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The early interest of psychoanalysis in artistic creation has developed incomparably more in the direction of the study of literature than of figurative art, with music occupying even a less favorable position. There must be difficulties inherent in the topic itself since we can hardly surmise that among all the artists, writers were the only ones to consult psychoanalysts and to supply them with material for study. Moreover, there are no less works of figurative art in the world than there are works of poets, playwrights and novelists, and the biographies of painters are no less known than those of writers. Yet to my knowledge there are no psychoanalytic studies of painters or of single works with the two exceptions of Freud's study on Leonardo da Vinci and Abraham's on Giovanni Segantini.
The difficulties inherent in the topic itself seem to be manifold, and I wish to enumerate some of them. It seems at first that the word material is more accessible to the general understanding than the figurative one; one wonders whether this is not tied up with the more general faculty to use speech as a medium of expression as compared to the medium of painting or for that matter of music. Another important point of difference lies probably in the fact that in figurative art there is—or at least there seems to be—a much wider distance between the original ideas and emotions on the one hand and their final artistic expression on the other. We think more in words than in images so that the verbal material seems to offer a more direct and adequate expression.
Another difference seems to me much more subtle and subject to doubt. If we put aside some special currents of modern art, then what remains will be a large part of figurative art more or less concerned with the representation of the so-called objective reality (whatever this may mean from the philosophical point of view). On the other hand the verbal art even if it is of a descriptive nature