The Unconscious Influence

17 September 2011      

By Lauren Painter

           Austrian psychiatrist, founder of psychoanalysis, and the most influential psychological theorist of the twentieth century is known as Sigmund Freud. His theories concerned the human mind, human sexuality, and dreams. He had a revolutionary effect on modern society and the arts of the twentieth century. Freud’s work and theories helped shape views of childhood, personality, memory, sexuality and therapy. Literature, art, and music expanded and transformed through the twentieth century, heavily influenced by Freud because they all explored the inner depths of the unconscious mind.

Freud impacted all forms of art with his new psychology, one of the most important being literature. He influenced many writers in his time, but the three most greatly affected by him were Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, and James Joyce.

In Swann’s Way by Proust, readers notice the use of Freud’s “free association” method. Proust recalls the extreme pleasure of savoring a piece of cake soaked in tea after digging through the depths of memory (Fiero 33).

Kafka’s The Metamorphosis displayed themes of insecurity and vulnerability. The main character, Gregor Samsa, awakes from slumber to realize that he’s transformed into a giant bug. Kafka’s novels review dreams versus reality and illogicality versus logicality, just as Freud did (Fiero 35).

The last writer who was most affected by Freud was Joyce. The way he wrote his novels displayed a dedication to Freud by using interior monologue, which are the innermost thoughts of a character told to the reader to form a “stream of consciousness”. This was where a line of ideas and pictures are connected by free association. In these novels, all the important events are the ones inspired by Freud, which encounter dreams, nightmares, memory, and the mind itself (Fiero 36).

Influenced by Freud’s focus on the subconscious and dream-world, artists began new methods of art by interpreting their own desires, fantasies, and illogical situations. The Freudian revolution inspired Expressionism, Metaphysical art, Dada, and Surrealism.

Edvard Munch was an Expressionist artist who was taken over by thoughts on the suffering of sexual maturity and confused sexuality. His painting, The Scream, incorporated the visual difference between dreams and real life. Two artist groups came out of hiding due to Freud—Die Brucke and Der Blaue Reiter—displayed paintings of overwhelming emotions, harsh thoughts, and brutality; what they claimed was an “inner necessity” (Fiero 38).

Metaphysical art portrayed unnatural images, illogical perspectives, and played with dreamlike inconsistencies much like the literature did during this time. In The Nostalgia of the Infinite by Giorgio de Chirico, he explored how everyday objects or places can be transformed to arise a mystery. Same with Chirico, Marc Chagall painted a picture called I and the Village. The painting shows imbalanced shapes, broody colors, and pensive ideas, which directly relates to Freud’s studies.

The Dada Movement was a group of artists who were obsessed with showing the people the irrationality of the world after World War I. They produced collages and made use of Freud’s free association technique through improvisation. One of the most famous artists during this time was Marcel Duchamp, who created Fountain to depict the line between what makes sense and what does not. The urinal showed that a piece of art was more so about the artists idea even if the creator did not make the actual object (Fiero 40).

Surrealism was the most distinctive movement rooted from Freud because it presented a physical appearance to the unconscious mind. Most artists during this period relied on their hands to take the brush across the canvas and let their imagination burst through it spontaneously. It correlates with Freud’s theories because it caused the artists to—ironically enough—focus consciously on a painting supposed to appear as an unconscious one. A well-known example of this is Pablo Picasso’s Seated Woman. It also symbolizes Freud’s research on a three-part psyche (Fiero 43).

Like with literature and art, Freud had an effect on the music of that time. It was found mostly in musical dramas which were typically sexual, dreamlike, and dealt with female hysteria, topics Freud researched exclusively about. Bluebeard’s Castle composed by Bela Bartok demonstrated the sexually tense and moody scenes between the sexes through music. Arnold Schoenberg was another composer who created monodramas, which were pieces of music for just one character. Schoenberg exposed the audiences to the personalities and emotions of each individual character and made the ‘dreamworld’ become livelier. A student of Schoenberg, Alban Berg, created two distinct operas: Wozzeck and Lulu. Both involved suicide, the inner thoughts of the characters, murder, and sexual frustration. Lulu tells a tale relative to female hysteria, where a woman is ruined by and kills her lovers. It is a nightmarish atmosphere and shows a sexually dominating woman (Fiero 50).

Freud was a psychologist who theorized mainly about the unconscious mind. He interpreted dreams to be hidden emotions and desires. These emotions and desires inside the minds of artists during the twentieth century were influenced by Freud’s controversial ideas and are still well-known today. With literature came the nightmarish and grotesque novels that dealt with bizarre and illogical situations. Art expanded into spontaneity use of hands, collages, and messed with reality versus dreams. Influenced by sexual nature and ideas, music soothed the ears with rhythms and patterns which demonstrated female hysteria, repressed sexuality, and emotions. Freud’s ideas may not be believed by modern society, but his ideas clung onto the artists of his time period and transformed every form of art into the way it is seen, read, and heard today.