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.
The late and distinguished art historian Erich H. Gombrich was no stranger to psychoanalysis. In 1953 he presented to the British Psychoanalytical Society the Ernest Jones lecture, “Psychoanalysis and the History of Art,” in which the psychoanalytic idea of regression was first applied to the understanding of art. In 1966 he published in the magazine Encounter an article titled “Freud's Aesthetics,” in which he explained Freud's disdain for modern art. Gombrich found an answer to the question of why Freud saw himself as the patron saint of surrealism and at the same time was unsympathetic to surrealist works. The regression that Freud would tolerate in a work of art has to be under the control of the ego. Surrealist regression was judged by Freud as having gone too far and therefore being insufficiently under the ego's control.
In this posthumously published book, Gombrich considers the problem of regression at greater length and in greater depth. Already in the Jones Lecture he noted that “impressionism succeeded in excluding literary association and in confining the give and take to the reading of the scrambled colour-patches. But in return for this effort of shared activity, it yields a wonderful premium of regressive pleasure. For the first time in several centuries the public were allowed to see real splashes of loud, bright, luminous colours which had been banned as too crude and primitive by Academic convention” (Gombrich 1953, p. 41). By “literary association” Gombrich means the adding of a biblical or mythological context to landscapes, as if landscape itself was not enough of a topic.
The brief analysis of impressionism is remarkable for two reasons. It applies the psychoanalytic concept of regression to works of art and