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This communication aims to show how a working alliance of psychoanalysis and art can be mutually fruitful. Movement is of central importance to both art and psyche. Drawing on this realization enables me, in my capacity as a psychoanalytic aesthetician, to propose a theory of (1) how aesthetic responsiveness takes place, and (2) sometimes has therapeutic efficacy.
In The Survival of Images , Louis Rose examines a small circle of art historians and psychoanalysts in the first half of the twentieth century who explored images of movement. This group of cultural scientists consisted, on the one hand, of Aby Warburg and his successors Fritz Saxl and E. H. Gombrich and, on the other, of Freud and his disciple Ernst Kris, himself trained as an art historian and the student of Emanuel Loewy.
Freud never referred to Warburg, and the latter opposed Freud's sexual theory. Yet, Rose argues, whether the link in question was between ancient culture and modern life or between the infant and the adult, “the object of cultural study common to the psychoanalyst and art historian [was] the image of movement” (22). And though the repository of images for art historians was the public archives, while for psychoanalysts it was the private stock of any individual's dreams, both “placed image-making at the center of their researches, exploring how visual pictures and scenes gained qualities of immediacy and living movement. According to both, those qualities of pictures and performances resulted from dramatic fragments of the past coming into renewed contact with the present” (26).
I would like to utilize Rose's research as a springboard to reflect on the temporary therapeutic miracles that music and art can sometimes accomplish with victims of neurological devastation. For example, listening to music, performing it, or just imagining it can restore motor ability, emotional range, and psychological identity for a period extending from moments to hours. This may be accompanied by a revival of