THE AMBIVALENCE OF THE MATERNAL BODY - PSYCHOANALYTIC READINGS OF THELEGEND OF VANGOGH

This article aims to identify the collective social investment in 'Van Gogh' as a cultural icon, and to ask what function his life story, co lourfully illustrated by his art work, has performed in the West since the 1890s. It argues that the life and work of a Dutch artist have be come the raw materials for a series of secular 'mystery' plays and chr istological psychodramas that reflect the ills of twentieth-century ex perience. The key moments when Van Gogh was made into a figure in a po pular imagination were psychologically significant: the Depression and the immediate aftermath of World War II. 'Van Gogh', a fantasy figure of modern man, has been over-'psychologised', his work becoming only the testament to the myth of modern man. Using social-art-historical t echniques, the author tries to distance this kind of reading in the ca se of one drawing of a peasant woman, bending over. Situating the fant asy that the drawing services in precise social and historical terms o f bourgeois men formed in childhood in relation to a split feminine/ma ternal figure of the lady/mother and the working-class nursemaid, the article examines how to use psychoanalysis to read the formal oddities of the work-distortion and monumentality, attention to a fragmented, eroticised but also punished body-for the oscillation between pre-oedi pal fantasies of maternal plenitude and awe and oedipal anxieties whic h sadistically inflict humiliation on the maternal body. Finally, inst ead of producing Van Gogh as the extreme case of an 'other', the autho r recognises the drawing as a space where present fantasies of the rea der encounter those of the producer. Psychoanalysis informing historic ally-precise interpretation becomes a demythologising hermeneutic.