Chapter One. Freud's Theory of Art and Creativity

This chapter explores the general direction of Freud's writings on art and its relationship to his metapsychology. I hope to show that Freud's contribution to aesthetics, although criticized for being ambivalent and incomplete, is significant largely because it made subsequent developments possible within the British School of Psychoanalysis.

First, I explore Freud's interest in “pathography”—the viewing of art as a privileged form of neurosis where the analyst-critic explores the artwork in order to understand and unearth the creator's psychological motivations. We will see the limitations of focusing solely on the content of the artwork and the inner world of the artist. This view is enriched and expanded, however, by Freud's later (1905c) theory of the joke mechanism and its relationship to his account of the primary and secondary processes. Although Freud did not fully pursue his investigation into the relationship between the joke mechanism and aesthetic experience, we will see that this aspect of Freud's theory seems better equipped than the pathographic approach to address the formal structure of art and the nature of aesthetic experience. Rather than just an object