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1. Keynote for University of Essex Workshop 3, 28 June 2013
1
Art History and the Mind: questioning the shift from
psychoanalysis to neuroscience
David Hulks
Neuroaesthetics seems to represent something of a challenge to the traditional
connection between psychoanalytic perspectives and art-historical subject matter.
In particular, it threatens the dominance of established psychoanalytic doctrine,
and makes us question, or confirms, what we thought we knew but that in fact we
were only guessing at. Neural imaging can help sort fact from fiction, revealing large
swathes of psychoanalytic theory to be correct, suspect or just plainly untrue. It
can make us lean away from Freud, more towards Piaget, for example. But in
moving away from Freud, and the wider discussion of applied psychoanalysis, will
we be losing a cultural hermeneutics that many in the humanities argue is an
invaluable intellectual tool, a method of thinking out carefully the psychic
dimensions of art history and aesthetic experience? What follows will be an
historical investigation. I want to ask whether psychoanalysis is something that we
should retain or no longer need. We first need to know what it has been used for;
why it became such a crucial plank of art-historical method. So, a little history.
In order to understand how Freudian ideas were taken up by art historians, we first
need to appreciate the wider intellectual climate and history of psychoaesthetic
thought that Freud inherited. It is helpful, for example, to return not just to the
early formation of the psychoanalytic movement in Vienna and Zurich from where
the International movement was launched, but also to recover the aesthetic and
psychological traditions from which psychoanalysis derived.
The idea of the Unconscious, it bears repeating, does not derive from Freud. It was
introduced into university discussions much earlier on, mainly through the
influence of the philosopher and pioneer of pedagogy, Johann Friedrich Herbart
(1776–1841). Herbartian ideas were strongly adopted by the Austro-German
educational establishment in the 1850s and formed the basis of a general
pedagogic programme in German-speaking universities in the 1860s. Eduard von
Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869) and Karl Scherner’s Life of
Dreams (1861) are typical of this movement rather than simply foreshadowing
Freud. Or to put it another way, the idea of Freud being revolutionary is, to quote
James Strachey, ‘journalistic cliché’.1
Freud’s commitment to Herbartian
determinism, for example, is well attested, and underpins not just psychoanalytic
thinking but also the scientific pursuit of art history. Herbart’s psychological
theories as applied to aesthetics were developed by a string of aesthetic
philosophers in the 1860s and 1870s. The Herbartian theories of Fechner (1801–
87), Zimmermann (1824–98), Vischer (1847–1933) and others ultimately fed in to
the development of art history as a discrete university discipline in the 1880s, as the
famous Wienerschule2
separated from its parent disciplines of psychology and
aesthetics.

2. 2
Nevertheless, within the early Wienerschule, psychological considerations were
assumed to be crucial to art-historical study, offering not only a way of
understanding the aesthetic perception of the individual, but also other aspects of
the history of art, including the way art history seemed to be comprised of periodic
styles and was differently inflected in different parts of the world. As well as
providing racial typologies to explain this (as Kant had done towards the end of the
18th
century),3
psychology also focused on the dynamics of style ― its shifting
character ― suggesting quite precise psychic mechanisms for the exhaustion of one
style and its replacement by another. Also, it was hoped that psychology would be
able to penetrate the important art-historical mystery of how art had begun in the
first place, the so-called ‘origins’ problem – a challenge that in the years around
1900, within a strongly Darwinist environment, several art historians attempted
using the latest psychological theories.4
The key to understanding all these large-
scale phenomena comprising art history was the investigation of the universal
perceiving mind, the mechanisms of which, once discovered, would explain art
making in all its forms – whether at the origins of artistic production in prehistory,
during the rise of civilizations in antiquity, in the medieval cathedral-building
periods, or later in the Renaissance, Early Modern and Modern periods.
If this was the general intellectual backdrop of the original Wienerschule ― the
discipline of art history co-existing with psychology but developing essentially its
own ‘image anthropology’ – in the ‘Second’ Wienerschule of the 1920s and 1930s5
more tangible connections to psychology were developed. Not to over-simplify
what was at this time still an open range of options, we can nonetheless see a
tension or split between those who advocated drawing lessons from the new
Gestalt psychology that certain German universities were developing, and others
who were more interested in the influential psychoanalytic movement that was
now asserting itself between centres in Vienna and Zurich. Those of the former
persuasion, most notably Hans Sedlmayr (1896–1984) and Otto Pächt (1802–1988),
called for a Kunstwissenschaft (science of art) that would use psychology so as to
replace Alois Riegl’s (1858–1905) admired but fuzzy notion, Kunstwollen (will to
art). The new art history was to focus on structure, referring to a precise aesthetic
‘attitude’ ― in Sedlmayr’s words, both ‘psychophysical and intellectual’.6
Others,
however, including Ernst Kris (1900–57), Otto Kurz (1908–75) and a youthful Ernst
Gombrich (1901–2001), leaned more towards Freudian psychoanalysis so as to
emphasize the importance of instinctual drives and cultural memory. Freudian
ideas appear to have been helpful in stressing the deep psychic structures
determining the course of art history, as opposed to a more conscious and
biologically located set of determinants assumed in Gestalt psychology.7
We might also look for the origins of psychoanalytic art history in the
psychoanalytic movement itself. Freud’s interest in art history seems to have
commenced in the 1890s, and became increasingly focused on the possibility
historical pathography. His attempt to recover the childhood causes of Leonardo’s
artistic expression in adulthood, however, seems to have been only a past-time
initially, an amateur contribution to an established but niche genre of psycho-

3. 3
historical cultural criticism rather than part of his normal psychoanalytic method. In
the last, surprisingly cautious chapter of the Leonardo book, his suggestion is only
that an artist’s childhood traumas and fantasies might determine the possibility of
artistic expression in adulthood; not that Leonardo’s ‘artistic power’ is fully
explained by, in this case, the fantasy of the vulture.8
In fact, you could argue that
Freud’s Leonardo study only becomes fully art-historical after its English translation
in 1916 and with a series of extensive footnotes that Freud added rather
defensively in 1919 and 1923. These connect Freud’s amateur art-historical
interests only tentatively with other psychoanalytic art writers, including Oskar
Pfister’s (1873–1956) suggestion that the blue drapery can be read as the outline of
a vulture, which Freud acknowledges but says he is ‘not inclined to accept without
reserve’.9
These debates about art history within psychoanalysis only gradually feed into
mainstream art history ― Jung and others frustrated by Freud’s reluctance to push
these ideas much harder, but Freud understandably cautious about the speculative
nature of what many regarded as fringe theories or wild hypotheses. The
equivalent in art history was iconology, which like psychoanalysis was
internationalised via the Warburg Library coming to London and in the United
States through Erwin Panofsky’s (1892–1968) influence. Iconology, like
psychoanalysis – using less speculative but often equally controversial
interpretations and imaginative leaps – attempted a diagnosis of past cultures
through the recovery of encoded symbolism. Aby Warburg (1866–1929) in fact
described himself as a ‘psycho-historian’, referring to evolutionist questions of
cultural history that it was thought might be solved by a combination of historical
speculation and psychological insight. Warburg also seems to have picked up on, if
not psychoanalytic, certainly psychiatric perspectives when further asserting that
art historians should not only attempt to investigate the symbolic connections
between art and other potent images; they should also do this with a purpose: so
as to ‘diagnose the schizophrenia of Western Civilization’ which he assumed was
institutionally embedded and endemic.10
Simultaneously in psychoanalytic contexts, essays on art were used to inform and
extend theoretical psychoanalysis – often referred to as ‘applied’ psychoanalysis.
Kris tells us that in international scholarship the direction of travel was generally
from art history into psychoanalytic discussion; not, as had originally been hoped, in
the opposite direction: psychoanalysis informing academic art history and theory.11
It was within psychoanalytic circles mainly, therefore, not in the universities, that
discussions were had about how psychoanalytic theory might be employed for art-
historical purposes, Freud’s own forays into art history providing the impetus (but
not necessarily the template) for the psychoanalytic interpretation of culture.
Freud’s art-historical essays nevertheless were the central point of reference for
psychoanalytic art history, and for good reason. They articulate, for example, an
important transition from the pathography of artists (so-called psychobiography) to
the more conventional art-historical method of focussing on the work of art and its
impact on the viewer.

4. 4
Freud’s method for his second art-historical study was repeated observation of the
Moses figure that he wanted to understand in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli
near the Colosseum in Rome. At the beginning of his 1914 essay he reveals the
extent to which he has absorbed the lessons of classic empathy theory by referring
to ‘the formal and technical qualities’ of works of art, which he says he struggles to
appreciate.12
He signals, in other words, that he is aware of the debate about form
developed by the empathy theorists; but says he feels more competent to discuss
‘subject-matter’, in other words content. We know from the essay, and his private
notes on the multiple visits he made to San Pietro, however – and of course from
his work on dream theory – that he was as interested in the ‘how’ as he was in the
‘what’. The real prize of psychoanalytic art history was recovering how exactly
psychic content was encoded into a work of art, not what in each case was
symbolised.
Freud’s Michelangelo essay is much more assertive than his earlier Leonardo study.
We experience the ‘Moses of Michelangelo’, Freud argues, as ‘more than human’,
or ‘superhuman’ (Übermenschliches) – a godlike figure ‘struggling successfully
against an inward passion for the sake of a cause to which he has devoted
himself’.13
So, Freud wonders, how has this been achieved? His argument is
revealingly art-historical. Michelangelo has not just reflected or expressed his
cultural environment; more importantly, he has ‘added something new’, he says, to
the standard iconography.14
This parallels the addition psychoanalysis makes to art
history. Yes, Michelangelo is a man of his time: he expresses the general
Kunstwollen and Zeitgeist of the High Renaissance. But also he adds something
new, profound and all his own, which can only be understood by psychoanalytic
investigation. In Freud’s view, it is this individual ‘sublimation’ and ‘externalisation’
of an ‘inward passion’, made everlasting in the marble contours and aesthetic
substance of the Moses figure, that constitutes a ‘concrete expression of the
highest mental achievement that is possible in man’.15
Great art therefore, for
Freud, is not just symbolic expression, the communication of content (subject-
matter) from artist to audience via form. It is also a more universal delving into
oneself; a fruitful regression into common human processes, without which style
stagnates rather than being advanced.
Most art historians, however, were unimpressed by – or just not interested in –
Freud’s art-historical writings, with only a handful of exceptions. Kris and Gombrich,
for example, spent several years trying to understand the history of facial
expression and caricature,16
developing the Freudian idea of regression; this
resulting, ultimately, in Kris’s classic description of the extraordinary self-
portraiture of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, thought to be a very clear
demonstration in art history of the psychoanalytic principle: ‘regression in the
service of the ego’.17
Kris also began to develop a psychoanalytic model of
aesthetic engagement that referred closely to Freud’s 1927 paper on Humour.18
This further shifted the use of psychoanalytic art history away from trying to
understand the pleasure derived from beautiful configurations of form, instead
towards an attempt to appreciate how advanced art might be based on a complex

5. 5
psychic economy combining both pleasure and unpleasure to create uniquely
powerful works of art.
Kris’s employment of psychoanalytic ideas was unusual, however. It needs to be
stressed that mainstream art history was more interested, if it was interested at all,
in developing the ideas of Gestalt psychology, based on the continuing belief that
art was essentially a visual mode of expression and therefore that optical
investigation was the best way of understanding the seeing mind in preference to
the theoretical speculations about unconscious, and therefore untestable,
perceptions. The growing emphasis in psychoanalysis on unconscious processes
consequently only had a limited impact on art history in the inter-war period,
although iconology was of course pursued in earnest. Iconologists generally,
however, concentrated on symbolic interpretation without recourse to
psychoanalytic theory, explaining the hidden meaning and general psychologies of
past cultures without feeling the need to describe these psychoanalytically.
If psychoanalysis was mentioned, in fact, it was usually viewed as a popular
discourse of contemporary society more than as an intellectual tool for art-
historical use. In his 1939 Studies in Iconology, for example, psychoanalysis is
compared by Panofsky to neoplatonism: the religious philosophy that became a
form of mystic knowledge in the Italian Renaissance, countering conventional
Catholic thought.19
Like neoplatonism, or scholasticism in the medieval period,
psychoanalysis was therefore for Panofsky simply a ‘mental habit’, not a serious
attempt at advancing psychological questions. A similar attitude seems to have
prevailed across academia. Meyer Schapiro (1904–96) in his 1956 reassessment of
Freud’s Leonardo study notes: ‘most students of art who have written on Leonardo
since this work appeared have ignored it, although they are concerned like Freud
with the artist's psychology in accounting for singular features of his art.’20
This
neglect of, or disdain for, psychoanalytic ideas, however, started to change as
Freudian concepts within Surrealist theory began to filter through to mainstream
art criticism.
A key instigator of the take-up of psychoanalysis in Britain was Herbert Read (1893–
1968), particularly with the publication of Art and Society (1936). Read not only made
clear his full acceptance of psychoanalytic principles at this time; he also argued that
these were the means for unlocking ‘the unsolved problems of art’ which had eluded
art historians and theorists hitherto.21
‘The theories of Freud,’ Read writes in Art and
Society, ‘may not, it is true, have yet met with universal acceptance, and may still
require drastic criticism.’ Nevertheless, he argues, ‘there are no longer any serious
grounds for questioning their relevance.’22
Read further prepared the way for
psychoanalytic art history in the immediate post-war period with the even more
influential publication of his pedagogical work, Education Through Art (1943), and
was joined by others in the same period, most notably Adrian Stokes (1902–72), who
revealed increasingly the extent to which his seemingly original form of literary art
criticism was fundamentally based on psychoanalytic theory ― a revelation that lost
him several admirers, among them Kenneth Clark (1903–83).

6. 6
In the post-war period, however, psychoanalytic art history did increasingly seem
viable, even if few, if any, art historians completely embraced it. Certainly, Read’s
influence continued to be important. It was Read who pushed Kris to publish his
1930s essays, finally, in the important publication Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art
(1952). It was also Read who agitated for psychoanalytic readings of Henry Moore
(1898–1996) and the new generation sculptors, who, he argued, were articulating,
very much as Jungian theory had predicted, the general Zeitgeist and what he
described famously as ‘a geometry of fear’.23
Adrian Stokes also provided an
important setting for art historians and psychoanalysts to come together with his
organization of the Imago Society in Hampstead. Although he struggled to get
sympathetic art historians to attend, he did attract a handful of critics and theorists,
including the Viennese psychologist and art educator, Anton Ehrenzweig (1908–66),
who contributed his controversial ‘theory of unconscious perception’. Stokes also
had some influence on Ernst Gombrich, who in a 1955 paper attempted to show
how an artist like Raphael (1483–1520) might be understood psychoanalytically as
someone able to store inherited style in the ‘preconscious’ – actually, an idea as
indebted to the art historian Emanuel Löwy (1857–1938) as it is to Sigmund Freud.24
It is really only in the 1960s, however, that academic art historians explore more
thoroughly the potential of psychoanalysis to probe fundamental art-historical
questions, using French structuralist theory and in particular the unconventional
philosophical speculations of the renegade psychoanalyst and cultural theorist,
Jacques Lacan (1901–81). This took time to filter through, but by the mid 1970s
attempts are being made to apply Lacanian theory to classic, and still unsolved, art-
historical questions. Rosalind Krauss (b.1941), for example, in the context of October
magazine, makes a very interesting case, by leaning on Lacan, for simultaneously
abandoning simplistic style theory while at the same time showing a sea change from
one type of practice in American Abstract Expressionism into something, not just
observably different but also psychologically changed within Minimalist and
Conceptual Art. In other words, she is not just looking in her Notes on the Index
essays (1977)25
at individual psychological strategies. Krauss’s use of Lacan
(combined with the semiotics of A.J. Greimas (1917-1992) and others) to examine
the work of conceptual artists like Vito Acconci (b.1940) is an attempt to investigate
no less than the group psychology of a movement and, by extension, a period.
Krauss here attempts to use Lacan rather like earlier art historians used psycho-
logical aesthetics: as a way of explaining style change – or, as she puts it, ‘an
extraordinary mutation’ in art history – in terms of a mental and, she says,
unconscious shift. In the case of conceptual art, she argues, this is to do with a
‘logic’ attributable to photography becoming ‘the operative model’. 26
This arises
from a new, largely nonconscious ‘sensibility’ that reaches for a different medium in
order to make radically new visual art displays. The sudden appearance of
photography in 1970s New York galleries is symptomatic, she argues, of a new
postmodernist logic that replaces the mentality of modernism, not just in a
material, conscious way, but also at a deep-rooted unconscious level.

7. 7
Krauss’s strongly Lacanian basis for these views is, however, more psycholinguistic,
one could argue, than psychoanalytic, recalling Karl Bühler (1879–1963) and others
more than Freud. It is interesting to compare this strongly linguistic case of
psychoanalytic art history with the more clearly Freudian psychoanalytic visual art
theories of the British philosopher Richard Wollheim (1923–2003).
Wollheim was another graduate of Stokes’s Hampstead circle whose influence on
art history is deep and extensive. Yet the complexity of his often very forceful, not
always tactful arguments, as well as the strongly psychoanalytic basis of his
thinking, are under-appreciated. For the argument I am developing here, however,
Wollheim is particularly interesting, since he appears to have been aware of, and
endeavoured to retain, many of the fundamental aims of both psychoanalysis and
Wienerschule aesthetics, exactly at the moment when postmodernist art history
was, in sharp contrast, distancing itself from traditional art-historical authorities
and the grand-seeming concerns of the German-Austrian tradition. Wollheim had
no such qualms. His strongest impact on art history is perhaps in the early 1980s, by
which time he had re-located to the United States.
Wollheim’s psychoanalytic art history derives, however, from the 1960s, and is
clearest perhaps in a 1965 Forward he wrote to Adrian Stokes’s The Invitation in Art
(1965). In this essay, Wollheim argues that what Freud contributes to art history is
an advance in our understanding of the ‘form problem’ that the earlier
philosophers of aesthetics had been wrestling with, but had not solved, in empathy
theory. Whereas it had been assumed by earlier scholars that the work of art
needed to be understood as a ‘higher’ kind of artefact; Freud showed that it was
more important to examine what a work of art ‘says’, as Wollheim puts it, thereby
demonstrating, he argues, something extremely important. Freud’s focus on
content, especially in his Michelangelo paper, is about asserting that all
phenomena, including art, have content – but not only that, potentially have the
same content. What is different therefore about the work of art, what distinguishes
art from non-art, or great art from bad art, is the way in which that content is, as it
were, folded in to the work of art and then released in the act of appreciation, both
during the period in which it is made and afterwards through exhibition.27
One thing this argument does is it counters a common objection that some
intellectuals had in the 1960s – particularly to the Kleinian version of Freud’s ideas
that Wollheim subscribed to – known as the ‘British Independent perspective’. As
the social anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer (1905–85) put it: one is apparently asked
in Kleinian theory to accept that ‘infants are filled with the most monstrous and
cannibalistic fantasies and wishes’ as if, without that belief, the whole apparatus of
British psychoanalysis would fall apart.28
Wollheim, however, diverts attention
away from these aspects of psychoanalytic theory, through recourse to aesthetic
theory. He argues that artists are fundamentally ‘rooted in the visual process itself’;
although he does not mean by this that all we require therefore from psychologists
is that they tell us about ‘the prejudices of vision’ which underpin aesthetic looking.
This dry, empirical approach does not tell us how the artist looks, what he sees or

8. 8
how we see in response. For Wollheim, the ‘orbit of art’, as he puts it, revolves
around not just seeing but also feeling. He requires art historians therefore to
address not just the biographical, biological or contextual facts of artistic
production. The more fundamental information needed is how the artist ‘felt these
facts: the fantasies under which he subsumed them and through which they
impinged upon him.’29
Wollheim applies these principles in his Andrew Mellon lectures delivered in the
early 1980s. What is crucial in Wollheim’s theory is the locating of the object of art
history: not in the thing itself, the aesthetic artefact; not in the social or studio
environment of art making, although this is important; and not, either, in the
biology of vision necessary for being able to see in the first place and for future
generations to register the work of art within the visuality of a different period.
However, art history tells a reconstructive story essentially about how artists
thought and felt at the time, and wants to known also how these feelings, beliefs,
thoughts, etc. are, as it were, deeply encoded in the work of art. Wollheim argues
this is not, then, purely about psychoanalysing the artist: we need to know, he
argues, also how a society, a community, or an individual (all of these are of course
connected) arrives at the opinion that certain works deserve the status of art ―
and, if that society has galleries or their equivalent, displays these things as special
artefacts, works of art. It is from this institutional scenario, he suggests, that we can
gain access to the artist’s ‘instrumentality’ – in other words, how he or she uses the
art work to invite the spectator to engage in a particular act of artistic seeing,
‘seeing-in’.30
This takes us to the heart of what the debate about neuroscience is all about.
Psychoanalytic art history, as Wollheim describes it, assumes there is a ‘mind’ (both
conscious and unconscious) that ‘sees in’. It is this seeing-in mind that
psychoanalytic art history attempts to reconstruct. Readers of psychoanalytic art
history expect to be told what it was like for Ingres, for example, to paint portraits,
and also what it was like to view an Ingres painting: how the gaze that Ingres
constructs affects the contemporary viewer in the early 19th
century when the work
is first displayed. ‘Neuroarthistorians’, however, insist there are only ‘brains’. The
idea that there is a mind in addition to the brain is, for them, metaphysical stuff and
nonsense. Millions, possibly billions of neurons fire in the brain, and chemicals
(neurotransmitters) flow between synapses producing responses such as attraction
or repulsion. But it just does not make sense to a neuroscientist or neuro-
arthistorian to ask what it was like to be an 18th
century spectator. How could we
possibly know? Neuroarthistorians are materialists; they deal only in empirically
derived data from which indisputable facts can be inferred. To ask about how a
situation might have felt, as Wollheim does, introduces intentionality,
instrumentality, subjectivity and so on. These, neuroenthusiasts suggest, are effects
of language; they aren’t real and can never reliably be known.
Neurosceptics, however, beg to disagree. The philosopher, John Searle (b.1932), for
example, pointed out in the mid 1990s that subjective states are certainly

9. 9
knowable; in fact, they lend themselves to being studied and described.31
It is just
that scientists don’t understand the biology that underpins these subjective
experiences. They understand that the brain is made up of billions of neurons, but
how these neurons form neural ‘networks’, which give rise to conscious and
unconscious processes, is still in the realm of the unknown, or at best speculative.
Searle, and people like him, are not dualists it should be emphasized. They do not
believe that the mind is made up of mental stuff, whereas the brain is physical – the
traditional ‘mind-body problem’ that Gilbert Ryle’s (1900–76) work did much to
undo.32
Searle accepts that subjective states must be produced by the same
physical stuff that makes up the rest of the world. It is just that knowing the
physical structure and chemical composition of neurons – knowing how many
neurons there are, understanding which parts of the brain light up when subjects
are stimulated in certain ways – none of this explains what it is like to have this or
that experience, including what it is like to be an artist or to see in to a work of art.
Empathy, projection, identification and so on, while fundamental to psychoanalysis
are all denied by neuroenthusiasts.
Psychoanalytic art history therefore seems to be needed if what we want to do is to
understand the past subjectively – which is to say, if we want to write about what it
was like to be there: to sculpt or paint like that, to see in a different way, or to
experience the contemporary power of images. The powerful effect that a great
image seems to have over us is something art historians generally want to explain
― and to explain in context. Psychoanalysis has shifted its opinion about this, but
usually attributes this affective power of images to the way the work is invested,
somehow, with formative childhood experiences. For Lacanians the regression
involved here is to a pre-linguistic ‘imaginary’. For Kleinians, it is usually about
regressing to part-object persecution or to do with re-experiencing the ‘depressive
position’ where psychic fragmentation is healed. For Freudians, it is regression to
primary narcissism, or to do with sexual anxieties, wish-fulfilment and repression.
Art history, however, does not necessarily need to know why exactly any particular
emotion or strong idea is experienced. What it may, however, need to do is to
describe the subjective emotions of the artist, the effect on the viewer, or even the
psychological shape or atmosphere of a whole movement. Dull art history only
describes past events in objective terms (behaviours and the facts of events). Lively
art history does more than this: it tells you what it was like to make a work of art or
how in qualitative terms it was to experience it.
Michael Podro (1931–2008) discusses this issue at some length in his last book,
Depiction (1998). In his chapter on the visceral nature of Chardin’s still-lives, Podro
asks how exactly works of art can be seen to possess subjective characteristics. How
can a painting be melancholy for example, or a sculpture uplifting?33
This would be
a question that a neuroscientist or neuroarthistorian would simply be puzzled by:
clearly, this is an illusion, an example of how easily the brain can be fooled into
entertaining false ideas. Podro, however, thinks that, on the contrary, this is a key
question for art history, since the answer, if we can arrive at an answer, may

10. 10
explain what is meant by ‘expressivity’. The artist has made the image express an
emotion, not literally but within imaginative perception. For Podro, we are probing
here the very stuff of art history, its basic unit, so to say, in the field of depiction.
The essential operation of art according to this view is as an act of projective
identification: the viewer reaches out to grasp imaginatively the work’s visual
significance. For Podro, as for Wollheim, this can best be explained in terms of
some sort of relationship with infancy. Drawing on Winnicott’s classic description of
the transitional shift that the infant makes from undifferentiated vision to the
perception of things and gradual understanding of self, Podro argues that
foundational experiences such as this leave a legacy that remains in adulthood.
Winnicott’s psychoanalytic explanation of child development provides both
Wollheim and Podro with a theory of why exactly works of art and images generally
might appear to have sentient qualities, and why therefore we describe them as
‘sad’, ‘joyous’, ‘uplifting’ and so on.34
There is something deeply old-fashioned, however, about this kind of psycho-
analytic art history, and the Californian art historian Whitney Davis I think puts his
finger on why that is in his 1994 analysis of ‘erotic revision’ in the work of Thomas
Eakins.35
For Davis’s generation of psychoanalytic art historians, the kind of
explanation Wollheim and Podro attempt is oddly historicist and causal. For art
historians steeped in the phenomenological aesthetics of Husserl, Heidegger,
Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur, art history is not a science but a hermeneutics of vision.
The essential task of art history, in other words, is interpretation. Art historians
examine certain situations where art is made, produced, valued and so on, so as to
get as close as possible to a truthful interpretation of objects and events. They do
not need to explain why works of art take the form they do; they do however need
to ascertain exactly what that form is through a hermeneutics of the ‘visuality’
registered in the work of art and the contexts in which it is made, displayed, and
consumed. Thus Davis, after forensic historical study, does not offers an
explanation of how the work is instrumentalized by the artist and becomes a
vehicle of expressivity; he does not explain the ‘how’ so as to focus on the ‘what’.
This kind of psychoanalytic art history is perhaps the most sophisticated use of
psychoanalysis there is. Instead of reaching for psychoanalytic theory as
underpinning truth, Davis and others instead simply ask of psychoanalysis that it
provides them with an intellectual model to think out how a particular artistic
situation might have been played out. The result is revisionist art history that claims
to offer a better, more plausible account than before. In the case of understanding
the work of Thomas Eakins (1844–1916), Davis wants to change the very question
that people usually ask about the work. The usual assumption is that paintings such
as Swimming Hole (1884–5) straightforwardly express homoerotic desire. Davis’s
research indicates, however, that far from wanting to express any homosexual
energy, the artist in fact wanted to suppress all sexual ‘discharge’. Davis’s question
then becomes: how did he manage then not to do this? In other words, what are

11. 11
the psychic mechanisms by which the wish fulfilment follows an unexpected course
producing what seems like the opposite of what one would expect?
A similar, but less structural, psychoanalytic strategy is pursued around the same
time in Alex Potts’s re-reading of Winckelmann’s writing (Flesh and the Ideal, 1994).
Both Davis and Potts mine neglected corners of Freud’s theory so as to discover
unconscious processes that might account for the unexpected complexity of making
or perceiving a work of art. Like Davis, Potts discovers what seems an obvious, and
equally unintended, homoerotic projection in Winckelmann’s description of the
Belvedere Antinous. However, he reads this not as a simple expression of
homoerotic desire on Winckelmann’s part projected onto the receptive loveliness
of a captivating white marble statue; rather, he tries to decipher a more complex,
regressive fantasy of narcissism that was ‘pervasive … within modern European
culture’ during the Enlightenment and that Winckelmann channels into his
description of the statue.
The daring move here is to use Freud’s theory comparatively. Freud’s idea of
narcissism and Winckelmann’s are not the same, Potts argues; ‘But it is
nevertheless worth making the comparison with Freud (and with Lacan), for it
underlines [he says] the regressive dynamic of this structure of fantasy pervading
modern notions of an ideal self.’36
Winckelmann regresses the adult male athlete to
boyhood, whereas Freud and Lacan speculate about a much more radical, infantile
regression to primary oneness. Nevertheless, despite the historical and cultural
distance between Winckelmann and Freud, this is still the same type of operation:
‘an imagined regression to an earlier state of being’ so as to entertain a fantasy of
solipsism devoid of conflict. Again, what Potts is attempting here is hermeneutics
rather than historical science. We are a long way here from the Kunstwissenschaft
that Sedlmayr and Pächt were calling for and that is continued in the more literal
use of psychoanalytic theory attempted by Wollheim and Podro. Potts and Davis,
however, you might say, are no less interested in getting at the truth of the
situation they are examining. It is just that they appropriate Freudian ideas, rather
than relying on them completely.
To take one more example of this genre, Griselda Pollock reaches for Freud in order
to prosecute her case against the male gaze and the supposedly phallocentric
structure of language within which all Europeans, but women in particular, are
trapped. Art-historical objectivity is necessarily compromised in such a situation,
provoking a radical departure from what Pollock calls the ‘dominant modes of art
history – monograph, movement, style, descent, work of art.’ Freud’s account of
fetishism is also of course compromised for the same reasons. However, again, as
with Potts’s use of Freud, there are structures that Freud’s work reveal that enable
an unmasking of the aggressive Oedipal fantasies encoded within the European
tradition of depicting women. ‘I am not’, Pollock argues, ‘describing a supposed fact
there in the drawing, but reading, ie. verbalizing, the image’s materials for the

12. 12
psychic ambivalence it stages … confronting us with what we try not to know about
our fantastic psychic life.’37
There are strong similarities here, therefore, with the strategies employed by both
Potts and Davis. All three art historians, though their aims and methods might be
very different, nevertheless pursue a detailed subjectivist account, drawn from a
reading of Freud, so as to expose unconscious processes at the heart of the
Western tradition. In the same way that Potts argues that his interpretation of
Winckelmann’s writing is a way of gauging a wider Enlightenment psychology
focused on the fantasies of the Greek Ideal; so Pollock is also concerned to insist
that her account improves on old-fashioned pathography which immunises the
observer, or archival researcher, from any implication in the neuroses the analysis
reveals. Despite these claims, one might be forgiven for asking how exactly the
cause of art history, specifically, is advanced by working in this way. Pollock’s
psychoanalysis of Arthur Munby (1828–1910), for example, certainly connects with
wider histories – in fact, the widest histories imaginable: specifically, those of
Victorian class, gender and colonial attitudes. At some point, however, more
specifically art-historical questions inevitably return: for example, when not trying
to diagnose the ‘schizophrenia’, as Warburg puts it, (misogyny, racism and so on) of
the supposedly civilized West.
In a more globalized, less cynical art historical enterprise, the hermeneutic
approach might seem too narrowly focused on subjectivist pathography and, at the
same time, rather vague and unfocused in its claim to be able to read off from an
individual study the ‘visual regimes’ of art in the West. Is there another kind of
psychoanalytic art history, then, that might lend itself more readily to the new
challenges of art historical enquiry consistent with ‘post-postmodernist’ concerns?
It seems to me inevitable that psychoanalytic art history today will find itself
gradually re-engaging with other, more forensic psychoaesthetic or even
neuroaesthetic approaches, not least because of the emphasis there now is on
interdisciplinarity and public engagement. As such, the new situation seems not
unlike that of the Wienerschule a hundred years ago, when psychoanalysis, Gestalt
psychology, neuroanatomy, and other sciences of the mind and perception all
presented themselves as equally available to the history of art.
What I am suggesting then is a coming-together of the two sides that have opposed
one another in the debate over whether or not your brain is you.38
This, in fact, I
think is already happening, gradually, but it needs to happen more rapidly so that
common interests can produce, not neuro-art-history (a term that implies a purely
biological, extremely one-sided approach),39
but rather the psychology of art history
– psychology being a fairly neutral term that can accommodate findings from
psychoanalysis just as readily as from neuroscience, psychology itself, philosophy of
mind and psychiatry. It seems to me, in fact, a good time to return to questions
that Wollheim and Podro’s generation raised; such as, how it is that works of art
provide opportunities for reading-in certain emotions through what psychoanalysts
call ‘projective identification’.

13. 13
A reductive form of neuroaesthetics rejects such ideas as simply a misreading of
what happens neurologically when people respond to pictures, things and images.
However, it is not inconceivable that neuroaesthetics will advance beyond its
current dismissiveness and will begin to investigate how these effects might occur
in the sorts of situation that we find in specifically art-historical contexts. Searle and
others, while holding out for intentional consciousness, do not, because of this, in
any way deny that there is a biological basis for subjective, instrumental visual
perception. Psychoanalytic art history, should for its part, one might argue, defend
its subjectivist approach while looking out for new ways to do something more than
work from individual case histories – which might well be more idiosyncratic than
typical. Potts and Davis in fact appear to have already travelled somewhat in this
direction, getting more involved in their later careers in wider macro-historical and
philosophical issues that show how questions of style are not so easily dismissed.
However, they have only done this, it seems, by leaving their earlier fondness for
Freudian ideas behind, as if psychoanalysis is only a philosophical or literary source
to be mined, not for scientific insight as much as for interesting intellectual ideas
and informed beliefs, true or not.
The question today for anyone still interested in pursuing the complex
psychological aspects of the art-historical situation is: to what extent are such
questions still viable and pursuable through traditional or more recent
psychoanalytic inquiries? Has psychoanalytic theory become implausible or
exhausted, not because of the arrival of new techniques in neuroscience but more
due to a change in what Panofsky calls our ‘mental habits’? There is no need for
psychoanalysis to fall out of use; it ought to be able to co-exist alongside
neuroanatomy and other scientific approaches. As a field of inquiry, surely it is far
from exhausted: psychoanalytic thought is still constantly revising its method, as
well as occasionally pursuing new theories and developing fresh ideas. This said, it
does look as though psychoanalysis’s heyday is now passed, in art history and the
humanities at least. We are entering now a period in which our continuing interest
in psychoanalytic questions, it seems, is largely historical and more than a little
nostalgic.
NOTES
1
J. Strachey, ‘Sigmund Freud: A Sketch of his Life and Ideas’ (1962), Penguin Freud Library,
vol. 4, 1991, p. 19.
2
See J. Schlosser, ‘The Vienna school of the History of Art: Review of a Century of Austrian
Scholarship in German’, trans Karl Johns, Journal of Art Historiography, vol. 1, December,
2009; http://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/karl-johns-schlosser-trans-
wienerschule-revised.pdf.
3
See I. Kant, ‘Of the Different Human Races’ (1777), in R. Bernasconi & T.L. Scott (eds) The
Idea of Race, Indianapolis, 2000, pp. 8–22.

14. 14
4
See H.F. Mallgrave and E. Ikonomou (eds), Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German
Aesthetics 1873–93, Los Angeles, 1994.
5
‘II. Kunsthistorisches Institut der Universität Wien’. As at note 2.
6
H. Sedlmayr, ‘Towards a Rigorous Study of Art’ (1931), in C.S. Wood (ed) The Vienna School
Reader, New York, 2003, pp. 133–80.
7
See E.H. Gombrich, ‘Art History and Psychology in Vienna Fifty Years Ago’, Art Journal, Vol. 44,
1984, pp.162-4; http://gombricharchive.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/showdoc22.pdf.
8
S. Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood, Penguin Freud Library, vol. 14,
1991, pp. 223–31.
9
Ibid, p. 208.
10
A. Warburg, Journal (3 April 1929), in E.H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual
Biography, London, 1970, p. 303.
11
E. Kris, ‘The Contribution of Psychoanalysis and its Limitations,’ Psychoanalytic
Explorations in Art, London, 1953, pp. 13–31.
12
S. Freud, The Moses of Michelangelo, Penguin Freud Library, vol. 14, 1991, p. 253.
13
Ibid, p. 277. On Freud’s likely indebtedness to Nietzsche, see: R. Lehrer, Nietzsche's
Presence in Freud's Life and Thought, New York, 1994, p. 127 ff.
14
Ibid.
15
Ibid.
16
E.H. Gombrich & E. Kris, ‘The Principles of Caricature’ (1938), Psychoanalytic Explorations
in Art, London, 1953, pp. 189–203.
17
Ibid, pp. 128–50.
18
S. Freud, Humour, Penguin Freud Library, vol. 14, 1991, pp. 425–33.
19
E. Panofsky, ‘The Neoplatonic Movement in Florence and North Italy’ (1939), Studies in
Iconology, 1972, p. 146.
20
M. Schapiro ‘Leonardo and Freud: An Art-Historical Study’, Journal of the History of Ideas,
vol. 17, no. 2, 1956, pp. 147–78.
21
Herbert Read, Art and Society, London, 1967, p. 83.
22
Ibid, pp. 82–3.
23
H. Read, ‘New Aspects of British Sculpture’, The XXVI Venice Biennale: The British Pavilion,
exbn cat, London, 1952, unpaginated.
24
E.H. Gombrich, ‘Raphael’s Madonna della Sedia’ (1955), in Gombrich on the Renaissance,
vol. 1, London, 1966, pp. 64–80.

15. 15
25
R. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge,
Mass, 1986, pp. 196–219.
26
Ibid, p. 210.
27
A. Stokes, The Invitation in Art, Preface by Richard Wollheim, London, 1965, pp. ix–xxxi.
28
G. Gorer ‘Psychoanalysis in the World’, in C. Rycroft et al (eds) Psychoanalysis Observed,
London, 1968, p. 44.
29
Preface, as at note 27, p. 10.
30
R. Wollheim, Painting as an Art, New Jersey, 1987, p. 286 ff.
31
See J. Searle, The Mystery of Consciousness, London, 1997.
32
See G. Ryle, The Concept of Mind, Harmondsworth,1963.
33
M. Podro, Depiction, New Haven, 1998, p. 112 ff.
34
Ibid.
35
W. Davis, ‘Erotic Revision in Thomas Eakins’s Narratives of Male Nudity’, Psychoanalysis in
Art History, special edn of Art History, vol. 17, no. 3, 1994, pp. 301–41.
36
A. Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History, New Haven,
1994, p. 151.
37
G. Pollock, ‘“With My Own Eyes”: Fetishism, the Labouring Body and the Colour of its Sex’,
Psychoanalysis in Art History, as at note 35, p. 377.
38
Clearest exposition of this argument: A. Noë, Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your
Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness, New York, 2009.
39
See J. Onians, ‘Neuroarthistory: Making More Sense of Art’, in W. van Damme & K.
Zijlmans (eds) World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches, Amsterdam, 2008,
pp. 265–286.