Esorcismo e psicoanalisi nell’opera di Hugo Ball

During the last years of his life, Hugo Ball was intensely devoted to the study of psychoanalysis. His reflections are very original, because they start from an artistic and religious background. His short avant-garde experiments, first alongside Wassily Kandinsky later in the Cabaret Voltaire, and his mystical conversion experience in 1920 are necessary to understand his spiritual evolution and his particular interest in psychoanalysis. In his essays on psychoanalysis the medical problem of neurosis approaches the religious question of exorcism. Wesensspaltung, Zerrissenheit, Zerstückung, Besessenheit belong to both the medical and the religious languages and they are the expression of the modern disease that has infected a whole epoch and of which the artist is the first victim. Unfortunately Hugo Ball died too soon to be able to leave a complete work about the psycho-religious argument. The work about the "Therapie der Kirche" is fragmentary and appears today as a work in progress, that we must reconstruct and interpret like all works of mystics. Significant are his Schizophrene Sonette, as well as his last major work, the biography of his friend, confidant and source of inspiration, Hermann Hesse.