SIGMUND FREUD AND GUSTAV VIGELAND

PSYCHOANALYST AND SCULPTOR

Victor Bloom MD

Wayne State University

There are many fascinating parallels between the creative works of Sigmund Freud and Gustav Vigeland. These were first documented in a most compelling paper by Richard Simons (1), in which he found a very significant relationship between early loss and creativity. While Simons commented on Vigeland's 'dread of paternity', he reflected as well on his creativity.

Both Freud and Vigeland experienced the loss of a younger sibling while only three and four years old. Both went on to major expressions of creativity, Freud as a psychoanalyst and writer, and Vigeland as Norway's foremost sculptor. It is unfortunate that Vigeland is not better known in the U.S. and the world, but it is hoped that this paper will be part of a renewed interest in the power and scope of his artistic expression. Freud and Vigeland both observed the depth and breadth of the life cycle of the human being.

Only recently, as the scientific and literary establishments have challenged the place of psychoanalysis as a science, Alan Stone wrote in the Harvard magazine (2), that psychoanalysis would be more comfortable as an art than a science. This was his conclusion, acknowledging the failure of psychoanalysis to live up even to its own expectations as a panacea for most mental ills, even the most severe. At the same time he valued the healing effects of the analyst-analysand relationship, but he suggested that whatever good results accrued were due more to the art of psychoanalytic therapy than the science.

In this light, consider for the moment Freud and Vigeland as two contemporary artists.

I will say, without much fear of contradiction, especially in knowledgeable circles, that psychoanalysis is part science and part art and maybe in addition, part philosophy. Once we accept a rather over-arching evaluation of a philosophical system of thought, as articulately and profoundly presented by Jonathan Lear in his book, "Open-Minded", (3) both Freud and Vigeland can be subsumed under the same rubric. The best comparison I can think of is that Freud gave us insight into the human life cycle with words, while Vigeland had similar insights which he demonstrated in his timeless sculpture.

Vigeland is the one artist at the early part of this 20th century, whose sculpture encompassed the entire life cycle and depicted all the human conflicts which Freud elucidated. Vigeland's sculptures go from the fetus to the newborn, the toddler to the latency age, to the adolescent, the young adult, the mature person and the aging human being.

He addresses the Life Force (Eros) and the Death Force (Thanatos), which are always in conflict. Vigeland was a voracious reader of the classics, philosophy and psychology. Vigeland and Freud co-existed at the turn of the century, and yet there were no books in Vigeland's library by or about Freud. (4) For whatever reason, Vigeland, like Van Gogh, wrote down his thoughts and feelings, and interestingly, he wrote down his dreams. His biographer and later museum curator, Tone Wikborg enlisted the talents of psychoanalyst, Richard Simons, to interpret these dreams. She must have known that dreams were important to the artist, but she herself could not analyze them. Simons' paper suggests that Vigeland was a tortured soul and many armchair analysts think that the misery of the neurotic is what drives creativity.

My own experience is to the contrary, a position I have presented in a previous meeting of the Academy. (5) The technique of free association and the process of systematically analyzing the resistance and the transference seems to liberate previously bound up creativity. The free expression of creativity is necessary to maintaining self-esteem and a feeling of well-being. People who are blocked in their creativity, especially the most intelligent and talented are truly living lives of quiet desperation.

In my personal life I had a close friend for 25 years, a sculptor, who refused to go into psychoanalysis because he thought analysis would render him too serene to produce great art. For a quarter of a century we had long conversations in which he told me what was conscious about his creative process, and I shared in turn some general and specific psychoanalytic insights.

It became clear that his art was his therapy. For example, one day he had a sudden memory of his mother coming after him with a pair of scissors, threatening to cut off his penis, and he was horrified. When he later, as an adult, carved mother-figure after mother-figure, I could see that the process put him in the power position, instead of feeling fearful and impotent as a helpless child. And in a probable use of reaction-formation, he always depicted the female as lovely, kind and gentle, whether it be earth-mother, angel, goddess or queen.

In yet another memory he told me about being with his father as a small boy when Ford workers were demonstrating about working conditions in the factory. Ford sent in thugs and uniformed mounted police to break up the demonstration and mounted police descended on the crowd. He remembered being terrified. When the crowd dispersed, the father took him to the movies, and it just so happened that the movie was "The Four Horsemen of the Apocolypse." There was a scene in which the four horsemen seemed to be coming right at the audience, and my friend was very frightened. He remembered screaming and screaming, and that he could not be comforted. My intuition told me that this very experience is what contributed to his production of sculpted horses for several years. Carving a miniature and inanimate horse is different from being passively fearful of being trampled catastrophically by one (or four!). His horses were idealized as gentle and joyfully rideable. Turning this fantasy into an artistic reality is like therapy to the artist.

I believed that he largely transcended his fear as he studied horses, he sketched them many times, carved and molded ever larger horses until his supreme accomplishment was a beautiful, nearly full-sized horse. One of his favorite photographs is one of himself next to this statue.

Creative expression in artistic modalities allows for a sublimation of primitive (early childhood) fears. The child is passive and easily victimized, the artist is in control of his media, by technique and formal expression. The best artists convey strong emotion. It takes great skill to give life to bronze and granite, and this is what Vigeland did.

(I will show you some slides to illustrate how closely Vigeland's depictions of the varieties of human expressions and conflicts conform to Freudian theory and observations.)

For example, the first slide shows a mother-son depiction which I believe is a singular artistic expression of the Oedipal theme. No other sculpture from antiquity to modern times has shown the conflict between the tender erotic intimacy between mother and son and the incest taboo, as this. The subjects are naked, as are all Vigeland's sculpture-park statues, and here is a young and beautiful mother, squatting down and holding her son close to her, between her legs. He is naked too and although staying close to her, seems to be turning away.

I think Vigeland was unconsciously depicting his own tender relationship with his mother. His father was often drunk and abusive and the mother would protect her children by taking them to her father's idyllic farm in Vigeland. The grandfather was a wood-carver and eventually, Gustav changed his name to the place where his mother took him to safety.

An Oedipal complex is sure to develop in a family with a tender, passionate and loving mother and a passive or distant father. It is the boy's deep and guilty wish that he replace his father, and he must struggle with the fact that he ultimately defeated his father. It was only after the father's death when Gustav was 17 that he went to Christianstadt (later called Oslo) to find a sculptor from whom he could learn by becoming an apprentice.

Norway's then most famous sculptor, Brynjulf Bergslien , upon seeing the boy's drawings declared him a genius and took him in out of the cold, whereupon the young man asked the housekeeper to discard all his teenage drawings, but save the suitcase. His artistic productions grew on all that had created before and he took up the career of the sculptor, which he felt he was even before he was born! It was his fate to depict all aspects of his life, with a range of emotion that went from happiness and joy, playful freedom and love, to the deep pain and depths of despair. He said it was agony to be an artist. I believe the agony was the necessity of reliving old painful memories in order to open up the palette of the unconscious. Without Freudian psychoanalytical understanding, chances were he relived old memories without insight, even though humanity achieved personal insights without the benefit of psychoanalysis.

I conclude that Vigeland lacked significant personal insights because of what he did in his personal life. At the same time, he seemed greatly insightful about the human condition and the (unresolved) conflicts of others, which is a major part of the 'human condition.' He had a very strong love-hate relationship with women. For example he had two children with his first wife, which was his model. At the time they were not married. Afterwards, he fell in love with another woman, also a model. To free himself from the first relationship, he drove a fateful bargain. He would marry the mother of his children on the understanding that they would be immediately divorced, and that he would never see his wife or children ever again. He never saw them again! He only agreed to support them financially and this he did.

Gustave and his second wife had a 'play-child', the daughter of a friend with whom they would have idyllic vacations and play at being a family. The question is, why would he disown his own children and the mother of his children? And what would be the meaning of his many varied depictions of childhood? Could it be that he was more comfortable with children of granite and bronze, children without real feelings and demands? It is my contention that he created sculptured children as a substitute family. Real children would have evoked in him the powerfully painful conflicts of being erotically attracted to and attached to mother, without being able to have her. Such unresolved Oedipus complexes lead to ambivalent relations to all women; they are loved, despised and feared. In addition there is the burden of unconscious guilt, which calls for self-punishment. In one dream reported in Simons' paper, Vigeland is run through by a unicorn's horn, and in one statue he depicts this painful image.

Similar to Freud at the time, Vigeland thought that women were inferior intellectually, and that they were not as highly evolved as men. It was believed that men have lofty thoughts, but women are earthy and primitive. Like children, they are close to the animals. Vigeland sculpted many statues of women with monsters, beasts and serpents. In one, she is nuzzling a unicorn. In another, she is like a cow with a litter of babies nursing. There are statues of women being carried off, cruelly.

But this is not the whole story, because in some she is idealized and worshipped. There is a statue, similar in detail to the mother and son, of a young man and woman in what seems to be an erotic embrace. The man is pulling her to him and they are joined at the pelvis. But they seem to pull apart, he looking at her questioningly and she attempting to withdraw. Her face is turned away, her arms down, and from behind you can see that her hands are in a fist.

The third slide of this series is an old woman and a mature man. She must be his mother. She is looking at him worriedly and he is turned away, looking into the future as if it is bleak and he is full of regrets. If this interpretation is correct, it is true to life of the man with the unresolved Oedipus complex. He has had many women, but none lasting or fulfilling, his mother is powerless to help him now; she is concerned that he is bitter, sad and lonely. He discovers that his life is full of regrets; he has missed out on the best things in life, a loving wife and wonderful children. That man could be Vigeland himself.

Agreeing with Simons' contention, it would seem that a man with an unresolved Oedipus conflict would not be comfortable with children. Children would bind him to the mother. In addition, my contention is that the death of a younger sibling while still a small child would create an overly intense dread of death, with fear of catastrophic annihilation, of non-existence. Such children, if they have the talent and capacity, would have the unconscious motivation to overcome the fear of death by becoming famous and immortal. One identifies with his artistic creations, and if they are great enough, would ensure an immortality of fame. (For such as Gustav Vigeland, Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes is not enough!)

And so Vigeland would not have children of his own, or if he did, he would tend to be distant and critical to cover up his unease. At the same time, such a man as Vigeland also had memories of idyllic and lovely times with his mother and grandfather. And so he is able to produce statues of babies and children of every variety, young mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, a couple with a child between them, symbolizing the happy family--- as long as they are not his.

There are some scenes which are shocking, a father throwing his babies into a lake, a father severely upbraiding a pubertal girl, a man beating a boy, a mature man beating a younger man. In his need to keep open the wellsprings of his unconscious, which is the source of creativity, a great part of his ambivalence leaks out through artistic expression.

Freud was convinced that sublimation was the ultimate defense mechanism. In creative expression, the artist unconsciously does the equivalent of dream-work. Primitive and socially unacceptable feelings and fantasies are rendered concretely. In the case of Vigeland, the disguise of dreamwork is only partly successful, as some rather horrible and primitive emotions bubble to the surface. And yet there is a drama and grandeur in his sculpture matched in this millenium only by Michelangelo and Rodin. It is a pity his works do not leave the city of Oslo, according to Vigeland's contract with the city of Oslo, which provided him with everything an artist would want, a major studio and all the assistants and materials he would need. This is an ideal situation for a creative artist, but still, Vigeland was ambivalent about it, saying that he had sold his soul.

His crowning achievement is the monolith, (The Human Pillar), which some Norwegians joked about being a 'phallic symbol'. It was carved out of a single block of white stone, 55 feet high and weighing 260 tons. The finished work consists of 121 interlacing human bodies. At the bottom are dying figures, crushed under the mass of struggling, climbing figures. Most of the figures are seen climbing toward the top, struggling. As your gaze ascends, they appear to be getting younger and younger, until at the very top are babies, numerous babies. Nearby is another large statue of many babies.

I believe the phallus and the babies are his symbols of the Life Force, Freud's "Eros". In Vigeland's depiction, Woman take a subordinate position. This philosophy may be considered an attempt to diminish the importance in his life of his mother, because of Oedipal guilt.

But in balance, Vigeland is with the Life Force, with the vitality of life triumphing over all. The human condition is full of pain and strife, struggle and torment, but all in all, men and women get together and make love and have babies and form families. The live joyfully, suffer greatly, die and life goes on. Vigeland himself never quite feels fulfilled, even as he knows he is Norway's greatest sculptor and famous in his own time. He cast off his own children, but made a sculptured "Family of Man."

References:

1. Richard C. Simons MD--- "Creativity, Mourning and the Dread of Paternity: Reflections on the Life and Art of Gustav Vigeland" (Int. Rev. Psycho-Anal. (1984) 11, 181-198

2. Alan Stone--- "Where Will Psychoanalysis Survive? (What Remains of Freudianism When Its Scientific Center Crumbles?) Harvard Magazine, January-February 1997, a condensation of his keynote address at an annual meeting of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis.

3. Jonathan Lear--- "Open-Minded" (Working out the Logic of the Soul), Harvard University Press, 1998

4. Tone Wikborg, Chief Curator of the Vigeland Museum, Oslo, Norway. (Personal communication)

5. Victor Bloom--- "Psychoanalysis and Creativity", presented at the spring 1998 meeting of AAP, Toronto.

6. Ragna Stang--- "Gustav Vigeland--- The Sculptor and His Works" (1965) Tanum-Norli, Oslo, Norway.

7. "Embrace of Life"---The Sculpture of Gustav Vigeland" Text by Nathan Cabot Hale, photographs by David Finn. Harry N Abrams, Inc., Publishers, New York.