Turning Danger into Performance – The Relationship Between Perspective and Psychology

“I do not want to reproach my beginnings; admittedly I was still in darkness and moved forward in a kind of unconscious drive, but I had a sense of what was right, a divining rod that showed me where gold lay.” Goethe in conversation with Eckermann

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“for art is neither pain nor pleasure but the triumph over the one and the transfiguration of the other.” Stefan George

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“The Greeks are interesting and extremely important because they have such a multitude of great individuals. How was that possible? One must study it.” (original spelling) Friedrich Nietzsche

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“As I live in millennia … it always seems strange to me when I hear of statues and monuments. I cannot think of a statue erected to a deserving man without already seeing it in my mind’s eye being knocked over and smashed by future warriors.” Goethe, 1824, in conversation with Eckermann

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Modernity has removed depth from the world and relocated it into the subject.

Before Freud, someone could be angry because they were insulted. Since Freud, the question arises immediately: why did this particular insult affect them? Which earlier wound was activated? Which desire, which conflict, which repression is speaking here?

Just as linear perspective overlays visible objects with an invisible geometric space, psychoanalysis overlays behavior with an invisible psychic space.

Dear J., I believe your Altdorfer analogy is indeed a fruitful insight. What convinces me about it is that it avoids the usual narrative of progress. As soon as one says early novels “lack psychology” or early painting “lacks perspective,” it immediately sounds like a story of deficiency—as if both were merely incomplete stages on the way to something finally achieved later.

Your analogy shifts the emphasis. It does not ask: what is missing? But rather: what form of reality becomes visible?

In Albrecht Altdorfer, it is a world in which space is not yet the sovereign organizing principle. In the mass-produced literary works of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, it is a world in which the psyche is not yet the guiding star of narrative.

The sentence from your first attempt that stayed with me most is:

“A murder happens, and in the next sentence dinner is served.”

This corresponds to a pictorial logic like that of Altdorfer—not because feelings are absent, but because no one yet feels compelled to explain everything through the individual. Events possess their own gravity. They do not need psychological justification. Perhaps this is why such works often feel so alive today—not despite their “incompleteness,” but because of their resistance to our habitual modes of seeing and interpreting. They present a reality that has not yet been fully translated.

The Relationship Between Perspective and Psychology

Perspective and psychology are, historically speaking, entirely different phenomena. One belongs to the representation of space, the other to the representation of the human being. But structurally, they perform a strikingly similar function: both generate an invisible order for visible phenomena.

Before linear perspective, the size of a figure is not solely a matter of spatial distance. Size expresses meaning, power, sanctity, or narrative centrality. Multiple orders overlap. With perspective, these layers are separated. The size of a figure is now primarily determined by its position in space. Meaning must be expressed through other means.

Space acquires an autonomous logic. Something similar happens with psychology. In earlier narrative forms, emotions, passions, fears, or desires certainly exist. But inner life is not yet the central organizing principle of narration. Actions are often understood in terms of status, fate, religion, honor, property, dependency, or necessity. The inner world does not yet function as a universal explanatory domain.

With modern psychology this changes. Just as perspective generates a homogeneous space, psychology generates a homogeneous inner space. Events increasingly become legible through motives, trauma, desire, conflict, or repression. Action appears as the surface of a deeper psychic structure.

In both cases something new emerges: a tremendous increase in coherence. The viewer knows why a figure appears small; the reader knows why a figure acts.

Once an ordering system becomes dominant, productive ambiguities of earlier forms disappear. Before perspective, size could simultaneously express spatial position and meaning. Before psychology, an action could simultaneously be fate, coercion, social structure, and personal impulse.

In this sense, Freud would be for inner life roughly what Alberti was for pictorial space: not the discoverer of a new reality, but the theorist of a system that henceforth determines how reality is understood. The soul becomes perspectival. From this moment on, it becomes difficult for us to read human beings as anything other than symptoms of their own interiority.

Many analogies are ultimately decorative. One says: this is like that. But here something else happens. The comparison between perspective and psychology begins to work. It produces insights that cannot be gained from art history or literary history alone.

An archaeology of self-evidence emerges. One discovers that something that today appears completely natural—namely the assumption that behind every action there is a hidden inner space—is itself a historical achievement. A powerful, productive achievement, but not an anthropological constant. And at precisely this point, the serially produced early nineteenth-century gothic novels suddenly become interesting. They are fossils of a different distribution of depth.

Seeing and Self-Perception

Leon Battista Alberti’s metaphor of the painting as an “open window” (finestra aperta), formulated in 1435, marks a radical ontological shift that mathematizes space and anchors the human subject at the center of reality.

From mystical to rational space

In the Middle Ages, pictorial space was often a spiritual field of meaning. God or saints were depicted larger, independent of physical laws. Alberti transforms space into a homogeneous, infinite, geometric continuum. Linear perspective works mathematically only if it converges toward a single immobile eye—the vanishing point. This has consequences: the human being becomes an Archimedean point of the world. Everything in space aligns itself according to the position of the viewer. The human being produces spatial order through their gaze. Long before the philosophy of René Descartes, this spatial concept separates the thinking mind (the viewer before the window) from nature (the world in the window). To grasp space geometrically is to control it. This way of seeing laid the foundation for modern cartography, architecture, and the scientific conquest of the world.

Space becomes a system. Centuries later, Freud discovers a hidden connection between familiar phenomena. Dreams, parapraxes, symptoms, memories, and desires are brought under a common explanatory framework. The psyche becomes a system.

The crucial point is that both systems appear, in retrospect, so self-evident that their historical contingency is barely noticed. Today it is difficult to perceive space otherwise than perspectivally. Even knowing that medieval images are organized differently, we intuitively experience perspective as more “natural.” Likewise, it is difficult not to interpret human action psychologically. As soon as someone does something, we automatically ask about motivation, trauma, desire, fear, or repression.

Once an ordering system becomes universal, it begins to suppress other possibilities of experiencing the world. Perspective marginalizes symbolic space. The mass-market literature at the threshold between Classicism and Romanticism preserves a conception of the human being in which the psyche is not yet the unquestioned center of explanation. Horror is not located in repressed wishes or traumatic memories. It resides in property disputes, inheritance conflicts, patriarchal violence, economic dependency, and social exclusion. The figures appear psychologically thin because narrative depth is located elsewhere.

One can describe the history of the novel as a gradual relocation of the abyss. The early gothic novel seeks it in the external world. The early psychological novel seeks it in the internal world. Freud marks the moment when horror finally begins to move from houses into the soul.