The Power of Visual Memory: the Earliest Remembered Drawing of Alberto Giacometti, Snow White in Her Coffin

Abstract

Since the time of Freud, many psychoanalysts have seen screen memories and earliest memories as reflecting underlying dynamics. I propose that an earliest remembered artwork is a highly condensed construction similar to a screen memory. Alberto Giacometti’s earliest remembered drawing, of Snow White in Her Coffin, contains clues to the artist’s personality and references to childhood experience. Giacometti’s memory of the drawing done in childhood is a striking condensation of significant biographical events and psychodynamic conflicts, as well as a marker of important unconscious fantasies. The artist’s postwar sculptural style, utilizing gaunt figures, epitomizes the final transformation of the psychological meaning of his earliest remembered drawing.