Discussion

THE SCOPE AND SWEEP OF PROFESSOR KUHN'S presentation are awesome. He moves from art and literature, to philosophy, to psychoanalysis, and back again, integrating as he goes, and he does so with a sure touch. He makes convincing use of his wide scholarship to establish, under the strictures of what is after all a very brief format, a vast hypothesis about the relationship of art to itself and to the person viewing or reading it.

The paper is a rescue effort. We must ruefully admit that art historians and students of literature have had some good reasons, at least until recently, not to take psychoanalysis seriously as a tool of investigation. We owe Professor Kuhns a debt of gratitude for contributing to making psychoanalysis a potentially productive member of the interpretive fields which, together, offer us a picture of the life of our culture and those which have gone before. While I do wish to begin, then, by thanking Professor Kuhns for his paper and for the opportunity to participate with him in this program, he deserves our greater appreciation for being able and willing to see beyond the received view of academia, no matter how justified it may have been in the past, and for making a new beginning, looking deeply into the crosscurrents of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and art.

Even if Professor Kuhns had not just accepted the received view, but had made his own judgment of the potential of psychoanalysis to contribute to the understanding of art, art history, and literature, he might very well have based this judgment on past efforts in this direction. If he had seen no farther than this, I think he would not have taken up the challenge which his paper represents. Too many psychoanalytic interpretations in the past were primarily a series of links, sometimes forced and often strained, between the the artist's work and the exigencies of the artist's life.

It is perhaps supportable to believe that one can look at a work of art, or read a piece of literature,