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“Ihr Anblick gibt den Engeln Stärcke Wenn keiner sie ergrüden mag….”
In the course of explaining human activity and feeling, psychoanalysis has inevitably sought to explain the production and enjoyment of art. Philosophy, committed to making explicit what is implicit in certain intuitively known but poorly defined abstraction (5) has for centuries probed the nature of Beauty. But though esthetics and the psychoanalysis of art use similar terms and examples, and thus appear to share a common puzzle, their solutions seem to have nothing whatever in common. This is a paradox we cannot afford. For if psychoanalysis has the most adequate answers to questions about our feelings, in the case of esthetics philosophy is the only repository of the questions. We risk irrelevance when we apply the new answers to the old questions if we do not first determine where the two investigations fit into each other. If we are interested in esthetics, we must promote a conversation between philosophy and psychoanalysis.
The psychoanalyst typically begins with a study of the individual artist and the features of his work. The philosopher generally begins with the description of beauty and may work back to its particular sources. Psychoanalysts are there-fore