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May 21, 1963. PSYCHOANALYTIC CONTRIBUTIONS TO AESTHETICS. Robert Waelder, Ph.D.
In his Freud Anniversary Lecture, Dr. Waelder comments that Freud never approached the subject of æsthetics systematically but limited himself to occasional statements on the subject of beauty and art. Aesthetics deals not with the beauty of nature or of natural objects but with the subject's response to artistic creations, including patterns in space, color schemes, etc. The pleasure is at a deep, preverbal, almost physiological level, involving not simply discharge of tension but a peculiar sequence of rising and falling tension such as that described by Freud in The Economic Problem of Masochism.
Freud's writings contain three major contributions to the psychoanalytic understanding of beauty in art. The first of these, an id and dynamic formulation, is in the paper, Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning. There he describes the artist as a man who turns from reality because of difficulty in the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction. He returns to reality from fantasy by creating truths of a new kind which men value because they fill their fantasy needs. The artist expresses for them their dissatisfaction in the replacement of the pleasure principle by the reality principle.
Dr. Waelder emphasized the partial desexualization involved in the artistic creation. Although a response to the demands of censorship, this is also a narcissistic requirement that the wish-fulfilling aspects not be too apparent and create a sense of shame and naïve gullibility. Perhaps one can measure artistic sophistication by the length of the detour sustained in the process of tension and discharge.
Freud's second contribution, an ego and economic formulation, occurs in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. The pleasure in jokes is attributed to the sudden breakthrough of sexual and aggressive drives with a saving in the energy needed for repression. This is the ego aspect of