The Problem of Art in Freud's Writings

With the passing of Sigmund Freud, it becomes our task carefully to examine the great wealth which he has left and faithfully and productively to cultivate it. But it is impossible for us to perform this part of our work of mourning without a feeling of profound admiration for the multifarious character of his extraordinary creative capacities. No aspect of the human mind and its activities has been left untouched; and even if only once the searchlight of his genius has been thrown in passing, its powerful beam has always been directed upon the most essential points of the field in question. Depth and enlightenment are to be found in every sentence.

The ensuing pages are a work of compilation such as falls to a follower and part contemporary of Freud. A full and complete presentation of his psychoanalytic observations on art and artists is not to be found as such in Freud's works. In examining his papers from the standpoint of the enlightenment they contain regarding the problems of art and the artist, one encounters two sources which stand in a complemental relationship to each other. One source is a number of different papers on the theory of the neuroses, and in introductory presentations of psychoanalysis in which are to be found scattered remarks and observations about art and artists. The disclosures, the investigations and parallels which to a certain extent are only marginal remarks in these papers devoted to other themes are, as far as the theoretical problem of the psychology of art is concerned, of more value and profit than those deriving from the other, direct sources of information, papers in which artists and works of art are submitted to analysis. Among these are: Delusion and Dream based on Jensen's Gradiva, Leonardo da Vinci: A Psychosexual Study of an Infantile Reminiscence, The Moses of Michelangelo, A Childhood Recollection from Dichtung und Wahrheit. The essential general value of these