Freud and the Two Michelangelos

The aesthetic experience of an art work, and the analytic experience, are both created in a partnership; between artist and viewer, and analyst and patient. They take the viewer of an art work, and the analytic patient, beyond their familiar ways of relating to the world. The Moses of Michelangelo made a powerful impact on Freud, but he was unable to appreciate the aesthetic experience because he could not understand it rationally. Giving up the assumption that a work of art must represent something allows a different kind of engagement with it that is more contemplative and more psychoanalytic. Freud identified with Moses as a Jewish hero preserving the word-presentations of the Law against the irrational thing-presentation of the Golden Calf. A different response to the Moses appears in a film by Michelangelo Antonioni. Without words, it shows Antonioni gazing at the statue and interacting with it emotionally. Antonioni made the film aged 92. It is the last footage he shot, and its ending shows that, as well as the statue, he is gazing at his own death.