Psycho-Analysis and the History of Art32

When I was honoured by the invitation to give this year's Ernest Jones Lecture I felt, of course, the usual mixture of trepidation and pride; trepidation at the thought of having to address an audience of specialists in a field where I am only a trespasser—an audience, moreover, accustomed to listen with the third ear; pride in being allowed thus to pay a public tribute to a great scientist and scholar. I was particularly glad that this should happen in a year in which Ernest Jones has yet again added to the debt of gratitude we owe him by turning historian and biographer in his exciting Life of Sigmund Freud. But what I did not know when I accepted, and what may perhaps also be new to you and to him, is that I would find in Ernest Jones also a dangerous rival in my own proper field—the history of art. I once tried to tell the whole story of art in a mere 450 pages. Imagine my mortification when I found that Ernest Jones had performed the same feat in exactly half a page, and that, perhaps, unconsciously! I must read this rival product to you, because I shall have to come back to it more than once in the course of this lecture. It occurs in Ernest Jones' classic paper on 'The Theory of Symbolism', 1 very near the beginning:

If the word "symbolism" is taken in its widest sense" – he writes – "the subject is seen to comprise almost the whole development of civilization. For what is this other than a never-ending series of evolutionary substitutions, a ceaseless replacement of one idea, interest, capacity or tendency by another? The progress of the human mind, when considered genetically, is seen to consist, not—as is commonly thought—merely of a number of accretions, added from without, but of the following two processes: on the one hand the extension or transference of interest and understanding from earlier, simpler, and more primitive ideas etc., to more difficult and complex ones, which in a certain sense are continuations of and symbolize the former; and