Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

DISCUSSION: Dr. Albert Rosner discussed the area of adaptation, the vicissitudes of style, and the vicissitudes of the organizing function. In pathological states,

regressive alterations in the organizing function, especially in respect to its control of regression, may confer upon style certain potentials for regressive adaptation. Dr. Bruce Ruddick stated that artistic style is often associated with an art that is disruptive, demonic, revolutionary, and shocking. Such profound æsthetic sensibility, accompanied by a compulsive organized drive, seemed to him to be a psychic condition not easily circumscribed by the term 'regression in the service of the ego'. Dr. Ruddick treasured 'the gypsy phrase'; e.g., he was not so needful as Pater, whom Dr. Rosen quoted, of punctilious observation of the demands of the medium. Style involves the new and unexpected rather than Pater's sacred punctiliousness. Dr. Bernard Brodsky felt that a more specific ego function involved in style could be distinguished; namely, the expressive function. He would redefine style as the manner in which content is expressed. People, especially creative ones, are under an inner pressure to express the awareness they have of the world. For the artist there is an imperative need to give material being in the work of art to what excites him in the universe. The organizing functions of the ego are behind every form of organized human activity as well as creative activity. Although form may be appropriate to content as dictated by the organizing function, the tout ensemble of form content is more specifically characterized by the new mode of expression which is the creative artist's response to his own particular hypersensitivity to the inner and outer worlds.

Dr. Martin Stein limited his discussion to Dr. Rosen's choice of method in his study of literary style. Neither dictionaries nor critics, such as Pater, can offer us a psychoanalytically useful definition of style. He advocated an