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The Psychoanalytical Aspects of the Deconstruction of Images of Socialist Ideals
Visual schemas and emotional symptoms of bodily signs vary depending on the
context as well as on evolutionary processes in visual perception; “the artist, clearly,
can only render what his tool and his medium are capable of rendering” (Gombrich
1960: 64-65). Psychological explanations are a key to understanding how these
individual artists ‘saw and how they built upon the traditions they had inherited
and of which they were a part. With the dialectics of making and matching,
schema and correction, Gombrich sought to ground artistic development on more
universal truths, closer to those of science, than on what he regarded as fashionable
or vacuous terms such as ‘Zeitgeist’ and other ‘abstractions’ (Ibid.).
Claude Lévi-Strauss (2000), who draw an analogy between nature and culture,
noted that the formation of types of body decoration and samples of tattoos, orna¬
ments and incisions in ‘primitive’ peoples resemble the natural need for mimicry
(protection). Repeated movements, gestures and mimicry, as well as the use of
masks in rituals, reflect an understanding of the regularity (invariable frequency) of
natural life and phenomena.
The ‘higher’ the level of civilisation, the greater the number of taboos and cul¬
tural limitations is. While in ‘primitive’ cultures the semantics of visual codes are
based mostly on mimicking totem objects, others apply a more complicated hier¬
archy of conditional and symbolic limitations to bodily signs. At the same time,
Claude Lévi-Strauss has analysed the terminology of kinship, the structural prin¬
ciples of building primeval classifications of the natural and social worlds, rituals,
totemisms, myths and masks as sign systems of a special nature. His studies reveal,
among the visible versatility of social rules, the general schemas that create condi¬
tions for information exchange and, thus, overcome the antinomy between the
postulated unity of being and the plurality of the forms of perception: “Any myth
or mythological sequence would have remained incomprehensible if each myth
was not opposed to other versions of the same myth or myths” (Lévi-Strauss 2000:
47). This statement can be applied to the reorientation of the communist myth in
conditions of post-modernism. The masks, movements and gestures of ritual fig¬
ures perform the functions of signs and they, like words, may be read in a particular
semantic space. Despite the apparent semantic diversity of various cultures and
graphic traditions, they all have a formal similarity of visual signs. This is explained
by the fact that cultural signs reflect the natural human need for a consolidation
of sentient experience in the visual arts. For example, the use of similarities in the
types of symmetry and related image transformations in different regions and eras
is explained as follows: the organisation of forms and colours within (unconscious)
sentient experience is, of its own accord, the first level of denoting reality for these
plastic types of art.
‘The findings of structural anthropology are in many ways corroborated by the
historical ethology of Konrad Lorenz. He compared the behaviour of animals and
humans and viewed their similarity as a “function of the system that owned its
existence and its special form to the historical course of its formation in the history
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