ABSTRACT
In The Restoration of the Self, Kohut (1977) hypothesized that the great artists address the crucial psychological issue of their era in their society. Kohut observed that the great European novelists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries dealt with the problems of Guilty Man, who was torn by his drives and internal prohibitions, and with oedipal disorders, which were characterized by neurotic conflict. These oedipal disorders developed out of the emotional overcloseness and rigidity of parent-child relations in the bourgeois family of the 1800s. In contrast, the great Western artists and writers of the twentieth century, such as Picasso, Kafka, and O'Neill, dealt with the problems of Tragic Man, who failed to fulfill his ambitions and ideals, and with narcissistic disorders, which were characterized by tendencies toward empty depression and fragmentation. These narcissistic disorders developed out of the child's emotional deprivation fostered by such social factors as the shrinking size of families and the increasing employment of both parents outside of the home, in response to increasing industrialization, since around the 1890s. Kohut (1977) speculated about modern artists: "The musician of disordered sound, the poet of decomposed language, the painter and sculptor of the fragmented visual and tactile world: they all portray the breakup of the self and, through the reassemblage and rearrangement of the fragments, try to create new structures that possess wholeness, perfection, new meaning" (p. 286).
