The Future of an Illusion, A Different Perspective: A Review of Necessary Illusion: Art as “Witness”: Resonance and Attunement to Forms and Feelings by Gilbert Rose. Madison, CT:  International Universities Press, 1999,  148 pp.

AT A TIME when the cruel persistence of destructiveness in human life is all too evident, we can benefit from being reminded of what an essential role the arts play as an ever-available resource for shoring up our emotional strength. This is the third volume in a trilogy, following The Power of Form and Trauma and Mastery, and it is remarkable how much the author is able to say in little more then a hundred pages. This is a fascinating small book, chock full of ideas. Rose makes a “fresh attempt to relate art and affect” (p. 60), and he believes that the study of artistic process can contribute to the understanding of affect and emotional development.

Rose's main focus is on “exploring the emotional resonances to art with one eye on contemporary affect theory and the other on a nonreductionistic psychology of art” (p. x). He argues convincingly for an amplification of the psychoanalytic focus on the dynamic unconscious by adding a “fuller appreciation of the sensuous surfaces of experiences.”