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Dr. Robert Waelder's 1963 Freud Anniversary Lecture continues the author's forty years of interest in art. It was in 1925 that his article, Schizophrenia and Creative Thinking, paved the way to his influential structural concepts of creativity.
Two avenues are selected for exploration in the present lecture: Aspects of Aesthetic Response, and The Situation of the Arts in the Contemporary World. The former is closer to the analytic tradition, appraising the experience of beauty with respect to each of the components of the personality. Thus, Dr. Waelder traces the precursors of the æsthetic response, in the genetically and structurally undifferentiated phase, to patterns of neurophysiological tension and discharge which underlie pleasing configurations of sensory stimuli. Here Freud's concepts of end-pleasure and forepleasure find application, as does the tendency of æsthetic taste to evolve from simple discharge satisfactions to more complicated detours in the course of maturation.
As Waelder proceeds to a more advanced layer of the personality, the id is depicted as the breeding ground of the artist's fantasies and the conventionally accepted illusions that provide escapes for the individual and the culture. To the critic who complains that the essential qualities of beauty and artistic accomplishment are not to be derived from fantasy and escapism alone, Dr. Waelder points out the implications of Freud's theories about the transformations of fantasy into art, the nature of formal beauty, and the analytically inaccessible form-giving activities of the artist himself. Nevertheless, he calls attention to the elements of æsthetic appeal that depend on the 'aura' of a work of art rather than on its form—its ability, for example, to conjure up feelings of nostalgia, or the setting in which it is seen, or our knowledge of the artist's worth. There is also to be considered that aspect of evolving taste that follows the detour from wish-fulfilment to boredom in its r