You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In Necessary Illusion: Art as Witness, Gilbert J. Rose quotes Freud on his experience of Michelangelo's Moses: “Some rationalistic turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected” (p. 90). With this, his third and most comprehensive work on the subject, Rose offers an “Aesthetics” that goes far toward answering Freud's question about the mysterious power of art.
Taking a psychoanalytic approach, Rose differs from writers on aesthetics who begin with works of art that have been considered great for a very long time and try to tease out their essential features. For example, in his Poetics, Aristotle noted that one feature of Greek tragedy is “unity of time.” By the 20th century we find Joyce's Ulysses admired in part for its all-in-one-day narrative, but Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, equally admired, treats time in a radically different way. Artists find new ways to be “great,” and over the centuries works of art enter and leave the canon with surprising regularity. To build an aesthetic theory on a study of “great” works is to build on shifting sand.
Instead Rose begins his study of art with human psychology, analyzing what it is we yearn for and are delighted with in works of art. By a well-reasoned and nicely documented argument, Rose demonstrates that what we seek in the experience of art, as with a psychoanalytic “object,” is the “holding environment” described by Winnicott or the empathic selfobject of Kohut. In the work of art we find that object in a new and stable form. Unconsciously we are drawn to experience through art a state of symbiosis with a “holding, responsive presence,” the symbolic equivalent of an empathic caregiver who has never been experienced before or who has been lost. Just as we hold on to the lost object by internalization,