Art as a Medium of Theoretical Self- and World-Critique in Dark Times

A Morphological Analysis of Goya’s “Black Paintings” and Their Contemporary Relevance

Research Question:

How can art - understood in terms of Psychological Morphology - serve as a medium of theoretical self-knowledge and world-understanding in dark times of political and symbolic crisis?

Thesis:

Goya’s Black Paintings can be read as paradigmatic aesthetic articulations of the paradoxes of an entire cultural epoch. Paradoxes that still shape our present and whose intensification becomes increasingly evident today. Created during a period of political and societal upheaval, these paintings mark the beginning of modern art and continue to provide an aesthetic access to the structural problems of contemporary world-construction. Through art-based experiential work with these images, such paradoxes can be revealed and made experientially graspable.

Theoretical Context

Wilhelm Salber’s Morphological Psychology is largely unknown internationally, yet in Germany it has been successfully applied as a qualitative methodological approach in market, media, and cultural research. Nonetheless, Morphological Psychology offers a rich perspective on everyday culture, art, and media and resonates with contemporary art and cultural psychologies, such as those stemming from the Frankfurt School or Lacanian theory.

In Morphology, the psyche is not conceived as a fixed cognitive apparatus nor as a biological computer program, but as an ongoing self-treatment of reality, which itself has an art-analog character and expresses itself through cultural and artistic forms (Salber’s psychaesthetics). Morphological Psychology draws on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (natural-scientific) morphology and positions itself as a further development of Gestalt psychology (Köhler, Koffka, Wertheimer) as well as of depth psychology in the tradition of Sigmund Freud.

From Goethe, Morphology adopts the idea of intuitive, object-adequate thinking: scientific theories are regarded as aesthetic media of the self-presentation of their objects. From Gestalt psychology, Morphology retains the insight that psychic life continues the process of forming figures (Gestalten) of reality; combined with Freud’s thesis of the unconscious overdetermination of such formations, it overcomes the classical Gestalt focus on “gute Gestalt” in favor of imperfect, constantly transforming formations, thus returning to Goethe’s understanding of morphology as a theory of transformation.

Parallel to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Wilhelm Salber developed a cultural psychology that interprets cultural epochs as provisional attempts to solve—or treat—fundamentally unsolvable paradoxes. Morphological art psychology, in turn, emphasizes that artworks provide an opportunity to encounter these paradoxes—structural tensions inherent in all cultural constructions—in an aesthetic object, offering modes of further development and transformation. Modern art in particular fulfills the task of rendering a culture’s self-treatments transparent while simultaneously challenging them, setting in motion interpretive processes analogous to psychoanalytic dream-work.

Object of Analysis – Goya’s Black Paintings

Through concrete image analyses, I aim to show how Goya’s art makes the paradoxes of modernity—paradoxes that especially concern us in today’s dark times—experientially accessible.

Wilhelm Salber regarded Goya’s famous Pinturas Negras as modern art avant la lettre and considered Goya himself to mark the transition from classical to modern painting. Goya was not only an artist but also an acute observer of his time. In his Black Paintings emerges a new type of art that seems to undermine classical ideals of beauty. Mythological motifs from art history are taken up, decontextualized, and rendered in a manner that anticipates the perceptual shock of modern art. Engaging with these works allows one to experience the fractures and gaps inherent in our culture—as well as our ways of dealing with them.

According to Salber’s cultural psychology, modernity is the epoch in which people become aware that their perspectives on reality are themselves permeated by paradoxes—an insight manifest not only in art and culture but also across the natural and human sciences. Salber referred to such paradoxical structures as Undinge (“non-things,” impossibilities, structural contradictions). Philosophically, this becomes evident in German Idealism, which arose contemporaneously with Goya’s modern art and to which progressive political theories, such as Žižek’s, still refer.

Based on qualitative interviews in which I explored long-term experiential engagement with the Black Paintings, I was able to show that these images continue to function as media of self-experience: they confront viewers with the impossibilities—Salber’s Undinge—embedded in their constructions of reality, thereby enabling a widened scope for action and reflection.

Art thus has the capacity to reflect the paradoxes of our constructions of reality—including political realities. Artworks offer intuitive, image-based theories and simultaneously operate as unconscious “symptoms” that process and express the Undinge—the gaps and ruptures in the symbolic order in the Lacanian sense. Speaking about these gaps—initiated through art—can help us reposition ourselves toward cultural and political orders in new and transformative ways.

References

Fitzek, H., & Salber, W. (1996). Gestaltpsychologie: Geschichte und Praxis. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

Grünewald, S. (2013). Die erschöpfte Gesellschaft: Warum Deutschland neu träumen muss. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag.

Licht, F. (2001). Goya: Die Geburt der Moderne. München: Hirmer Verlag.

Salber, W. (1999). Kunst – Psychologie – Behandlung (3rd ed.). Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König. (Original work published 1977)

Salber, W. (1993). Seelenrevolution: Komische Geschichte des Seelischen und der Psychologie. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag.

Salber, W. (1994). Undinge: Goyas Schwarze Bilder. Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König.

Žižek, S. (1998). Die Nacht der Welt: Psychoanalyse und Deutscher Idealismus. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuchverlag.

Zwingmann, B. (2019). Begegnung mit dem Ungeheuren: Selbsterfahrungsprozesse mit Goyas Schwarzen Bildern. Berlin: HPB University Press.