Abstract
Rome celebrated the four hundredth anniversary of Michelangelo Marisi da Caravaggio’s death with an historical exhibition of his brief lifetime’s work. Yet psychoanalysis has not studied this work extensively, despite the artist’s compelling portrayal of a full range of human affects, including ambivalence. Psychoanalysis has studied artistic pioneers such as da Vinci (Freud 1910) and Michelangelo (Freud 1914), Giotto’s use of blue sky as psychologically innovative (Blatt 1994), and Magritte’s play with external reality (Spitz 1994). What can we learn about Caravaggio’s work—including innovative contributions such as visual representation of expressed emotions, particularly negative emotions, including ambivalence, and remarkably candid, even critical, self-representations—and how can this late-sixteenth-century artist teach us about the development of the concept of mind underlying psychoanalysis?
Rome celebrated the four-hundredth anniversary of Michelangelo Marisi da Caravaggio’s death with an historical exhibition of his brief lifetime’s work. Yet psychoanalysis has not studied this work extensively, despite the artist’s compelling portrayal of a full range of human affects, including ambivalence. Psychoanalysis has studied artistic pioneers such as da Vinci (Freud 1910) and Michelangelo (Freud 1914), Giotto’s use of blue sky as psychologically innovative (Blatt 1994), and Magritte’s play with external reality (Spitz 1994). What can we learn about Caravaggio’s work—including innovative contributions such as visual representation of expressed emotions, particularly negative emotions, including ambivalence, and remarkably candid, even critical, self-representations—and how can this late-sixteenth-century artist teach us about the development of the concept of mind underlying psychoanalysis?
Caravaggio’s innovative contributions to the visual representation of expressed emotions, particularly negative emotions, included representations of ambivalence and remarkably candid, even critical, self-representations. That is, he portrays intensely emotional moments with greater complexity and ambiguity than many of his predecessors. I suggest that he foresees Freud’s discovery of the complex emotions involved in intimate relations (1923). 1 Here I will study his work using psychoanalytic concepts, complemented by Paul Ekman’s approach to reading expressions of emotion—particularly facial, but also gestural and emblematic (2003). I will also discuss how Caravaggio’s work is an example of representing personal and societal dilemmas—in this case, the Black Plague’s effect on Caravaggio’s childhood and community—even if his work does not resolve personal and societal crises, as Erikson (1968) suggests occurs in creative individuals (see also Schütze 2009). I take a synergistic approach to art history and the science of mind. We can learn historically about how and when certain concepts of mind developed by looking at aesthetic works (visual art, literature, music) produced before the dawn of psychoanalysis; in turn we can understand earlier representations of inner reality via what psychoanalysis has learned of the mind over the past century. I will concentrate here on the first tack: what does Caravaggio show us about the representation of emotions and intimacies as he saw and painted them in Rome’s fin de siècle late 1500s, representations that continue to move us?
Freud (1919) deepens our understanding of aesthetics as “not merely the theory of beauty but the theory of the qualities of feeling” (p. 218). Caravaggio presses us toward more intense, complex, at times ambiguous qualities of feeling.
Ellen Handler Spitz (1989) outlines three psychoanalytic approaches to aesthetic studies, all initiated by Freud: pathography, psychoanalytic textual interpretation, and psychoanalytic understanding of art’s effects on the audience. In my own work (Szajnberg 1992, 1996, 2010) I add a further variation: picking up from Freud’s remark about literary masters describing aspects of inner life that he could systematize (and of course treat), I describe how pre-psychoanalytic aesthetic works anticipated psychoanalytic knowledge of the unconscious, the notion of working in layers, and the centrality of the dyadic relationship.
I suggest further (Szajnberg 2010, 2012), following both Auerbach (1946) and Berger and Luckmann (1966), that the Western concept of personhood was constructed over two millennia. We can discern developmental shifts (backward and forward) in our concepts of what we consider “human” at pivotal points in time. This is an extension of Erikson’s idea (1968) of how creative individuals resolve crises, which he demonstrated later in studies of Luther, Gandhi, and Freud. Ogden’s recent studies of Kafka and Borges (2009a,b) add a new approach to Spitz’s three models: using what we know of an artist’s life and work so that one enlightens the other.
Blatt’s study of Giotto (1984) sets a conceptual stage for our exploration of Caravaggio. In the fourteenth century, Giotto’s thirty-eight chapel frescos initiated the Renaissance representation of infinity 2 (using celestial blue rather than medieval opaque gold for the sky), perspectival three-dimensional portrayals, and steps toward naturalism and humanism (as against the stylized otherworldliness of medieval art). Blatt reviews the stages of visual representation in Western art: preclassical monadic, diagrammatic art; classical dyadic art without comprehensive spatial representation; medieval art, with its more concrete, static, and stylized human portrayals (such as the Byzantine); and Renaissance art, with its innovative three-dimensionality and the associated humanism and naturalism. This last stage diminishes the distance between the sacred and the profane (Eliade 1957). Jakob Burkhardt (Blatt 1984) characterizes the Renaissance as a recrudescence of Greek concepts of self-confidence in humanity and the dignity of man. Caravaggio pushes Renaissance art further: both by including the mundane/debased as part of the “dignity” of man and by flattening perspective, paradoxically focusing us on the subjects’ interior lives, deepening the picture’s emotional representation, and evoking emotionality in the viewer.
I will look at how Caravaggio leaps forward in the visual representation of complex emotions, including negative, teasing, and ambivalent states, as well as the interplay of emotions among those portrayed. Caravaggio paints intriguing, compelling dialogues among the emotions of those drawn together; one set of emotions plays against another, like the point/counterpoint of Bach’s music. A century following his namesake Michelangelo Buonarroti, Caravaggio pushes the boundaries expressed in the Sistine Chapel, even as he “quotes” visually from the master’s early Pieta (Figure 1). 3 Some of Caravaggio’s work commissioned by the Church or religious orders were considered so controversial they were refused. In others works, Caravaggio subversively slips past the Church’s eye or tweaks its nose with subtle gestures, such as sneaking two penitent drudges with dirty feet into a portrayal of the Virgin, thereby inserting contemporary “lowly” characters into Church art.
Michelangelo, Pieta
We would like to have childhood background on this “avant-garde” artist, but we know little. He was born in Milan, the first-born child of his parents, and his father and a sibling died of the plague when he was three. His mother died when he was eighteen, at which time he moved to Rome, where artists could thrive on the Church’s commissions. He had been apprenticed to Peterzano, a proud student of Titian. We can see echoes of Titian in some of Caravaggio’s subjects, such as the crowning of Christ, even as Caravaggio presents this with greater intensity. 4 Caravaggio died in exile at forty-one, several years after killing an opponent in a tennis match in Rome. Escaping from prison, he remained on the lam, protected by patrons. I will return to one of his last pieces: David holds Goliath’s severed, blood-dripping head with Caravaggio’s face on Goliath’s skull; David appears somber, as he looks aside over the severed head; Goliath/Caravaggio, mouth agape, brows still knitted, appears puzzled. David’s cross-shaped sword rests loosely at his side or, in an earlier version, against the back of his neck.
Apart from this sketchy biographical information, art historians can offer background on the foundations on which the artist built his work. Barasch (1991) writes on emotional expression in art: in ancient Greece and reappearing in the Renaissance, “a system of expressive facial signs . . . formed an important matrix within which painters . . . shaped their work” (p. 16). He refers also to gesture—an important component that Caravaggio used synergistically with facial expression: the “gestural situation . . . [is composed of] the gesticulating figure . . . granting neighboring figures . . . potential for expression . . . a tool for moving and convincing the audience” (p. 18). When Barasch uses the word “moving” here, he includes being moved emotionally, as Leonardo insisted was necessary (da Vinci 2004): “the most important things . . . in the analysis of a painting are the movements appropriate to states of mind . . . such as desire, contempt, anger, pity and the like” (p. 16). We note that the “movements” Leonardo refers to specifically are what we psychoanalysts would call emotions. With that, let us turn to how Caravaggio tried to move his audiences.
Caravaggio used several themes and innovative techniques 5 to pull the viewer into the frame and to portray emotions in a complex way.
His subject matter (despite the Church’s dictates) pushes the edge of more honest human portrayal, including the prevalence of decay and death: David and Goliath, Judith and Holofernes, Abraham and Isaac, Medusa, St. John the Baptist on several occasions, an ailing Bacchus with a fixed smile, and portrayals of Christ, with varying facial features. Often one character plays off against another. Even in single portraits, such as his representations of St. John (in some cases, louchely smiling), the figure plays against the observer (including Church elders, we might speculate).
There is a complexity of emotions in the presence of others. In Caravaggio’s hands, the characters portrayed perform like members of a small chamber orchestra, each one’s emotions playing responsively in harmony or disharmony with others’; the emotions evoked by the picture are amplified by the play of emotions among the performers. In Judith Beheading Holoferenes (Figure 2), 6 Caravaggio captures the moment when the Jewish widow severs the marauding general’s head, having seduced him. He depicts the physically imposing Holoferenes with his mouth agape as if howling; his eyes roll upward showing shock, perhaps disbelief, even as his left hand grabs the bed linen and the other strains mightily—forearm muscles and triceps bulging, blood vessels distended—to push himself away from this deathbed. Yet Judith’s expression is almost passive, her eyebrows knitted in effort. In contrast to Holofernes’s bulging muscles, her left hand softly grasps a tuft of his hair as her right, with unmuscled forearm, continues amputating the head with a scimitar, Holofernes’s blood gushing out toward the viewer’s lap. Judith’s elderly handmaid rushes in with a bag to grab the soon-to-be-liberated head, her face fixed in fury, possibly touched with contempt. The triangular interplay of the three characters’ emotions amplifies and humanizes the scene’s power.
In the Akeda, Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son Isaac is prevented by an angel. Abraham, aged and bald, yet powerful and determined, is poised with his left hand pressing Isaac’s face downward, the father’s thumb imprinting the lad’s cheek, distorting the boy’s face (Figure 3). Abraham’s knife-wielding right hand is poised, neckward bound, yet painted as if it were already slicing the boy’s arm. Abraham’s face is turned away from the boy, looking back at the angel; the father’s brow is wrinkled, his eyebrows knit with a look of determination or anger, or both. 7 Isaac’s mouth is asymmetrically open as if shouting, eyes wide open, his face showing pain anticipated or beginning. The angel’s face, looking past Abraham in the direction of the ram, shows no emotion. Look more closely: a peculiar ambiguity is revealed in a difference between the angel’s two hands: his left finger points (softly) past Abraham’s chest toward the ram, but his right grabs Abraham’s knife-wielding wrist so firmly that the skin there is wrinkled from pressure. But the direction of Abraham’s wrinkled skin appears as if the angel is forcing the father’s arm downward, forcing the knife to its first victim. That is, if we believe that this expert technician, Caravaggio, painted with intent, with precision, then the angel “shows” ambivalence: one hand directs Abraham’s gaze outward, the other presses his arm toward the son’s neck. And lest the observer be uncertain of the angel’s intent with his right arm, the artist shows bulging forearm extensors and triceps in extension (rather than showing the biceps and flexors, as if he were pulling Abraham’s knife away). X-ray study of the painting shows greater underlying ambiguity and ambivalence. Beneath the surface, the X-ray reveals that Caravaggio used the face of his servant and student, Cecco Boneri, for both the angel’s and Isaac’s visage. Caravaggio later modified facial features so that the two figures appear different on the surface apparent to us today. But, if the X-ray is interpreted correctly, then Caravaggio adds a layer of psychoanalytic complexity to this scenario: the person to be sacrificed—Isaac—and the one who ambivalently halts Abraham—the angel—are the same person beneath their revised masks. This suggests a certain genius of Caravaggio: recognizing that the victim of sacrifice may also be the one who tries to halt the act, even while ambivalently forcing the hand of his would-be executioner. In an unusual touch for Caravaggio, in the upper right corner—above Isaac and the ram’s head—is a glimpse of landscape. 8 But the remainder of the background is darkly shaded, forcing the scene into our faces.
Death and decay in the midst of life are central themes threading throughout Caravaggio’s work, beginning with his earliest still life (the French, nature morte, a more fitting term) of a fruit basket. While death had been visually portrayed in religious art—notably in depictions of the passion of Christ and of the martyrdom of saints like Steven and Sebastian— Caravaggio begins to humanize (even secularize) the study of decay and death. In his lush nature morte of a woven basket filled with fruit, the contents are on closer study seen to be overripe: some of the fruit indeed verges on decay, a spotted apple possibly worm-eaten. Caravaggio carries this basket of overripe fruit into later works, particularly his portrayal of Christ’s appearance at the house at Emmaus after rising from the dead. Here the same basket is perched almost precariously over the front edge of the table, almost protruding out of the picture toward the viewer. 9 This Emmaus (he painted another) captures a powerful moment: two disciples recognize Christ, his face impassive as he raises his hand to bless the bread. One disciple’s face is clear: shock and surprise. The other, back to us, tensely grasps the arms of his chair as he is caught mid-leap from his seat, an elbow revealing torn fabric. Thus, Caravaggio uses not only faces to reveal emotion, but also body tension and “movement.”
Caravaggio sculpts the peaks and crevasses of darkness and light to focus our attention. First, he often uses dark, muted tones—browns and blacks—in the background, pushing the figures into the viewer’s face. They crowd into our attention. Caravaggio plays with light and shadow to focus us on a scene. Early in his work, light comes off-screen from the left, usually upper left, without an obvious source. X-ray study shows in one case that Caravaggio painted over the source of light (the moon shining through a window). A notable exception is his portrayal of Judas’s kiss of betrayal. Here the weak light source comes from the right—a dim lamp held aloft by a familiar observer looking in quiet wonder: the painter Caravaggio, a Zelig-like touch. Later Caravaggio brings light as if it were streaming over the viewer’s left shoulder, alighting on the canvas. Now we see, we feel, a dual effect: the dark background pushes the figures toward us; the light shining from behind and above us nudges us toward the painting. He is an in-your-face painter. 10
Caravaggio portrays an intense humanity, a range of emotions in which each character in the drama plays reciprocally against another like the instruments in a small chamber orchestra. Reading and appreciating the feelings of one person—facial, gestural, emblematic (Ekman 2003)—is best done by studying those of the others in the drama. None stands alone.
There is plasticity from picture to picture of some characters. Within two years, Caravaggio paints two episodes with Christ, showing completely different facial features. He humanizes Christ, unlike standardized, more iconic portrayals of how a Christ should look. This carries humanization further. In the second Dinner at Emmaus, a beardless, chubby-cheeked Christ appears (three days after being dead) blessing the bread.
He uses torso and gesture to insert, to insist on, dynamism in the moment captured. That is, he recognized that emotion is captured not only in the face, but also in gesture and “movement.” The challenge for the painter, whose creations are static, is to represent a sense of movement to the viewer. An example is his use of opposing shoulder to opposite hip, baring the midsection, torquing the torso. This is a technique that Michelangelo used, particularly in the Sistine Chapel’s Sybils, and that Michelangelo in turn took from the then recently unearthed Belvedere torso (Figure 4). 11 Viewers subjectively “feel” this and identify with the “movement.” 12
Caravaggio, Judith Beheading Holofernes, 1598–1599
Caravaggio, The Sacrifice of Isaac, c. 1603
Appolonius, son of Nestor,
In general, Caravaggio imbricates the profane with the sacred, just as he creates a duet between light and dark. With light and dark, he technically uses the extremes of the visual world to intensify the portrayal of reality, to enhance reality so that it feels real. 13 By employing the extremes of the visual, he also enhances the shades and colors between these extremes. So too for the sacred and the profane. Previously, artists had separated profane from sacred representations, or made almost didactic use of the sacred to distinguish it from the profane. For instance, in depicting the passion of Christ, artists made it clear who was evil, those who lashed him or speared his side. Even the master, Michelangelo, in the Sistine Chapel Last Judgment, makes clear who beneath Christ’s feet is going to be or is in hell, and who are the beatified en route to heaven. No room for ambiguity. 14 Caravaggio, by contrast adds, ambiguity, shades of judgment about the profane and the sacred. First, he brings the profane into sacred representations, such as the portraits of contemporary laborers in their worship of Mary. Second, as mentioned above, he portrays the “sacred” acts of Judith or David with greater subtlety. Third, he plays with portrayals of sacred characters, as with the almost teasing, lounging, perhaps louche, St. John, his satisfied smile almost mirroring that of Caravaggio’s Bacchus. Caravaggio’s introduction of ambiguity—light/dark, sacred/profane—leads to greater appreciation of the fullness and complexity of emotional life, the “shades” between darkness and light.
Further, Caravaggio’s elevation of the mundane or profane into the aesthetic or sacred is similar to early Christianity’s elevation of the worldly to the divine as captured in Matthew’s “one [sparrow] shall not fall to the ground without your Father [knowing]” (10:29). In this sense, Caravaggio challenges the Church of his time, engorged with wealth and corruption, to live up to its early dedication to the downtrodden.
For Caravaggio, when people are together, they are together intensely and often with murderousness enacted or in the air. Murder’s presence is clear in paintings such as Judith Beheading Holofernes, David with the Head of Goliath, and even The Sacrifice of Isaac. Caravaggio’s portrayals of Christ show either violence (flagellation, crowning with thorns) or implicit violence in the passion, albeit with Christ appearing indifferent, neutral, possibly saddened or resigned. While his Christs do not differ in this sense from those of other artists, Caravaggio pushes the degree to which death and decay are present and to which, when people become close, murder or death enters. In psychoanalytic terms, Caravaggio recognizes and portrays the presence of ambivalence and ambiguity between people, particularly when emotions run high. Freud’s recognition of ambivalence in our intense, intimate relationships is one of his major contributions. Caravaggio, perhaps among others, identified this visually some three hundred years earlier.
Caravaggio’s “graphical autobiographical” notes about himself also are not new: previous artists would insert themselves, for instance as an observer in a crowd. In one of Michelangelo’s last sculptures, a second Pieta for his tombstone, he imposes his face on that of ancient Nicodemus, poised above both Christ and Mary, supporting the fallen son. 15 But Caravaggio takes us and himself much further into the intense moment. We see only Medusa’s severed head (no Perseus present), snakes writhing in death throes (Figure 5). But it is Caravaggio’s visage, eyes and mouth wide open, showing more fear than anger, glaring at us.
Caravaggio, Medusa, 1597
Another example: in his depiction of Judas’s kiss, soft embrace, and betrayal of Christ, others are charged with emotion—a Roman soldier rushing to grab the revolutionary, a citizen turned away from Christ in shock, others crowded about. Then, at the right edge, arm aloft shedding light on the scene, is the artist, mouth and eyes alert with interest, perhaps a touch of surprise. Caravaggio crowds us toward the central scene; he is a parenthesis to the moment. Finally, his near-death portrayal of David and Goliath (Figure 6) is another stark portrayal of himself. We can compare this to Bernini’s David sculpture: victorious, muscular, and fiercely, angrily expressive—a look of fiero—he swipes his blade through. But Caravaggio, now in his early forties, running from justice for years, portrays something more complex. Yes, it is his face on the severed skull of Goliath. Even in death, Caravaggio/Goliath’s upper face shows “corrugator action,” which Darwin called the muscle of difficulty—seen also in pain, anger, fear, and sadness. His lower face shows his mouth agape.
Caravaggio, David with the Head of Goliath, 1609–1610
We can treat this picture like a dream in which the artist (or the dreamer) can parcel himself into several characters, as Freud (1900) and Erikson (1954) have taught us. Then, to the degree that this David is Caravaggio’s David, the young shepherd’s face shows no fiero, no anger, no joy: he looks, head tilted, slightly downward to his left, toward the dangling head held by his almost soft grasp. He shows remarkable calm, but with a tone of sadness or remorse or pity in the brows of the victor’s face. That is, Caravaggio in his penultimate work both somberly metes out justice (David) and is met with justice (Goliath).
Discussion
Four hundred years after Caravaggio’s short career and early death, psychoanalysis can place him in a pantheon of artists who, from a psychoanalytic perspective, advanced the representation of complex emotions. While constrained by his patrons’ wishes and subject matter, Caravaggio built on his great predecessors’ achievements, particularly those of his namesake, Michelangelo, and went beyond most of them, such as Titian, his initial influence. Caravaggio transgressed contemporary norms to expand the range of emotions that could be represented and to show the interplay of emotions in intense moments of human experience. He openly portrayed what psychoanalysts consider the fuller range of inner reality, including our ambivalences, thereby revealing our inner lives on the surface of the canvas.
We can frame this discussion in terms of Spitz’s overview of the relationship of psychoanalysis to aesthetics (1989), and informed by the focus of Blatt (1984) and Barasch (1991) on continuities and changes in the visual representation of humankind over the ages. Spitz gives three broad categorical approaches for the relationship between psychoanalysis and aesthetics: (1) pathography (using psychoanalysis and aesthetic works to understand the author); (2) psychoanalytic readings of the text (such as Freud’s “reading” of the three caskets), and (3) grasping the audience’s reactions to a work (Freud’s study of jokes [1919]). If we consider Erikson’s studies of Luther, Gandhi, and Freud as deep elaborations of pathography involving not only the individual’s psyche but also the society’s dilemmas, then my paper falls in part into that category: studying how an artist’s work addresses not only his or her views and challenges, but also those of the era. Specifically, while this paper is not a pathobiography, given the paucity of information about Caravaggio’s life, we can speculate that he dealt with the personal experience of the deaths of his father and a sibling in the Black Plague when he was three to four, as well as the deaths of many others at the time, not to mention his dislocation from town to town to avoid the plague, by portraying death and decay from his earliest work onward: as I have noted, decay and death appear even in an early still life—nature morte—of a fruit basket. 16 His gruesome portrayals of decapitations might also be related to the developmental age of the painter at his father’s death, that is at the early oedipal stage, suggesting (from the very little we know of his early life) his sense of the price paid for an oedipal wish fulfilled. We know so little about his early life that we are left to speculate. But we do know that the Black Plague painted a swath of death across northern Italy in Caravaggio’s youth, killing some one-third of the population (Schütze 2009). We can suggest that Caravaggio’s portrayals of decay and death as a part of life would resonate with concerns of his community and could in part explain his popularity and the power of his work in his era (Schütze 2009). He also was employed by the Church and various religious orders, and was aware of the level of hypocrisy and obscene wealth and sexual practices of the Church, the same attitudes and actions that three centuries earlier had moved the devout Dante to write the Inferno.
Caravaggio was an artistic picador to such churchly bullish antics. That is, following Erikson (1968), we can understand Caravaggio’s subject matter as his way of addressing both deeply personal childhood (and adult) experiences that also resonated with his era and community.
But let us turn to the central focus of this paper: a sixteenth-century artist’s representation of the complex emotions that arise in intense relationships. Blatt enlarges this effort—applying psychoanalytic thinking to aesthetics, and aesthetic development to understand our contemporary view of inner life—when he demonstrates that there are significant advances, turning points, in visual representations in art. Further, he suggests that these advances are consistent with Piaget’s ideas about cognitive development, even as Blatt cautions that we not “primitivize” the art of earlier eras. This moves us closer to understanding what steps, what efforts, were needed to develop the concepts of personhood and relatedness that eventually allowed Freud to found the discipline of psychoanalysis. Makari (2008) elegantly shows the scientific concepts of the nineteenth century (about sexuality, psychopathology, normal psychology) that Freud learned and was able to weave into a new discipline. Here, following Blatt (1984) or Szajnberg (2010), for instance, I suggest that one can use psychoanalytic understandings of inner life to chart how these concepts were developed, studying aesthetic works (literary, visual, sculptural, musical) over greater spans of time.
In this way we can begin to observe how artists have advanced and documented our views of the inner life of mankind over the centuries, preparing the infrastructure of a road, an intellectual via Appia from Rome to Vienna (not just to Brindisi), all the way to psychoanalysis. Caravaggio brought the profane closer to the sacred, not only as Eliade has described (1957), but also as Freud did by elevating the mundane, the debased (parapraxes, dreams, symptoms) to self-enlightenment.
We too can further explore humankind’s development of self-awareness by using psychoanalysis. Blatt argues that Giotto’s new techniques—new ways of seeing and representing the world—represented a movement forward psychologically, both cognitively (in the Piagetian sense of reversibility, reciprocity, and conservation being connected with the sense of infinity) and emotionally (in the sense of naturalism and humanism). 17 That is, we can read the history of art (visual, plastic, literary, musical) as a way of reading our progress (and regress) in Western concepts of the inner world. I have focused here on the representation of emotions, expressed in face, body, and gesture and among the participants in intense moments.
I suggest that Caravaggio’s bold representation of both negative and positive feelings, including ambivalence and moments of ambiguity about feelings, demands that the viewer approach, feel moments of identity or uncertainty, and think harder about these works: the angel’s passive, calm face, yet pressing arm; David’s somber look; the absence of wrath, disgust, or victory in Judith’s moment of killing the evil Holofernes; Caravaggio’s self-portraits in Medusa and the final Goliath; the impending rot in a basket of ripe fruit.
Auerbach’s argument in his now classic Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946) includes his view that literary modes of representation develop over time, with occasional leaps of achievement: the New Testament’s elevation of the mundane to the sublime; Dante’s self-portrayal voyaging through Hell in order to reach Paradise; Shakespeare’s overly self-reflective (and secular) prince. When we read Auerbach closely, it is clear he defines mimesis not as “imitation” of reality (the usual translation of Aristotle’s term): rather, mimesis is in large measure the re-presentation of reality (external, internal) in such a manner that the reader or listener is moved to feel as if this could be happening or has happened. We “know” that these stories may not be factual (the Akeda; Ulysses’s slaying of the Cyclops; Aeneas’s amorous sojourn with Dido; the tales of the Grimms or Sheherezade), but they feel deeply human, they move us (Bernstein 1976). That is, with psychoanalytic thought, we can begin to grasp why certain works (literary or visual) move us so much. In Caravaggio’s case, he tackles the imbrication of Eros and Thanatos, ambivalence, and decay and death with life.
Conversely, we can use our psychoanalytic understanding of what appears to be universal in inner life (e.g., the existence of the unconscious, the extent to which we are influenced by it, the presence of ambivalence in close relationships, the enduring nature of working models of attachment) to look back on the evolution of Western art to discern the turning points in the development of our concepts of self, personhood, and relatedness. For example, the genre of autobiography was begun by Rousseau’s Confessions in the late eighteenth century (Szajnberg 1992). The elements of what we consider autobiographical first appear in this work: that early childhood influences the person we become in adulthood, that we can reflect on our lives, and that we can construct narratives of our lives, particularly with an audience available. 18 In this sense, a foundation stone for psychoanalysis was laid by Rousseau: the value of narrating one’s life to both understand and explain and the value of reviewing one’s early life. Psychoanalysis can be considered an oral/aural extension of the autobiographical genre (Szajnberg 1992).
We have the opportunity then to look at various forms of art to see how we have developed our psychoanalytic concepts over time. We can learn from great artists how we have come to be who we are now as twenty-first-century psychoanalysts, learning what may be universal, but also what may be cultural variations of our concepts of humankind. Dyson (2007) has outlined how cultural differences between the French and Anglo-Germanic schools of physical and mathematical science refracted into different paths of methodology and discovery. With time, discussion, and critical thinking, such differences are resolved by the larger scientific community. Paul (2010), a psychoanalyst and anthropologist, points out that as an anthropologist he expects differences in psychoanalytic thought across cultures (e.g., regarding the optimal inner life, the nature of intimacy, the goals and method of treatment). He cites evident differences between the Western individualist perspective and more family- and group-centered Eastern cultures. With careful study across time and cultures, we can gain clarity regarding how we have constructed our views of inner life, what we share as “human,” and what differentiates us from each other.
In this study of a late-sixteenth-century Italian master, we see Caravaggio’s perspective on the universality of emotions, a harbinger of the psychoanalytic understanding of ambivalence and intimacy. 19 We learn that as he exposes the darker and more intensely ambivalent aspects of our inner lives, this aesthetically enhances our view of humankind.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Bruno Bettelheim for introducing him to art and psychoanalysis, the Wallerstein Fellowship for its support since 2005, his daughter Lily for escorting him to Italy, Sidney Blatt for discussing and critiquing this paper, and Paul Ekman for his sensitive reading of the emotions in the works discussed and for his dear friendship.
Wallerstein Research Fellow in Psychoanalysis, San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis; Training Analyst, Israel Psychoanalytic Society; faculty, New York Psychoanalytic Institute.