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Temperament is simply a convenient term for explaining away what a man is. The temperament must be analysed. This can be done physiologically and psychologically by direct examination. It can also be done � and this has so far been my purpose in this essay � historically.

Evaluating Picasso’s personality and artwork through the medium of history, John Berger has written a captivating interpretation of Picasso as a naïve artist struggling to find his subjects. Defined by his origins in Spain and status as a foreigner in France, Picasso was a child genius who found Cubism but ultimately remained static as an artist, never reaching maturation. While at times slipping past the modern boundaries of interpretive license and into the realm of speculation, Berger’s theory of Picasso is nonetheless sharp and enlightening.

Freudian analysis, whatever else it may offer in other circumstances, is of no great help here, because it is concerned primarily with symbolism and the unconscious.

The Success and Failure of Picasso can be understood within the framework of its own historical context, one where Freud and Jung held in thrall the imaginations of intellectuals and pseudointellectuals alike, making psychoanalysis both a new technique in psychiatry and a sensational new hobby. Although Berger explicitly denies taking a psychoanalytic, or psychological, approach and defends his use of historical methodology, the evidence of Freud’s influence is evident in Berger's sexual digressions and his direct and indirect references to the anima, primitive, and archaic.