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“To make someone love the unconscious, that is teaching art”
Anton Ehrenzweig's enthusiasm for the study of psychology and art was present from the very start of his academic career. At the same time, he studied law in his native Vienna and was appointed a magistrate there in 1936. Two years later he moved to London, where he lectured in Art Education at Goldsmiths' College until his death in 1966. It is interesting that in an early paper (1949) he should address the nature of guilt, a feeling that he believed was implicated in all scientific endeavour, and also in our constant need to establish causal links and reasons. This also has implications for his view of art history, explored below.
Ehrenzweig was well acquainted not only with recent developments in psychoanalysis, but also with cognitive psychology. Indeed, much of his work is a critique of what he called “academic theories of perception”, and it is the Gestalt account of perception