There is evidence for Gedo’s remark about Dona Maria’s “vulnerability” insofar as she was exhausted by giving birth to Pablo and may have gone on to suffer from postpartum depression. After difficult labour and delivery, she had the shock of believing she had given birth to a dead baby. (Picasso often told the story of how his uncle had revived him by blowing cigar smoke, and biographers have taken this as a reason for the artist’s life-long preoccupation with death.) Richardson says only that as “the mother was slow to regain her strength”, christening was postponed, but the break in early care was more serious than that.8 A note reveals that Manuel Blasco, Picasso’s cousin, said that “his mother was Picasso’s wet nurse (Dona Maria being too weak to suckle her own baby)”.9 Thus, not only had Picasso nearly succumbed at birth, his feeding and caregiving were shifted to another woman. He had to share nursing, the substitute mother perhaps not being enthusiastic about having to feed two infants. The duration of this substitute caregiving is not known, or how good it might have been. However, the hiatus in caregiving would have been significant for the on-going attachment of mother and infant, and it suggests that Picasso’s mother was more than usually anxious about him. Both are likely to have suffered some degree of separation anxiety, and it is plausible to think that an avoidant attachment on Picasso’s part was the result. Mother may have been stand-offish and he may have felt abandoned at the start of life.
As noted in the Introduction, avoidant attachment is one of four possible attachment styles described as tactical, or defensive, outcomes of the biological tie between mothers and infants. Every infant who survives must maintain proximity to its mother to sustain life, with differing maternal reactions to the infant’s needs necessitating differing strategies by the infant to maintain life-giving self-organization. Self-organization includes affective states, so mood regulation is inevitably part of achieving balanced organic functions and healthy development. Secure attachment between mother and infant is the most desirable, while avoidant and resistant carry potential for misaligned personality development. Disorganized attachment has high risk for serious emotional disorder. Avoidance is a self-protective strategy in the absence of a responsive mother, and it carries implications for detachment and dismissiveness in later personality style.10 Avoidance is self-preserving insofar as it asserts autonomy in disconnecting from the caregiver who is herself stressed and disengaged, but it is also self-thwarting, as disconnecting entails risk-taking with the very source of life most needed. in this sense, it is a desperate remedy in the strategic interest of survival and, while seemingly justified in response to maternal indifference or incapacity, early avoidance sets up inflexibility impeding later healthy emotional development. We will ask whether such a state, elaborated by developmental transformations, may have implications for Picasso’s inconstant and mistrustful later love-life.
To return to biographical assessments of Picasso’s earliest relations with his parents, we note that the biographer Patrick O’Brian points to paradoxical feelings about his artist father, a disappointed and to some extent rejected man, nonetheless idealized in later life: “Every time I draw a man, automatically I think of my father [Don Jose] ... and that will be as long as I live”.11 However elderly, ineffectual and “bourgeois”, in later life Picasso wished to maintain his father at least as a masculine ideal. Picasso had several intense male friendships in later life, including Max Jacob, Guillaume Apollonaire and the ever faithful Jaime Sebartes, but homoeroticism seems to have been far less in evidence than compulsive attraction to women. Citing the predominantly female household (and Spanish male contempt for women that prevailed at the time) O’Brian sees the relationship between mother and son as “uncomplicated love on either side”, but this surely cannot have been.12 While it is true that there are more portraits by Picasso of his tall “English”-seeming father, his earliest mentor in painting, those of his short, dark Italian-descended mother are even more indicative of distance between them. The Artist’s Mother (Maria Picasso Lopez) shows her eyes downcast over a rather bulky bodice. Similarly, watercolour profiles of 1896 show a severe, distant countenance, again with eyes averted.13 There is no sense at all of connectedness with her, or even that she might be the artist’s mother. Was this mere convention of the time, or is there a clue to residual avoidance in their earliest relationship?
Whatever Picasso’s feelings upon considering their portrait images, he took the unusual step of assuming his mother’s rather than his father’s surname by which to be known as a professional artist. No doubt he wanted to dissociate himself from his father’s bland academic artistry, but he seems also to have wanted to affirm his mother’s Italian lineage, which included a notable painter. After the initial hiatus following birth, re-engagement of mother and infant seems to have been strong, certainly on Maria’s part, and his childhood was closely managed by her thus reversing the early interruption of attachment. she remarked on being charmed by him, but perhaps also intimidated, as he was a prodigy who could draw before he could speak. He had been “an angel and a devil in beauty and no one could cease looking at him,” his mother told Gertrude Stein.14
Picasso was cosseted until his sisters were born and, afterwards, favoured as the only boy in the extended family. Gedo thinks that Picasso’s mother was an “all or nothing type”, who bestowed attention completely on a newly arrived child to the neglect of the elder child. (Gedo wrote before attachment theory brought into currency in America the possibility of deviation from “Secure” attachment.) The European psychoanalyst Alice Miller, an early proponent of trauma theory, detected a major source of Picasso’s fears in the earthquake which struck Malaga in December 1884, when he was just three. Picasso’s father fled with his son and pregnant wife to temporary shelter, escaping destruction and chaos. Three days later Lola was born, adding to the shock of earthquake. Miller speculates that three-year-old Picasso witnessed Lola’s birth, or at least was close by in the refuge to which the family had fled. She points out that he was encouraged to see around him but, by his mother, not to talk about what he saw. Miller summarizes, “One can, if one must, see the twisted, distorted female nudes still being done by the artist at ninety simply as a sign of his preoccupation with sex. i prefer to picture the three-year-old boy, who in the midst of all the turmoil of the earthquake and the family’s flight, was also witness to his sister’s birth. How does a woman giving birth look from the perspective of a three-year-old and what happens in the young boy’s psyche when the woman writhing in pain happens to be his mother? And all this in surroundings that have just been rocked by an earthquake. The little boy had to repress his feelings, but many images no doubt remained fixed in his memory, although separated from their context”.15
When Picasso was six a second sister Maria de la Conception (Conchita) was born, not under such fear-inducing circumstances as Lola’s birth, but with the likely result of another lapse in mothering. Conchita was to die of diphtheria in 1895, an upsetting loss for her parents and brother, reinforcing Picasso’s fear of death. We do not know much about the immediate effects of Conchita’s death nor about reconfiguring of family relationships during Picasso’s childhood. Mother was certainly dominant, but what of the aunts: to what extent did they both neglect and over-stimulate him? We may learn something of this when Picasso’s correspondence with his mother becomes available.