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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, ornaments 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 cultural limitations is. While in ‘primitive’ cultures the semantics of visual codes are based mostly on mimicking totem objects, others apply a more complicated hierarchy of conditional and symbolic limitations to bodily signs. At the same time, Claude Lévi-Strauss has analysed the terminology of kinship, the structural principles 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 conditions 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 figures 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 437
