Physical illness, psychological woundedness and the healing power of art in the life and work of Franz Kafka and Frida Kahlo

This dissertation is a comparative case study focusing on the life and work of Franz Kafka and Frida Kahlo, with special attention to the physical illness and psychological woundedness that permeated their lives and which they transmuted into the images of their art. Both artists depicted violence and bodily injury in their work, referencing wounds that were “unsayable” in life and could only be symbolized in art. For both, art served to express and assuage the psychological experience of these wounds within “the holding environment of the artistic endeavor.”;This narrative inquiry incorporates constructivist, phenomenological, hermenuetic, feminist, and psychoanalytic perspectives, especially object relations and self psychology. It is based on primary literary and visual texts as well as secondary sources, including standard biographies of these artists. From the vast body of primary material, selections were chosen based for their pertinence to the themes of “wounds, blood and woundings.” This study is also informed by Gruber's “Evolving Systems Approach” to the study of creative individuals and his conceptual categories of “ensembles of metaphors” and “networks of enterprise.”;The dissertation provides the cultural, historical, and personal contexts for these artists' life and work upon which later interpretations are based and explores the motivational factors that allowed these artists to make reparative use of creative processes in spite of chronic physical illness and psychic anguish. Several chapters elaborate the kinds of wounds to the self that Kafka and Kahlo grappled with in their relationships and which they expressively tried to heal through the holding environment of their art.;All chapters are comparative except for one that is dedicated entirely to Kahlo because it explores an ensemble of gender specific images which suggest that Kahlo may have been expressing in her art an otherwise “unspeakable” history of sexual abuse. The final chapters interrogate the function of the blood and wounds that mark these artists' work and explore the psychological mechanisms through which healing may have taken place. The dissertation concludes that the process of producing art may have worked therapeutically for Kafka and Kahlo, enabling them to break through and enliven the “psychic deadness” that plagued them.