Aesthetic models of the psyche

Aesthetics were defined by Freud as the science that “investigates the conditions under which things are felt as beautiful” (1930, p. 82). Freud also wrote that “psychoanalysis unfortunately has scarcely anything to say about beauty” (p. 83). Nevertheless, the importance of art and literature for psychoanalysts has somehow been an established fact since psychoanalysis was discovered by its founder, an emblematic indicator of its significance being the role played by the ancient tragedy Oedipus rex by Sophocles in Freud’s self-analysis. Psychoanalytic investigation of art and aesthetics was inaugurated by Freud himself, for instance in his seminal works on Leonardo and Moses of Michelangelo. It comprises a trajectory from the artist to creativity, to the work of art and to the nature of experience it may constitute for the viewer. But why is art and aesthetic experience of special interest for psychoanalysts? “I would turn to art and literature to learn psychoanalysis,” writes Kohon (1999, p. 10).

Maybe pondering the nature of aesthetics could help us approach the above. If aesthetic forms, rhythms, movements are conditions under which things are felt (aesthetics coming from the Greek work αίσθησις, which means sensation), this can be a road to the internal world; from there one could imagine affinities with psychoanalysis. “In the art work, as well as in psychoanalytic therapy, in the session … attention will be given to the plasticity of forms and words, that is their capacity for deformation, their displacement, their polysemy” (Coblence & Dechaud-Ferbus, 2003, p. 407, my translation).

In addition, contact with the work of art or literature entails for the viewer or reader psychic work – as, apart from the pleasure the aesthetic experience gives to the viewer, the work of art somehow imposes, through the viewer’s empathy with the aesthetic forms or with the artist as an imagined figure, pity and fear on the audience; it was Aristotle that identified this feature of