A Freudian Psychoanalytic View of Artworks of Ray Caesar

Abstract

Many artists use their past experiences and subconscious to convey a subject, message, feelings and thoughts to the audience through art. The existence of the unconscious along with the conscious in the artists' production process is closely related to Sigmund Freuds' psychoanalytic theory. In psychoanalysis, a treatment method applied in mental disorders, it is thought that the artist provides catharsis by revealing the subconscious through the artworks. The Freudian perspective, which emphasizes that artworks can be interpreted together with the artist's personality, feelings and thoughts, has also affected the development of the descriptive theory, which is an artist-centered approach. In this context, patterns emerged among notions such as art, psychoanalysis, subconscious and creativity. It is seen that the works of the pop surrealist artist Ray Caesar, who experienced dissociative identity disorder due to childhood traumas and reflects his subconsciously hidden personality to his art, are related to some subjects that Freud mentioned under the name of child sexuality and contain symbols for the notions that are their indicators. Therefore, analyzing the artworks requires a psychoanalytic perspective. Some sexual child behaviors such as thumb sucking seen in Freud's psychoanalysis-centered psychosexual development theory and the transformation into a different identity due to personality disorder are among the images seen in Caesars' works. While these images and the meanings and concepts attributed to them form the thesis of the research, when the artists' works of this type, in which he visualizes his subconscious, are viewed from a Freudian perspective, it is noted that this subconscious reflection is shaped by some acts of sublimation in the sense of helping the catharsis process in the audience.