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This book is an attempt to apply psychoanalytic knowledge to an understanding of aesthetic form. It is the first such attempt in a book-length format undertaken by a clinical psychoanalyst and, as such, is to be commended as much for the courage it displays as for the stimulation of its ideas. Gilbert Rose is fully aware of the difficulty of the task he has set himself. The book is not a definitive study but a beginning approach, and a prompting toward further work in the area of psychoanalytic aesthetics.
Nor is the book merely confined to aesthetic theory. It also offers a number of cogent formulations on the psychology of the creative process, illustrative clinical vignettes, and applications of the central concepts to particular works of arts, such as Samuel Beckett's Molloy, Edvard Munch's The Cry, and William Faulkner's Light in August. Although the style of the book is elusive and evocative rather than precise, readers who take the trouble will find much to enrich their understanding of art in general and to illuminate the meaning of particular works.
In considering the basic assumptions about art in this book, the reader becomes aware that they are very much a product of our own time. The modern view of reality as relativistic and shifting would not have been acceptable to our forefathers, just as the psychoanalytic interest in early object and self-representations, early mother-child ties, and early developmental considerations would have been foreign to the first generation of psychoanalysts, who found the Oedipus complex and its vicissitudes capable of great explanatory power in understanding a work of art.
But reality now tends to be seen as a state of flux, with nodal states of shifting stability. So, too, has the scene of psychological interest shifted to the infant's experience in forming a self and concerns with separation, fusion, and individuation. In fact, it is Rose's contribution to emphasize that in order to appreciate the formal qualities