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“Why shouldn' we use a little art jargon. There' the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein in life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose each inch of it.”
One can observe clear signs of a reluctance to treat separate, concretely individual motives both in esthetic and psychoanalytical texts of today. This trend could perhaps be regarded as an expression of a Victorian antisensual movement to be compared with non-figurative painting, a movement towards the non-representative and abstract, away from the sensual and imagination-stirring. The anti-motive approach compels us to restrict and elucidate the expressions, inter alia alleging that the ideal message in most of life' situations—also in scientific contexts—is one which appears as unambiguous as possible. As soon as we seriously dedicate ourselves to the study of different motives, we enter the realm of ambiguities where the traditional scientist is easily bewildered, and in order to overcome this state of bewilderment, wants to split the different parts of the motive into various, mutually completely disconnected contexts. It is not enough that the motive can be infinitely varied, and that it thus can transmit mutually completely different messages; it is also mostly impossible to trace the different versions to their incontrovertible source; which part of the motive originates from whom?
On the other hand, it is obvious that the disciplines which investigate the most sensitive and multifarious elements of human life—art and