Subject and object in psychoanalytic criticism: on the interpretative method of Freud's 'The Moses of Michelangelo'

• Published in: Textual practice Vol. 28; no. 5; pp. 783 - 806
• Main Author: Albrecht, Thomas
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 29.07.2014
• Subjects: interpretation; psychoanalytic art criticism; psychoanalytic methodology; Reimut Reiche; Sigmund Freud; The Moses of Michelangelo
• ISSN: 0950-236X; 1470-1308
• DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2013.858070

This essay engages with several commentators, foremost among them the German psychoanalyst and critic Reimut Reiche, who have located the psychoanalytic nature of Freud's famously 'non-psychoanalytic' essay on Michelangelo's Moses in its interpretative method (rather than in its content). Reiche holds up the essay as a heretofore largely overlooked paradigm for a vibrant future psychoanalytic criticism, one that would be unprecedentedly attentive to artistic form, and be modelled on Freudian therapeutic techniques, in particular on the analytic practice of 'aimless' and 'free-floating' attention. This kind of psychoanalytic criticism, he argues, would rigorously focus on its object, the artwork in question, and thus provide a preferable alternative - from a formalist and ethical point of view - to the standard rote application of psychoanalytic concepts to artworks and to psycho-biographical speculations about artists and authors. While wholly in agreement with Reiche's attempt to redirect psychoanalytic criticism into more formalist and more ethical directions, my essay also critiques Reiche for drawing too strict and schematic a distinction in Freud's interpretative method between an objective hermeneutics (which he endorses) and a subjective 'counter-transference' (which he condemns and would exorcize from the method). Through a close reading of Freud's essay, one that exemplifies the very kind of formalist rigor Reiche prescribes, I demonstrate that Freud's paradigmatic interpretation of Michelangelo's Moses inextricably combines objective and subjective elements. I draw from this demonstration the distinctly psychoanalytic conclusion that a subjective element (in short, the analyst's own unconscious) can never simply be elided from the interpretation, as per Reiche's insistence, but must always be accounted for in any psychoanalytic method, no matter how object-focused and rigorously formalist. In my conclusion, I recommend that psychoanalytic criticism not repress this fundamental insight about itself, but rather, following Freud's example in 'The Moses of Michelangelo', integrate it productively into its own practice.