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.
The artist, with his innate gift of penetrating into the realm of the unconscious and representing it in his work, has appealed to psychoanalytic thinking since its first days. Freud perceived in the work of art another medium to uncover the depth experience of man as it is being shaped in the artistic form (cf. his letter to Arthur Schnitzler, 192211). In the work of art Freud and his followers tried to find additional confirmation to display and validate the existence of dynamic forces of the mind which they had observed in clinical experience. No wonder then that in one of the great tragedies—Oedipus Rex—a constellation of these profound forces is seen at work, which has come to be known as the Oedipus complex.
With the advancement of psychoanalytic theory the language of art per se moved into the center of interest; it was attempted to understand the laws governing its structure, to grasp what sets it apart from other modes of communication, and to disclose the secret of its effect on the perceiver. Over the years a variety of opinion has been put forth. Every school has tried to interpret this Phenomenon along its own lines of reasoning, but all are agreed that the art medium evokes a particular experience of satisfaction. The various schools separate on the question of whether this feeling of satisfaction should be regarded as gratifying instinctual needs and the wishes aroused by them, as reinforcing the various defensive needs, or perhaps as gratifying the need for mastering external and internal stimuli.
With the attempt to define the nature of aesthetic satisfaction