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In recent years, particularly in America, Freud's incidental remarks and occasional essays concerning art or a specific artist have provided his students and followers with a new viewpoint from which art and relevant problems could be examined. Most, if not all, critics seem to agree that the Freudian interpretation of the nature of art and the relation of the artist to his spectator supposes that art as such is a negative experience, perhaps even symptomatic of disease. But the literature purporting to examine Freud's view of art has been largely confined to a discussion of “the findings of psychoanalysis,” more method than philosophy, rather than to Freud's more general philosophic concerns pertinent to the subject within which context his understanding of art may invite, perhaps indeed require, other conclusions. To this end we propose to explore briefly what Freud's philosophic assumptions in fact were and, more particularly, how they are related to his view of art.
To assume that Freud discovered in art simply negativity and only the diseased condition of the creator and spectator would be to overstate the case, and modifications which seem to contradict this should be noted.
There is no doubt that Freud enjoyed literature and the arts. As Lionel Trilling points out: “Freud is neither insensitive to art—on the contrary—nor does he even intend to speak of it with contempt; indeed, he speaks of it with real tenderness and counts it one of the true charms of the good life.”1 Several critics discern that Freud always retained a deep feeling for the qualities of the “classical” style.2 Freud himself admitted, however, that he did not qualify as an expert upon questions of style, and that content rather than technique appealed to him in artistic representation.3