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Ernst Kris introduced the Panel by postulating two possible incentives for our present preoccupation with our theme, the scope of the contribution of psychoanalysis to the biography of the artist. As he put it: "The first concerns interdisciplinary communication; the second, intradisciplinary progress.
"The influence of psychoanalysis in the study of the arts, particularly in that somewhat amorphous area which we designate when we speak of 'literary criticism, ' has over the last decade taken an almost protean character. The influence of psychoanalysis is omnipresent, but the attitudes toward it are subject to broad fluctuations and naturally to the customary misunderstandings.
"Reverberating circuits of fashion and ambivalence seem to have become largely independent of the central areas in which analytic research and knowledge are making their slow advances. While these are in part phenomena on the fringe of science or scholarship, a dilemma of more essential nature reaches down to the central area: it concerns the true problem of interdisciplinary contact. How shall the literary expert, the historian or sociologist of the arts find his way to a full and adequate understanding of psychoanalysis, with its infinite and ever-growing complexity? How shall the psychoanalyst find the scholarly equipment to fit the approach of his science into the structure of those questions which are relevant in the field of the arts? What contingencies will arise from such contact? What shortcomings may we expect? In my own mind, the first difficulty, that of the student of literature, is of greater moment—the danger is that of simplification, of psychoanalysis as a cliché.
"The second question is that of intradisciplinary problems, problems