The Problem of form in the Psychoanalytic Theory of Art

What attracted my interest to this topic is the seeming discrepancy between the formalist interpretation of the nature of the esthetic experience, as advocated by such writers as Bell2 and Fry,10 and the psychoanalytic wish-fulfillment theory of art. While Freud did not discount independent esthetic values, he certainly placed primary psychological value on the associational significance of a work of art. The so-called “pure formalists,” by contrast, maintain that the representational and associational value of a work of art is irrelevant to, if not distracting from, the true nature of artistic production and appreciation. It is clear that the formalists would impose a far more restricted and distilled criterion of what is esthetic than would psychoanalytic writers and many other estheticians. What is crucial here, however, is the deep psychological import the formalists attribute to purely formal qualities, in contradistinction to the manner in which form has been interpreted in the psychoanalytic literature on art. The purpose of this paper is to examine how psychoanalysis has attempted to deal with the most ancient and prominent criterion of esthetic value-form, and to see what kind of rapprochement is possible with the traditional formalist position.

On Form And Content

Any discussion of form and content in art immediately gets one into some of the murkiest problems in esthetic theory. These terms have been used in so many ambiguous, contradictory, and different ways