Per una buona psicoanalisi dell’arte: Vygostskij e il Mosè di Freud

The aim of this article is to show that Vygotskijan and Freudian positions on the psychological analysis of art move from a similar conception of art and of human mind. To demonstrate our thesis we have substantially used two works: Vygostkij’s Psychology of art and Freud’s Moses of Michelangelo. We consider that, in spite of the critic that Vygostkij makes against the psychoanalytic approach to the products of art, probably for historic reasons, the importance that he gives to the notion of form, of social context and of conscious factors in artistic creations is the same that Freud gives in his applied psychoanalysis, and this is clear in the essay on Moses. In particular, if we concentrate on the Freudian notion of evenly-suspended attention (FREUD 1912), we can see that what psychoanalyst does when he studies an artistic object is, first: considering its form and its details because only by the form is possible to conduct an analysis. Second: watching at the artist’s social context to understand social reasons of that form. Third: discovering universal and often opposed feelings that the form could amplify inside a particular society and inside the spectator in general. All of this, besides, allow us to show that only a particular conception of the specificities of human mind and human language can consider the place of art in human specie and his strict connection with his psychology.