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It is easy to suppose that psychoanalysis must have something special to add to the mystery of creativity and to the psychology of art in particular. At least a fairly sizable literature has grown up on this whole subject. Not only did Freud make more than one stab in this direction, but others, both within psychoanalysis and art history, have taken up his lead. Even if this endeavor were to turn out to be a wholly mistaken one, the Freudian revolution in the history of ideas has already taken place. It is not just that surrealists in the 1920s had some contact with Freud, but someone like Jackson Pollock actually underwent psychotherapeutic treatment. There is a collection of his drawings that he gave to one of his therapists, and it is natural to think of psychoanalytic theory in order to help explain what that part of his work adds up to.1 So, like it or not, by now the ties between psychoanalysis and art are a secure aspect of intellectual history.
It is not immediately obvious what is meant by psychoanalysis, although defining that term may be easier than coming up with something satisfactory about either creativity or art. Psychoanalysis might seem identical to what Freud himself wrote. At least while he was alive Freud was insistent that he alone had the right to decide between that which properly qualified as psychoanalytic and what he regarded as work merely masquerading as part of his discipline. But even if we were to make psychoanalysis coterminous with Freud's texts, the problem we would confront would not be an easy one.
For although Freud created a coherent and unified system of thought, just as Karl Marx did, the body of Freud's writings is necessarily subject to interpretation. For not everything Freud wrote has the same professional standing. For example, should a letter Freud wrote be treated with the same amount of weight as a sentence from one of his most scientific-sounding treatises? It is tempting to think that a writer reveals himself most