Art and Personality (1929)

Abstract

In this essay Sachs faces and tries to solve one of the most difficult problems of psychoanalysis of art. That is how it is possible to understand a series of artistic products in which the individual contribution seems minimal (or even nonexistent) through the Freudian instruments, developed and tested on the basis of an equation between art and personality, or on the assumption that the work of art is expression of the personality of the author. Sachs, quite rightly, refers not only to the mosaics of Ravenna, which seem to inspire this essay, but also to certain types of epic, the art of the primitive and so on. It is clear that for such works the classic interpretative framework, established for example in Freud’s The Relation of the Poet to Daydreaming, whose crucial moment is the daydream itself, is totally inadequate. In the Ravenna mosaics there isn’t any (apparent) satisfaction of desire or expression of a personality, as even the artists hide all traces and evidence of it, together with the cypher of their name.

Sachs's answer, as we will see, aims to integrate the original Freudian formulation with other elements, derived almost exclusively from the most recent works by Freud, in particular Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego and The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious. In the end Sachs restores the traditional framework, although expanding it to the maximum: the intention of the “impersonal artist” is to establish a lasting peace with the superego and also in his work we find a satisfaction of desire related to drives connected to a pregenital phase - but at this point he does not go beyond the dimension of the hypothesis.