Did Freud Really Advocate a “Hands-Off” Policy Toward Artistic Creativity?

Every student of Freud's writings is familiar with statements like the following: “Psychoanalysis can do nothing toward elucidating the nature of the artistic gift, nor can it explain the means by which the artist works”; “Whence comes the artist's ability to create is not the question of psychology.” The most stringent statement on this topic is contained in Freud's essay on Dostoievski, published in 1928: “Unfortunately, psychoanalysis must lay down its arms before the problem of the artist.” That statement is quoted with glee by poetry and literary magazines; it seems to them proof positive that psychoanalysis has “no business” to interfere with the artist's God-given mysterious powers.

In a previous paper, published in this journal, I pointed out the rather amazing fact that Freud's last statement on artistic productivity, published two years after his utterance in the Dostoievski study, is constantly and gratuitously overlooked. In Civilization and Its Discontents, published in 1930, we read:

Another technique of fighting mental pain uses shifts of libido which our psychic apparatus permits, and which renders its functions so much more elastic. The problem to be solved, consists in shifting aims of drives in such a way that these cannot be hit by the outerworld. The sublimation of drives lends its help in that endeavor. One achieves the most if one is capable of sufficiently increasing the pleasure stemming from psychic and intellectual work. In this case, Fate can harm that person but little. Contentment of that type, like the pleasure of the artist in creation, in the personification of his phantasies, or that of the scientist in the solution of problems and

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finding of the truth, carry with them a specific quality which—one day—we shall surely he capable of characterizing metapsychologically. (1)

This statement seems to me indicative that nine years before his death Freud relinquished his pessimism (at least temporarily) as to the role psychoanalysis can play