insight and rigourthe assumption of the determinism of mental life by unconscious knowledge. For this
reason, Freud saw leonardo’s paintings as the repository of the unconscious knowledge
that the artist himself did not know that he possessed. a paradox of psychoanalysis
is that while the analyst cannot supplement this unconscious knowledge with his
own interpretations, as soon as the analysand begins to articulate this unconscious
knowledge, he potentially puts himself in the position of the analyst, that is, a
person who fully accepts the determinism of mental life. in the account of leonardo
da Vinci given by Freud, this would be equivalent to a recognition on leonardo’s
behalf, that the tension between finishing a painting and not finishing it was related
to the distinction between conscious and unconscious knowledge, rather than being
a question of existential doubt, creative angst or contingent circumstances. in this
admittedly speculative scenario, leonardo would then have fully shifted his subject
position from the artist to an artist- researcher, and would have been enabled to use
this rigour of the researcher to produce works that dealt with the cultural aspects of
sublimation. This would require a leap of the imagination in which leonardo da Vinci
was deemed capable of making Jacques prévert’s matchboxes, a work in which the
existential dilemma of finishing or not finishing a work of art, is transformed by prévert
into the logic and the thesis of the work of art itself. of course, leonardo da Vinci
did not, and could not, have proceeded in this direction. nor would we be inclined
to hail the genius of a hybrid version of da Vinci and prévert. leonardo’s agency as a
researcher is still understood as a narrative of complexity, ingenuity and genius within
the framework of a life experience that can comfortably accommodate leonardo the
artist and leonardo the researcher. in drawing attention to an incommensurability of
these two versions of leonardo, however, Freud was unintentionally pointing the way
to the possibility of properly formulated psychoanalytic research within the creative
arts. This is a research paradigm that demands a shift in the subject position of the
artist, rather than a notion of practice in which the position of the professional artist
and that of the self- reflexive researcher can co- exist. in the next section, i will show
why this shift to the position of the researcher presented difficulties even for an artist
with a theoretical interest in psychoanalysis and a wish to alter the relations of the
artistic subject and the objects of art.
the rotten donkeyThe manifold connections between sigmund Freud, salvador dalí and Jacques lacan
are well documented, and include correspondence, the writing of essays and doctoral
theses, the construction of paintings and the analysis of madness (Chadwick 1980;
greely 2001). These connections are established around key texts and images. dalí
employed readings of Freud’s leonardo and gradiva essays in his approach to his version
of millet’s Angelus. in turn, Jacques lacan interviewed a man who had attacked millet’s
Angelus, who had hesitated between this, Watteau’s Embarkation for Cythera and the
Mona Lisa. dalí’s engagement with Freud was directed towards the establishment of a
method of painting that would consciously reproduce the delirium of the dream. dalí’s
self- authored ‘paranoiac- critical method’ worked against the passivity of surrealist
automatism, based on the individual free associations of the analysand, towards an
active automatism that staked a claim to the possibility of collective delirium. The