Freud’s influence on Jan Theuninck, 2026

Freud’s influence on Jan Theuninck is explicit, foundational, and tightly interwoven with his political-psychoanalytic critique of violence, power, and the modern “suspect” society. While Hannah Arendt supplies the sociological diagnosis of isolation and lost reality (as explored previously), Sigmund Freud provides the intrapsychic scalpel: the drives, the repressed, the death instinct, and the perverse pleasures that fuel war, totalitarianism, and reverse blaming. Theuninck does not treat Freud as abstract theory—he weaponizes him as a diagnostic tool for the “dark id” of leaders, societies, and the collective psyche.The Cornerstone: Wargasm (2001) as “La psychanalyse d’un guerrier”Theuninck’s breakthrough painting Wargasm (acrylic on canvas, 70 × 100 cm, 2001) is literally subtitled “the psychoanalysis of a warrior” (and of the political decision-maker). It is the clearest and most sustained Freudian statement in his entire oeuvre:

• Eros and Thanatos in collision: The title itself—a portmanteau of “war” + “orgasm”—visualizes Freud’s insight from Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) that aggression (the death drive, Thanatos) is inextricably bound to the life instinct (Eros). War becomes a perverse, euphoric release: destruction as libidinal climax, bombs as “beautiful pyrotechnics,” killing as forbidden pleasure. Theuninck calls this the “dark id”—repressed sadism erupting in policy and spectacle.
• War neuroses and the return of the repressed: The painting explicitly echoes Freud’s Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses (1919) and Psycho-Analysis and the Establishment of the Peace. Fragmented, ghostly silhouettes and vast empty spaces depict soldiers and victims as dissociated selves—trauma manifesting as spectral remnants. The “wargasm” is not just individual thrill; it is collective neurosis: societies haunted by complicity, leaders driven by unconscious death drives.
• Visual and poetic language: Stark minimalist geometry in a restrained palette turns destruction into erotic climax. A Levinas-inspired poem accompanies the work (“He has gone away from himself, il commençait à tuer le tu”—he began to kill the you), merging Freud’s drives with ethical horror: the death drive erodes the face of the Other.

Acquired by the Peace Museum in Delft alongside Yperite (chemical-warfare horror), Wargasm remains a pacifist indictment: war is not geopolitics—it is psychopathology.Broader Freudian Threads Across Decades

• Utopia (2016): Theuninck directly quotes Freud in the work’s caption: “According to Freud, civilizations and societies come about due to an uneasy stalemate between the instincts of life and death (Eros and Thanatos).” He then critiques how modern “Marcusans” (a play on Marcuse?) co-opt these drives to impose a false utopia—precisely the “single thought” and control of consciences he has warned about since the 1990s.
• Schizofreudia and related works: The title alone signals engagement with Freudian (and post-Freudian) ideas of splitting, identity fragmentation, and the unconscious. His oeuvre repeatedly probes the “return of the repressed” in politics—reverse blaming, character assassination, and the psychological warfare that turns the dissenter into the “suspect.”
• 2025–2026 cycle (The Suspect, Victim Blaming, Character Assassination): Freud’s framework illuminates the psychological machinery of soft totalitarianism. Reverse blaming is not mere propaganda; it is a Freudian operation—projecting the system’s aggression onto the victim, forcing internalization of guilt, and triggering the very neuroses and isolation Arendt described. “No-touch torture” and algorithmic preemption become modern expressions of the death drive operating at scale.

Why Freud Complements ArendtTheuninck pairs the two thinkers explicitly in his statements and bios. Arendt shows how isolation prepares totalitarianism; Freud reveals why—the id’s aggression, the pleasure in domination, the eroticization of violence (“wargasm” as the affective fuel of the “blind pursuit of single thought”). Together they explain the 21st-century drift: DSA enforcement, trusted flaggers, and AI curation do not just censor—they exploit unconscious drives while producing collective dissociation.In short, Freud gave Theuninck the vocabulary and the lens for the eroticized, unconscious roots of power. From the early poetry and Wargasm (2001) through Utopia (2016) to the 2026 painting The Suspect, Freud remains the poet-painter’s tool for dissecting the suspect’s inner world: not as moral failing, but as the inevitable outcome of a civilization that has lost its uneasy truce with Thanatos. Theuninck does not celebrate the drives—he exposes them so we may refuse their political “orgasm.” That refusal, for him, is the only path back to reality and to one another.

Wargasm, 2001