You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
ART AND PSYCHOANALYSIS, edited by William Phillips. New York: Criterion Books, 1957, xxiv + 552 pages, $8.50.
A series of articles, gathered from various publications, upon the relationships between art and psychoanalysis, most of them by psychoanalysts, others by analytically oriented psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists, and a number by novelists and critics. Among the authors represented are Freud, Jones, Greenacre, Fromm, Ernst Kris, Róheim, Thomas Mann, Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson. The contributions fall into three general categories: studies of single works of art or creative artists, theoretical essays, and literary pieces. In his Introduction, William Phillips, who is co-editor of Partisan Review, suggests the enormous complexity of the relationship between art and neurosis, designating as the "modern experience … the unique combination of neurotic experience with some apparently objective or plausible view of the world, such as we find in writers like Kafka or Eliot …" He says further, "Our idea of art embraces in addition a control of the medium, a profound and arresting sense of the world, and it is conceivable that this power, though mainly intellectual, is enhanced by a disposition, which we would call neurotic, to reject conventional attitudes."
BEYOND LAUGHTER, by Martin Grotjahn. New York, Toronto, London: The Blakiston Division, McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1957, ix + 285 pages, $6.00.
The author expands the thesis that "The analytic study of laughter is a study of creative communication between the unconscious and the conscious, leading to the experience of happiness in fulfilling one's potentialities." On the basis of Freud's original findings, he describes the unconscious factors in wit, humor, the humorist as a personality type, the developmental aspects of laughter and humor, and the relationship of the comic to artistic creativity. Laughter in its creative meaning illustrates "our need for free and episodic regress