The artists drink from their lives and their conflicts to produce their works. Thanks to psychobiography we can see how.
Have you ever wondered what would go through the mind of an author, an artist or a composer when performing a certain task? It’s not the only one.
Within psychology, psychobiography is gaining more and more value. We could describe it as the efficient use of psychological theory to transform a subject’s life into a coherent and enlightening story. This research method traditionally focuses on politicians, leaders of social movements and artists.
As for artists, psychobiographers discover and analyze the development, evolution and change of their personality, the relationship between this and their work and even the possible dumping of their internal conflicts in artistic works, among many other data.
As for the latter, let’s look at some examples.
The well-known psychobiographer James W. Anderson, who has studied artists and psychologists throughout his career, published several works on the figure of Arthur Miller (1915-2005).
In his article The Psychology of Artistic Creativity: With Reference to Arthur Miller and The Crucible, he said that the playwright was well aware of the personal burden he had placed on his work.
A man in a raincoat and hat looks at the camera while smoking a pipe.
Arthur Miller in a 1966 photo. Eric Koch / National Archives
His famous work The Crucible of The Witches of Salem tells a story set during the trials held in Salem, Massachusetts in the seventeenth century for women accused of witchcraft. With this argument, Miller deposited his fears and experiences during McCarthyism, the persecution carried out in the United States by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, in which people were suspected of being communists.
Not only that, there seem to be parallels between the sentimental themes of this story’s protagonist and his own. John Proctor, the protagonist of The Salem Witches, feels guilty for sleeping with Abigail, his young servant. Abigail, obsessed with Proctor, accuses his wife of being a witch in order to have a “free way”. In addition to the context of the story, Miller stated that the soul of the work was the guilt John felt for being unfaithful to his wife.
By this time, Miller, who was married, had already met Marilyn Monroe and was fascinated by the actress. This made him feel like a real traitor to his wife. Although he tried hard to forget her, he eventually divorced his first wife and married Monroe.
Prolific psychobiographer Todd Schultz, in his article Behind the masks, recounts that reading Kafka’s short novel The Condemnation—in which a father vehemently argues with his son, condemns him to drown, and the son throws himself into the river to fulfill that wish. fulfilling – it makes sense to think that there would be such a conflict in the writer’s real life.
Well, in his Letter to the Father, published a few years later, Kafka reproaches his father, among other things, for the emotionally abusive treatment he has towards him. In that letter, the author compares himself to vermin, which makes it clear how his father made him feel.
This is in line with his great work The Metamorphosis, in which the main character undergoes a sudden transformation into an insect, which causes him serious difficulties in communicating with his environment.
Elvis Presley was primarily an interpreter of the musical compositions of others. Although he did not write the songs he recorded himself, he sometimes adapted existing songs for his own purposes, modifying words, sentences and entire lines of lyrics.
In the chapter “Twelve Ways to Say “Lonesome”: Assessing Error and Control in the Music of Elvis Presley” from the Handbook of Psychobiography, Alan Elms & Bruce Heller analyze the interpretation of the song Are you lonesome tonight?.
Colonel Tom Parker, his manager, suggested this song to the singer, especially since it was one of his wife Marie’s favorites, and he agreed to add it to his repertoire.
But here’s what’s interesting: Elvis had a tendency to “crush” this song during performances, whether intentionally or not. He usually did it with errors in the lyrics or with laughter in between. In his last live version, he was on the verge of a complete collapse. He managed to reach the end of the song with great difficulty.
Elvis plays “Are you lonesome tonight?” in the ’68 Comeback Special, the fifth performance analyzed by Elms and Heller in their study.
What Elms and Heller discovered by analyzing the various live performances of “Are You Lonesome Tonight” is that in the parts of the song where the lyrics indicated loss of control and vulnerability, there were many misinterpretations. But when the message implied control and power, the errors decreased remarkably.
In other words, the mistakes Elvis made seemed to have a psychological explanation. Elvis protected himself. The singer was very afraid of loneliness all his life, and this gave him difficulties in singing this song that his audience liked so much.
In my psychobiographical research into the figure of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), it was very difficult to find a clear transfer of his story, especially his emotional experiences and inner conflicts, to his work. Was it a dissociation or just a healthy ability to separate the professional from the personal?
It is also true that they were different times. The romantic period had only just begun and it was not yet customary to explicitly express emotions in musical works. However, another composition illustrates his feelings.
Beethoven suffered from a myriad of illnesses, some more serious than others. With a stoic attitude, he left them all behind, but there was one occasion when he believed that soon he would no longer see the light of the sun. He felt the anguish of the artist who knew he still had a lot to offer the world and that he couldn’t leave.
When he managed to recover, he composed one of the most beautiful parts of all his work; the third movement of his string quartet number 15 in A minor, which he called Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an der Gottheit, in der Lydischen Tonart – can be translated as “A restorative thanksgiving to the divinity composed in Lydian mode” -.
The Danish String Quartet plays the third movement of Beethoven’s Quartet No. 15 in A minor, Op. 132, (Molto Diary).
Creators, researchers and psychobiographers, we speak from experience in our various fields of the almost impossible separation that can be made between what one is, suffers, desires and what remains in artistic works. However, the reflection is not always so direct or clear, but sometimes more symbolic or metaphorical. And of course, not all artists know they’re doing it. Some speak of the muses as if the artistic work came to them from a remote place completely foreign to them…
Curious.
This article was published in ‘The Conversation’.
Source: La Verdad
I am David Jackson, a highly experienced professional in the news industry. I have been working as an author at Today Times Live for over 10 years, and specialize in covering the entertainment section. My expertise lies in writing engaging stories that capture readers’ attention and deliver timely information about the latest developments.
