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Since Freud's pioneering effort in his Leonardo paper of 1910, psychoanalysts have tried in various ways to apply their methods and insights to the artifacts of culture, to the lives of some of those who have created them, and to the processes through which they have done so. Their labors have met with mixed responses from those who have traditionally regarded themselves as the guardians and interpreters of the cultural corpus—the art historians, critics, and social scientists—responses ranging from disdain and skepticism to guarded or sympathetic acceptance. Strikingly, in recent years these humanist scholars have demonstrated growing interest in the possibilities of intellectual exchange with psychoanalysts and of beneficial exploitation of psychoanalytic ideas.
Nowhere has such interest been expressed more enthusiastically, however, than in this essay by a philosopher of esthetics, which amounts to nothing less than a proposal for the total integration of psychoanalysis into the methods of cultural analysis. In Kuhns' view, every artistic product—he refers to them generically as "objects"—has both an individual and a social, an immediate and a historical dimension. Each is an "enactment," a cultural event that exists within a tradition—or, as he puts it, "culture is a tradition of enactments" (p. 53). Each such "enactment" is susceptible to interpretation along both psychological and historical lines, as both a private and a public event.
Kuhns founds his argument primarily on the classic Freudian