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While it is always a danger that psycho-analytic definitions may be taken out of context and applied unintelligently for obsessional control in the social sphere, the hazard must be faced if a guide is to be afforded, in the realm of aesthetics, to the artist and the serious scholar and critic for drawing differentiations of a valid and useful sort between the representation of passion in art and literature and its misrepresentation in pornography. This brief paper, one trusts, will be of no use to courts of law, Lords Chamberlain or compilers of one index or another, but may help the artist and his patrons to traverse with lessened anxiety and guilt the scorching borderland.
In my dialogue with Adrian Stokes in “Painting and the Inner World” I have drawn upon discoveries related to psychic structure to emphasise the necessity of recognising the individual and social forces which invade the art world for destructive purposes. I have attempted to reinstate the term “evil” in its juxtaposition to “good” to differentiate this realm of value judgement in aesthetics from the more technical realm of “success” in representation (or “transformation” as Bion has more recently called it) and communication. Such a theoretical structure in aesthetics, based on psycho-analytical concepts of motivation and responsibility, lend themselves to application in the consulting room only, for they are bound up absolutely with the psycho-analytical method for investigation of the mind. But experience in the consulting room should enable us to derive indicators of a structural, rather than descriptive, sort, for our external judgement of works of art as objects—aesthetic objects.
This paper is intended as an initial intrusion into this area, attempting to transpose a definition of pornography as a calculated attack on the internal situation and integration of the self in other people, i.e., a motivational definition, into an operational and structural one which can be applied with some confi