Becoming “too close” was the danger signal set up internally, reverberating from misaligned attachment to his mother and attendant female caregivers in the household of his childhood. Caught in a narcissistic bind, his romantic relationships, and the art memorializing them, inscribe a diary of futility and defeat evident from his final vacant, staring, self-portrait—a terrifying image of fear of the void beyond life.22 Picasso seldom risked reflecting on his inner life, and candid moments are rare: “The awful thing is that one is one’s own Promethean eagle, both the one who devours and the one who is devoured”, he startlingly said, echoing Faust.23 He could see that he was consuming himself, as the final portrait testifies. But psycho-dynamic principles did not interest him: the basic obsessional defense, with narcissistic refinements, was too securely built to allow escape from self-victimization, even when the imagery of art exactly disclosed its terms. Picasso was thus ill-served by the convention that a work of art is a terminal product, to be valued in itself, rather than a vital communication back to the self from which it sprang. In this sense the imagery of art is like dreams, holding encoded meanings most useful to the artist himself, should he wish to free up his avoidant defences. The pioneer object relations theorist Ronald Fairbairn saw the obsessional defense (the main strategy of avoidance) as an endless bi-polar struggle in the psyche because the mother was internalized by her infant and child as both accepting and rejecting. In the adult psyche, the battle pulsates one way then the other, catching up all external relationships; because it can never be resolved unaided, that is, without striving for insight, something like the Promethean problem results.
Picasso’s entrapment was further complicated by the false protection of narcissism. seeming to protect against risk of psychological wounding, narcissism severely limits access to the mutuality of love. By concentrating gaze upon the self, it imperils life-sustaining and enriching relationships. Picasso painted eroticism, not love for another human being. (His famous remark about love is arcane and evasive: “In the end, there is only love. However it may be. And they ought to put out the eyes of painters as they do goldfinches in order that they can sing better.”24) An extreme feature of narcissism is heartless grandiosity, the conviction that one is entitled to his every wish, regardless of consequences to other people. It comes out in the early self portraits, such as “Yo, Picasso” (Zervos XXI, 192) in which kingly dominance is asserted. Picasso’s mother is reported to have written: “I believe that for you everything is possible. If one day they tell me that you have said Mass, I will believe that too”.25 This indicates her grand idea for her son, the unrealistic self-image implanted and nurtured in him. Such inflation is likely to have typified the relation of the prodigy Picasso and his mother from the start. Freud had remarked that great men typically have great mothers, while he saw the risks of oedipal fixations, and the narcissism that easily entails, with a clarity that escaped Picasso. From Huffington’s biography to Picasso’s granddaughter Marina’s scathing memoir, Picasso is charged with insensitivity, even cruelty, in human relations including those with family members. A terrible price was paid for the narcissistic nurture of artistic gifts, almost as if the goldfinch’s eyes actually had been put out. self-blinded, he sang without seeing the consequences of his entrancing erotic song.
According to the psychoanalyst Phil Mollon, narcissistic personality originates not so much from “inadequate separation from the mother per se, but from the image of the child in the mother’s mind. The child feels compelled to be that which corresponds to the mother’s phantasy. He or she may thus identify with an idealized image in the mother’s mind, resulting in a grandiose self-image—this image may exist alongside a highly negative image corresponding to aspects of the mind that are implicitly rejected by the mother”.26 We recall that Picasso’s mother saw satanic along with angelic aspects in babyhood, yet adored his beauty. The narcissist’s mother responds only to “those aspects of the child that are consistent with her own desires”, thereby nurturing what Donald Winnicott calls a “false self’. The false self complies with mother’s wishes, short-circuiting the infant and child’s impulse for authentic growth. Mollon continues: “A claustro-agoraphobic dilemma seems a highly likely consequence, an oscillation between the twin dangers of fusion with the other and isolation. A proneness to shame and self-consciousness is likely to be associated with this vulnerable sense of self ...”. Defensive avoidance, spoken of in attachment theory, and the ambivalence of the obsessional defense, are compatible with this description of how mother is internalized by the narcissistic child.27
As to the potential for fathering balancing the equation, Mollon points out: “A crucial factor determining the failure to enter the triadic [Oedipal] position may be the mother’s wish to denigrate the role of the father... This malignant alliance between the mother’s wish omnipotently to do without the father, and the child’s Oedipal desire to remain close to the mother and exclude the father, may trap the child in a developmental cul-de-sac from which it is increasingly difficult to escape”.28 (Mollon qualifies that the father is typically not fully denigrated, only downgraded in favour of the of the mother’s ‘ideal’ for the son.) It is noteworthy that recent research shows an actual anomaly of gender identity in such boys, a feature of Picasso’s own disturbance insofar as he fended off fear of becoming female, a fear of assimilation to mother, aunts and sisters. Hypermasculinity was the means of doing so, in the absence of a strong, respected father. A cross cultural study “found a very significant correlation between distant father-child relationships and the likelihood that men will boast of their strength and sexual prowess, engage in warfare and demand submissiveness of women”.29
Eroticism and Anxiety: Picasso’s Women
Picasso’s erotic relations with women were motivated more by sexual anxiety—prompting the frisson of risk-taking—than by a wish for lasting love and companionship. He needed women to be submissive, readily dominated, not allowing their inner being to escape his control. The deeper he could invade a woman’s emotional control centre the safer he felt. From the forays of early manhood among prostitutes (his first notable pictorial dehumanization of women being Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) in which prostitutes are controlled by emergent primitivist and cubist manipulation) to the last erotic drawings of the aged artist and his young model, Picasso asserted masculine prowess over feminine submission. Narcissistic personality organization could not allow it to be otherwise and, to insure submissiveness, he chose women he sensed had already been weakened.
It may be objected that the portraits of his many conquests often reveal the subject, acting as aids to seeing hidden aspects of character, even if Picasso could not risk encountering the women in their full personhood. I believe that, insightful as they may sometimes seem, the portraits of females are mainly instruments of control. Despite sensitizing events in childhood, such as his sister Conchita’s death, what empathic capability Picasso had was sooner or later over-ridden by fear and avoidance of women. His main motive was to conquer and subdue the women to whose actual lives he could not accommodate because of projected fears of counter-control. Thus, he risked misreading character rather than penetrating it with fresh insight in composing female portraits. There are, of course, remarkable exceptions throughout his career; but the purpose here is to redress adulation of Picasso’s portraiture with a cautionary note about its idealizing, mistrusting and avoiding motivation.