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.
This essay contributes to the psychoanalytic understanding of creativity by applying Freud’s theories of jokes and dreams to the interpretation of Cubist-paintings and collages of 1907-14. The selection of Cubism is justified on the basis of various questions which Freud and the Cubists asked in common, questions concerning reality, both external and psychic; the processes of representation and interpretation; the correspondences between the arts and other mental products, such as language and dreams; and the nature of the child and of the so-called primitive mind. Moreover, certain innovative features of Cubism—the incorporation of words, texts, and jokes into painting, and the use of collage—lend themselves to, perhaps even require, exegesis in Freudian terms.
Assistant clinical professor of psychiatry, Yale University; candidate, Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis.
Portions of this essay were previously delivered in lectures at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, April 1979, and the Muriel Gardiner Program in Psychoanalysis and the Humanities, Yale University, March 1995, and appeared in my M.D. thesis, Yale School of Medicine, 1987.
I am grateful to Robert Herbert, Vincent Scully, Sidney Blatt, Nathaniel Laor, David Forrest, Marshall Edelson, Elise Snyder, Sidney Phillips, Stevan Weine, and Charles Di Sabatino, Jr., for their reading and support.
The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 52, ed. Albert J. Solnit, Peter B. Neubauer, Samuel Abrams, and A. Scott Dowling (Yale University Press, copyright © 1997 by Albert J. Solnit, Peter B. Neubauer, Samuel Abrams, and A. Scott Dowling).