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In 1956 I was asked to give a lecture to a public audience at London's Friends' House on psychoanalysis and art, as part of the Freud centenary celebrations.1 Here I once more decided to make use of some of Susan's drawings (see Chapter 6) and, again, some of Blake's Illustrations to the Book of Job.
What is art? And what is genius in art? When I set out to prepare this lecture I intended to try to select out of writings on art, both by analysts and non-analysts, whatever might point the direction towards an answer to these questions. I read many books and technical papers on both sides. On the non-analysts' side, for instance, I read Berenson, Kenneth Clarke, William Empson, Gombrich, Susanne Langer, Maritain, André Malraux, and Herbert Read. On the analysts' side I read Freud, Ernest Jones, Ella Sharpe, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Balint, Fairbairn, Kris, Hanna Segal, Rycroft, and many others. I also read two who are not analysts but who are identified with the analytic approach — Ehrenzweig and Adrian Stokes. Of course I soon found what an enormous task of digestion I had set myself. Instead of my mind being full of ideas about what art is, it felt a complete blank, so that it seemed quite impossible to achieve any sifting of the various ideas presented by all these writers. Gradually, however, after many weeks, instead of fighting the blankness I became able to accept it. And then I found that certain ideas about what I had read began to emerge of their own accord.
The first one came from the non-analytic side, from Herbert