer adds to and subtracts from that work. One pays attention to the laws of form and style.

Jung was interested in clarifying the psychological motives and conditions behind artistic creativity. Some of Jung’s interpretations of artworks were based on his theories of neurotic and schizophrenic personalities. In his letter to Herbert Read of September 1960, Jung (1984a, 194–95) wrote about Picasso that “I find no signs of real schizophrenia in his work except the analogy, which however has no diagnostic value, since there are plenty of cases of this kind yet no proof that they are schizophrenics.”

Jung wrote that Picasso’s personality was fatefully drawn toward the dark and follows a demoniacal attraction to ugliness and evil. Picas-so’s art was a sign of the times. His pictures leave one cold, or dis-turb one with their paradoxical, unfeeling, and grotesque unconcern for the beholder. Jung compared Picasso’s art to images by schizo-phrenics that expose a separation from feeling. Such schizophrenic pictures are not unified or harmonious but include conflicting feelings or even a complete lack of feeling. Their most characteristic feature is a fragmentation or division, which expresses itself in so-called “lines of fracture.” Such works can be interpreted as a series of psychic errors that runs through the image (Jung 1966, 137–38). In the analysis of artworks, compositional realities should not be ignored—every line and color can impact the emotions. However, any strong statement about an artist’s personality, based on the actual artwork, should be carefully asserted, because an artist’s original intentions are not always accessible for interpretation.

Jung also painted, and his interpretations were sometimes based on artistic values. At the same time, in his work he sought to under-stand the psychological motives for creating. Jung declared that the best expression of modern art is found in paintings, since paintings do not require an explicit form with an idea, as a sculpture does.

Paint-ings can dispense with such form, and in paintPaint-ings one can discern evidence of the sequence of development. For instance, Jung followed the course of a painting by Picasso: Picasso was suddenly struck by a triangular shadow thrown by the nose on the cheek. Later, the cheek itself became a four-sided shadow, and so it continued. In this process, killing one development occurs in order to release another. The human figure disappeared, and the details gained independent value. The artist shifts the emphasis from the essential to the seemingly nonessential.

This process draws the interest away from the reality-based image, and the internal object gains importance. By breaking up the object and then seeking the core internal abstract image, modern art turns away from the representation of the external and directs its gaze toward the unconscious creative source and the inner values (Jung 1989, 53–57).