Art
Freud valued art as one of humanity's great cultural institutions,
and dedicated many papers to discussing both the process of artistic creation in
general and certain works of art in particular. He explained artistic creation by
reference to the concept of SUBLIMATION, a process in which sexual libido is
redirected towards non-sexual aims. Freud also dedicated a number of papers
to analysing particular works of art, especially works of literature, which he
argued could be useful to psychoanalysis in two main ways. Firstly, these
works often express in poetic form truths about the psyche, which implies that
creative writers can intuit directly the truths which psychoanalysts only dis-
cover later by more laborious means. Secondly, Freud also argued that a close
psychoanalytic reading of works of literature could uncover elements of the
author's psyche. While most of Freud's papers on particular works of art
concern works of literature, he did not entirely neglect other art forms; for
example he devoted one paper to discussing Michelangelo's statue of Moses
(Freud, 1914b).
Lacan's works also abound in discussions of particular works of art. Like
Freud, Lacan devotes most of his attention to works of literature of all genres:
prose (e.g. the discussion of The Purloined Letter by Edgar Allan Poe in S2,
ch. 16, and Lacan, 1955a), drama (e.g. the discussions of Shakespeare's
Hamlet in Lacan, 1958-9, and of Sophocles' Antigone in S7, chs 19-21)
and poetry (e.g. the discussion of Booz endormi by Victor Hugo in S3, 218-
25; S4, 377-8; E, 156-8; S8, 158-9). However, Lacan also discusses the visual
arts, devoting several lectures in his 1964 seminar to discussing painting,
particularly anamorphotic art (Sll, chs 7-9, where he discusses Holbein's
The Ambassadors; see also S7, 139-42).
There are, nevertheless, significant differences between the ways in which
Freud and Lacan approach works of art. Though Lacan does speak about
sublimation, unlike Freud he does not believe that it is possible or even
desirable for psychoanalysts to say anything about the psychology of the
artist on the basis of an examination of a work of art (see his critical remarks
on 'psychobiography'; Ec, 740-1). Just because the most fundamental com-
plex (Oedipus) in psychoanalytic theory is taken from a literary work, Lacan
says, does not mean that psychoanalysis has anything to say about Sophocles
(Lacan, 1971: 3).
Lacan's exclusion of the artist from his discussions of works of art means
that his readings of literary texts are not concerned to reconstruct the author's
intentions. In his suspension of the question of authorial intent, Lacan is not
merely aligning himself with the structuralist movement (after all, authorial
intent had been bracketed by New Criticism long before the structuralists
appeared on the scene), but is rather illustrating the way in which the analyst
should proceed when listening to and interpreting the discourse of the analy-
sand. The analyst must, in other words, treat the analysand's discourse as a
text:
You must start from the text, start by treating it, as Freud does and as he
recommends, as Holy Writ. The author, the scribe, is only a pen-pusher, and
he comes second. . . . Similarly, when it comes to our patients, please give
more attention to the text than to the psychology of the author - the entire
orientation of my teaching is that.
(S2, 153)
Lacan's discussions of literary texts are thus not exercises in literary criticism
for its own sake, but performances designed to give his audience an idea of
how they are to read the unconscious of their patients. This method of reading
is similar to those employed by formalism and structuralism; the signified is
neglected in favour of the signifier, content is bracketed in favour of formal
structures (although Jacques Derrida has argued that Lacan does not in fact
follow his own method; see Derrida, 1975).
Besides serving as models of a method of reading, which Lacan recommends
analysts to follow when reading the discourse of their patients, Lacan's
discussions of literary texts also aim to extract certain elements which serve
as metaphors to illustrate some of his most important ideas. For example, in his
reading of Poe's The Purloined Letter, Lacan points to the circulating LETTER
as a metaphor for the determinative power of the signifier.
A new branch of so-called 'psychoanalytic literary criticism' now claims to
be inspired by Lacan's approach to literary texts (e.g. Muller and Richardson,
1988, and Wright, 1984; other works dealing with Lacan and cultural theory
are Davis, 1983; Felman, 1987; MacCannell, 1986). However, while such
projects are interesting in their own right, they do not usually approach
literature in the same way as Lacan. That is, while psychoanalytic literary
criticism aims to say something about the texts studied, both aspects of
Lacan's approach (to illustrate a mode of analytic interpretation, and to
illustrate psychoanalytic concepts) are concerned not with saying something
about the texts themselves, but merely with using the texts to say something
about psychoanalysis. This is perhaps the most important difference between
Lacan's approach to works of art and Freud's. Whereas some of Freud's works
are often taken to imply that psychoanalysis is a metadiscourse, a master
narrative providing a general lutmeneutic key that can unlock the hitherto
unsolved secrets of literary works, it is impossible to read Lacan as making any
such claims. For Lacan, while psychoanalysis might be able to learn something
about literature, or use literary works to illustrate certain of its methods and
concepts, it is doubtful whether literary criticism can learn anything from
psychoanalysis. Hence Lacan rejects the idea that a literary criticism which
makes use of psychoanalytic concepts could be called 'applied psychoanaly-
sis', since '[p]sychoanalysis is only applied, in the proper sense of the term, as
a treatment, and thus to a subject who speaks and listens' (Ec, 747).