Picasso, Cubism and the Eye of the Beholder: Psychoanalysis and Cognitive Psychology
The purpose of this article is to summarize an approach to Picasso that integrates psychoanalytic theory with the scientific methods of cognitive psychology. 1 Psychoanalysts have always been especially intrigued by Picasso, as his private biography and public artworks alike are steeped in a notoriously Freudian current of sexuality and aggression. And to make matters more enticing, Picasso’s seething content is mirrored in his tumultuous pictorial form—or as he put it: “A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case a picture is a sum of destructions” (Ashton 1972, 8). This content/form correlation, emerging in force with the 1907 Demoiselles d’Avignon, suggests that Cubism might be profitably approached through a psychoanalytic regression-for-progression theory. That is, Cubism, the greatest leap of modernism, may have originated in a psychoanalytic descensus ad infernum—a heroic invocation of primitive conflicts in pursuit of a new aesthetic. Psychoanalytic speculation on the matter dates back to Jung and Ehrenzweig, and continues in the writings of Gedo (1980) and Kuspit (1989).
The present essay, relying on the psychoanalytic tradition, argues that Cubism begins with the eruption of vitalized latent contents, which are disguised and tamed by the art-work (as in dream-work, symptom-work, or joke-work). The translation of the latent into the manifest is enacted in Cubism through classic primary process mechanisms: condensation, displacement, and symbolization. To put this differently, Picasso’s vitalized latent contents seem to have fueled the development of an ambiguous pictorial style, capable at once to reveal/conceal or express/suppress the covert message.
In grappling with questions about the audience—or the eye of the beholder—we may turn to cognitive psychology for assistance. The purpose of studying the audience is to tackle the problem of aesthetic communication (e.g., Wollheim 1987), [End Page 53] where the sender (the artist) transmits a coded message (the artwork) to receivers (the audience). And why turn to cognitive psychology, instead of, say, the semiotic reception theorists, who problematize the privileged and privilege the marginalized (e.g., Bal and Bryson 1991)? The answer lies in the pictorial structure of Cubism. As will be argued, Cubism packs a seething array of latent contents that, for all intents and purposes, are subliminal—you will find little notice of them in the extant Picasso literature. Yet, cognitive psychology has demonstrated that subliminal contents, analogous to the Picasso imagery, can often be discerned by the viewer, unconsciously. By unconsciously, it is meant that the subliminal or latent contents are not available to the viewer’s introspective, phenomenal awareness, but nevertheless exert an ongoing, tangible, and measurable effect on both intellectual and emotional responsivity (e.g., Bornstein and Pittman, eds. 1992).
What exactly is at stake here? If it can be demonstrated that a large audience discerns Picasso’s latent contents, unconsciously, then compelling convergent validity will have been established. To this end, an internally consistent model will be advanced, where theories of production and reception converge, mutually validating each other, and uniting artist, artwork, and audience.
The article proceeds with the Cubist latent contents, in Picasso and psychoanalysis. This is followed by Picasso and cognitive psychology, which describes the experiments that I ran on audience responsivity, and reproduces some fascinating viewer drawings copying Picasso. Finally, in Picasso, psychoanalysis, cognitive psychology, and mainstream art history, I will integrate my work with current state-of-the-art Picasso scholarship.
Picasso and Psychoanalysis
Some preliminary words of definition: According to Freud (1900), latent material: (1) involves sexual and/or aggressive wish-fulfilling content; (2) is organized according to primary process form: condensation, displacement, and symbolization; [End Page 54] and (3) tends to be unconscious, at least prior to insightful decoding. Other assumptions are numerous, but they tend to be ancillary. For example, (4) latent contents express childhood experience, usually conflictual and always imperishable. Psychoanalysis, in fact, is not one theory; it is a vast collection of mini-theories. Generally, the mini-theories are independent of each other; each one can be embraced or jettisoned, depending on the purposes at hand. For our purposes, we must articulate a working definition of latent contents that is attuned to the demands of art history.
Let us proceed from the common sense position that art history, first and foremost, is about art. The artist is a theory-laden construction; his mind is possibly irrelevant, and for a deceased artist, unobservable as well. However, his artworks, our chief concern, are observable. A psychoanalytic approach should therefore not dwell on the artist, but rather demonstrate that his latent pictorial contents are observable and tangible (at least, just as tangible as any symbolic imagery unveiled in the tradition of Panofsky or Janson). To this end, it is wise to define latent material conservatively, as: (1) sexual/aggressive content (2) that has been disguised through primary process formal mechanisms. We will postpone discussion of Picasso’s unconscious and his childhood; later, in discussing convergent validity, we will look at ways to connect the artist (sender), artwork (message), and audience (receiver).
Picasso’s Woman in an Armchair of 1913 (Plate #I) was featured in my experiments on audience responsivity. There are six further Plates, each holding about ten illustrations. Plates #II–IV (holding Figures #1–30) reproduce Picasso works, occasionally cropped to highlight details; Plates # V–VII (Figures #31–60) contain experimental audience drawings of Picasso’s Woman in an Armchair.
Plate #I, ostensibly a topless woman seated in an armchair, conceals a multileveled, covert content that can be unveiled through contextualization and documentation. To begin with, the work owes its Cubist building blocks to Picasso’s 1912 Guitar sculpture (Figure #I—on Plate #II). As is well known, Picasso’s constructed Guitar “borrows” its protruding soundhole from the cylindrical eye of an African mask (Figure #2). [End Page 55] However, the guitar, in Spanish lore, is an amorous female, like the Cubist self-strummer in Figure #3. The 1912–1915 series indicates that Picasso covertly fused guitar and mask, yielding: (1) head/torso condensations, (2) with undifferentiated anatomical soundholes, often eye/genital, but no holes barred; (3) this orifice, in turn, is often penetrated by a trompe-l’oeil nail or cone, at once sexual (phallic) and aggressive (sharp and mean). Sometimes, one can sense the vicious circle of rage/fear when the soundhole acquires menacing teeth.
This mask/guitar scenario is best documented by comparing Picasso’s covert Cubist works to his overt Surrealist reincarnations. In Figure #4 (1914), the mask/guitars, hung by trompe-l’oeil nails, evidences bridge/grins, strings/teeth, strings/eyelashes, soundhole/eyes, and even name tags (Ma Jolie: Picasso’s pet name for his girl Eva). Figure #5 (1912) displays a mask with nail/eyes, which reappear implanted in Figure #6 (1912): two nails bracket a shared trompe-l’oeil shadow to form an “f-hole”—one for the guitar, two for the violin. Figure #7 (1924) depicts much more suspicious nail/eye-guitar interactions. In Figure #8 (1925), the guitar is hung by trompe-l’oeil nails/strings that jut down toward the guitar’s soundhole, mirroring the phallic fruit bowl that thrusts upward, as well as the adjacent head’s nail/eye. The next year (1926), Picasso implanted several real metal nails into his infamous Guitar sculpture made from “a coarse dishcloth; an object which can easily be associated with his [estranged wife] Olga. . . . This expression of aggression . . . described by Frazer and Freud . . . conforms with the imagery of African sculpture fetishes, in which nails . . . are punctured into a figure to . . . transfer bellicose feelings” (Stich 1977, 98). Eventually, Guernica’s weeping women (Figure #9) are “savagely pierced by tears” (Rosenblum 1966, 25); in the monocular example, “Picasso presents us with a terrible image of sight and blindness in the same face . . . one [eye] is replaced by . . . a dagger, plunged deep into her” (Penrose 1967, 21). By this time, Picasso’s sculptures are implanted with real nails-as-pupils; and in his “‘Blind Minotaur’ plates, the once powerful lover appears as an emasculated cripple” (Costello 1978, 306). “The emphasis in early Surrealism on castration through mutilation of the [End Page 56] eye, with its primary source in the Oedipal complex, reflects the fascination with Freud at that time” (Siegel 1982, 105). Figure #10 (1927), a castrating, musical vagina dentata, evidences a toothed soundhole/mouth above, and an anatomically correct, horizontal guitar/torso below, amidst menacing, phallic nail/limbs. Elsewhere, Picasso’s Surrealist nail/guitar imagery is discussed insightfully by Gasman (1981), who notes that the African nail-fetishes were readily available in modernist Paris (e.g., Picasso’s confidant Apollinaire displayed one in his office during the Cubist years). 2
The 1912 Guitar’s hollow cylinder, a fusion of solid (the African mask’s palpable eye) and void (the guitar’s impalpable soundhole), consistently reappears as a slyly penetrant trompe-l’oeil nail. The sexual/aggressive symbolism becomes more convincing when the Guitar’s hollow cylinder divides into your basic cone-in-hole configuration, beginning with Figure #11 (1913). This cone actually emerges from the priapic props of the 1907 Demoiselles. In the preliminary drawings, the sailor sits among the brothel nudes, with a sly phallic extension on his lap—his conical “porrth as sexual surrogate . . . a Spanish drinking vessel . . . characterized by an erect spout” (Steinberg 1972, 25). The sailor’s porrse is eventually replaced by the pointed table wedge—“a triangular shape that provides a forceful and . . . phallic thrust from the outside to the inside of the picture” (Rosenblum 1986, 56). Actually, one preliminary table drawing conceals Picasso’s first decisive anthropomorphic still life (Figure #12: left). It is a grinning mask/skull, with one winking melon/eye and one conical porrve/eye; in the final Demoiselles canvas, it becomes a fruit/face, complete with curly grapes/hair (Figure #12: right). This imagery resurfaces in musical guise in 1913, in the grinning, winking, and conical Guitar on a Pedestal Table (Figure #13: left). In 1915 (Figure #13: right), a sharpened table pedestal juts upward, pierces its own circular table top, and decisively impales a centered guitar. It becomes a cone-in-hole torso/neck, balancing the Demoiselles fruit/face above. Turning to the Surrealist replays, see Figure #14: an amoeboid Olga with nails/teeth devours a cone; a suspiciously taurine cone-in-hole torso acquires Olga’s sharpened breasts. [End Page 57]
All this imagery variously infuses our 1913 Woman in an Armchair (Plate #I). To begin with, cruel and conical “trompe-l’oeil nails peg the breasts to the body” (Stich 1977, 274). She has distinctly conical breasts, which double as the eyes of a covert face condensed with her torso. This argument is best made via a preliminary drawing, Figure #15. In this early version, she possesses eye/breasts, a navel/nose, and a grinning abdomen/mouth; its two curvilinear lip/lines stick out a gartered leg stump. The centered leg actually originates in the Demoiselles brothel drawings, of both the sailor and a prostitute (Figure #16).
In Figure #15, the centered leg stump surely represents a tongue; the motif reappears regularly, prior to Surrealism. For example, see Figures #17–18 (1915 (1920): the torso/face is formed by the bulging lap/tongue and two eye/breasts. The tongue symbolism is confirmed in Figures #19–20 (1913 (1924): giant two-eyed masks, with guitar eyes, retain dangling table/tongues. When the tongues are displaced onto the female genital region, it is reasonable to infer phallic symbolism, foreshadowing the frequent Surrealist leg/tongue/phallus condensations. 3
In the final canvas (Plate #I), her conical torso/neck emerges from two converging lines below, and balances a tiny face on its apex above. The centered leg has disappeared—she has two sprawled legs, with bulbous kneecaps. The trapezoidal skirt occupies the place that the centered leg was in. Her abdomen, which originally possessed two grinning lines, becomes a gaping crater. Her asymmetrical ribs, as concentric arcs, suggest the inside of a biomorphic cave, as though we were staring down someone’s throat (not to mention a gynecologist’s-eye-view). This devouring femme fatale is as serious as any of Picasso’s Surrealist vagina dentata creations. And clearly, the conical torso impales the cavernous abdomen from below, emerging erect from inside of her. Although well concealed, this is the familiar cone-in-hole configuration (as in Figure #11). In a rare reference to sex during Cubism, Penrose (1973) has intuited the phallic symbolism lurking within Plate #I: “The painting evokes in the ovoid shape of the figure and the central vertical column which has penetrated it from below [End Page 58] an act of copulation and the dramatic fusion of opposing forces” (104).
One final latent content will be mentioned here. Our protagonist’s skirt, not attached by any waistband, trickles out from inside her abdomen, in undulant, biomorphic blobs. This image recalls Picasso’s lifelong tendency to inscribe the bullfight evisceration upon the female torso, with a penetrating object, and/or a wound, and/or trickling entrails. To document this, let us begin with Surrealist exemplars. Figure #21 (1934) features a naked, primordial blob; her legs, unformed fleshy loops, trickle out of a suspicious crescent slit (ostensibly a dress hem). In the contemporaneous Figure #22 (1934), her legs flow out of a vertical slit that unmistakably doubles as genitals. This imagery emerges directly from a 1934 bullfight series. See the grimly poetic Figure #23: the gored horse’s buckling leg, on the right, is neatly mirrored in, and punned with, a parallel loop of flowing intestines, on the left (as in Figure #24, discussed momentarily). Conversely, in Figure #25 (1934), the bull plunges his own two limbs into the horse’s crescent wound. This scenario repeats itself three years later in the monumental Guernica (1937). In a preliminary drawing (Figure #26), the horse’s wound/genital gives birth to a winged colt (also the soul ascending after death). Soon (Figure #27), the horse reappears with four nail/limbs, and its entrails trickle out of its gaping wound. Elsewhere, in the preliminary Figure #28, the infant’s “head, as though still half unborn, is enclosed in a diamond-shaped shaded cavity” (Arnheim 1962, 51) of its anguished mother’s torso/genital. The torso/genital, ostensibly bloodied with a wounded infant, actually derives from the disemboweled horse (see especially Gedo 1980). This sexual/aggressive symbolism has been intuited in a series as early as 1917. In Figure #24, the gored horse’s phallus defies gravity to contact his own genital-shaped wound-with-entrails. As Costello (1978) has written, “the erotic overtones of this [1917] series have often been noted . . . because of the sexual allusions implicit in the plunging of the horn in the white mare [female? male?]” (270). “At the beginning of his relation with Olga . . . he did a dynamic series of a bull goring a horse; since we know that for him the one was [End Page 59] masculine and the other feminine, the sadistic meaning of this is transparent” (Machotka 1992, 147). Returning to Cubism, Woman in an Armchair derives from a horned African mask (Figure #2). And it follows a wave of bullfight works. In the Aficionado drawings (Figures #29–30 of 1912), the man holds an inflated and erect banderilla between his legs, in an obvious weapon-as-phallus pun. This is certainly consistent with all the nail and cone imagery discussed earlier.
In summary, Woman in an Armchair features a relatively tame manifest content—a topless Cubist woman in an armchair, wearing a skirt. She is constructed out of cylinders, spheres, and cones, to apply the famous dictum of the proto-Cubist Cézanne. Even the cruel nails have a good, clean excuse for being there—as references to collage (tape, glue, and tacks). But beneath the slick Cubist facade, her cone-in-hole torso covertly involves a seething latent content: the condensation of male/female facial/genital features, at once wounded/wounding (castrated? castrating? devouring?), in a dramatic and vicious cycle of rage and fear.
Picasso and Cognitive Psychology
Reception theory, the study of the audience, has emerged in force with the advent of semiotic, feminist, and multicultural perspectives on art history (Bal and Bryson 1991). For example, Chave (1994) argues that the Demoiselles and its reception tell a shameful story of unbridled phallocentrism—“a narrative of exclusion, then: a story told by a heterosexual white male of European descent for an audience answering to the same description . . . the stories told ever since . . . have mostly been no less narratives told by straight white males for a like public” (598). Frascina (1987) agrees: “Rosenblum . . . obviously accepts that the spectator must be a male. . . . The goddess/whore characterization leads Rosenblum, inevitably, to use Steinberg’s phallocentric reading of the Demoiselles. So we get terms such as bursting forward, inner sanctum, spreading, forceful, phallic thrust, erotic still life . . . that presses upward . . .” (410). Granted, modernism implicates males sharing images [End Page 60] of female flesh, more so than the other way around. But are Chase and Frascina correct in discerning phallocentric metaphors in male artwriting? In fact, much of what reception theory proposes can be tested empirically, and thereby verified or falsified, via cognitive psychology. In the case of Chase and Frascina, the most basic empirical question is whether a large sample of male viewers (but not female viewers) will consistently describe the Demoiselles (but not, say, Braque’s L’Estaque landscapes) using terms with phallic overtones (such as bursting, spreading, forceful, thrust). There is actually a solid research literature linking latent contents to metaphorical expression, which will be discussed shortly, in the context of my Picasso experiments. At this point, we turn to the cognitive psychology of the viewer, looking at its overlooked contributions to reception theory.
Back in 1917, a Viennese psychiatrist named Otto Poetzl stumbled upon an intriguing discovery. He was working with war victims who had suffered gunshots to the occipital cortex, which mediates higher visual processes. These patients manifested a mysterious symptomatology, as in the following case, summarized by Fisher (1960):
A patient was shown a bouquet of roses from which a stalk of asparagus projected in a conspicuous fashion. He consciously perceived only the red roses . . . the stalk of asparagus did not emerge into consciousness. The roses were removed and the patient was asked to identify the regimental color on the collar of an officer. . . . The patient . . . stated that he saw a “green tiepin.” The implication here is that the stalk of asparagus not noted on exposure of the bouquet was unconsciously registered and then emerged into consciousness after a delay but transformed into a green tiepin. There is the further implication that the patient did not perceive the actual . . . officer’s collar but saw the green tiepin instead. According to Poetzl, such delayed form impressions undergo condensations, displacements, rotations, and other kinds of transformations in the same manner as do dream images.
(4) [End Page 61]
Next, “Poetzl wondered whether it might be possible to demonstrate such . . . effects in normal subjects. . . . He carried out an experiment with a dozen subjects involving the following steps: A complex pictorial stimulus . . . was exposed for [one hundredth of a second] by means of a tachistoscope; the subject was required to produce an exhaustive . . . drawing, of what he had seen—which was generally little. . . . Poetzl’s finding was that initially inaccessible stimulus elements emerged in the content of subjects’ dreams” (Ionescu and Erdelyi 1992, 144). In fact, Poetzl’s experiment “prompted Freud to add an enthusiastic footnote about it in his 1919 revision of The Interpretation of Dreams, one of the exceedingly rare occasions when Freud had anything positive to say about a laboratory experiment” (Erdelyi 1985, 79–80).
Poetzl’s basic discovery was that more of a picture is perceived nonconsciously than consciously, although he further surmised that nonconscious contents undergo primary-process transformations. Poetzl’s efforts laid the foundation for modern cognitive psychology (Bornstein and Pittman, eds. 1992). Currently, the reigning theory of nonconscious visual perception is held by Marcel (1983):
Nonconscious perceptual processes automatically transform sensory data into every possible representation, at the highest level of description possible, resulting in multiple interpretations. These interpretations automatically activate candidate perceptual hypotheses, which involve stored representations in semantic memory. A conscious percept follows the parallel testing of multiple perceptual hypotheses against the sensory source. Consciousness results from fitting a particular hypothesis to the sensory source. Candidate perceptual hypotheses that are not verified are not represented in phenomenal awareness. The perceptual hypothesis that is selected is the one that makes sense of as much data as possible at the most functionally useful level.
(Ettinger 1994, 35—paraphrasing Marcel 1983)
When we gaze at the world around us, our vision seems like an instantaneous and faithful record of external reality; [End Page 62] but it is actually a complexly sequenced interpretation. According to this position, when the viewer gazes at Woman in an Armchair, the unconscious will instantaneously decipher and mentally represent, in parallel, most, if not all, of the multiple latent and manifest contents lurking therein. On the one hand, as a corroborative intuition, consider that humans are evolutionarily adapted, and exquisitely attuned, to perceiving biologically salient stimuli, in particular those signaling threat (aggression) or reproduction (sexuality). Further, humans in our culture are perpetually bombarded with post-Cubist aesthetics (such as MTV), and can surely negotiate the Cubist code. On the other hand, as a discouraging intuition, at least some of the Picasso contents seem indecipherable without external art-historical contextualization and documentation.
The foregoing theory also addresses the process by which a single interpretation becomes conscious, selected from multiple unconscious interpretations. The theory states that competing unconscious interpretations are rapidly and automatically adjudicated using two criteria: first, internal information (general semantic knowledge about the depicted subject); second, external information (further inspection of the picture for disambiguating clues). The single percept that consequently flashes into consciousness is the one that best integrates and accounts for the multileveled and contradictory pictorial information. To apply this to Picasso’s Woman in an Armchair: Are the cones breasts or eyeballs? Is the cavernous circle below an abdomen or a mouth? Is its biomorphic extrusion a skirt or trickling intestines? Why do viewers tend to see the manifest content rather than the latent?
Using the internal information criterion, perceptual hypotheses will be adjudicated in reference to the cultural conventions of portraiture. For example, a topless female is more likely to be wearing a skirt, than to have her intestines trickling out. Note that psychoanalytic theory proposes a further internal criterion: drive/defense psychodynamics. Artworks “responded to by humans will exhibit the force of repression . . . possess[ing] a latent content whose translation to manifest content will be at once sought and resisted” (Kuhns 1983, 28). Thus, in addition to public semantic knowledge, adjudication is influenced by private wishes and fears: [End Page 63] “Insight . . . is achieved when unconscious latent contents become accessible to consciousness. Interpretation . . . is subject to psychodynamic distortions. . . . Decisions about what aspects of the potential context to sample determine at a fundamental level what is actually seen or remembered consciously. It is at this level . . . that defense processes can be clearly observed . . . [in] the failure to see the deep meaning of complex events” (Erdelyi 1988, 201–11). In this psychoanalytic view, the beholder’s unconscious asks itself: Would I rather send up to consciousness the percept of a vitalized mouth/wound/genital or a neutrally geometricized abdomen? Surely, Cubist ambiguity invites or facilitates defense: the viewer can easily go for all things bland and tame, without defying pictorial evidence and violating perceptual laws. 4 Note that non-psychodynamic personality theorists, too, believe that private internal information contributes to the interpretation of ambiguous imagery. However, these theorists reject Freudian psychodynamics in favor of two entwined factors: stable traits (long-standing personality dispositions) and temporary states—emotions (current feelings and moods) plus accompanying cognitions (current thoughts, mind-sets, expectancies, and so forth). 5
The unconscious adjudication of ambiguous imagery thus depends on internal information: common semantic knowledge about the depicted subject, plus idiosyncratic drives-and-defenses and/or traits-and-states. But adjudication depends equally on external information: the viewer must test all competing perceptual hypotheses against the sensory source for verification. This simply dictates that the viewer must search harder and longer for disambiguating clues. A closer look at Woman in an Armchair reveals a tiny dot-and-line face above: wavy hair, a conical neck, two schematic arms, and bulbous kneecaps below—all framed within an abstract armchair. Naturally, after all the evidence is gathered, sorted, and weighed, the palpable, literal, denoted, manifest content trumps the impalpable, metaphorical, connoted, latent material. 6
If this occurs naturally, under normal, continuous viewing conditions, it can be unnaturally interrupted by the experimental use of a tachistoscope. Subliminal presentation restricts [End Page 64] the viewer’s capacity to search and re-search the painting for the disambiguating clues. What are the implications for Picasso’s Woman in an Armchair? Subliminal presentation should make the viewer more likely to become conscious of the latent contents. With the external information unavailable, the viewer will not be able to adjudicate matters so easily. The palpable, literal, denoted, manifest content becomes coequal to the impalpable, metaphorical, connoted, latent material. This brings us to matters of experimental design.
The experiment that I conducted 7 compares audience responsivity under continuous (Supraliminal) and tachistoscopic (Subliminal) conditions. Here, forty-eight undergraduates participated, recruited by a bulletin board blurb that read Look at art and discuss your thoughts and feelings openly! The subjects were divided up into two equal groups, with twenty-four Supraliminal and twenty-four Subliminal viewers. Due to the complexity of our painting, the Subliminal group actually got ten presentations of Woman in an Armchair, over a range of exposures that gradually increased, making the painting more and more visible (first 4/1000 of a second, then 8/1000, then 16/1000, and so forth). Subjects had two minutes after each view to describe and draw their interpretations of the painting. The Supraliminal condition mimicked the Subliminal treatment in every way, except that the painting was available for prolonged viewing in each of the ten trials.
The results of this experiment are as predicted. Subliminal viewers were significantly more likely than Supraliminal viewers to discern the painting’s latent contents. See Plates #V–VII: Each plate presents audience drawings of the latent contents within Picasso’s Woman in an Armchair. Plate #V reproduces torso-as-face interpretations; Plate #VI reproduces erotic interpretations of the cone-in-hole (genitalia and/or pregnancy/maternity 8); and Plate #VII reproduces aggressive interpretations (torso-as-wound and/or eviscerated skirt-as-entrails). All these viewer drawings are scored latent by consulting what the viewer actually wrote—for example, the words intestines, wound, or synonyms thereof, accompany all images on Plate #VII.
Recall that the Subliminal group received ten views of the painting, with each successive view becoming longer and [End Page 65] clearer. During the early exposures, Subliminal viewers perceived the latent contents exclusively. But eventually, as things became increasingly visible, they changed their minds (at around the eighth view: the half-second picture exposure). Suddenly they began to see that the painting features a topless female wearing a skirt.
In addition to monitoring latent/manifest reports, the experiment tallied all other sexual and aggressive reports, whether literal or metaphorical, and scored them as associations. Why? Recall that Poetzl surmised that unconscious contents can undergo primary-process transformations, emerging into consciousness transformed. (Chave and Frascina intuitively invoked this principle in positing phallocentric Demoiselles artwriting: bursting, spreading, forceful, thrust, and so forth.) Cognitive psychology concurs, except that it rejects the Freudian id and its transformational grammar in favor of a semantic network model. Where psychoanalysis finds motivated symbolism, cognitive psychology finds neutral semantic relatedness. To clarify with an apropos example (Dixon 1981), consider the case where the experimenter presents penis subliminally, and subjects produce associations like knife. Psychoanalysis finds symbolic aggression; cognitive psychology finds common features—size and shape—to be a sufficient explanation. In favor of the psychoanalytic approach, people do make lexical choices that accord with independent assessments of their core conflicts. 9 In favor of the cognitive approach, the same lexical processes occur among completely neutral words, immune from any expression/repression whirlwind. 10
The results of the associations are complex, but two examples will suffice to underline the value of monitoring such reports. First, under the heading of aggression, eight subscales emerged from sorting all responses into categories. One of these was unexpected: peripheral body damage (such as “severed arm”). Could it be that at times, the abdominal evisceration registers unconsciously, undergoes defensive transformation, and emerges displaced, onto the more neutral periphery of the figure? Quite possibly: the Supraliminal group reported the abdominal evisceration less often than the Subliminal group, [End Page 66] but reported the peripheral damage much more often. In this first example, aggression is displaced onto a more neutral percept; but latent material can also emerge transformed into a more neutral concept. This is the case with our second example: all possible conceptual associations to the abdomen/mouth were tallied, in an oral scale (food, fat, teeth, hunger, cannibalism, even alligators, and so on). Again, Supraliminal reported no abdomen/mouths, but produced many more oral metaphors than Subliminal. To fully understand the implications, we must turn to the other experimental groups.
The aforementioned groups, (#l) Subliminal and (#2) Supraliminal, involve a manipulation of viewing conditions. Four further groups were run, manipulating artwork properties. Specifically, three of these new groups received a specially prepared, altered version of Woman in an Armchair, deleting or censoring her (#3) latent content abdomen, (#4) manifest content breasts, and (#5) a hybrid area. Finally, the last group (#6) received Braque’s Woman with a Mandolin (1917), a close Cubist match, but minus the latent contents.
The rationale for isolating the various contents was to differentiate their contributions to audience responsivity. Returning to peripheral body damage, we find a subtle quandary. Did Supraliminal surpass Subliminal due to unconscious transformation/displacement of the abdominal evisceration . . . or . . . simply because they were able to look longer and harder and form opinions about the tiny peripheral details? The answer is found by examining the abdomen-deleted group. Happily, in strong support of perceptual transformation/displacement, this group emitted no peripheral body damage reports: with no abdomen present, no peripheral aggression is perceived. Overall, the abdomen-deleted group emitted far fewer aggressive and sexual associations than the intact Woman in an Armchair group. However, both groups emitted the same quantity of oral associations. This, unhappily, falsifies the transformation/displacement from abdomen/mouth to oral metaphors. Why would this pattern of results occur? To give one reason, breasts elicit oral metaphors as well—as Freud surmised—and our protagonist is topless (the abdomen-deleted group still had pictorial breasts to arouse oral associations). [End Page 67] On the other hand, might the oral association results suggest that the torso-as-face and its abdomen/mouth are not really genuine latent contents? Did the intact Subliminal group find the torso-as-face only because people will read any 4/1000 of a second Cubist circle physiognomically? The Braque group answers this quandary, because his depicted female holds a big circular mandolin on her lap, complete with a generous soundhole. Not one viewer reported a mouth or a face therein. It can therefore be safely assumed that Picasso’s Woman in an Armchair does conceal a torso-as-face percept, but one that does not engender voluminous oral metaphors. The different control groups, then, serve to isolate the individual pictorial contents, thereby clarifying their contributions to viewer responsivity.
Picasso, Psychoanalysis, Cognitive Psychology, and Mainstream Art History
What, specifically, does this psychoanalytic/cognitive strategy accomplish? An internally consistent model has been advanced, where artistic production and audience reception harmonize, mutually validating each other. Let us take a closer look at the artist/artwork/audience matrix, in preparation for the topic of convergent validity.
Picasso’s stormy biography—which we have ignored thus far—is known through a few dozen sources: the artist’s own statements, books by his confidants, confessions by his mistresses and progeny. Although he shines at times (his great wit, his moral commitment to art-against-war), a darker side has persistently surfaced: his goddess/whore syndrome, his superstitiousness, hypochondriasis, and fragmentation, all mastered via magical rituals. Significantly, Picasso’s art as a form of magic emerged just as Cubism was exploding:
When I went to the old Trocadéro [museum] . . . The masks . . . were magic things. . . . The Negro pieces were against . . . threatening spirits. I always looked at fetishes. . . . I too believe that everything is unknown, that everything is an enemy! . . . I understood what the [End Page 68] Negroes used their sculptures for. . . . They were weapons. . . . I understood why I was a painter. . . . Les Demoiselles d’Avignon must have come to me that very day, but not at all because of the forms; because it was my first exorcism-painting!
(Picasso 1937, to Malraux, while in his studio painting Guernica; at least four other confidants published similar stories)
Psychoanalysis argues that Picasso expressed his personal biography, in the content and form of Cubism. “Psychoanalysis is a mode of reading the unconscious and its relationship to expression. . . . Using this theory for the study of visual art assumes that art bears traces of the unconscious” (Bal and Bryson 1991, 195). Thus, “Picasso’s Cubism . . . begins with a controlled unconscious regression. . . . His creative act became tinged with magic. . . . The subject of these works is feared/desired fusion—among Picasso, women, and the mask as transitional/fetishistic object” (Ettinger 1989, 163, 205). The psychoanalytic literature on protective objects, and art-as-magic, maintains two foci: Winnicott’s transitional object (the infant animates his blanket-as-breast) and the Freudian fetishistic object (the male disavows “that females have no penises . . . proof of the possibility of his being castrated”) (Freud 1938, 202); “this disavowal is expressed by the formation of the fetish, which stands for the woman’s penis” (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973, 429). Picasso’s Cubist masks, magical and protective, are perfect textbook exemplars of the transitional/fetishistic object. Picasso appropriates the mask’s cylindrical eye, sharpens it, and relocates it within the female guitar’s soundhole. Thus, Woman in an Armchair evidences the fetish (the cone-in-hole abdomen) as well as the transitional object (the cones-as-breasts).
The psychoanalytic theory of expression has been extended to reception: “The artist’s acuity lies in his ability to raise and to express latent ideas; viewers’ perceptions and responses are, in turn, shaped by those ideas. . . . [Their] latent presence is recognized, appeals to, and satisfies an audience” (M. Bornstein 1984, 13). As the foregoing experiment has demonstrated, Picasso’s Cubism transmits its latent contents, which find their mark squarely in the viewer’s unconscious. [End Page 69] The artist/artwork/audience nexus fits the psychoanalytic model, as summarized by Kuhns (1983): “It is as if works of art have the power to transport certain thoughts from the unconscious to the preconscious through their having been . . . aestheticized. The whole complex activity of art-making and art-using can be understood as a cultural loosening of the ordinarily rigid boundaries of the unconscious and the conscious” (18).
From another perspective, the artist/artwork/audience matrix can be profitably re-formulated under the banner of convergent validity. This viewpoint seeks to disentangle the artist/artwork/audience. Why? There are several caveats surrounding Picasso’s psychobiography, caveats that threaten to contaminate the credibility of the artworks. To begin with, the transitional/fetishistic object, although embraced by psychoanalytic theory, is not widely endorsed among academic psychologists or art historians. Even if this were to change, its application to Picasso still risks an insidious circularity, because to some extent, the phenomenon is tacitly inferred from the very paintings that it seeks to explain. Aside from this, there is good reason to touch base with the semiotic paradigm. In this view, Picasso is a mere conduit for the zeitgeist, the final link of a great causal chain: “In those art-historical discourses that remain colored by romantic ideas of artistic creativity, the death of the author thesis [Barthes] may come as a shock. . . . The author is not an origin, but just one link in the chain. . . . What the author-function enables is the closure of the chain” (Bal and Bryson 1991, 182–83). Here, the pictorial structure of Cézanne, fin-de-siècle perversity, and so forth, are “causes” that operate through Picasso, “effecting” the Demoiselles. A semiotically-correct version of the artist’s unconscious latent contents would cleave the phrase, shelving the artist’s unconscious and showcasing the latent contents. Latent contents can live happily ever after in a painting, apart from the artist or his unconscious: they may be defined humbly as covert sexual/aggressive images, concealed/revealed via primary-process form:
Latent contents are customarily treated in the psychoanalytic literature as unconscious. The reason for this is [End Page 70] that they are almost invariably discussed in the context of dreams and symptoms, the underlying meanings of which are, in fact, typically unconscious. Since, however, the same semantic multilayeredness characterizes other psychological materials such as jokes, the latent-manifest content distinction does not coincide with that of unconscious-conscious. Thus, latent contents . . . can be conscious as well as unconscious.
(Erdelyi 1985, 89)
In summary, Picasso’s biography converges with his art and mutually corroborates it; but his persona is theory-laden, certainly not necessary, and possibly irrelevant to his Cubist artworks. Audience responsivity—under experimental viewing conditions designed to elicit unconscious processing—concords auspiciously with the prior, independent interpretations of Picasso and his paintings. The net result is a full circle of convergent validity, among the artist (the sender), the artwork (the coded message), and the audience (the receivers).
The final topic concerns the relevance of this interdisciplinary approach for mainstream Picasso scholarship. In 1989, MoMA mounted Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism, an exhibition of unsurpassed ambition, scale, and critical acclaim. At the same time, “Rubin, the director of this historic exhibition, organized an extraordinary meeting of twenty-seven of the world’s foremost authorities on early twentieth-century painting, in an effort to advance scholarly understanding” (back cover blurb from the conference proceedings, Picasso and Braque: A Symposium 1992). The symposium pivots on the archtypal paradigm clash, in this case a battle of the Picasso power cliques, if you will: Rubin and the MoMA network versus Krauss and the semiotic enthusiasts. Psychoanalysis and psychology are in exile, banished from text and bibliography alike. And I mean banished! Personally, I sent preprints of my 1989 monograph, Picasso: The Pictorial Structure of Cubism and the Body-Image Construct, to Rubin (the organizer), Varnedoe (the moderator), and Rosenblum (my former teacher from the good old days), just prior to the conference. But to no avail, unless I count polite thank-you notes!
The most basic Symposium question is this: Does Cubism [End Page 71] feature personal expression (Rubin et al.) or impersonal semiotic operations (Krauss et al.)? Let us look at the arguments and evidence presented by each camp. Among those authors who endorse personalized contents, the artwork that receives the lion’s share of sexy speculation is Picasso’s Au Bon Marché of 1913. As Rosenblum (1973) originally wrote, “clandestine and witty is the lascivious joke concealed in a masterly collage of 1913. . . . Above, we see a commercial drawing of a properly dressed lady, cut off at the waist; below, the label . . . lingerie; and below that . . . we read the fragmented words TROU ICI (HOLE HERE)” (36). Picasso’s Au Bon Marché of 1913, actually reproduced four times in Symposium (70, 82, l02, 117), becomes a battleground:
Rosalind Krauss: I would like to address the issue of whether there are limits to a correct reading. . . . I just cannot imagine Picasso constructing an illusionistic space with a woman behind a table, or making that area with the TROU ICI clipping into her genitals. I find this repellent and also counterintuitive as a reading. . . .
Leo Steinberg: I’m not sure that it should be referred literally or exclusively to the female anatomy . . . the TROU ICI . . . has to be taken in an ambivalent, ambiguous, symbolic sense. . . .
Kirk Varnedoe: Are there any readings that are wrong? And if there are, what are the criteria by which one decides they are wrong? . . . one has to construct a sense of the artist and his practice writ large in order to have some guidelines for what he might do, instead of deciding . . . on a nice story about each of the elements in a given composition.
(79–85)
The Symposium dialogue adjudicates TROU ICI through “a sense of the artist and his practice.” Psychoanalysis, psychology, and soundholes are all highly relevant here. In fact, Picasso’s “clandestine and witty lascivious jokes” (Rosenblum’s TROU terminology) can just as readily be called “latent contents” (Freud’s terminology). The difference is one of terminology, not ideology. Psychoanalytic interpretations (at least [End Page 72] those that stick closely to the pictorial evidence) are fully consistent with the MoMA agenda (we share the task of deciphering Picasso’s disguised erotica).
Krauss, conversely, finds the TROU reading to be “repellent” and “counterintuitive” to her own semiotic theory. Put differently, her theory gains its strength by repelling Picasso’s personalized contents. It is ironic that Krauss and her semiotic disciples (such as Bois) have found their shining star in Picasso’s 1912 Guitar (the mask/guitar sculpture: Figure #l). This work is spotlighted in the Symposium essays by Krauss and Bois (and in most of their key essays elsewhere):
Yve-Alain Bois: What the mask [Figure #2] clarifies for Picasso is the . . . semiological nature . . . of painting and sculpture. . . . The direct effect of the encounter with the mask . . . was Picasso’s 1912 Guitar [Figure #1], where the soundhole protrudes, and the virtual outer surface of the instrument is engendered non-mimetically by a network of contextual oppositions. . . . In 1912, Picasso had virtually omitted symbolism, in the literary sense, from his work, and any kind of expressionism.
(Symposium, 173, 214)
Picasso’s Africanized, Dionysian Guitar, however, is not so easily neutered by the semiotic invocation of formal oppositions: “The radical formal innovations of this work serve the covert content, as follows: The cylinder, with its unprecedented conflation of negative/positive, recessed/protruding, solid/void, and so forth, quintessentially captures the . . . penetrations. . . . Picasso’s mask/guitar cylinder condenses two orifices (eye, female genital) and two penetrating intrusions (nail, phallus)” (Ettinger 1989, 195, 191).
The semiotic argument regarding Picasso’s Guitar can be challenged without relying on Freudian latent contents. Bois (1992) writes: “I would like to trace four lessons drawn by Picasso from this encounter with the mask, by using the semiological model. . . . The first principle, from which the others proceed, is that signs are arbitrary . . . there is no relationship of similarity between these protruding cylinders . . . and the eyes of any human being, in the same way that [End Page 73] there is no connection between the word tree and the mental image . . . we form of a tree” (173). Bal and Bryson (1991) concur: “To the extent that the recognition of images depends on a prior, hard-wired program, it stands outside semiosis” (195).
In the specific case of facial imagery, The first principle (Bois) is easily falsified, from several converging lines of scientific evidence: (1) Developmental: Infants are considered hard-wired to recognize two big dots as eyes. Neonates smile at simple cardboard cards with two big dots printed on them, the bigger the better. They decode and mimic maternal facial expressions, automatically, without training. (2) Perceptual: Vision analyzes a complex scene into separate spatial frequency channels for neural network propagation. When viewing a face, lower channels code two big dots; higher channels code details like eyelashes. The lower channels are processed first. The implication is that the brain first reconstructs an abstract and schematic mask-like face, and then decodes facial expression (nice/mean?) and identity (who is it?). (3) Neuroanatomical: Face recognition is hard-wired into a specific part of the brain. Prosopagnosics—with damage to the mesial part of the occipital and temporal cortex—are unable to recognize familiar faces, with no other impairments. Your prosopagnosic friend will not recognize your two big dots; he must identify you by your voice or your hat. (4) Evolutional: Human semiotic systems, especially language, are recent, emerging with the neocortex association areas. Face perception surely antedates these in phylogenesis (as in ontogenesis). (5) Ethological: Infrahumans, lacking a (semiotic) neocortex, respond to faces as outlined above (primates share visual perception structures/processes with humans—but not language). (6) Anthropological: Remote and isolated indigenous people clearly recognize Western facial imagery, with minor exceptions. Conversely, we can all see just about any primitive mask as a distinctly expressive face, without accessing the diverse semiotic conventions of Africa, Oceania, Mexico, Greenland, and so forth. Not so for the word tree, contra Bois. 11
The overarching issue, common to the diverse scholarly paradigms, concerns the origins and meaning of Cubism. The [End Page 74] psychoanalytic position—variously articulated by Jung, Ehrenzweig, Fisher, Gedo, Kuspit, myself, and others—is that Picasso’s 1907 conception of art-as-magic, and his ensuing primitive pictorial contents, fueled the revolution of pictorial form:
Picasso’s Cubism . . . begins with a controlled regression. The subject of these works is feared/desired fusion—among Picasso, women, and the mask as transitional/fetishistic object. . . . The final canvas of the Demoiselles is the product of two phases of work. [During the first phase of] March through June, 1907, Picasso transforms his triangulated female flesh into fantastic aggregates of interpenetrating male/female diamonds—into female genital/wound/mouths (castrated/castrating) imprinted with the sharp phallic wedge (assaulted/assaultive—reparative/fetishistic). . . . And the complex, almost geometrical structure attained by these works is ultimately preserved and consolidated in our demoiselle[s]. . . . Picasso’s primitivism, consolidating the vitalized preliminary work, decisively inaugurates the themes/imagery of Cubism: (1) self/other fusion . . . (2) body-image dissipation/dismemberment . . . and (3) the condensation of views. . . . The fundamental characteristic of Cubism is ambiguity—of boundary, substance, and so forth. . . . Picasso, exquisitely sensitive to the metaphoric potential of Cézanne’s visual ambiguity, developed a pictorial structure that could embody his own dynamic subject matter—the cycle of disintegration/reintegration, the conflict of fusion at once feared and desired. As Modell has written, ‘creativity takes place in the primary process as a private function and is then communicated and given conventionalized form by the secondary process. It is then shared and made public; private and public modes of thinking interpenetrate.’ . . . Picasso’s Cubist pictorial structure is underpinned by primary process fusion issues, yet this primitive ideation is brilliantly articulated, transformed by the secondary process into a new and valued pictorial style.”
(Ettinger 1989, 151, 206) [End Page 75]
As a concluding comment, the psychoanalytic viewpoint seems to be gaining credibility in mainstream Picasso circles. Consider, for example, John Richardson’s (1991) definitive biography: “Drawings of 1907–08 abound with ideas for what I can only describe as a ‘phallic woman.’ One sheet depicts three kneeling nudes whose buttocks form an obvious phallic pun, as well as a standing woman who appears to grasp a penis—her penis—in her left hand. In the end, Picasso arrives at a solution that is less crude and more ingenious: he turns the female diaphragm into a monumental mandala that is both phallic and vaginal” (408–10). Richardson does not endorse psychoanalytic terminology (in fact he criticizes my reference to the theme of castration—see his page 277). Still, his discussion is entirely consistent with the psychoanalytic approach, and even inconsistent with current MoMA and semiotic versions of Picasso c. 1907–08. It will be interesting to see how Richardson pursues these early “abundant phallic women” in his forthcoming Life of Picasso, Volume II, which opens with the Cubist epoch. As another example, Picasso’s Cubist perversity recently infused Wheeler’s popular textbook, Art Since Mid-Century (1991): The 1912 “Guitar . . . represented sexual intercourse emblematically as a cylinder combining orifice and shaft in one” (19). Even more promising is Pepe Karmel, an IFA student who participated in the 1989 Symposium and then wrote an interesting dissertation in 1993 (under Varnedoe, Rubin and Rosenblum) on Picasso’s Cubist drawings:
Neither semiology nor the theory of ‘essential form’ [formalism] deals effectively with . . . Cubism. . . . We need, instead, a model which incorporates metamorphosis as a basic principle . . . we can perhaps turn to psychoanalytic theory, which offers at least a provisional vocabulary for describing symbolic transformations. . . . To date, psychoanalytic interpretations of Cubism have generally lumped together the movement’s formal innovations under the rubric of ‘disintegration,’ and then set out to explain this disintegration by some external cause. . . . [T]he real problem with [all prior authors— [End Page 76] but here Karmel errs in restricting his bibliography to Gedo and Kuspit] is their description of Cubism solely in terms of disintegration. There may well be a strong element of ‘regression’ in Cubism, but . . . if psychoanalytic theory is to be useful, it must account for the constructive as well as the disintegrative aspects of Cubism. . . . With its pictorial vocabulary of deliberately shifting forms, Cubism challenges the exclusionary ‘logic’ of realistic representation. On the other hand, Cubism cannot be described simply as a regression to the pictorial habits of childhood. As Freud writes . . . the joke must function at the level of both primary and secondary process thinking. . . . Similarly, in Cubist pictures we must account not only for the elements which evidence an awareness of ‘primitive’ forms of picture-making, but also those which correspond to the process of logical recuperation. The most obvious form of recuperation in Cubism is its continued reference to traditional representation.
(Karmel 1993, 326–28, 332–33)
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Footnotes
1. This article presents some of the highlights of a forthcoming book, Picasso and the Crisis of Interdisciplinary Strategies. The book is based on two manuscripts: a psychoanalytic monograph (Picasso: The Pictorial Structure of Cubism and the Body-Image Construct, 1989), and a cognitive psychology dissertation (Picasso, Cubism, and the Eye of the Beholder: Implicit Stimuli and Implicit Perception, New York University, 1994). For comments on various drafts of this manuscript, I am especially indebted to Ted Coons (dissertation sponsor), Leo Goldberger, John Bargh, Matt Erdelyi (dissertation committee), Lydia Gasman, Jack Spector, Donald Kuspit, Stephanie Dudek, Hellmut Wohl, and Richard Wollheim.
2. The sexual/aggressive leitmotifs entwined here—the erotic guitar, the blinded eye—are present prior to Cubism. Picasso published his first wave of guitars in Arte Joven, coincident with an article titled La Psicologia de la Guitarra (Lopez, 1901) “the guitar is feminine. . . . Its peg-box, the head, is like that of a woman . . . with illusory locks. . . . The body has the arrogant curve of the shoulders, the magic of the hips. . . . Like a woman, the guitar also prostitutes itself easily. It falls into the hands of vice. . . . [When the aged guitar] can no longer . . . sigh with love, she goes into the hands of the poor blind man and asks alms for him” (5–6). The next year, Picasso painted syphilitic prostitutes (1902), and then blind people (1903), including the one-eyed brothel madam, the Celestina, and the blind Old Guitarist. The entwined themes of prostitution/blindness converge again with the Demoiselles. In 1907, Picasso acquired a stolen Iberian stone bust, with monocular damage, which he tacitly transferred to his own protagonists: the sailor, the medical student (with “one eye shown in detail, the other an empty socket,” Daix & Rosselet, 1979, 26), and the masked demoiselles (the standing figure’s right mask/eye is totally blackened, with no pupil). Picasso’s prized Iberian bust assumed center stage again in a 1911 crisis, when it was forcibly surrendered to the police, and returned to the Louvre. The following year, 1912, brings us full circle to the cyclopic mask/guitar sculpture.
3. The leg/phallus is an important motif because Picasso shared it with other Surrealists. Its symbolism can be documented external to the artist’s own oeuvre. Spector (1988) discusses the relationship among Freud, the Surrealists, and the motif of the foot fetish:
Freud’s publication in 1907 of “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva” . . . had much greater consequence in terms of influence on artists, writers, and critics, especially the Surrealists. . . . Controversy about the sexual/ psychological significance of the woman’s foot occupied many hours of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1907 after Freud’s essay on Gradiva appeared. . . . Freud remarked that “foot-fetishism . . . must also have some connection with a search for and a happy recovery of this lost penis of the mother.” . . . Allusions to the foot—as female, fetish, or Oedipal—recur in the meetings. . . . Versions of the swollen foot as phallus have proliferated ever since. The sexual. . . associations to the foot doubtless attracted the Surrealists to Gradiva (who even named a gallery after her) . . . swelling feet and toes entered the art of Dali, Tanguy, and others. . . . By 1922, the French had available an explicit description of the (foot) fetish in psychoanalytic terms . . . “Les imaginations sexuelles des petits garçons prennent souvent le pied pour symbole de l’organe féminin, vis à vis duquel il remplace alors le pénis de l’homme.”
(53–54)
Picasso’s leg/phallus also functions as a tongue, in the head/torso fusion of Woman in an Armchair. It is noteworthy that the head/torso fusions created by Picasso’s Surrealist colleagues also involve Freudian references to stringed instruments—guitars for Miro, violins for Magritte. As Spector (1972) has written:
Le Viol by Magritte was from its creation in 1934 valued as a powerful and characteristic statement of Surrealism. . . . The fusion of torso and face in Le Viol shocks us. . . . But what can the viol signify? Possibly Magritte’s point is that the “rape” [the English translation of “viol”] of an attractive face . . . occurs each time a man superimposes his own image of the woman’s body, an obvious wish fulfillment, on the exposed face. . . . Yet the title . . . also alludes literally to violins, instruments with notoriously sexual connotations. Freud in 1906 referred to the idea often used by cartoonists of representing “the violin as a woman, and the violin bow as a penis;” and later, in Totem and Taboo, he cites the French phrase jouer au violon, which, he points out, represents onanism. . . . Already in 1926, Magritte . . . had contours ambiguously suggesting either a curvy female or a violin. . . . The sketches for a later painting . . . show the hair-violin-face clearly and frontally. . . . Without the psychoanalytic mode of seeing, we would miss Magritte’s special way of packing complex associations into what seems to be his simple image in bad taste.
(172–76)
4. The research literature does suggest that an individual’s private psychodynamics can influence automatic information processing. For example, individual differences in defensive style are clearly correlated with looking style, as follows:
In their ten-second inspections of each of the ten pictures, the sixteen subjects showed a style that was related to their defensive style. . . . The more repressive the style, the less looking about. . . . One measure of looking about is the scatter of eye fixations around the picture, which correlates . . . with the RIRS [Rorschach Index of Repressive Style]. . . . The repressors may look less at the sexual contents of each picture. . . . [Comparing] two subjects’ looking patterns for a sexual picture[:] The isolator subject spent considerable time looking at the woman’s breast, while the repressor spent no time looking at the woman’s breast, except for a very peripheral part of it.
The same point reappears in studies linking defensive style to art preferences:
Machotka found that people who value the expression of emotion tend to use art to gratify unconscious needs that cannot be fulfilled in reality; those who are repressed, possessing strong inhibitions, seek in art qualities to support these inhibitions. . . . The study showed that art serves different needs for different people, and the aesthetic choices of individuals extend and support their normal method of coping with the world.
(Winner 1982, 75–76)
5. The non-psychodynamic approach to personality and perception pivots on the empirical exploration of traits and states. The finding is that these two “preconscious influences . . . independently produce the same effects on the interpretation of ambiguous [scenarios]” (Bargh 1989, 18). To apply this to Picasso, aggressive-trait viewers (such as professional bullfighters), and aggressive-state viewers (such as florists who just read a bullfight story in Le Torero), will be equally likely to see trickling entrails in Picasso’s Woman in an Armchair. Also, note that the effects of “[trait-plus-state] preconscious influences appear to combine additively” (Bargh 1989, 19). The bullfighter who just read Le Torero will be seeing evisceration everywhere (compared to the bullfighter who just had lunch with the local florist).
6. Keep in mind that we are discussing visual perception, pure and simple. This is not to undermine the fact that we have more complex cognitive processes available. In principle, we can gradually become aware of all things ambiguous, overdetermined, and polysemous. To put this differently, all unconscious interpretations can become conscious, but one at a time: consciousness is serial; unconscious processes are parallel.
7. The following summary aims to communicate the logic and results of the experiment, but makes no attempt at scientific rigor, with its operational definitions, graphs, and statistics. The reader interested in more precision can consult my doctoral dissertation, cited earlier.
8. The genitalia/maternity transformation is discussed elsewhere: “To apply this [the Guernica scenario] to the Demoiselles: Can one discern the maternal—phallus/baby equation? A buckling, pregnant torso as castrated, dilated orifice giving birth to a reparative phallus? The visual evidence certainly repeats itself” (Ettinger 1989, 179).
9. Spence’s (1980) experiments have demonstrated that speech contains derivatives of unconscious ideation, which finds safe expression, censored and transmuted, via metaphorical language:
To find lawfulness in the seemingly random events of dreams, slips of the tongue, accidental forgettings . . . was one of Freud’s first popular discoveries. . . . But slips are only the most obvious errors of this kind . . . a close look at the choice of language in an interview will reveal many examples of nonrandom word selection. . . . The extent to which lexical choice reveals something significant about underlying needs, drives, or bodily states can be conceptualized as a type of displacement—more specifically, a kind of lexical leakage, parallel to the way in which warded-off affects seem to influence facial expression. . . . A particular comment is in order about the function of metaphor in relation to lexical leakage. . . . The metaphor, because of its connotative properties, allows language to emerge in a semiprotected fashion; it gives the patient a chance to say something without making an explicit statement that can be directly challenged. Therefore, we might assume that metaphor is particularly vulnerable to unconscious needs.
(115–17, 128)
10. The cognitive paradigm makes its case through clever, dry, rigorous empiricism (Bornstein and Pittman, eds., 1992). For example, consider three conceptually interrelated, yet neutral, words: moon/ocean/tide. The experimenter presents moon/ocean subliminally, and asks the viewer: What is the first detergent that comes to mind? Subjects will say Tide, more often than a control group who never received the subliminal words. Note that these procedures meet the definition advanced in the introduction: “By unconsciously, it is meant that the subliminal contents [moon/ocean] are not available to the viewer’s introspective, phenomenal awareness but nevertheless exert an ongoing, tangible, and measurable effect on . . . responsivity [they determine the response of Tide].”
11. It is instructive to see why Picasso’s 1912 Guitar is so popular among semiotic enthusiasts. Frascina (1987) writes: “Krauss[’s] aim is to provide an account of . . . representation . . . by using a post-Saussurian philosophy of language. . . . For her, it is collage [c. 1912] that ‘raises the investigation of the impersonal workings of pictorial form, begun in analytical cubism [c. 1911], onto another level: the impersonal operations of the language . . . the subject of collage’ [Krauss 1981]. . . . She identifies the most crucial formal oppositions: ‘figure/ground multiply into the great stylistic markers, like linear/painterly, planar/recessional, haptic/optic’ [Krauss 1981]” (405). Yet, the problems underlying Guitar semiotics persist in analytic and collage Cubism. The analogy with language is simply misguided; and Picasso’s Cubist oeuvre is everywhere loaded with personal contents.
