ABSTRACT
Segantini was published in 1911 as a monograph in the series Schriften zur angewandten Seelenkunde. In 1924, Karl Abraham added a new final paragraph. The painter Giovanni Segantini was born in Arco near Lake Garda, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was famous in the late nineteenth century but rather faded from view in the twentieth. Abraham's aim was to apply psychoanalysis to Segantini in an effort to understand him. Karl Abraham claimed that in his autobiography Segantini wrote about his mother not as a loving carer, but as if she were a lost lover who, in his imagination, as an ideal image, occupied an increasingly important place as the years went by. According to Abraham, Segantini's resistance to depression and with it his resistance to his aggressive impulses became increasingly fragile. Abraham wrote of Segantini that he was reserved and shy in relation to the female sex.
