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Since the discovery of psychoanalysis much has been written on the role of free association or free expression in art. Investigations along psychoanalytic lines now reveal that this mental activity is one of the essential processes by which the artist and scientist creates. By enabling the creative mind to roam the mental highways and byways unhampered by conscious restrictions, free association provides it with a flow of ideas and impressions, relationships and patterns, and a world of imagery unattainable by merely intellectually directed efforts alone.
This principal, frequently referred to as automatism in the literature of art criticism, has come to be so thoroughly accepted and integrated in the general philosophy of much of our contemporary art that it seems to have dwarfed into insignificance the other aspects of creativity. We hear much of free art, automatic art, the stream of consciousness, unloosening the emotions, pouring out the soul, and expressing inner feelings. So much so, that the impression is created that organization, design, sustained composition, mature control of medium, the element of communication, or any of the other synonomous expressions by which the term “form” is referred to, is of considerably less importance for the artist, the spectator, or the work of art itself.
When we investigate the historical background of this