Freud’s Psychoanalytic Interpretations: A Critique
Sigmund Freud’s essay on Leonardo da Vinci opened the floodgates for a deluge of psychoanalytically tinged commentaries on art and artists. Freud attempted to penetrate the artist’s soul through their artifacts, their works. Once there, the psychoanalyst turns around and, based on their own theoretical considerations, creates the psychological makeup of the artist-creator.
Thus, from the outside, the artifact, to the inside, the artist. A canvas of understanding and explanation is stretched over the presumed traumatic, problematic, tension-creating events from the personal past. From there, each interpretive fantasy of the psychoanalyst leads to explanations of the creation of that same artifact (book, painting, music, sculpture…).
A circular argument: from outside to inside, from then to now, from unconscious drive to the creation of an artifact (book, painting, music, sculpture…). At first glance, this train of thought seems to travel through an intellectually exhilarating landscape, while in a matter of fact it goes it around in circles on a closed circuit, always ending up where it started, without the passenger being aware of it. It seems profound but goes nowhere.
Moreover, Freud has a habit of drawing generalizing conclusions from a particular case. Simply put: once an Oedipal conflict was defined in one person, this concept became a general law, valid for all people, exaggerated.
Of his “science,” today only the historical value remains.
Amidst the vast array of psychoanalytic articles and books, often relying on this simplistic (simplistic?) mechanism, Marcel Proust was also subjected to being squeezed into this reductionist mold: asthma as neurosis, an overly close mother-child bond, rivalry with and of his younger brother, a cold and distant relationship with his father who was a competitor for his mother’s love, homosexuality as perversion. In short, through the psychoanalytic lens: the genius of Proust’s work stems directly from the compensation for and the unconscious processing of his Oedipal conflict.
The immense popularity of psychoanalysis has spawned numerous publications in which key scenes such as the Petit Madeleine and the rejected goodnight kiss are anchored to an unconscious fantasy. Everything in Marcel’s life and work is given a sexual connotation, and these interpretations run rampant as if they were the only true reality.
One of Proust’s earliest biographers, George D. Painter (1959 and 1965), wrote a true bestseller with two remarkable characteristics. Firstly, he based his work solely on written sources, even though he had the opportunity to interview many of Proust’s contemporaries who were still alive at the time. Secondly, he constantly dissects Proust’s behavior to arrive at explanations that, according to Jean-Yves Tadié (the world authority and “Professor Proust par excellence”), are based on “two-cent psychoanalysis,” “market-place Freudianism,” “outdated scientism1“, and “bazar psychoanalysis2.
Amateur psychologists have attributed all sorts of trendy and not-so-trendy diagnoses to Marcel Proust: clinophilia (love of beds), cacography (bad writing), graphomania (excessive writing), high sensitivity, psychosomatic hypochondria, voyeurism, borderline personality disorder, and the like.
Ah…
Leave a Reply