Transitions in Art and Psychoanalysis

As a student in a French lycée, I learned to write an explication de texte of the literature we read. Much later, I recognized the continuity between the process of explication de texte and the practice of psychoanalytic listening that I learned in my professional training. Explication de texte means coming to an understanding not only of the author's own psychology but also of the techniques that he or she uses to influence the reader's mind. Sigmund Freud's paper, “Creative Writers and Day-dreaming” (1908[1907]) offers just such a psychoanalytically informed explication de texte and his own words show that he is being disingenuous when he states that he does not understand how the creative writer (the Dichter) works. In clinical psychoanalysis, the mechanisms by which repulsive material—abstossendes—is made aesthetically acceptable are similar to the techniques that we encounter in art and literature.

A manifest theme in Freud's paper is the limited ability of analysts to comprehend the creative process. Yet, we find the essence of the psychoanalytic process precisely where Freud also finds the probable locus of the elusive creative process. To help make this point, let me quote at length from the final section of Freud's essay:

… the day-dreamer carefully conceals his phantasies from other people because he feels he has reasons for being ashamed of them. I should now add that even if he were to communicate them to us he could give us no pleasure by his disclosures. Such phantasies, when we learn them, repel us or at least leave us cold. But when a creative writer presents his plays to us or tells us what we are inclined to take to be his personal day-dreams, we experience a great pleasure, and one which probably arises from the confluence of many sources. How the writer accomplishes this is his innermost secret; the

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essential ars poetica lies in the technique of overcoming the feeling of repulsion in us which is undoubtedly connected with the barriers that rise b