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It is art that MAKES life, MAKES interest, MAKES importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.
Many years ago I tried to prove that eidetics played a decisive rôle in the genesis of the obsessional symptom. Several analyses of patients with similar symptoms showed that they all had a special faculty of seeing before them, in concrete images, that which they were afraid of. In contrast with patients suffering from compulsion neurosis they are tormented by images, not by thoughts.
The patient reported on in that paper (2) was haunted by images of dangerous objects — razor, knife — moving towards him at different speed and angles. Already then it occurred to me how closely those eidetic images resembled abstract art. Many years later I saw at an exhibition of non-figurative art a sculpture (“objet composé”), called “piercing object”, which an art critic described as “a lump of plaster with baked-in hatpins and razors”.
“One man's vision, says Hanns Sachs (3), may be another man's hallucination.”
The idea that obsessions can be regarded as only partly successful efforts at artistic activity was confirmed through observation of a patient who during analysis developed his artistic talent.