Back to the contents page

Volume 12, Number 2
July-December 2008

Autoritratto, io narrante e rappresentazione di sé
(Self-Portrait: Narrative Ego and Self Representation)
Simona Argentieri


SUMMARY

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 non-human 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.