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The analyst has usually, and with good reason, been diffident in his approach to aesthetics. Freud's well-known admonitory statements need scarcely be repeated.2 While common roots of art and neurosis have inevitably provided a subject of interest, most analysts have recognized that the fundamentals of artistic technique, talent, creativity and appreciation are not mere derivatives of defenses against neuroses. Nor does the analytic mode of investigation, free association, permit more than a partial survey of the artist's activities and productions. The analyst does not qualify as an art critic.
Daniel E. Schneider, in The Psychoanalyst and the Artist, now reprinted in a second edition, does assume the role of an art critic and disputes Freud's terse judgment that "Psychoanalysis can do nothing towards elucidating the nature of the artistic gift, nor can it explain the means by which the artist works—artistic technique" (5). No new observations on talent or technique are made available by this author, nor is even the usual method of analytic investigation adopted. A loose collection of biographical material and subjective interpretations of art productions is made the basis of a new "psychoanalytic" aesthetics which attempts to resolve all previous difficulties by promulgating a remarkable series of definitions.
These include the following propositions: (1) "the artistic gift and artistic technique are the capacity to achieve partial forms of intuitive and implicit analytic interpretation in representative action"—i.e., the artist is an inintuitive analyst endowed with the power to translate dreams into a form intelligible and aesthetically appealing to the universal consciousness of man. (2)