Abstract

A psychoanalytic approach to aesthetics is suggested by tracing the historical development of psychoanalytic theories of art and creativity. Individual works of modern painting are then evaluated within the critical framework established by this psychoanalytic aesthetic. ;Freud views art as cultural formation analagous to dreams and traces the phylogenetic root of art to the oedipal complex and the ontogenetic root to children's play. The British school incorporates Freud's theory of the death instinct into aesthetic theory. Artistic creativity entails the sublimation of the depressive position described by Melanie Klein. To realize and symbolically express depression, the artist must be capable of a process analogous to mourning, which involves acknowledging the death instinct in both its aggressive and self-destructive aspects. ;Anton Ehrenzweig provides a psychology of unconscious ego perception. Creative work, in his view, reveals a hidden order in art through the coordination of unconscious vision with conscious percepts. This integration is signalled by the creation of a dynamic or plastic pictorial space, the image of living form. The ego psychologists see art as a process of creative sublimation or 'regression in the service of the ego'. The formal resolution in art is the embodiment of ego values deriving from secondary, autonomous ego functioning. The attainment of these ego ideals in art corresponds to the highest level of development of the psyche, and stands for the healthy individual capable of freely determining his actions. ;From these arguments the basic thesis emerges that art functions as a symbol of psychic integration and this integration is the result of a process of creative sublimation objectified in the work. Further, there is a relationship between art and morality. The formal resolution in the work of art symbolizes freedom, the precondition for moral action. And the expressive and communicative aspects of art indirectly symbolize several moral ideas. Through the disguised expression of the lived body nature and culture are integrated; as a creative process art is the symbol of non-alienated labour or authentic work, and finally, the organic order in art stands for the ideal order of the state