山田維史の遊卵画廊

■(19-1)英語訳論文『エドヴァルド・ムンクの去勢不安』(1)

6月 04, 2025

Castration Anxiety of Edvard Munch, 1994
by Yamada Tadashi

山田維史「エドヴァルド・ムンクの去勢不安」　日本語初出『AZ』誌 1994年（新人物往来社）

Introduction
   Edvard Munch is the greatest artist born in Norway and an important pioneer of German Expressionism. However, he was not recognized in his native country until he was over 50 years old. Munch's art was banished from his native country due to ridicule and incomprehension. He wandered around European cities for a long time. In that sense, he was a homeless person. Munch was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, but the manifestation of schizophrenia is not unrelated to the loss of his homeland.

   When Munch began his career as a painter in the 1880s, Western Europe was a place where old and new ideas were in conflict in every field, and the influence of this conflict extended to Scandinavia as well. Munch became a member of the young radical group Bohem in Christiania (now Oslo), which attacked conventional bourgeois civil society and aimed to destroy its hypocritical public order and morals. Although they lived decadent lives, they had a great influence on Munch's spiritual development.
   However, the source of Munch's creative activity must be found in his family relationships.

   Munch said, "My family was a family of sickness and death. I certainly could not overcome this misfortune. This was therefore decisive for my art. [1]"

   By immersing himself in his inner life, he was able to grasp the spirit of modern people suffering. His art was inspired by many artists and thinkers of the same era and the past, and although it cannot be said that his techniques are original, all of his themes are based on personal experiences. And when personal experiences were fixed in his works, they had a mythical atmosphere. Munch did not paint religious paintings. He did not take mythology as his subject matter. He did not follow traditional symbolism, but rather tapped into the primitive symbolism that exists in the subconscious. Munch's art can be said to be an expression of Jungian archetypes.

   Munch's style of painting changed many times before he died at the age of 81, and was not necessarily uniform. Psychiatrist Tadao Miyamoto divides Munch’s work into four periods in Relation to his history pf pathology, as follows [2], and I think is generally agreed upon by those in the art world.

   The first period is the period from the start of his artistic career until around 1893, during which he made sketches or copies. However, The Sick Child (1885-6) was completed during this period, and Munch-like motifs are already apparent.

   The second period was the ten years from around 1894 to 1905-6. He perfected his own style, and clear symptoms of mental illness appeared.

   The third period was from around 1906 to around 1908. "This period coincides with the time when his mental illness became apparent. He lost the eerie, tense appearance of the previous period, and his expression lost density, his touch became rough, and his composition was not well thought out."

   The fourth period began around 1909. Although there is more cohesion than in the previous period, the symbolic landscapes disappeared. "He began to paint external materials as they were, but his way of handling them was unnecessarily gaudy and decorative, showing a tendency toward "fullness" (Anfullung, remplissage), which W. Morgenthaler and others unanimously pointed out as one of the characteristics of schizophrenic painting. Thus, the expressive density seen in the second period, especially in "The Fleece of Life," never recovered. "

   Below, I will mainly compare the works of this second period with Munch's real relationships with women, and examine Munch's castration anxiety [※] that can be seen in his works.

   First, let me describe his family relationships in his childhood, which serve as the premise.

【*Note】Castration: Removal of a male's testicles to eliminate reproductive function.

Black Angels
   Edvart Munch (1863-1944) was born in a rented house on the Engelhaug farm near Leuthen (now Ruthen) in southern Norway. His father, Christian, was a military doctor and later became a practicing physician. His mother, Laura, was 20 years younger than his father. Edvard was the second of five children. His father's family was a highly cultured and prestigious Norwegian family that had produced soldiers, bishops, and poets. One of his ancestors was Jacob Munch, who holds an important position in the history of art education in the country. In addition, Peter A. Munch, author of the five volumes of The Norwegian People's History, was Edvard's uncle. Edvard was very proud of his family background and especially respected his uncle Peter. Having had a strong conflict with his father, he may have sometimes compared his father and uncle in his mind. His mother's family were farmers and sailors, and they were strong and strong-willed, but these traits were not passed down to Laura. His mother died of tuberculosis when Edvard was five years old. He seemed to think that his parents' marriage was an ill-matched one. He looked up to his uncle Peter as a role model for his courage in order to pursue a life as an artist. When he overcame the frequent illnesses he fell into and escaped from a mental crisis, feeling full of energy for the next step, he realized that he owed his body to his mother's family.

   His father was an introverted man with a strong religious faith and social convictions. His salary as a military doctor was not very high, and he lived a very simple life. Moreover, when Edvard was one year old, his father moved to a slum, where he treated the discouraged people for free. Although he was poor, he was kind to children and played with them. The family's happy life changed drastically after his mother's death. His father became gloomy and depressed, and nervous. He also became strict with his children. And he was plagued by an extraordinary religious anxiety.

   "Disease, madness, and death were the dark angels who watched over me at my cradle. They followed me all my life."[3]" Munch later recalled. "I learned early about misery, the transience of life, and the eternal punishment that awaits the children of sin in hell after death....When my father punished us, he was so ferocious that it almost reached the point of madness. As a child, I always felt motherless, sick, and wronged, with the punishment of hell hanging over my head.[4]"

   Another death devastated Munch. When he was 14, his sister Johanna Sophie, who was one year older than him, died of the same tuberculosis as his mother. This latest death cast a deep and dark shadow over Munch's heart. His father, too, never recovered from the shock and regret he felt as a doctor for having caused the deaths of his wife and daughter to the same disease, even until his own death. Munch was very close to his sister. Munch himself was born with a frail health and was very sensitive, so when illness and death took away those he loved, he thought it would be his turn next. He was unable to attend school as he would have liked due to his severe rheumatic fever. Even though it was time for him to enter society, he was apparently unable to even give himself a sense of the concept of life.

   After his mother's death, his mother's sister, Karen Björsta, looked after the young children. Munch had mixed feelings about this aunt, but at least she brought a touch of warmth to the cold, gloomy household. It was she who recognized Munch's talent for art from an early stage. She herself painted landscapes, and used the money from selling them to buy art supplies for Munch and herself. When Munch confessed his desire to become a painter, his father was strongly against it. To him, it was not a legitimate career. However, his aunt Karen worked hard behind the scenes to persuade him.

   Munch finally found what he really wanted to do. On November 8, 1880, the year he dropped out of school after a long absence, he wrote in his diary, "My destiny is now -- to become a painter."[5] However, the black angels did not free Munch from the curse of death. At the end of 1889, while staying in Paris, he received news of the death of his father, with whom he had been estranged for a long time. Perhaps because of the shock, his style of painting, which had been light and joyful in Paris, changed completely. He wrote a memo that is now known as the "Saint-Cloud Manifesto." He wrote, "From now on, I will no longer paint interiors, people reading books, or women knitting. I will paint living human beings who breathe, feel, suffer, and love."[6]"

   In 1894, his younger sister (second daughter), Laura Catherine, fell ill with schizophrenia. We can encounter her pathetic figure in the work entitled "Melancholy" (1899). In a corner of a bright red room, sealed off from the outside, a woman dressed in blue-black clothes sits stiffly. She lived in this condition until the age of 59.

   In 1895, Munch's brother Peter Andreas, the only one of his compatriots to have married, died just six months after his wedding. Munch was against his brother's marriage. His sister-in-law was full of vitality, while his brother was physically frail. Munch believed that sexual intercourse sucked the life out of a man and led to his death.

   Munch was so frightened of illness, madness and death that it put his own mind at risk. However, he never looked away, but closely observed the events that unfolded, and engraved them deeply in his memory. His attitude could even be described as cold-hearted. He looked at the other person and at himself, simultaneously grasping the whole picture of the events surrounding them both, as well as the natural phenomenon, and he never tried to erase that memory into oblivion. He probably ruminated on it countless times in his mind, and then, several years later, even ten years in some cases, his painful memories were expressed in the form of paintings. It is worth emphasizing this point when considering Munch's art.

(To be continued to next page ; 次ページにつづく）

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