Portrait

Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘portrait’ operates on at least three distinct registers, each carrying significant theoretical weight. First, the self-portrait functions as an externalised index of individuation: Murray Stein’s extended readings of Rembrandt and Picasso treat successive self-portraits as documentary evidence of imago formation — the emergent, archetypal image of selfhood that crystallises across a lifetime of creative work. Second, and more neurologically grounded, Iain McGilchrist deploys the history of portraiture as diagnostic evidence for hemispheric dominance: the shift from schematic, symmetrical faces in archaic art toward individualised, emotionally expressive portraiture in classical Greece signals an advancement of right-hemisphere functioning, while the later collapse of that individuality in Late Antique stonework indexes right-hemisphere recession. Third, Otto Rank and Joseph Campbell situate portraiture within a longer genealogy of artistic truth-telling: Rank identifies it as one of two master-examples (alongside tragedy) of how scientific truthfulness infiltrated aesthetic ideals in Greece, while Campbell contrasts the portrait’s celebration of individuality in Renaissance and Baroque art with classical antiquity’s preference for ideal-typical nudes. Winnicott adds a clinical dimension, using the patient’s acquisition of a portrait of the analyst as an interpretive vehicle for theorising the mother’s face as a developmental mirror. The term thus traverses aesthetics, neuroscience, clinical practice, and cultural history — unified by a shared question about how the face renders psychological interiority visible.

In the library 15 passages

in his final self-portraits, he depicts himself as an artist who has joined the company of the immortals… these self-portraits are statements of great personal modesty. The artist is brutally honest about his less than ideal physical appearance, yet he shows his figure as illuminated by divine inner light.

Stein reads Rembrandt’s late self-portraits as the culminating expression of imago formation, in which brutally honest physical self-disclosure coexists with an archetypal aura of spiritual illumination.

Stein, Murray, Transformation Emergence of the Self (Volume 7) (Carolyn, 1998thesis

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The relatively sudden change that came over the portrayal of the human face in the period beginning in the sixth century BC… in which the more abstracted, stereotypic and inexpressive gaze… gives way to portraiture which is more individualised, varied, emotionally expressive and empathic, is attributed by Brener to a rapid advancement in functioning of the right hemisphere.

McGilchrist uses the historical emergence of individualised portraiture in classical Greece as direct evidence for an advance in right-hemisphere functioning, linking artistic form to neurological development.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis

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Until the end of the third century, portraiture had sought to convey a lifelike individuality… Around AD 300, however, a fundamental change took place in the depiction of the face. Portraits in stone begin to show a ‘peculiarly abstract’, distant gaze… ‘the features suddenly stiffen in an expressive Medusa-like mask’.

McGilchrist interprets the Late Antique collapse of individualised portraiture into rigid, symmetrical masks as symptomatic of right-hemisphere recession and left-hemisphere dominance.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis

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at the apogee of Renaissance and Baroque achievement the art of portraiture came to flower — in the canvases, for instance, of Titian, Rembrandt, Dürer, and Velazquez. Even the nudes in this period are portraits… The epochs of history are read not as impersonal, anonymous effects of w

Campbell contrasts the Renaissance and Baroque apogee of portraiture — centred on individual character — with classical antiquity’s ideal nude, reading the shift as a transformation in how historical epochs understood human individuality.

Campbell, Joseph, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968thesis

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We will take two examples (which are fundamental for the whole artistic development of Europe) to illustrate the influence of this idea of truth on that of beauty. The one is portraiture, the other tragedy.

Rank identifies portraiture as one of two foundational European artistic forms through which the Greek scientific ideal of truth transformed the aesthetic ideal of beauty.

Rank, Otto, Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development, 1932thesis

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Rembrandt’s self-portraits change dramatically in style and tone. He has entered another phase of inner development… as the artist grows into what will be for him old age. As he takes up this last phase of his life… the trappings and aura of pomp disappear, and another distinctive image begins to come forward.

Stein treats the stylistic evolution of Rembrandt’s self-portraits as a legible record of inner psychological transformation, charting the progressive consolidation of an archetypal imago.

Stein, Murray, Transformation Emergence of the Self (Volume 7) (Carolyn, 1998thesis

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There is no evidence of achieved serenity in Picasso’s self-portraits or in the biographies written about him. But there is abundant evidence of powerful and abiding connections to the archetypal unconscious.

Stein contrasts Picasso’s self-portraits with Rembrandt’s, arguing that they reveal not spiritual transcendence but an unbroken, vitally creative connection to the archetypal unconscious.

Stein, Murray, Transformation Emergence of the Self (Volume 7) (Carolyn, 1998thesis

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Just now, near the end of my work with her, the patient has sent me a portrait of her nurse. I had already had her mother’s portrait and I have got to know the rigidity of the mother’s defences very intimately.

Winnicott uses the patient’s transmission of portraits — of nurse and of analyst — as clinical material for theorising the face as developmental mirror and the portrait as a transitional object carrying relational history.

Winnicott, D W, Playing and Reality, 1971thesis

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An early play of polarities shows itself in a pair of self-portraits from 1901. One of his most significant early statements, Yo, Picasso [I, Picasso], painted when he was twenty, shows the artist as a handsome Spanish painter with a bright orange-red tie dramatically flaring out above his colorful palette.

Stein reads Picasso’s early self-portraits as the first external expressions of a fundamental intrapsychic tension between opposing poles of identity, anticipating the later emergence of his adult imago.

Stein, Murray, Transformation Emergence of the Self (Volume 7) (Carolyn, 1998supporting

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plastic aims more at reality because it grows out of the desire to preserve the body as a whole; though all the same it does not reproduce an exact portrait of reality, because the belief in the soul… permits, or rather demands, an abstract representation of the essential.

Rank argues that plastic art, while motivated by the impulse to preserve bodily reality, cannot produce a literal portrait because the soul-belief underlying all artistic form demands abstraction over fidelity to nature.

Rank, Otto, Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development, 1932supporting

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The stepdaughter’s brother, Reginer, who was the king’s coachman, thought his sister so beautiful that he painted her portrait and gazed at it daily. One day the king heard about the portrait and asked to see it, and because of her overwhelming beauty he fell in love with the sister of Reginer.

Von Franz employs the fairy-tale motif of the painted portrait as the mechanism by which the anima-figure is transferred from brother to king, triggering the narrative of transformation and shadow conflict.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, 1970supporting

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Lovis Corinth suffered a RH stroke in 1911. Compare (top row) a portrait of his wife in 1910, and of a friend’s daughter, Sophie Cassirer, in 1906, with (bottom row) a portrait of his wife in 1920, and of his own children in 1916.

McGilchrist uses the comparative evidence of Corinth’s pre- and post-stroke portraits to demonstrate how right-hemisphere damage measurably alters the capacity for individualised, empathic facial representation.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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Jung considered it a representation of the self. For our purposes, we can consider it a self-portrait of Jung’s imago, an expression of his fully realized adult form.

Stein extends the concept of the self-portrait beyond painting to include Jung’s Bollingen tower, treating the architectural structure as a three-dimensional self-portrait of the individuation process.

Stein, Murray, Transformation Emergence of the Self (Volume 7) (Carolyn, 1998supporting

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Once Christopher’s distinctive style was perfected through developmental stages of imitation, he began to move away from the relatively safe process of working from other people’s art. He initiated a major change in his work by attempting representations of real people and things in his surroundings, as well as self-portraits.

McNiff documents the emergence of self-portraiture in an outsider artist’s trajectory as a marker of developmental maturation — a movement from imitation to genuine self-expression.

McNiff, Shaun, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004supporting

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