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This volume collects fourteen essays, written by the author over a period of more than twenty years, concerning the nature of art as elucidated by psycho-analytic methods, concepts, a nd theories. Except for the introductory essay which has been rewritten and considerably expanded, and a hitherto unpublished essay which is added to the third as an appendix, the essays are reproduced largely unchanged. They have, however, been provided with footnotes which give an orientation to the relevant literature of recent years, and to some extent interrelate the essays here collected. The choice of this form of publication unfortunately results in some redundancy and lack of cohesiveness.
Those familiar with the psycho-analytic literature—particularly with the trials and tribulations of the psycho-analytic investigator who wants to shed some light on the nature of art, the artist, the art product and the effect of art on the audience—will not fail to be impressed with this volume. The very persistence in one field of study—rare in the literature since Freud—is in itself striking. A sustained attempt to do more than decipher the latent meaning of the manifest art product and then to relate that meaning to the artist's life is—to say the least—still infrequent. The vigilance and sensitivity with which material is gathered, from such varied fields as ancient biography, aesthetics, art criticism, subjective accounts of artists' experiences, historical accounts of psychotic artists and their products, clinical observation of psychotic artists and their products, psycho-analytic observations, and others, have succeeded in culling material for future work and have provided hints for future investigators as to where and how such material may be found.
The merit of Dr. Kris's studies is thrown into relief when set against the background of the major trend of psycho-analytic studies of artists and their works. This major trend, which has become standardized in the decades since Fr