Knafo’s Schiele

Review of Danielle Knafo, Egon Schiele: A Self in Creation: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Artist’s Self-Portraits. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993. ISBN 083863480X, 185 pp., 83 illus., $60.

No doubt the creative energies of all artists are fueled by powerful psychic forces, mostly multiple and deeply submerged; yet nowhere else but in the work of Egon Schiele are the psychic and the aesthetic so directly and often transparently linked. Had it not been for his creative gifts—he began drawing at age one—his fate would have surely been sealed by its 19^th-century versions of heredity and environment. Born near Vienna in 1890 to a

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syphilitic stationmaster and his infected, desperately depressed wife, Egon entered the world beset by dead siblings—three older brothers had died at birth, a sister born three years later died as a child. “For the Schiele family, birth had come to be associated with death, disease, punishment, and, eventually, madness” (his father’s terminal condition, p. 38). His mother failed to empathically mirror her talented child and spurned his burgeoning creativity. In his art, the mother is inevitably turned away from him or else he is frantically encased in a dead woman’s womb. Experiencing his mother as dead, he was forced to enlist his art in the service of self-mirroring and self-validation. But the mirror of his art candidly reflected his anguished self-distortions, his mutilated or contorted limbs, his body often stiffly bound to a double or paying for its autoerotic pleasures with castration.

Both a rebuke to the deficits in mothering and a struggle for developmental mastery, his art also blazed new directions in expressionistic modernism. He also visually records his painful struggles to identify with a father he admired but also feared for equating sex with disease/madness/death, and his struggles to find heroic substitutes, notably in his precursor, Gustav Klimt.

Though Schiele was polymorphous perverse to a fault and his identity remained diffuse, he somehow managed to work through his conflicts to a degree and had embarked on a promising marriage when both he and his pregnant wife were carried away by the post-World War I Spanish flu. He was 28. It occurred to me that if we had lost Freud’s writings, his ideas could be reclaimed in Schiele’s art. But upon further consideration, I find this unlikely. What is needed is a third text, an interpretive key to carefully probe the visual work for the connections, some of which lurk on the surface, but many of which are more elusive.

Danielle Knafo is the ideal analyst for Schiele, not only because she is sensitively attuned to his aesthetic qualities but also because she enjoys the rare analytic ability to tune into all their hidden melodies and modulations. She hears not only the preoedipal pain but the oedipal striving, not only the narcissistic issues within the damaged self but the struggle for stable object relations. Most rewarding, her handsomely illustrated text reveals how astutely Schiele mirrored his own inner conflicts as well as those of his times—and ours.

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