Freud and Modern Art: Object, Empathy, and Ideational Mimetics

Freud's twin accomplishments in aesthetics are found in his abiding contribution to critical theory and his profound influence on early twentieth-century artists. In his early training, Freud eagerly absorbed Charcot (who discerned hysteria in art historical depictions of demoniacally possessed women), Breuer (Freud's collaborator on Studies on Hysteria, conceptualized as repressed fantasies translated into the motor sphere), and Lipps (who developed an empathy theory for viewer attunement to art). Freud eventually linked hysteria and artistry through the comic's exaggerated pantomime each involves emotional discharge, expressive gesture, and cryptic symbolism. Thereafter, artists were thought to harness “ideational mimetics” for creativity, as did the viewer-analyst for the purposes of empathic interpretation. Freud's Studies on Hysteria, The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious disseminated to Modernist artists directly, beginning with the Surrealists (sexual—aggressive themes expressed via primitive symbolization, condensation, and displacement). After psychoanalysis and the art capital emigrated to America, they again enmeshed through the Abstract Expressionists (who were especially fascinated with Jung). Shortly thereafter, Postmodernism

emerged, a complex amalgam of poststructural philosophies uncongenial to psychoanalysis. Although mainstream American art historians trivialize Freud's legacy, the psychoanalysis of culture is alive and well and living in specialized journals (American Imago and Art Criticism), and other countries (such as Germany, Austria, and Argentina).