"The Moses of Michelangelo" by Sigmund Freud

Today I will expand (or perhaps revise) one of my earlier posts on Salvador Dali's paranoiac-critical method. After reading through a book titled Psychoanalysis Outside the Clinic by Stephen Frosh, and specifically a section titled "Freud on Art, Culture, and Society," I have come to realize that Sigmund Freud had a much greater impact on Dali's method of art-analysis then I originally suspected. In fact, Dali may not have invented the method himself, as he claims. Instead, Sigmund Freud was already using this method, albeit without such a striking name.

First of all, Stephen Frosh's book, which never mentions Surrealism directly, referenced an essay by Freud titled "The Moses of Michelangelo." In this work, Freud goes about analyzing Michelangelo's sculpture in terms of psychoanalysis, just as Salvador Dali did with his interpretation of "The Angelus" by Jean-Francois Millet. On page 46 of Psychoanalysis Outside the Clinic, Frosh states that

Freud applies psychoanalysis in order to enhance the understanding of the work of art itself, with his remarkable if rather underpersuasive analysis of The Moses of Michelangelo.

Salvador Dali attempted to use this exact method in his essay "The Tragic Myth of the Angelus of Millet." Calling it his paranoiac-critical method, Dali asserted that his radical new approach would aid in the analysis of art and literature for years to come; however, there was nothing new about this method by the time Dali wrote his essay. Freud had already published "The Moses of Michelangelo" by 1914.

Either way, this psychoanalytical approach, according to Freud, was nonetheless extremely radical: using psychoanalysis to interpret a work might help draw new light on a piece of art that is hundreds of years old. In "The Moses of Michelangelo," Freud even goes so far as to say:

It is possible, therefore, that a work of art of this kind needs interpretation, and that until I have accomplished that interpretation I cannot come to know why I have been so powerfully affected.

Stephen Frosh further elaborates on the importance of this technique on page 47:

...the key point here is that psychoanalysis is being used to make sense of the art object not in order to advance understanding of psychological process...but rather as a mode of art criticism.... This is, in some ways, a scandalous claim, displacing specialist art criticism...in favour of a speculative "reading into / out of" the art object in terms of the possible psychological intentions of the artist.

Thus, we are able to conclude that Freud influenced Salvador Dali's paranoiac-critical method in a much more emphatic way than we previously concluded. After all, Freud first invented the method years before. Interpreting a piece of art "in terms of the possible psychological intentions of the artist" is exactly what Dali was attempting with his essay on "The Angelus."