Artwork Title: Psyche

Psyche, 2016

Alexa Pienaar

From the artist's statement: Sigmund Freud is considered the founder of the psychodynamic approach to psychology which investigates the unconscious mind closely and what drives it to act in certain ways. According to Freud there are three aspects of the mind that is believed to make up people’s personalities namely; the id, the ego and the superego. The id is the part of the mind which holds all of human’s most basic and primal instincts and focuses on immediate pleasure while the ego is responsible for creating balance between pleasure and pain (the id and the superego). It is also ultimately derived from bodily sensations and can be regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the body (Cortical Homunculus). Lastly the superego develops around the age four or five. It incorporates the morals of society and is the conscious of the mind because it has the ability to distinguish right from wrong. My composition consists of three large drawings of myself. The first drawing of myself is drawn animalistic while the second drawing of me is a warped image of my body. My hands, mouth and eyes are enlarged while the rest of my body is thin and small. The third and last drawing of me is one of transformation. My right arm has turned into a wing and it therefore looks like I am transforming into a bird, or furthermore, and angel. I have drawn myself in these three different ways to visually display my perception of Sigmund Freud’s theory of the unconscious mind. The first drawing is symbolic of the id. I have drawn myself animalistic symbolizing the primal nature of the id. The second drawing, which symbolizes the ego, is distorted according to the specifics of the ‘cortical homunculus’, a figure designed to show how the mind perceives the body. The enlarged hands also resemble a balancing scale because the ego is supposed to be the balance between the id and the superego. Lastly I have drawn myself transforming into a winged creature. This resembles the wings of an angel, but rather drawing myself as an actual angel or rather a birdlike creature, something that I find idealistic. I am therefore still becoming or striving to become this idealistic person that I, and society, has set out for me to be.
Uploaded on Feb 13, 2017 by Minette Visser

Arthur is a
Digital Museum