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The interface between art and psychoanalysis has in recent years become increasingly an object of systematic scrutiny. This methodologic scrutiny is bound to benefit both fields of scholarship, to the extent that it sharpens conceptual thinking and enhances the capacity
of scholars to assess their respective roles in the interdisciplinary study. Thus we have had such recent volumes as F. L. Kuhn's contribution to the psychoanalytic theory of art, P. J. Mahony's study of Freud's literary style, M. Skura's critical review of the applications of psychoanalysis to literature and, in this new work, a review of some of the fundamental questions in the area of so-called "applied" analysis as it relates to the arts in general and the plastic arts in particular.
Dr. Spitz has sought here to define systematically the various ways in which both analysts and estheticians have attempted to use psychoanalytic ideas to enlarge our grasp of the artistic enterprise. She distinguishes three basic approaches—each more or less associated with an aspect of evolving psychoanalytic theory. Freud's Leonardo essay serves appropriately as the prototype of the pathographic method, in which the emphasis has been on demonstration of the connections between the artist's work and the unconscious conflicts that, presumably, determined it. In this mode the work of art is treated as equivalent to the symptom or the dream, and biographical data are used in a manner analogous to the analysand's associations, with the author interpretively connecting unconscious configurations.
The second approach Spitz identifies is that in which the work of art itself becomes the focus of study. Here the artifact is treated as autonomous, and the interpreter seeks to explicate the role of defensive and integrative factors, largely through the study of the nuances of form and style. This mode of approach is congruent with, and largely an expression of, ego psychology, as well as being consistent (with regard to