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Though short in length, this book is by no means short of ideas. It consists of two essays, in the second of which Professor Waelder makes some perceptive comments about the artist's dilemma in our ‘alloplastic’ civilization in which ‘initiative and efficiency’ are prized more highly than ‘ripeness and wisdom’.
It is, however, the first essay, ‘Aspects of aesthetic response’, which is of particular interest to analysts. Here Professor Waelder makes the stimulating attempt to expand the psychoanalytic theory of aesthetics by suggesting that beauty involves the activation and the satisfaction not only of one but of all the three psychic institutions contained in the Freudian schema of the psyche.
Waelder accepts Freud's theory that art is concerned with the satisfaction of unconscious phantasies, but then proposes that this is only one aspect, the Id aspect, of the aesthetic function. He believes that our understanding of man's reaction to beauty will be increased if we recognize that ego and superego aspects are also involved in the aesthetic experience. The ego aspect, he suggests, is expressed in the achievement of ‘unity in complexity, of a rhythm between richness and order’ (p. 55) and in an elegance which depends on precision, brevity and on a general economy of means. Waelder considers that such a theoretical amplification will help meet the justified criticism of the original Freudian theory, which, by concerning itself only with content and not with the quality of execution, had remained an inadequate tool in the study of aesthetics.
In the discussion of the third, the superego aspect, Waelder attributes to the superego qualities which could equally well refer to the Jungian concept of the self. Thus he describes as superego aspects of beauty such characteristics as the ‘victorious assertion of the ego's invulnerability’ (p. 60),‘the pleasure in the transcendence of reality’ (p. 62), the ‘spiritualization of nature’ (p. 64) and the ‘human ability to rise above s