insight and rigourfind one’s way in this bewildering complexity? The creative artist is the least
doubtful: dostoyevsky’s place is not far behind shakespeare. The Brothers
Karamazov is the most magnificent novel ever written; the episode of the
grand inquisitor, one of the peaks in the literature of the world, can hardly be
valued too highly. Before the problem of the creative artist analysis must, alas,
lay down its arms.
(Freud 1961 [1928]: 177)This is an odd piece of text, not least because it offers a deft literary analysis of
dostoyevsky, only to foreclose immediately on that interpretative route as an option
for psychoanalytic inquiry. psychoanalysis, Freud claims, can offer a reading of
dostoyevsky as a neurotic, a moralist and a sinner, but not as an artist. This leaves the
integrity of dostoyevsky’s ‘practice’ somewhat challenged. What is significant here,
is how Freud’s approach to dostoyevsky begins with a declaration that his position
as a psychoanalytic investigator actually alters the status of dostoyevsky as an object
of investigation. The famous author is deliberately not treated as a unified creative
subject and a literary genius, but as a fairly shapeless screed of unconscious knowledge.
The all- consuming focus on the interplay of conscious and unconscious thought in
psychoanalysis, means that where in the dostoyevsky essay, the analysis is a speculative
reconstruction of the architecture of one man’s neurosis, on other occasions, such as
the introduction of the painter signorelli in the essay on ‘The Forgetting of proper
names’ in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, the artist becomes a mere motif or
fleeting instance of Freud’s repression of a more crucial and unpleasant event, namely
the suicide of an analysand (Freud 1960 [1901]). in this case, of course, Freud’s own
thought process is also put on display as a shapeless screed of unconscious knowledge,
in order to offer a subtle analysis of the difference between forgetting something and
the fall of knowledge produced by unconscious thought. The early and notorious essay
on leonardo da Vinci, is the most interesting example of Freud’s engagement with the
creative artist, not least because its central theme is the manner in which the agency of
the researcher intervenes within the activity of the artist:
The investigator in him never in the course of his development left the artist
entirely free, but often made severe encroachments on him and perhaps in the
end suppressed him.
(Freud 1957 [1910]: 64)in the leonardo essay, there is no mediation of the uniqueness of genius by the
generality of creative practice, as Freud shifts register quickly from the base level of
‘infantile sexual researches’ to the re appearance of this obsessive research process within
canonical works of art. a key point to note here is that the artistic activity is directed
to an audience that confirms leonardo’s genius, while the infantile sexual researches
are not directed at anyone, but instead follow the circular path of the Freudian drive
(Trieb). This inevitably produces a conflict within the production of the art object:
Then, when he made the attempt to return from investigation to his starting
point, the exercise of his art, he found himself disturbed by the new direction