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Rickman discusses in a speculative and general way (he himself calls the paper 'marginalia psychoanalytica') some basic problems of æsthetics.
Psychoanalysis has always attacked its problems from the point of view of conflict and polarity. For example, it never investigated the phenomenon of pleasure in any other way than in connection with its adversaries pain, anxiety and guilt. Similarly, says Rickman, problems of æsthetics cannot start with abstract questions about the essence of beauty. If one is to investigate the battles between creative and destructive impulses which form the basis of artistic creation it is also necessary to understand ugliness.
What is ugly? Etymology shows that the ugly means the frightful or the hateful (German: hässlich, Hass). The child does not consider the same things ugly that an adult does. Sexual repression can explain a great part of this change in the conception of ugliness. The sight of something which is incomplete, dismembered, or of a torso in which a part is missing, especially gives the impression of ugliness, not only because of castration fear, but also out of fear of one's own aggression, because the sight of injury awakens the impulse to carry the destruction a stage further. Deformities, defective growth, unfinished things and things which contain details which give the impression of a foreign body are also considered ugly. All these antipathies are very similar to sexual antipathies.
The internal objects of unconscious destructive impulses which are so often decisive for what is felt as ugly have still other functions in art: they are the