Wednesday 22nd October, 5pm – 7pm
Art History and Visual Cultures Research Seminar
Janet Sayers, Professor of Psychoanalytic Psychology, University of Kent
‘Psychoanalysing Michelangelo’
Why psychoanalyze artists? What, if anything, does it add to our experience of their art? In answering this question I begin with the centenary this year of Freud’s (1914) article about Michelangelo’s Moses. I then recount the art critic Adrian Stokes’s (1955) psychoanalysis of Michelangelo as means of illustrating the psychology of artistic creation and its aesthetic experience. Lastly I recount responses evoked by these accounts of Michelangelo and general issues they raise regarding psychoanalyzing artists and their art.