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Saturday, February 14, 2009

Diagnosing people according to their art-work

This is at Wikipedia and I believe that this kind of approach is very controversial:

Diagnosing the self-portrait
Self-portrait of Egon Schiele 1911, depicting masturbation.

"Some artists who suffered neurological or physical diseases have left self-portraits of themselves that have allowed later physicians to attempt to analyse disruptions of mental processes; and many of these analyses have entered into the textbooks of neurology.[2]

The self-portraits of artists who suffered mental illnesses, give a unique possibility to physicians for investigating self-perception in people with psychological, psychiatric or neurologic disturbances.

Russian sexologist Igor Kon in his article about masturbation notes that a habit of masturbating may be depicted in works of art, particularly paintings. So Austrian artist Egon Schiele depicted himself so occupied in one of his self-portraits. Kon observes that this painting does not portray pleasure from the masturbation, but a feeling of solitude. Creations of Schiele are analyzed by other researchers in terms of sexuality, and particularly paedophilia."

4 comments:

Mark Krusen said...

Ana,

The caption of your post is "Diagnosing people according to their art work".

How did you get from that picture on your last post to your subject matter on this post? I'm justa wondering.

You do realize how this subject will "excite" Stan?

Ana said...

That photo is not mine.
It's from Eric, the man whose blog I took it.
I believe Stan is excited by the photo but he doesn't dare to say.

Mark p.s.2 said...

In diagnosing others , the diagnoser can expose themself in the same way a ink blot (rochester?)test can. It tells what is on the viewers mind , not the artists.
I remember the scene in the movie with Woody Allen waiting to see a film. The guy ahead starts giving his opinion as if it was this famous persons. (since its a film)Woody magically makes the person appear and confront the confused person.

Ana said...

Mark,
I loved the ink blot analogy!
Its Marshall Macluhan that Woody Allen calls. The person was saying things that was totally distorted from his thinking.
That's really funny.