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This volume is made up of a series of essays published by the author during the past 25 years. He felt that studies in art would facilitate contributions to psychoanalytic psychology, but believes the time is not yet right for a comprehensive integrated text on the psychoanalytic psychology of art itself. He has therefore re-written only the introductory essay, and has added only references from the recent literature to the other papers.
The text begins with a discussion of approaches to art, and the author is rightly cautious of the use of isolated Freudian fragments, stressing the continuous attempts to unify detailed observations, and the need for constant re-formulation. This chapter is a good survey not only of these purposes of the text, but of specialized attitudes towards psychoanalysis itself. Day dreams and fiction, aesthetic illusion, magic, communication, identification and creation and re-creation are considered.
The author next undertakes a discussion of the image of the artist, which is really a study of the media of function of biographers. This is an intriguing chapter since it demonstrates the role of tradition and the lack of reality in many of the ancient biographical productions. These roles are traced on through to recent times, and conclude with the notion that the freedom of the individual is to some extent related to the problem of enacted biography where some people live “only for diary or obituary” purposes. This notion is intriguing and provocative indeed.
The second part of the book is devoted to the art of the insane, and after a brief discussion of spontaneous creations by psychotics, the author presents as an added appendix to the original article the case of a psychotic artist of the Middle Ages. This case history is clinically interesting and permits the author to compare the relationships of culture and personality. He also has a chapter on a psychotic sculptor of the 18th Century, and then another on the “Creative Spell” of a schizop