Picasso’s narcissism and the meaning of La Vie – a Lacanian analysis
La Vie by Picasso
INTRODUCTION
The fortuitous purchase of a print of Picasso’s La Vie in a charity shop led to this hunt for plausible explanation. This is a tentative interpretation of the art work based on a particular psychoanalytic (Lacanian) theory and Picasso’s documented history as a womanizing misogynistic narcissist.
Before I begin I provide a psychoanalytic preamble to try to provide the reader with a grasp of the theory behind my interpretation. This section can be avoided or returned to later. It aims to answer the question: “Why would a narcissist be terrified by his own mother?” To answer this we need to think about the way our identities (as eg neurotic or narcissist) are produced and formed.
THEORETICAL BACKGROUND – the origins of narcissism
In general I think we (that is to say most people in the West) tend to assume each person has an essential particular individuality, and that this autonomous and independent individuality constitutes our own personal identity: it is who ‘I’ am, so that ‘my’ own views and values etc. or my particular ‘personality’ is the product of and, in a sense, owned by ‘me’, my body and especially my brain. This is the philosophy of the ‘mind’ underpinning what is known as cognitive psychology and the neurosciences.
But here I want to challenge this assumption with Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. I believe this can provide us with at least a partial and better plausible explanation for the observed human condition: its destructiveness, its paranoia, its apparent gullibility and willingness to do ‘bad things’ – as well of course its capacity for love.
What we like to think of as our autonomous and essential individuality is, instead, the product of our attempts to conform to a set of cultural norms that we perceive as having been ratified as ‘the way I should be’ by some Big Other. For each of us this Big Brother stands in for, for example, the idea of He Who Knows, and a striving to ‘be like him/her’, or the idea that ‘There are things to be known’ and so a striving for this knowledge, and a striving to be accepted and to ‘belong’.
The point being that our sense of self is useful but an illusion, something we only imagine, as either how I like to see myself or how I would like others to see me. Our identity isn’t something innate, it is something based on an imaginary relation to the culture we live in and the norms that have come to exercise power over us and society over time. And of course, over time these norms and the ‘way we are’, the things we value, how we value them, could (and should) change.
Consider a psychoanalytic version of an infant’s perspective.
At the very beginning of a child’s life, the baby or infant, the argument goes, is at first at one with the mother and has no identity. But then a trauma – the baby has to separate from the mother. The child’s sense of self or identity must now emerge somehow after this separation.
After separation from the mother the child begins to try to learn to speak and learns that there are cultural rules to be obeyed and prohibitions. And, in order to develop a culturally functional identity the infant internalizes these cultural rules or norms but, crucially, in order to do so has to give up some imagined autonomy in deference to an imagined rule-maker (referred to symbolically as The Law of the Father, or The Name of the Father). If this happens successfully the child is said to be psychically castrated – this is called a subjectivisation: the subject participates in his/her own subjugation by ‘the state’.
In other words:
“the individual is objectivised in the constitution of her subjectivity and is thereby subjugated by her objectivisation to become an object of culture.”
In Foucault’s essay ‘the Subject and Power’. Subjectification refers to the procedures by which the subject is led to observe herself, analyze herself, interpret herself, and recognize herself as a domain of possible knowledge.
If this process goes smoothly then this creates a common or garden neurotic subject, like most of us, a person who has found ‘a culture’ to follow – no matter how dysfunctional or cult-like that may be and a person who is always more or less anxious about whether he or she is obeying the cultural norms adequately and continually strives to do so, always feeling a failure. He or she is effectively a slave to a cultural set of values that most of the time he or she is not even aware of (for example in the west this might be an attitude of bigoted and racist white supremacy – not to put too fine a point on it).
However, this process doesn’t always run smoothly. Sometimes there is a glitch and a truly narcissistic subjectivity can emerge. In common parlance: the narcissistic psychopath.
I’d now like to turn to how this particular version of subjectivity, known as perverse narcissism, emerges. This is of interest here because this is the mode of subjectivity consistent with features of Picasso’s behaviours, for example his destructive and sadistic misogyny outlined by Francoise Gilot and others.
With true narcissism the usual neurotic mode of subjectivity described above fails to materialize. Instead of the subject forming an identity in relation to some cultural Law Maker (The Name of the Father or Big Other), the subject rejects this law, or the law maker appears to weak to provide a template for identity formation. The subject fears not having an identity or struggles without one because without one it is impossibly to function in society. Without a Big Other the subject is confronted with what amounts to a terrifying existential void “There is no ‘I’, ‘I’ do not exist” – the theory has it that this is intolerable – it is made more intolerable because this fear of not existing is associated with the being part of an unified with the mother. The subject is terrified they are going to be swallowed up by the mother again. The mother is perceived as a monstrous mouth about to swallow the subject up.
To avoid this the subject attempts to become his own Name of the Father and in doing so becomes an emotionally unstable narcissist with a pathological terror of the mother-figure which terror is ‘managed’ by its transformation into obsessive destructive and controlling fetishes and associated phobias. But the attempt to be his own Law or Big Other is necessarily doomed to failure. The Law is always weakened by its origins in a known lack of power and knowledge. And so the the narcissist ends up trying to prop up an unstable identity by symbolically consuming or exercising fetishized possessions or destructions. But each attempt only makes this identity more unstable inciting fresh attempts. The narcissist’s life becomes a series of destructive and oppressive fetishisations acted out on and against others and designed to keep the monstrous mother and her gaping mouth at bay.
INTERPRETATIONS OF PICASSO’S
PAINTING ‘LA VIE’
A caution: psychobiography – the attempt to interpret a psyche through an artist’s work – is always capable of socially pathologising an individual. Here I argue Picasso’s narcissistic psyche can provide an alternative explanation for a notoriously inscrutable and famous artwork in order to enrich or at least enhance or expand the experience of the art and possibly of Picasso too.
The painting is from Picasso’s blue period and has long been regarded as enigmatic and the hand gesture of the male character as somehow ‘inscrutable’.
The image is though to be of Casamagas, Picasso’s very close friend who was impotent, obsessed with one of their crowd a woman called Germaine who rejected him leading to Casamagas’s suicide when he tried but failed to shoot Germaine in a restaurant and then turned the gun on himself and died. It is thought that Picasso had possibly already cuckolded Casamagas with Germaine and that this may have been a factor in Casamagas’s suicide.
Chalif (see article below), argues that La Vie symbolizes Picasso’s disapproval of maternal authority, and the that the gesture of the male figure in the “Noli mi tangere’ is directed by Casamagas who actually represents Picasso himself as a kind of alter-ego, at the mother (Noli mi tangere is a well known phrase in the Bible meaning ‘do not touch me’, the words spoken by Christ to Mary Magdalene (Vulgate, John 20:17). The phrase noli me tangere is thought by some to be a reminder to not cling to anything, as nothing physical is permanent and is depicted in several art works of scenes of Mary Magdalene with Christ after the resurrection. (See the example by Antonio Allegri da Correggio’s from the 1500s below.)
Chalif claims the ‘noli mi tangere’ gesture is directed at Picasso’s mother to symbolize his break with traditional forms of art.
Chalif also suggests Picasso’s art through his life reflected his ‘pain’ and his grief at his own mortality. However in my view, given Picasso’s narcissistic traits, it is more feasible that Picasso’s art was a product of his ‘enjoyment’ but a particular type of enjoyment associated with existential angst called jouissance (jouissance in Lacanian terms is an pleasureable but also intensely painful libidinal orgasmic-like release / the product of his narcissistic psychic instability).
Chalif suggests (p413)
“is he indirectly jailing his own psyche after a guilty verdict in the shooting of Casagemas?”
In La Vie: with the portrait of Germain, Chalif asks:
“Picasso’s lover had assumed the role as a mirror of universal suffering and angst”
Instead, I argue below that through La Vie Picasso may be vicariously ‘enjoying’, experiencing a libidinal thrill, at Germaine’s expense, through his cuckolding of Casamagas and at the same time protecting his fragile narcissistic ego from its potential nemesis, his own (m)other).
The psychoanalyst Carl Jung has famously critiqued Picasso’s (cubism), though the same critique may not apply to his blue period when La Cie was painted.
On Cubism Jung wrote:
“At any rate they communicate no unified, harmonious feeling-tone but, rather, contradictory feelings or even a complete lack of feeling. From a purely formal point of view, the main characteristic is one of fragmentation, which expresses itself in the so called ‘lines of fracture’ – that is, a series of psychic ‘faults’ (in the geological sense) which run right through the picture. The picture leaves one cold, or disturbs one by its paradoxical, unfeeling, and grotesque unconcern for the beholder. This is the group to which Picasso belongs*.”
I suggest that Jung’s analysis presents what appear to be echoes of the artist’s narcissistic perverse psyche, for example, the lack of ‘feeling’ for the onlooker and the ‘fragmentation’ in the images: both consistent with non-libidinal destructive tendencies, at least. But Jung sees this as potentially hopeful for Picasso’s emergence after his descent into ‘hel’. He sees these as schizoid tendencies (not, he adds, the clinical condition known as schizophrenia) unable to express what is in the unconscious directly but only symbolically and indirectly.
Others (Palermo 2016) argue that:
Antonio Allegri da Correggio’s “Noli me tangere 1500s
Mary Magdalene with Christ after the resurrection.
To illustrate Germaine’s experience with Picasso there was an occasion when he brought a woman to see the ‘fallen’ old, ill, poor Germaine ostensibly to be ‘kind’ to give her some money – but was this to gloat and to use Germaine as a prophecy or warning:
“This is what I can do to you too!”
[Whilst blaming Germaine for Casamegas’ suicide over 40 years earlier]
“We made our way up the hill…we went into a small house. (Picasso) knocked on the door and then walked inside without waiting for an answer. We saw a little old lady, toothless and sick, lying in bed… Pablo talked quietly with her. After a few minutes he laid some money on the night table. I asked him why he had brought me to see the woman. “I want you to learn about life,” he said quietly. “That woman’s name is Germaine Pichot. She is old and…poor and unfor- tunate now . . . but when she was young she was very pretty and made a painter friend of mine suffer so much that he committed suicide. She was a young laundress when I first came to Paris….(In those days,) she turned a lot of heads. Now look at her.” (Gilot cited by Chalif)
(Chalif 5, p 82)
A readers’s comment appended to Chalif’s paper suggests the paper is overly simplistic, and that :
“It is likely that Germaine shared Picasso’s bed from the first and that his sense of guilt over the death of Casagemas was heightened by this fact. Picasso’s misogyny is well known, but his treatment of the men closest to him was often no better.”
See also:
In Capello:
“Picasso dropped his father’s surname Ruiz and became simply Picasso.”
So, this may represent the rejection by Picasso of The Name of the Father or Le Non and Le Nom du Père, consistent with rejection of the paternal psychic castration and therefore effectively preventing the development of a culturally functional (non-narcissistic) neurotic identity formation. This leaves his without a functional identity or even existence, which exposes him to the full force of the death drive represented by his non-existence as an individual in danger of being swallowed up by the terrifying mother.
The (m)other is now a source of existential threat to him, a source of terror and this leads to a radical and narcissistically generated perverse Ego in thrall to it own Law: “Enjoy this little as much as possible!”: the perverse totalitarian psyche.
This condemns Picasso to an unfettered and limitlessly compulsive drive (the death drive) to attempt to find strategies for subjective stability and calm the distressing excess of provocative jouissance – through attempts to destroy the (m)other by destroying those that most closely represent her in Picasso’s life. The women, three of whom committed suicide.
Cappelo et al argue (wrongly I think) that:
“During the phallic stage, Picasso developed an insatiable sexual attraction to his mother repressed by fear of his father and society.”
This is describing a Freudian theory of development. However, I suggest a Lacanian might say instead that his failure of symbolic castration by The Name of the Father brings him face to face with his unbearable and terrifying own (m)other triggering thereby setting the death drive to work.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter if Picasso cuckolded the impotent Casamagas before or after his death … Picasso had in any case probably already cuckolded C, in his mind at least, and then Casamegas killed himself. Did Picasso feel guilt at all, ever? Did Picasso’s possession of Germaine obey or stimulate a psychic unconscious demand to destroy others, thereby partially stabilizing his unstable sadistic narcissism. ‘La Vie’ may be psycho-autobiographical (Picasso’s image lies under Casamagas on the canvas, depicting the moment of his rejection of castration (the absent Father, already out-mastered), and the terror/irresistibility of this confrontation with the impossible Real – the void of his subjectivity – represented by his (m)other and exposure to the death drive. “Noli Mi Tangere”
So, perhaps Picasso’s art isn’t an exorcism of a black spell of guilt, but rather a manifestation of a perverse and unbearable jouissance, a demand to release ever more jouissance through repetition of the acts of destruction of the (m) other, a jouissance released in one instance by his own perception of his part in the destruction of his close friend Casamagas, seemingly driven to death by suicide, and consummated through sex with the fateful and voracious love (Germaine) of his impotent friend. To be impotent, a dependent slave, and a companion (if not friend) of Picasso’s must have been torture and potentially a source of illicit pleasure for the perverse and sadistic Picasso.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion then, one interpretation of La Vie, the painting with its inscrutable noli mi tangere gesture, isn’t the product of guilt or grief , but is more likely to be symbolic of his solidifying narcissism, a representation of how he took Casamagas’s place to possess and subject Germaine to his sexual will as one act keeping his terrifying mother at bay.
REFERENCES
Creation and Destruction: A Psychoanalysis of Picasso
By Kelly Cappello & Dr. Cem Zeytinoglu CMST 363 11 May 2015
http://jungcurrents.com/carl-jung-takes-on-picasso-in-1932
THE DEATH OF CASAGEMAS: EARLY PICASSO, THE BLUE PERIOD, MORTALITY, AND REDEMPTION
Chalif, DJ. Neurosurgery 61:404–417, 2007
"My OwnPrivateMedicine" by Owen Dempsey 
Leave a comment