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Throughout most of the history of the relation between psychoanalysis and the arts, the arts have been the borrowers — people have used psychoanalysis to understand the arts. Now, I think, things are beginning to turn around. Some of the things we have learned by applying psychoanalysis to the arts can be transferred back to psychoanalytic psychology and psychoanalytic therapy. To illustrate this, I am going to start in an odd place — Freud's attitude toward physics; but I think this has something to teach us about Freud's — and our — attitude to the arts. Freud's ideas about the arts go hand in hand with his ideas about science and the science of psychoanalysis.
In science, Freud had one great master, the man on whom he patterned his scientific aspirations. This was the physiologist Ernst Brücke, whom he called “the greatest authority I ever met.” Brücke, in turn, had his master, Hermann von Helmholtz. Under Helmholtz's influence, Brücke had taken an oath to explain bodily processes by “no other forces than the common physical-chemical ones,” “by means of the physical-mathematical method or … new forces equal in dignity to the chemical-physical forces inherent in matter, reducible to the force of attraction and repulsion” (Jones, 1953-1957, Vol. I, pp. 39, 41).
When Freud turned to psychology, he modeled his work on this physicalistic physiology of Brücke and the school of Helmholtz.