Introduction: Paradigm Shifts in Twentieth-Century Art and Critical Theory

This paper introduces “Psychoanalysis and Art at the Millennium,” a theme issue of Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought featuring a target article by Donald Kuspit and seven peer commentaries. The purpose is to redefine and revitalize psychoanalysis in Postmodern art and critical theory. Psychoanalysis and Modernist aesthetics emerged in the same Zeitgeist and shared a fascination with unconscious expression and the mysteries of creative rejuvenation. As Freud's writing was disseminated, he influenced Modernist art directly, beginning in force with Surrealist dream imagery (disinhibited desire, convulsive beauty, and black humor; primitive symbolization, condensation, and displacement). Psychoanalysis persisted as a powerful presence through Abstract Expressionism (mythopoeic creativity, the collective unconscious, and transcendental aesthetic value). With the advent of Postmodernism in the 1960s,

psychoanalysis was superseded by a hybrid poststructuralism whose main currents are deconstruction, semiotics, linguistics, and sociopolitical philosophy (Derrida, Barthes, Foucault, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Jameson, and Lacan). Postmodern art criticism, epitomized by the journal October, decenters and jettisons creative unconscious expression in favor of a sprawling intertextual chain. Much Postmodern art, in turn, recycles impersonal, historical, and commercial imagery with an indecipherable mock seriousness. This introduction critiques the underlying paradigm shift in twentieth-century aesthetics through diverse theoretical and empirical psychological frameworks.