The enthusiastic despair of Francis Bacon, an uncanny painter

Abstract

The purpose of the paper is to examine Francis Bacon’s creative process, whose works present a mixture between realism, surrealism and violence, affected by the death instinct. Supported by the 1919 Freudian text The Uncanny (Das Unheimliche), this essay attempts to reflect on the similarities between Bacon’s creative process, the psychoanalytic technique and the self-analysis in his self-portraits. By giving up conscious choices and allowing himself to be led by chance, Bacon exercises something similar to the free association in the analysis, opening a gap through which the unconscious can flow. He seeks a mental state that allows, or at least favors, the loosening of the superego’s rigid bonds and allows him to vent his aggressiveness without guilt. Painted repeatedly, his self-portraits are the desperate expression of his loneliness. Bacon disfigures his own face analytically and coldly, submitting himself to the same violence that he prints on other portraits, in a dissatisfied and obsessive way.