Section Five - Twin Figures in Alternate Realities

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In this section we discuss Picasso's personal psychology. We want to show in a simple and compelling way what, in our view, made the man tick. And we hope to be able to suggest how this relates to his professional 'project', as we've outlined that in Part 1 and Part 2. We strive to do this in a way that shows how the individual's 'dominant function' can come to be expressed in a UNIQUE manner that can have profound psychological significance for the individual.

It is not easy to come to know others in a way that appreciates them AS unique individuals. We are not inclined to think that labels of any kind - psychiatric labels, personality type labels, or art labels for that matter - can capture the essence of the individual. So it is only after having made a thorough study of Picasso, which required the reading of dozens of biographies and a seemingly endless stream of books and articles on his work and its significance, that we presume to know enough about the man to offer our opinon on who, in essence, he was. And then only because we had the good forture to have happened upon an insight that permitted a host of curious facts about Picasso's life to suddenly fall into place - around one exemplary incident that occured in his early childhood.

As a boy Picasso would experience the illness and death of a sibling - his younger sister, age eight, whom he loved dearly. Under the weight of this momentous event, Picasso's psychological space would suffer a severe warp, and remain forevermore frozen in a distinctive shape that would govern his behavior for the rest of his life. Like the way in which a curved Einsteinian space guides the movement of the physical objects that travel through it, its influence would be subtle but pervasive.

To the death of his beloved sister, a tragic enough event in its own right,

Sleeping Nude, 1904

would be added an ironic twist. As his sister lay on her deathbed - she like the 'sleeper' in many of his paintings, he like the 'watcher' - the child prayed to God, begging that she be spared. In exchange for this he was prepared to offer, in the kind-hearted naivity of youth, the ultimate sacrifice. If she were to become well, he promised, he would never again paint. For a precocious child prodigy who, at the tender age of 13 was already recognized as a skilled painter from whom great future works were expected, this would have been the equivalent of sacrificing the very core of his being. If things had happened the way that he prayed they might, he would never have touched a paint brush again, and there would have been no 'Picasso', no 'Demoiselles', no 'cubism'.

He very rarely spoke about this tragic event in his life, and only to a few close friends. But some biographers have gathered enough clues about what may have occured on that occasion to put forward an intriguing hypothesis. He failed, they surmise, to keep his end of the bargain. And so when his sister died - and this part is OUR conjecture, ^20a not theirs - he is likely to have blamed himself, and his art.

As a consequence of the manner in which he had bound his art to her life, and vice versa - and the need to understand her tragic loss and assuage his own guilt - he would adopt a way of seeing things that permitted a most intimate exchange to continue to take place between mutually exclusive realms of existence, the twin worlds into which he and his sister were separated by death. This ontology ²¹ would allow him to conceive of beings in these twin worlds as literally involved in 'dying each other's life and living each other's death', to use Heraclitus's words (see [1] [2).

The point where the two worlds meet - the only point at which such a profound interchange can take place - would act as the fulcrum around which Picasso's psychological reality would thereafter pivot. This is the point at which intimacy runs so deep that it crosses every line that distinguishes self from other. The flood gates of creativity open and the creative act is revealed as a transformation in which art is capable of tapping directly into life's energies and stealing its power. At this point, the art work can literally come alive for its creator, as it did for Pygmalian. 'Each picture is a phial filled with blood,' as Roland Penrose, in his biography of Picasso, said of his paintings.

But the two - art and life - are not only mutually exclusive, they are inversely proportional. And the cost of an invigorated art of this sort is that we, as biological life forms, must as a result wither.

Or those whom we touch. And therein lay Picasso's greatest fear, and the source of a tremendous sense of guilt in him - that his art is achieved not merely at his own expense (which would be a cost that one might be able to endure) but at the expense of another's life force - his beloved's. From this perspective, art is not only a deal that one strikes with the devil, it is a type of alchemy that is far from being an exact science. We cannot control from whose pool of life energies we draw in our most creative moment, or, for that matter, who it is that manifests themselves in our art - what spirits come alive through us.

We are not suggesting that the picture we paint above constitutes a universal truth about the way things in fact happen, something the reader should herself believe in. We are, rather, trying to render as accurate a portrait as possible of the psychological space in which Picasso found himself precariously positioned. Interestingly, in many aspects this type of world view was shared by many artists at the time. It was what made Otto Rank's psychotherpeutic theories and practices - which explored the N-S ('art' versus 'life') struggle ²² - very popular.

Even if Picasso's presumed tragic failure to follow through with his pledge is only apochryphal, legends of this sort reveal profound psychological truths. The explanatory construct that this one offers provides a key to the meaning behind many of Picasso's most enigmatic behaviors. It sheds light on things that his biographers all have difficulty explaining - behaviors that have thus remained, to date, the anomalous pieces of an unsolved puzzle. Our hypothesis, which construes Picasso's pledge as a key formative experience in his life, provides an explanation for -

1. why, a few times during a long and prolific life as a painter (a painter who produced - according to some accounts - over 50,000 works) - Picasso would, without explanation, suddenly give up painting or have problems with his work. These were the occasions, as it turns out, on which his children were about to be born! It was as if continuing with his painting would interfere with a successful child-birth, in the same way that, in his view, it had with his sister's ability to remain alive.

2. why he named his daughter after his sister and also gave her a nickname - 'Maya' (i.e., illusion) suggestive of the relationship between art and reality.

3. why Picasso fretted about his children, especially his daughters, in their infant years. He frequently visiting them as they slept at night, or had his wife do so - in order to make sure that they had not stopped breathing.

4. Picasso's sketch of Conchita, his sister. She died at the age of 8.

   why portraits of his own children, as some critics have pointed out, tend to escape the distortions that otherwise appear with such constancy in his paintings that everyone has come to see these as a distinctive feature of his approach to portraiture. In this particular region of psychological space - where his art and the lives of his own children overlap - he apparently wanted to resist the urge to depict the presence of that inevitable enantiodromic point at which life can shift suddenly and unexpectedly into death. It is as if, by NOT incorporating spatial anomalies into their portraits, these cross-over points could be avoided, and the threat of death annulled.

    

5. why Picasso took younger and younger women as lovers - women who were, in the eyes of society, mere children. It is the childlike virginal quality - the pure potential - of these women that attracted him. They were reminiscent of his sister, with whom - whether or not there had been actual sexual attraction, or contact - he had nevertheless bonded 'in the flesh', as it were - as real (i.e., embodied) individuals.

6. why, in the process of producing what some believe to be the painting of the century - his Demoiselle D'Avignon - he would abruptly halt work on it at approximately the same time that Fernande, unable to have children, adopts a 13 year old girl. It is her intention that the three will live together 'as a family'. Shortly thereafter, however, Raymonde is returned to the orphanage (some biographers suspect that she picked up on an attraction he had to her), at which point he would resume work on the painting - but now in an altogether different style. At this point his relationship with Fernande is, in effect, over.

   In the midst of what was to perhaps be the most creative moment in a prolific and illustrious career the work was interrupted and a sudden move in an opposite direction took place - toward the family 'life' that that he typically experienced as interfering with his 'art'. The interruption would be short-lived, however, and this affair would have the same outcome as the incident with his sister - the child is abandonned, and the painter returns to painting, with enhanced creativity.

7. why, although deeply loving the women with whom he had relationships (in a way which they would find nearly irresistable) he also seemed always to suck from them their very life-blood - sacrificing them, as it were, to his art.

8. why he loved these women only until they, in turn, became mothers and thereby lost not only their sexual attractiveness in his eyes, but their 'potential'. Having manifested their own natural powers of creation (an S-based type of creativity that was anathema to his N-based personality preferences), they would forfeit their innocence, their status as 'pure' potential, and his continued attentions.