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Sexuality under the shadow of death: a psychoanalytic exploration of the

life and art of Egon Schiele (1890 1918)
Alles ist lebendig tot(All is living dead) Egon Schiele, 1914
Wenn du das Leben aushalten willst, so richte Dich auf den Tod ein (If you want to
bear life you have to prepare for death) Freud, 1915

Egon Schiele, 1914, source: Wikipedia.org

The Austrian painter Egon Schiele, an exceptionally gifted artist was not given long to
demonstrate that he was one of the finest draughtsman ever lived. He was just 28 when
he was tragically struck down by the flu pandemic that, worldwide, was responsible for
more deaths than World War I. His short life ended with the collapse of a world order and
the year was 1918. At that time Schiele was Austrias most eminent artist and with Oskar
Kokoschka the first expressionist painter. In essence, Schiele painted and drew what
Freud described in words, or Mahler and Schoenberg in music or Einstein in physics. His
feelings and his sexuality exploded on paper and canvas and, like it was with Freud, it

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shocked the existing social norms and values, especially the views held on the sexual
nature of man. But before I will attempt to plunge the depth of his work and soul I would
like to begin with entering the world in which Schiele and also Freud lived and to get an
understanding of the times when their creations came into being.
At the time of Schieles birth in 1890, the 19th Century came to an end and Vienna at that
time witnessed extraordinary events. The Viennese burghers might not have been aware
at the time, but Franz-Josephs Hapsburg Empire which had been in existence for
centuries would finally collapse at the end of the First World War. What was dubbed by
some romantically as the twilight of the Hapsburg monarchy was in fact a doomed
culture or as Karl Kraus put it more brutally as a Vienna, a research station for the end
of the world. (Mitsch, E. 2001, p.18)

However, as Bruno Bettelheim (1991) noted, the interesting thing was, whilst the time
was one of a disintegration of a world order, something took place at the same time that
was unique, i.e. the cultures greatest flowering took place. For the Viennese it was as if
things have never been better and never been worse a haunting contradiction, which
generated a sense of doom whilst sharpening the perception of the symptoms of the ills of
human existence. Life was felt to be infused with the inevitability of mortality and a
preoccupation with death.

Viennas cultural elite withdrew their attention from the wider world and turned inward
instead. This change was due to a despair that it was no longer within ones ability to
alter the external world or to stop its dissolution; that therefore the best one could do was
to ignore the state of the world and instead concentrate all interest on the dark aspects of
the psyche, or as Freud put it at the beginning of his work The Interpretation of
Dreams: If I cannot move heaven, I will stir up the underworld (quote from Virgil).
(Bettelheim, 1991)

It was not only Psychoanalysis that came into being through Freud at the time, but the era
produced such giants like Mahler, Schoenberg and Strauss in music, Schnitzler and

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Hofmannsthal in literature and in painting Klimt, Kokoschka and Schiele. It is interesting
to note that across all three creative areas emerged a common theme: inherent in the
expression of their arts, whether it was music, literature or painting, there was not only a
pre-occupation with death but a link between sex and death. For example, Mahler not
only wrote moving and beautiful songs on a childs death, but in his eighth symphony he
combines a medieval mass with the last part of Faust, where in death he is saved by a
woman. Strauss composed his controversial operas at the time, Salome and Electra,
both imbued with sexual issues and death. Salome, an intense, violent and contracted
opera was premiered in 1905 in Dresden but it was banned in Vienna because of the
offence it caused at the time.

Sex and Death were also found to a very marked degree in the work of Viennas greatest
artists of the period, most notable Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. Schiele, in particular
was pre-occupied and almost obsessionally driven by both. It was he who transformed
his own life into allegories and plunged the often painful depth of the intricacies of malefemale relationships.

It is to Schiele I now wish to turn. But before I introduce him and in great personal
appreciation of his exceptional artistic gifts I would like to quote Kallir from her
bookEgon Schiele Drawings and Watercolors (2003, (a)):

Schiele, by 1918 was regarded as Austrias greatest living artist of his day... In his
drawings he strove for purity of form, in his portraits for purity of being. Schiele could
catch a moving body or the flicker of emotion-a quivering lip, a furrowed brow-as it
passed fleetingly across a sitters face. In this he ranks alongside such artists as Hans
Holbein as one of the greatest draughtsman of all times. Because Schiele plumbed the
very souls of his subjects, his drawings remain as fresh and vital today as they were when
made. There is timelessness to Schieles best work that speaks to the unchanging essence
of humanity across time and space. (p. 442)

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HISTORY
Egon Schieles short life began on the 12th of June in 1890 in the family apartment in the
train station of the Austrian village Tulln. There his father Adolf as stationmaster could
offer his family a quiet comfortable middle class existence with the familys modest
fortune invested in railway stocks. He was a supportive father, a lover of nature who
collected butterflies and minerals and he was a draughtsman himself.

This seemingly peaceful and quiet existence, however, was tragically marked by illness
and deaths, not unlike many other families at the time. The first two children, a girl and a
boy were stillborn in 1880 and 1881, but rumor has it that there were three still born
children. A girl, Elvira, was born in 1883 but died age ten when Egon was three years
old. Melanie, four years older and Gertrude four years younger survived. Thus Schiele
was the only boy, a middle child flanked by two sisters, carrying the hope and
expectations of his parents that he would flourish.

Flourish he did, but not in the way his parents expected and not on their terms. According
to his mother, Egon began drawing at the age of 18 months, becoming more and more
obsessed with the railways and the trains, endlessly and frantically filling his sketchbooks
with drawings of trains, which were praised by his fathers colleagues as exceptional. The
proud father foresaw an engineering career, but this was not about to happen. To the great
disappointment of the family, Egon showed no interest in academic learning, failed to
thrive at school and only excelled in the pursuit of his artistic inclinations. Here he was
greatly supported by one of his art teachers who recognized Schiele as a master draftsman
However, in the Schiele family, Egon was seen more as a never-do-well than as a
wunderkind.

Whilst the family had their struggle with Egon, they also struggled at the same time with
an unbearable tragedy which would mark Egons life forever. His father, Adolf had
contracted syphilis around the time of his marriage to Egons mother, Marie. Adolf
Schiele first met Marie when she was twelve years old and decided there and then that he

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would marry her. Five years later when she was seventeen the marriage was
consummated whilst the deadly disease was kept a secret. Marie, on the other hand knew
nothing of the world as she had been strictly educated in a Viennese convent.

For Marie Schiele the first years of marriage were blackened by the illness of her
husband. Annually, more or less around the date of her wedding anniversary, she gave
birth, and each year, for three years in succession, the infants were stillborn. Her first
child who was born alive, Elvira, tragically died of meningitis, which is known to be a
common complication of congenital syphilis.

Adolf Schiele refused to seek treatment, remaining essentially asymptomatic until 1902,
when the disease entered its terminal phase. No longer able to do his job, he retired whilst
slowly losing his mind. It is said, for example, that in the last years of his life, he insisted
that a table should be laid for an imaginary guest who had to be received and treated with
reverence by the whole family. More tragically for everyone though, Egons father, in a
fit of madness, threw the familys investment, the railway stocks into the fire, thus
leaving his family almost destitute after his death on New Years Day 1905, when Egon
was 14 years old. There is no doubt that Egon suffered greatly from this loss and, as we
will see, this death marked his life as well as his art.

In the absence of his father, a rather disturbing event occurred, in that Schiele at 16 went
on holidays with his 12 year old sister Gertrude to the very same place his parents spent
their honeymoon: in Trieste. He was thus not only retracing his fathers life but also, it
seems the sexual life of his parents. There was not only an absent father but also an
absent mother, leaving Schiele to his adolescent troubles in a very disturbing way.

His mother could not cope and leaned heavily on the support of the family, in particular
on Egons appointed guardian, who again hoped that his ward would pursue an
engineering career. Egons will, however, was indomitable when it came to art. Despite
all obstacles he applied to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts where he passed with flying
colours and became, at 16, the youngest student admitted. The year was 1906, the same

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year where entry was refused to another young hopeful, the future Adolf Hitler who
would later passionately hate expressionism as much as he hated anything.

In his short life Schiele managed to produce about 300 paintings and more than 2,000
watercolours and drawings. Widespread recognition was denied him until just before his
death. In 1912 he fell foul of the law. While living in the country with his model, the
beautiful redhead Wally, he was accused of showing pornographic drawings to local
children and seducing an underage girl. He spent 21 days in investigative detention
before the major charges were dropped and this left him quite shaken.

1910 - 1915

Whilst at the Academy he got close to Gustav Klimt, whose influence was profound but
in 1910 Schiele began to develop his own style at that time he was 20 years old.

He was seized by a powerful creative urge, bordering on obsession, and his work was
permeated by the force of his personality as never before. Directness and spontaneity, an
uncompromising disregard for himself and a fanatic search for truth, unchecked by any
other consideration dominated his work. It was not about pleasure, but about pain and
desperation bound up with his own sexual insecurities and urges.

What emerged then in his art, was something extraordinary for his time, a time in which
the suppression of sex was such that postcard reproductions of nudes by Rubens and
Titian were confiscated on grounds of indecency. (Schroeder. K.A. 1999)

Schiele, undeterred by the existing taboos set out to destroy them by shamelessly
violating existing contemporary ideas of decency and by failing to meet the criteria of
beauty. At the time, beauty was both, a refuge and a moral code, turning the human body
into an artistic object defined by such values as symmetry, harmony, and clarity of form.
Schiele could not differ more; he turned the object inside out and forced the viewer to
take into himself what was hidden, primitive and raw and what ultimately represented the

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human condition. Furthermore, it was as if he used the paper and canvas to plunge the
depth of his own existence, to wrestle with his sexuality and the sexuality of the
tantalizing females he found amongst the prostitutes and the destitute of Vienna.

However, most of Schieles feelings, sexual and otherwise, were focused on himself.
He regarded himself as a prime object of study. His self-portraits show the artist in
torment, face and body expressively contorted into attitudes of self-love or self-loathing;
they were images of wretchedness and shockingly ugly. Furthermore, the proliferation of
self-portraits at that time showed that Schieles artistic explorations of himself showed
disorienting instabilities, fragmentation and confusions within the self, as well as an
anguished preoccupation with sexual identity. One must not forget, that Schiele at that
time was barely
twenty; still an
adolescent. For all
his artistic precocity
he was personally no
more mature than the
average teenager
perhaps slightly less
so. As one can see in
his art, he was
plagued by
adolescent conflicts
and sexual
ambivalence
especially in the
early years of his
brief career.

Figure 1 Seated Male Nude (Self Portrait) (1910). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

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In Figure 1 one can see how he has turned himself into a tortured soul in an equally
tortured body devoid of protection and stability. The absence of a seat upon which he can
rest, together with the absence of any feet to stand on, throws the whole into a
destabilized state. There seem to exist not only a threat to his emotional stability but also
one to his sexual identity as his body shows a clear suggestion of breasts. Nevertheless
the figure is dynamic and very forceful, as if he wished to throw himself into the gaze of
the viewer.

Figure 2 Nude Self-Portrait (1910). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

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In Figure 2 he shows himself quite unambiguously as a symbol of the masculine, as a
phallus: he has dismembered his torso, used his stomach as a shaft, and pulled his ribcage
up in a very suggestive way.

Figure 3 Standing Male Nude (Self Portrait) (1910). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

This self-portrait shows again a defenseless position of the body and together with the
unbearable tension and anguish it depicts it seems to speak of a wish to jump out of his

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skin. His hands do not protect him it is as if he is thrown into the viewers gaze against
his own will.

As I said, Schiele was twenty years old at the time, at odds with his family and guardian
as well as society. Despite being able to defy authority and the world around him and
single mindedly pursue his art; there was nevertheless a sense of feeling being lost to him
as an object. He said in one of his poems: whether I am there at all I barely know (in
Ich ewiges Kind: Everything was dear to me, in Schiele, E. 1985) and realizing his
condition he spoke of himself as Ich ewiges Kind: I, the eternal child.

Whilst he was truly obsessed with himself, he was at the same time with equal force
obsessed with female sexuality. He boldly portrayed women with the same intensity and
scrutiny as he portrayed himself and in doing so, he attempted to convey the impact of
female sexuality in all its erotic and seductive power. Thus, he broke with
academic convention which up to now has either carefully concealed or attempted to hide
female eroticism. At the same time, both the content and the form of Schieles nudes
brought the artists sexual anxieties and confusion too close to the comfort for some and
he was branded a pornographer. His critics labeled his nudes hideous-fantastic
caricatures. (Kallir, 2003, (b))

We know that Freud during that time was also grappling with the issue of sexuality. He
was the first who dared to describe the sexual instinct as being passionate and
polymorphously perverse. Freud spoke of the sexual instinct as one that disrupts order, as
being a force that is both passionate and violent.

Interestingly, the reaction of the critics to Schieles work is mirroring the reaction to
Freuds first edition of the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1905, then a
small book of 80 odd pages, little more than a pamphlet, but as explosive as Schieles
sexually explicit nudes. Freud was accused of being a dirty-minded pansexualist and a
Viennese Libertine telling pornographic stories about pure virgins. Furthermore, the
psychoanalytic method was described as mental masturbation (Gay, P.1988).

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Figure 4 Female Nude (1910). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

FIRST RELATIONSHIPS

Whilst busily making himself into Viennas enfant terrible, Schiele was finally able to
embark on his first relationships and finding a partner in his model Wally (Valerie
Neuzil). However, whilst making a significant psychological move into a relationship, at
the same time emotionally unsettling interrelated themes began to emerge around such
issues as mortality and procreation, death and birth. Schiele became almost obsessed with

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death and one can only assume that his own childhood issues including his identification
with his father and his feelings about his parents marriage and relationship must have
come to the fore. Perhaps born out of his despairing and haunting personal issues he
described himself as someone who is loving death and loving life, stating: Alles ist
lebendig tot, All is living dead.

To understand Schieles powerful statement fully I would now like to come back again to
what Austrian or Vienna Society was like at the time. As you will see, it will shed more
light on the issues of sex and death.

As we know from Freud, the moral code at the time was such that it turned the human
being into what Freud called a sexual cripple. (1898, p.25) Freud railed against the fact
that the young girls were systematically raised with the aim of repressing and denying the
existence of their sexuality. Coitus interruptus, masturbation and total abstinence
prevailed, all of which Freud regarded as fertile ground for the development of pathology
and despair.

The turn-of-the-century Vienna was governed by a strict double standard. Good girls
were not permitted to indulge in the same promiscuity as their male counterparts, and
women who engaged in extramarital sex were tainted for life, if it became public that is.
Often however, lower class women had little choice. Thus Vienna may have had its
morality of silences and concealment, but sexuality was omnipresent. In short, the
prevailing Austrian attitude was shot through with hypocrisy. For example it was quite
acceptable for a man to have sex with a 13 14 year old girl if she was a professional
prostitute and the brothels and streets of Vienna were full of them.

However, there was another very important and overlooked contributor to this very
hostile and split attitude towards the sexual urges and that was Syphilis.

As Peter Watson (2000) in his book A Terrible Beauty points out, at the beginning of
the 20th century peoples health was still dominated by a savage trinity of diseases that

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had a major impact on the social and cultural world and the human mind: tuberculosis,
alcoholism, and syphilis. With no cure available syphilis was a curse which posed acute
problems because this disease was the charged centre of conflicting beliefs, attitudes and
myths that had as much to do with morals as medicine. It was not before 1909 that a
remedy was found.

The chronic fear of syphilis in those who did not have it, and the chronic guilt in those
who did, created in Freuds and Schieles time a psychologically fertile ground in which
psychoanalysis could germinate and grow (Watson, P. 2000, p.107). Freud in his Three
Essays on the theory of Sexuality (1905) acknowledged the impact of syphilis. He wrote
In more than half of the severe cases of hysteria, obsessional neurosis, etc.. which I have
treated I have observed that the patients father suffered from syphilisthough I am far
from wishing to assert that descent from syphilitic parents is an invariable or necessary
etiological condition of a neuropathic constitution, I believe that the coincidences which I
have observed are neither artificial nor unimportant.

For Schiele, syphilis played its part as well. He had learned first hand that sex can kill.
Not only had his father succumbed to this disease, but the artists early life experience
has taught him that motherhood could also be extremely risky, both for women and their
babies, who so often died. Even if mother and child survived, there was nevertheless a
wasting away of her youthful vitality. In his view, death could be only conquered by his
art.

In order to flesh out Schieles internal conflicts I would like to begin with his feelings
about his mother, feelings which he translated into some major works on canvas, He
called this series the Dead Mother Series. (It was incidentally, whilst working on this
theme that he said everything is living dead)

He began his paintings in a frenzy on Christmas Eve in 1910, five years after his fathers
death.

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Here is the first work of the Dead Mother Series:

Figure 5 Dead Mother I (1910). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Inside this grey and withered body of his mother, the child resides like a source of light,
shining like the sun like in a medieval painting of the visitation, a theme that again is
picked up in the painting Dead Mother II, a painting presumed destroyed. However,
this source of life and light, this infant with such a hunger for life is actually entombed in
an exhausted figure, but a figure who nevertheless should nurture him. This view is
seemingly substantiated by a letter written in 1913 to his mother in which he told her: I
shall be the fruit which after its decay will still leave behind eternal life; therefore how
great must be your joy to have born me? (Nebehay, C.M. 1979, p. 252)

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Figure 6 Pregnant Woman and Death or Mother and Death (1911).

Source: Webmuseum: Schiele, Egon

We can see in Figure 6 that the hand of the mother resting on her baby inside the womb is
unable to protect the life inside her and death comes in form of a stern and serene monklike figure. The painting could be seen as a family portrait where the father is not the
protector of life but one that brings death. It reminds the viewer that Schiele was aware
that his father brought both, life (in form of a child) and death (in the form of syphilis) to
his wife and children.

However, despite his internal struggles with his mother, Schiele in 1911 was able to live
with his model Wally, who was 17 at the time she met him. In response to the intimacy of
this relationship his work changed and he became more outward looking. Another

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incidence also had a major impact and changed his outlook on life and that was the
traumatic incidence of his imprisonment, a very persecutory and shocking experience for
Schiele. As a result of this experience he developed a more constructive relationship with
his environment, and he also drew closer to Wally who supported and comforted him
during this very taxing and difficult time.

Figure 7 Self-Portrait with Chinese Lantern Plant (1912) and Portrait of Valerie Neuzil (Wally)
(1912). Source: Wikimedia Commons

Works appeared who were pensive and beautiful, intimate and tender. His female nudes
too became less explicitly erotic, his formal portraits of women grew in sensitivity and a
first depiction of a family occurred that is not taken over by death. In short, a process of
maturation had begun that would be painfully completed in the coming years, when he

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married and experienced World War I. Until this time, Schiele had been both the object
and subject of his own desires but now he began to relate to his environment and people
around him in a different and more mature way.
1915 - 1918
However, the relationship with Wally would not last. In 1915, at the age of 25 years,
Schiele finally decided to get married and it was not to his faithful Wally, who was not
acceptable to the Viennese Society. Schiele, despite his otherwise rebellious and
uncompromising nature, found his good girl, Edith Harms. The marriage took place
exactly on the day his parents got married 36 years before him.
In response to these major events Schiele created a painting called Death and the
Maiden, depicting himself and Wally at the point of their separation.

Figure 8 Death and the Maiden (1915). Belvedere, Vienna

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What is seen here is Schieles painful and poignant awareness of the emotional impact of
their separation and the pain he caused his most loyal friend. He chose to depict himself
as death embracing Wally and thereby showing that the guilt he is feeling is of a
persecutory nature. Hence the painting is at the same time almost a confession, but a
confession without the perhaps longed for redemption. His face looks horrified, hers
resigned. Wally, unacceptable to society and not fitting into his new life, painful as it was
for Schiele, had to go. They never saw each other again. Death indeed embraced Wally,
who as a Red Cross nurse died of scarlet fever two years later.

Further tragic fulfillments of his pre-occupation with death would became a horrible
reality three years later but Schiele did not know this at the time when his very new and
more respectable life started with his wife Edith, or Diderle a he called her. Further life
changing changes would occur due to the fact that Austria was at war and Schiele finally
had to do his duties. Thus, by 1915 he not only became a husband but also a soldier. We
will see in a moment how these major life events would prompt further emotional
changes in relation to his perception of the
subject of his art, including himself.
To start with, here is his painting of his wife
Edith, his Diderle. We can see here how
Schiele managed to give expression to his
feelings of tenderness towards his young wife;
she appears almost childlike, vulnerable and
innocent, like a girl of twelve perhaps. It
brings back the memory of her father falling in
love with a twelve year old Marie, or Schieles
almost incestuous closeness to his sister
Gertrude.

Figure 9 Portrait of Edith Schiele in a Striped Dress

(1915). Source: Wikimedia Commons

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Figure 10 Embrace (Lovers II) (1917). Belvedere, Vienna.

Figure 11 Crouching Male Nude (Self

Portrait) (1917). Source: Wikimedia
Commons.

1918: THE FINAL YEAR AND

DEATH

Whilst the Austro-Hungarian empire

plummeted headlong toward its
military and political demise,
Schiele received his recognition as
the preeminent Austrian artist of his
day. The year was 1918 and
Schieles financial hardship was
over. What has not left him,
however, was a sense of a bleak
view of our earthly existence: He
steadfastly conveyed his emotional

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conviction that we are born alone and we remain essentially alone throughout our lives.
This belief finds it most poignant expression in the painting Squatting Couple, which
was dubbed The family after Schieles death. He painted it at a time in his life when
another major life changing event occurred: his wife was pregnant with their first child.

This painting Squatting Couple is commonly regarded as his masterpiece.

Figure 12 Squatting Couple (1918). Belvedere, Vienna

This painting communicates sadness and resignation. The three figures: father, mother
and child do not seem to be emotionally closely linked nor relating to one another, neither
do they attempt to be each others comfort. Their blank stares and their nudity highlights
their isolation and vulnerability. Even the child has no one to hold its gaze or its hand.
What we see here is the loneliness of the child and a child lacking the redemptive power
of the child in the Dead Mother series. This painting is not a joyous response to
parenthood; to the contrary it seems to convey a belief held by the artist, that the man and

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the woman share a common destiny, and this makes them companions in suffering but
without relieving their loneliness. In essence, it is a bleak view of our earthly existence.

This bleak view and Schieles preoccupations with death came tragically true, when
Edith, six months pregnant and despite all of Schieles precautions, contracted the deadly
Spanish flu virus which was consuming the population of Vienna. Schiele sketched his
wifes face, then fever-ravaged and immensely sad for the last time on the
27th of October, creating a drawing that, unbeknown to him, would be the last expression
of his art. As for his wife she complied with Schieles request to assure him of her love
he was terrified to lose. Unable to speak she scrawled on a scrap of paper the following
words: I love you eternally and love you more and more infinitely and immeasurably.
She died the next morning and the baby inside her with her. Egon Schiele himself
succumbed to the same disease only three days later, 31st October. Three days later, on
November 3, Austria-Hungary signed an armistice and agreed to capitulate
unconditionally. The war was over.

CONCLUSION

A photo taken of Schiele on his deathbed surprisingly depicts a man at peace, almost
asleep, with his one of his hands behind his head and the other close to his mouth as if in
the process of thinking rather than having succumbed to a deadly flu. It invites one to
think again about the complexities of this artists life and soul, in particular about
Schieles pre-occupation with death and the interplay between sex and death.

Regarding the latter, I am mindful of Ronald Brittons thoughts about the longing for
death. In his book Sex, Death and the Superego (2003) he states that the longing for
death is often a desire for dying in love. Living means facing separation, while death
provides union. This perspective on the link between sex and death is drawing its
meaning from the romantic death of the late nineteenth century, where priority is given to
the possession of the love object in sexual but deadly fusion. This sort of romantic death

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is not what Schiele had in mind. His idea of death as depicted in his art is one of a
different sort, a dead mother or a stern and austere figure, not a couple that is joined
together in a blissful and never-to-be-separated union.

Freud too was pre-occupied with death throughout his life. There were reflections on its
significance, fears of it and later on the wish for it, long before he finally introduced the
concept of the death instinct for the first time in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which
was written and circulated for comment in 1919. By the time it was published in 1920
Freud not only had lost two close friends but also his beloved daughter Sophie whose life
was claimed by the Spanish Flu. Freud was said to be composed, not only in relation to
this tragic loss but also to a war that claimed millions of lives and led to the collapse of
the world he knew and had lived in for decades. We do not know what he really felt
personally, but it is interesting that his no doubt long-term thoughts about the death
instinct would finally be expressed at that time.

As we know, Freud introduced the death instinct as an unconscious wish to lose oneself
in the stillness of death, as a push towards a quiet return to the Nirvana state, or as Janine
Chasseguet-Smirgel (in De Masi, 2004, p.58) puts it: a desire to return to a womb-like
state, where no tension or need is felt. Looking at what we know about the mood and life
in Vienna at the time, one can see how Freud is perhaps not only expressing here his
psychoanalytic thoughts about the death instinct, but had, so to speak, the finger on the
emotional pulse and mood at the time.

The closest I personally come in understanding Schieles pre-occupation with death is by

examining his early life in the light of the tragedy of his family: every one of his internal
objects: father, mother and his parents as a couple were imbued not only with depression
(in the case of his mother) and madness (in the case of his father) but also with death
(fathers syphilis and mothers dead babies and child).

It is therefore to Andre Green I would now like to turn, and his dead mother concept,
described by Green as:

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an imago which has been constituted in the childs mind, following maternal depression,
brutally transforming a living object, which was a source of vitality for the child, into a
distant figure, toneless, practically inanimate, deeply impregnating the cathexes of
certain patientsand weighing on the destiny of their object-libidinal and narcissistic
future(The) dead motheris a mother who remains alive but who is, so to speak,
psychically dead in the eyes of the young child in her care. (Green A. 1986, p.142)

That object loss is a fundamental moment in the structuring of the human psyche. Green
also points out that the infant needs to survive a life with an object like this and in doing
so, he might develop a compulsion to imagine (a frantic need to occupy himself) and/or a
compulsion to think (which promotes intellectual development). Hence we are faced with
a paradox: artistic creativity and productive intellectualization are possible outcomes for
the dead mother complex. There is a high price to pay though, as Green points out: in
all, the subjects objects remain constantly at the limit of the ego, not wholly within, and
not quite without. And with good reason, for the place is occupied in its centre by the
dead mother (Green, A. 1980 pp.154). It could well be that Schiele was aware of this
when he stated All is living dead.

One can see in Schieles Dead Mother series how, the child within the dead mothers
womb is alive, often vibrantly so, his hands almost in the process of benediction. Could it
be, that Schiele attempted to not only stay alive whilst entombed in a dead object, but
also to be life and bring life? And could it be that behind the Dead Mother is also the
Dead Father and, of course, the dead couple?

In ending this paper I would like to say the following: In my view, Schieles preoccupation with death was not one of looking or longing for Nirvana, although Schieles
view of the world was imbued with a profound pessimism weighed down by a
melancholic grief and an indeterminate longing. Neither did it have anything to do with
the romantic notion of fusion through death. For Schiele, the stark reality of the neverending cycle of birth and death, of coming into being and passing away, as well as sex

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and death were inextricably linked as part of life and his life as he understood and knew it
from childhood through to adulthood. In short, Schiele knew that the unborn baby is
already wrapped in the cloak of death. Bearing this knowledge was part of his profound
struggle, both emotionally and in his art.

Freud never liked expressionism. He loathed modern art. When his friend, Oscar Pfister,
published a book discussing Expressionism from a psychoanalytic view, Freud read it
with interest as much as aversion and congratulated Pfister for explaining why these
people lack the right to claim the name of artist. (Burke, J. 2006). Freuds passion was
beautiful antique pieces which he loved and felt nourished by. These pieces were perfect
and harmonious in their beauty and perhaps reassuringly enduring and stable, unlike the
disorderly and chaotic as well as fallible and vulnerable world of the human psyche
which has to deal with the reality of the transience of life. We know, of course, that Freud
understood our human predicament und ultimately so did Schiele. But Schiele could not
find refuge in beauty and in the clarity of creative writing like Freud did. His destiny was
to paint and give artistic expression of what was inside him, as chaotic and disturbed and
painful as it was.

References

Bettelheim, B. (1991). Freuds Vienna and other essays. New York: Vintage Books.
Britton, R. (2003). Sex, death and the superego, Experiences in Psychoanalysis.
London:Karnac Books.
Burke, J. (2006). The Gods of Freud. Sydney: Knopf.
De Masi, F. (2004). Making death thinkable. London:Free Association Books.
Freud, S. (1898). Die Sexualitaet in der Aetiologie der Neurosen in Die FreudStudienausgabe, Band V. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH.
Freud, S. (1905). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE7
Freud, S (1915). Zeitgemaesses ueber Krieg und Tod. in Die Freud-Studienausgabe,

25
Band IX. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH.
Freud, S. (1920) Beyond the pleasure principle. SE18
Gay, P. (1988). Freud: a life for our time. GB:Billing &Sons
Green A. (1986). The dead mother. In A. Green On private madness. (1986). London:
Hogarth Press.
Kallir, J. (2003, (a)) Egon Schiele Drawings and Watercolors. London: Thames &
Hudson Ltd.
Kallir, J. (2003, (b)) Egon Schiele, Life and Work. New York: Harry N. Adams, Inc.
Nebehay, CM (1979). Egon Schiele, 1890-1918 : Leben, Briefe, Gedichte.
Salzburg:Residenz Verlag.
Schiele, E. (1985). Ich ewiges Kind : Gedichte. Wien: Brandstaetter.
Schroeder, K.A. (1999) Egon Schiele, Eros and Passion. Munich:Prestel Verlag
Watson, P. (2000) A terrible beauty: The people and ideas that shaped the modern mind.
A History. London: Phoenix Press
References to Images:
Belvedere, Vienna.
Webmuseum Schiele, Egon
Wikimedia Commons. www.artcyclopedia.com/commons/egon-schiele.html
(The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei. DVD-ROM, 2002. ISBN
3936122202. Distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH)
Wikipedia.org
Acknowledgements:
I would like to thank the Belvedere Museum, Vienna for giving me permission for
artworks in their holding to be reproduced in this paper

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