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Freud's certainty that in finding the laws of pathology he had at the same time discovered those of the human psyche remains valid today. However, the more the weight of the past diminishes, the more the individual acquires autonomy, becomes
capable of novelty and creation, and tends to escape these simple laws. Psychoanalysis has unfortunately remained reductionistic with respect to the arts. It is a serious fault of theorizing to confuse the paths of integration with the diverse regressions discovered in psychopathology. This confusion leads us to overlook one of the most important aspects of human psychology, its capacity to evolve. And if we understand anything of the essence of art, it is its integrative function. Luquet proposes a "metaprimary system." In this theory, the preconscious has two poles, one oriented toward the unconscious and the other toward consciousness and language. The first is the metaprimary system. It uses the mechanism of the primary process, organizes symbolic material, and may find expression for itself in language, in music, in pictorial art or in other functions which are more or less autonomous with respect to its own integration. The metaprimary preconscious is an essential part of the ego. Its mode of functioning, however, is centered on mentalization without being clearly conscious. It offers many diverse possibilities of expression and is intuitive, in contrast with the intellectual and verbal functioning of the ego. It is primary in art and love and in experiential rather than intellectual knowledge. The pictorial arts are to be understood at the level of the metaprimary preconscious. Freud wrote of sublimation in terms of the displacement of the instinctual aim. Luquet focuses on the question of what the displacement shifts to. His thesis is that it contributes to the organization of a complex function that involves several distinct underlying instinctual fantasies. Unless there is such a function on the way