Autoritratto, io narrante e rappresentazione di sé

Autoritratto, io narrante e rappresentazione di sé - Self-Portrait: Narrative Ego and Self Representation The interpretation of the self-portrait using psychoanalytical instruments is very inviting, very intense, apparently too easy. The basic assumption that the painting mirrors the soul of its creator from Plato to Leon Battista Alberti deserves discussion. In fact, a self-portrait can in the first place express the explicit cultural conscious aspects of the self; whereas the more secret traits of the personality can be hidden elsewhere, in other human and nonhuman figures, in the landscape or in the abstraction of the images. So-called modern art coincides, as we know, with the de-structurisation of form (there are interesting correlations with literature); disturbing repressed, split-off, projected and re-introjected parts of the self crowd into the painter’s face, in a seemingly irreversible drift. The integration between the visual and non-visual, symbolic and pre-symbolic aspects of the self-representation, the discrepancy between what is felt and what is seen, represents the creative drama of every artist through the ages: a drama to which psychoanalysis has provided the emotional scenario and the words for thinking it and communicating it to himself and to others at a conscious level.

Simona Argentieri, Autoritratto, io narrante e rappresentazione di sé in "PSICOANALISI" 2/2008, pp 69-88, DOI: