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.
On May 21, 1963, Robert Waelder, Ph.D. presented a paper on psychoanalysis and art at the New York Academy of Medicine. By 1965, when I first met him, he was completing his book on psychoanalysis and art which was published in 1965. Waelder mentions that in only a single field of our civilization has the omnipotence of thoughts been retained, and that is in the field of art, an accomplishment stemming from human desires that produce, thanks to artistic illusion, something real: an activity to allay ungratified wishes. Art, a conventionally accepted reality that, thanks to illusion, symbols, and substitutes, is able to provoke real emotions—sometimes unacceptable and sometimes hidden to conscious awareness. Art is the production of elegance by an economy of means constituting the ego's aspect of beauty—the Freudian theory of “incentive bonus” of “formal beauty” which lies in the economy of means (Freud, 1927; Turco, 2003b, 2005). Waelder also notes that science claims that beauty is a safe guide in search of the truth. Highly successful rules, in quantum physics for instance, are highly beautiful, and ugly rules lead to restricted use, thus the need for physical theory to be beautiful, as an overriding law of nature—a matter of faith rather than logic (Dirac, 1954). He notes that Freud also discussed a superego aspect of art stemming from humor—the ability to step back and look at one's self from an imaginary observation point (Freud, 1927). Waelder also expands his discussion to such very different men as Goethe and Thomas Jefferson focusing on the same artistic and scientific sphere (Waelder, 1965). He presents us with a lengthy discussion of surrealism and expressionism as a visual expression of thoughts and fantasies. Ultimately Waelder writes: “Thus, there does not seem to be any fundamental difference between the arts and other creative pursuits in the relative role of the Unconscious that provides the motifs and of the ego that integrates them into reality” (p