It is not your fault: it’s your penis.

Only in art it is possible, that a person with hidden wishes creates something that resembles the wish.
This play, thanks to the artistic illusion, creates affection for the object as if it was realistic.

This Dr. Sigmund Freud in Vienna, Austria, was writing in 1920.

It is total nonsense.

Freud was a man who believed he could see into the psyche of his fellow human beings and come up with effective explanations.
This pretension was nothing new.
For thousands of years mystics and healers were already able to do this very thing.
And spiritually enlightened person like Buddha and Lao Tse had an understanding of the human psyche much more sophisticated and correct compared to Sigmund Freud.

Freud though presented his ideas as a science.
As a non-emotional, analytic approach with sterile conclusions.
This was very successful: Europe devastated by the First World War and needing to build itself up again.
Also mentally.
To overcome the trauma of the barbarous war.
And Freud filled this gap with his explanations saying: it is not your fault, it’s your penis.

Let’s go back now to this statement Freud made in 1920:

Only in art it is possible, that a person with hidden wishes creates something that resembles the wish.
This play, thanks to the artistic illusion, creates affection for the object as if it was realistic.

It is a confused statement.
The first part explains something important about the artist.
But the second part suddenly speaks about the consumer of the art-object.
That is only the beginning of the nonsense.

Even more comes from this:
it might very well be that an artist has hidden wishes.
But maybe not at all.
Who will say?
If it is hidden, nobody can see it.
Even not the artist.
Hence, it becomes only a matter of speculation.
A great field to move in for psychologists and psychoanalysts.
Taking a position of authority and explaining with their self-assigned knowledge what are the hidden wishes.
It is B.S., fervent and loyal blog readers.

But sometimes an artist has indirect wishes and knows about them.
And this fact of knowing makes the wishes not hidden.
They are, more or less, in his or her consciousness.
But maybe the artist may hide his wishes from the audience.
In that case they are hidden only from the audience.
They are therefore not hidden wishes, but indirect wishes.
That are very common and unexceptional.
The wish to be loved.
The wish to have success and feel important.
The wish to make a lot of money.
The wish to be able to pick up girls or boys more easily.
Very ordinary, healthy and normal wishes.
Property not only of artists but for example sportspeople as well.

An interesting artist works with metaphors and sublimations.
Transforming his or her work in such a way that it has as an inspiration and starting point the personal wish or the deep desire.
The artist expressing in an indirect way issues that are playing in the mind and in the jungle of the emotions.
It is often a deliberate process.
Nothing mysterious about it.

Hence, an interesting art object never resembles the wish of the artist.
Because that would mean a lack of talent to sublimate and create metaphors.

Now, one could say, but what about this painter that made beautiful images of nude women?
Obviously expressing his hidden wish to be involved with a beautiful woman himself.
Not succeeding in reality and only expressing with the paintings the resulting frustration.
May we ask then if this we should consider art?
Or just a form of self-psychotherapy?

The rule is therefore that if in an art-object the wish or desire of the artist can be easily seen, it is not art of a very high level.
It is therapeutic handcrafting.

The second part of Freud’s statement concerns the spectators.
He claims that we develop affection for the art-object in such a way that the art-object becomes realistic.
When the artist has been making an artistic illusion of his or her hidden wishes.

Again, don’t be intimidated by this rattling: it is endless nonsense.

Imagine a painting on the wall.
According to Freud, this painting is not a realistic object.
It only becomes a realistic object after we have developed affection for it.

It is different though.
A painting, or any other art-object, is always a realistic object.
No matter what.
But we can develop affection, interest, fascination and a whole range of emotions for a painting or an art-object.
Depending of the connection we establish with the soul that the artist has put into the painting.
And then it becomes part of us.
In our mind and in our heart.
It is not a simple affection making the art object as if it was realistic.
It is loving an art-object that therefore becomes part of the personal existence; realistic and unrealistic.
In heart and mind.

For artists it is most irritating when psychologists start ploughing in their fields.
Planting and harvesting ideas, theories and thoughts that have not so much to do with the artists, but most of all with the psych’s themselves.
Who introduce mumbo-jumbo and that’s the business they are in.
To first claim there are hidden wishes to see people then come to them to assist them to find them.

Wake up!
As the famous Belgium painter René Margritte stated:

“Ceci n’est pas une pipe”.

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