To This Favor She Must Come: Tinguely’s Cow and Hamlet’s Mother

by Burton Melnick

In Tinguely’s construction “La Vache Suisse—Corso Fleurie [sic],” the cow’s head is represented, beneath a floral headdress, by the real skull of a dead cow.  Drawing on Freud, the author—who has elsewhere identified the iconic Swiss cow as a mother figure—suggests that the bitterness expressed by “La Vache Suisse” originates largely in infantile resentment at having received insufficient milk from the mother.  This feeling is linked to a sense of betrayal and also to a perception that the mother was unavailable for nursing because she was dead, so that the mother’s mortality becomes a source of angry resentment.  The same dynamics, the author argues, apply to Hamlet, where one of Hamlet’s grievances against women is that they, like Tinguely’s cow, hide their corruptibility under an artificially beautified appearance.  Though triggered by her present behavior, Hamlet’s feelings towards his mother also reflect the oral frustration of the past.

PsyArt is an online, peer-reviewed journal featuring articles using a psychological approach to the arts. We provide a rapid publication decision and a large and international readership. The journal is open to any psychology and any art, although PsyArt specializes in psychoanalytic psychology and literature or film.