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Abstract
Gustav Klimt led a very productive and creative life in Vienna during the famous fin-de-siècle time. Klimt's work is extraordinarily novel and his gift of depicting in his portraits the inner life of women and their sexuality has no peers. This chapter presents the hypothesis that he failed to master the tasks of young adulthood after suffering several losses and narcissistic injuries, and as a consequence his personality was arrested at the adolescent level. Another important fact is that Klimt did not have the benefit of an analysis that could have helped him through remembering, repetition, and working through his conscious and unconscious conflicts. His developmental arrest is illustrated in his paintings, which reflect preoccupations with the inner life of women, nudity, sex, and life and death issues. His creativity was generated from that area of his personality, uncontaminated by the arrested development.
Introduction
This chapter is a contribution to the study of the personality of the incomparable Secessionist Viennese artist Gustav Klimt (Arvason, 1998; Belli, 1990). This remarkably talented man, whose repeated interest in women was unequaled and boundless, single-handedly created an art form unequaled in the world. Klimt was a central part of the art and sociopolitical climate in Vienna that made so many contributions to the intellectual and cultural life at the turn of the twentieth century. Although very few facts are known about his early life and adolescence, and he was secretive about his personal life, much can be inferred from his work of over two hundred paintings and several thousand drawings. His artistic development reveals much about his arrested personality, and his compulsion to repeat (Freud, 1914b), together with his unconscious conflicts about women. A selection of his paintings reproduced throughout this chapter graphically shows how he regarded women. Drawing on my work on the transition from adolescence to adulthood (Brockman, 2003), I will show how these paintings reveal certain aspects of his personality that are the result of delayed or arrested adolescent development.
What I would like to emphasize here is the fact that he could not learn from repetition in the natural experience of remembering and processing traumatic memories, which is normally a central part of every successful analytic experience (Freud, 1914b). The analytic situation...