Yawns and Freud

Grading is tedious work, especially when it consists of counting students' absences and filling in a Scantron sheet for their mid-semester reports. I also had to put in the exam grades for my second section, and I was puzzled when I couldn't find one kid's name on the list. Turns out, he withdrew, which I didn't even know you could DO this late in the semester. This happened to be the same kid who failed his paper after he admitted to not going to the museum, and who I then had to have a stern conversation with about cheating. Um, apparently, I scared him off. Ironically, he got an 85 on the exam.

I also had to spend a couple of hours reading a loooong (exactly 100 pages) essay by Michael Fried about Eakins' Gross Clinic which was not only highly theoretical but also Freudian. I have such a suspicion of Freudian psychoanalysis! I have to admit that all my knowledge of Freud comes from secondhand sources, including pop culture (Oedipus complex) and, shockingly enough, Lacan (the Wolf Man, castration anxiety, the phallus as supposedly-non-gendered organ). I can accept the whole id/ego/superego structure, and the idea that we're primarily motivated by drives, but I'm skeptical of the Oedipus (and Electra) complex, penis envy, and castration anxiety. Penis envy didn't play into Fried's analysis of the painting, but the other two....

According to him, you can read the painting as displaying Eakin's Oedipal resentment of his father (who becomes Dr. Gross), his rejection of his mother (the woman in black hiding her face) and his own castration anxiety (the bloody knife in his father's/Gross' hand, himself as the patient on the table); Fried also claims that the painting goes on to resolve the Oedipal complex in the correct Freudian manner: Eakins finally identifies himself, as painter-creator, with Dr. Gross and thus, with his father. Freud apparently liked to use the term "family romance" as a euphemism for these types of relationships, so Fried follows suit.

I think what bothers me in this, as in any attempt to psychoanalyze a historical figure, is that 1) it's being applied to dead people; 2) it's being applied to dead people from another century, and we don't necessarily think and feel the way they did; and 3) a painting is being relied upon for information, as if it will simply reveal the subconcious workings of an artist's mind. This despite the fact that art historians constantly belabor the point that "every work of art is a construction." I've been reading Vernon Hyde Minor's book on the historiography of art history, and the chapter on Freud indicated that it's not even practiced much by psychiatrists anymore; it's become primarily a critical tool in the humanities. Should we still consider it a viable method of analysis if the discipline for which it was developed no longer sees fit to use it? That seems strange to me.