Picasso cure: Personality, psychoanalysis, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon centenary

Abstract

Why bother with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon? This article celebrates the painting's centenary. It argues its value as cure of widespread neglect of ways in which, like Picasso creating this painting, psychoanalysis, which often informs art therapy and recently developed mentalisation-based treatment of personality and other disorders, unifies different experiences and perspectives in interpreting the unconscious cause of its analysands’ ills. This article demonstrates this by re-visiting in turn the work of a number of writers in psychoanalysis and philosophy from Freud, via Hegel, to Kristeva today.

Keywords:

• Art
• psychoanalysis
• Picasso
• Freud
• Kristeva

Notes

¹My thanks to Linda Schädler at the Zurich Kunsthaus for providing me with details of paintings included and not included, in the case of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, in the 1932 Zurich exhibition.