You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Not long before he died last year, the painter, Robert Mother-well, said: “The game is not what things look like. The game is organizing states of feeling, [which] become questions of light, color, solidity, airiness, lyricism, whatever.”
Almost 100 years earlier, Paul Gauguin (1895) had written: “[I] arrang[e] lines and colors … that represent nothing absolutely real…; but they compel us to reflect… simply by means of the mysterious affinities that exist between our brain and those arrangements of colors and lines.”
What can psychoanalysis say, not tell, to help clarify the “mysterious affinities” that exist between “arrangements of colors and lines” — or acoustic tones — in a work of art, and the “states of feeling,” the emotional force, that art generates? How do external perceptual stimuli in the artwork impinge on the brain and become transmuted into internal affective meanings in the mind?
Psychoanalytic affect theory is still struggling to disentangle itself from early Freudian instinctual energy (Sandler, 1987). Despite recent progress in neuroscience, we still have no key to translate the language of neurophysiology into that of psychology (Reiser, 1984). How do we know what we know or feel? How talk about it? We are up against epistemology without a handle. Let us resort to homology and analogy to try to bridge, however clumsily, different conceptual realms.
The structure of art is similar to the structure of emotions. The emotionally expressive composition of art and the emotional responsiveness of a recipient are homologous structures. Tension