The Age of Insight, The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind and Brain from Vienna 1900 To the Present

[M]ind is a set of operations carried out by the brain, an astonishingly complex computational device that constructs our conception of the external world [ […] T]he insights it offers will lead us to a deeper understanding of ourselves by linking the biology of mind to other areas of humanistic knowledge, including a better understanding of how we respond to and perhaps even create works of art (p. 499).

Should foresight lead to insight?

The author, a neurologist and professor of neurobiology at Harvard, won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 2000 for his research on the human brain’s functions in memory storage. Viennese-born (1931) Eric Kandel writes clearly and most accessibly – and is understandably proud of the efforts in his field bequeathed, in part, by a Viennese quintet of exceptional cultural talents during the twilight years of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

The five creative giants were psychiatrist/author Sigmund Freud, physician/author Arthur Schnitzler, painters Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele. Their time span is from 1890 to 1918 (hence the “Vienna 1900” in the book’s title), although Freud remained productive until his death in 1939 and Kokoschka lived until 1980. Art historian/philosopher Ernst Gombrich, yet another Viennese star, judged Kokoschka, for example, “the greatest portrait artist of the twentieth century” (p. 159).

Eric Kandel offers readers two volumes for the price of one. The first is an intensive review in the evolution of our knowledge of the brain/neural system during the past five or six generations. The second “book”, enlaced within the text of the first, explains complex (but still not fully understood) mechanisms of the brain’s recognition and appreciation of artistic endeavor from the perspectives of both artist and observer. The art samples selected by Kandel are largely those of the expressionists Klimt, Kokoschka and Schiele. These painters are among the originators of the broader design school of Jugendstil, now a century-old innovation more easily recognized in English by its French designation, art nouveau.

Technical shifts and thrusts in the artistic world

Spurred on by the spread of photography, richly imaginative Gustav Klimt led the way in Vienna to wrench portraiture from the centuries-old tradition of realism (p. 4), allowing him to develop his own strategy in esthetics. He borrowed in part from the pointillists (“impressionists”) of Paris. From his own romantic affairs, Klimt “learned a great deal about women. His profound understanding of their sexuality, combined with his extraordinary gifts as a draftsman, enabled him to depict more than the sensuousness of the naked female body: he captured […] the very essence of femaleness”. The painter thereby provided “critical support for the early work of both Kokoschka and Schiele” (p. 91), both of whom very often depicted nudity in ways seldom seen before – occasionally with an eroticism difficult to distinguish from pornography.

In early twentieth century Vienna, physician–novelist–playwright Arthur Schnitzler (who kept a detailed diary of his female conquests) added literary and dramatic dimensions to radical novelty in the art world, as did composers of the Second Vienna School of music, architects and interior decorators, crafts designers of the Wiener Werkstätte and clinicians who were products of the pioneering Vienna medical faculty.

Sigmund Freud, already much influenced by Charles Darwin’s views on variations in human behavior, provided “a further break with the past. Philosophers had long “conceived of emotion as standing in opposition to reason […]” (p. 326). The same passage continues:

To make intelligent, well-thought out decisions […] philosophers have traditionally argued, we must suppress our emotions so that reason can dominate. Clinical experience convinced Freud otherwise. He found that emotions unconsciously bias many of our decisions and that emotion and reason are inseparably intertwined. Today […] when faced with a decision that is cognitively demanding […] whether to learn a complex new task or whether to go to war […] we ask ourselves not only, can we actually succeed in accomplishing what we want to do? but also, Is the task worth the emotional effort? Will it be rewarding to do this?

Freud founded, in addition to his other achievements, the journal Imago to throw bridges between the worlds of psychoanalysis and art (p. 507).

Understanding human emotions and the appreciation of art became inseparably intertwined with the creatively innovative efforts of Vienna’s artistic expressionists to push ahead and encourage others. The expressionists helped inspire, your reviewer would add, the Dadaists originating in Zürich (Hans Arp), the surrealists in Barcelona (Salvador Dali) and the post-Second World War abstractionists in America (Pollock, Rauschenberg, Warhol) and France (Yves Klein).

As to “the other book”

Eric Kandel’s second offering within the same covers requires somewhat more of the reader’s concentration. Kandel is a researcher concerned with the human brain: how it works, how it absorbs (or not) and assesses (or not) what it detects, how it may even communicate erroneously between the ambient world and the final repository of value-sense we call the mind[1].

Our increasing understanding of the processes involved has made it possible to progress from cognitive psychology (science of the mind) in the century recently ended to today’s fast-emerging neuroscience (science of the brain and its integated neural network). As a consequence, “[t]he central challenge of science in the twenty-first century is to understand the human mind in biological terms” (p. 14).

How fast-emerging is all this? Laboratory research on both animals and humans has advanced spectacularly with flourishing scenarios on how to apply sophisticated tools: electronics, optics, biochemicals, neuronal communication, perception via image categorization, scientific psychiatry, work at the nano-level in sensing and measurement and much more. One result is recognition of the importance of the neocortex (roughly, front and top of the brain) in message-processing and memorization. Presumably, scientists of the brain will persist during the years to come in translating “abstract philosophical and psychological questions about mind into the empirical language of cognitive psychology and brain biology” (p. 499).

To sum up, in Eric Kandel’s own words: “The convergence in Vienna 1900 of medical science, psychology, and artistic explorations that went below the surface of the body and mind in search of hidden meaning resulted in scientific and artistic insights that altered forever the way we perceive ourselves. [This convergence] uncovered our instinctual drives – our unconscious erotic and aggressive urges, our emotions – and exposed the defensive structures that hide them from view” (p. 506) (Schorske, 1980; Johnston, 1981)[2].

Professor Kandel’s book is in itself a work of art, handsomely and abundantly illustrated in color on quality paper. The images reproduced reflect the creative genius of the Viennese expressionists together with the geography of those portions of the brain identified as the receptors, mixers and perceivers of incoming signals and messages once that they have been processed through the retina and optic nerve. The book’s detailed Index of 49 pages should be invaluable to researchers in the complexity science of the future.

All in all, one understands easily why the Nordic judges awarded communicator Kandel the Nobel Prize in his field of brain and mind.