tegration of his isolated will by establishing a creative relationship to others. Schneider (1954) also takes a more optimistic view of art and neurosis and holds that art does not directly stem from emotional disturbance, even though some neurotic artists may get secondary (rather than primary) gains from being disturbed. Critique of the Freudian

View of Sublimation and Art Although there is much to be said in favor of certain aspects of the classical psychoanalytical theory of sex sublimation and art, the one-sided formulations of this theory that are often given fail to do justice to the immensely wide ranging elements of artistic creativity and, at best, give but partial answers to the questions of why some individuals are artists and why they create what they do. Specific limitations of the Freudian position include the following:

1. That the artist must in some manner tap his unconscious mental processes: if he is to produce and communicate to others works of lasting values is almost certainly true. But the "unconscious mind" that he thereby taps is hardly a mysterious entity in its own right. It consists, rather, of the total sum of the individual's experiences, attitudes, beliefs, and memories which, by an act of conscious introspection, he is able to dig into, reactivate, and recombine in an almost infinite number of new ways. All his artistic concepts, as Locke, Hume, and other philosophers have shown for several centuries, merely consist of re-experiences and recombinations of some of his original, if now mainly forgotten, precepts. It is true that he is almost totally unaware (or unconscious) of exactly how he reactivates and recombines his past experiences (just as most of us are unaware of exactly how we solve a mathematical or a chess problem, although obviously the solution does not really come to us-as it sometimes appears to come-by magic).

2. Granting that art depends largely on creative processes that involve our past experiences, many of which we no longer consciously remember and whose recollection and recombination into art forms are only vaguely understood by us, there is little evidence that the artist's use of his "unconscious" thoughts

and feelings invariably implies his coping with, defending himself against, and finally mastering his instinctual urges. This is not to say that some artists do not have sexual or aggressive feelings that they are ashamed to admit, that they unconsciously repress, and that consequently impel or compel them to work out these feelings in artistic productions, as a kind of expiation of or defense against these repressed feelings. But to believe that because some artists are thus unconsciously driven to creativity all artists must be so driven is to make one of the commonest errors of logical thinking and to set up a hypothesis for which there are as yet, no confirmatory data. One of the most unscientific aspects of orthodox psychoanalysis is the conclusion by its devotees that because A and B, who have been treated for some neurotic symptom, display X complex, every other human being who has the same symptom must also show evidence of X complex. Similarly, presenting evidence that artists A and B were impelled to create because of their defenses against their own unconscious sex or aggressive urges scarcely proves that all creative artists have similar repressed urges.

3. Assuming, again, that unconscious thoughts and feelings play a vitally important role in virtually all artistic creations, there are no scientific data whatever to support the Freudian assumption that these unconscious experiences are dynamically repressed. Occasionally, when a person is thoroughly ashamed of his ideas or phantasies, he may dynamically refuse to admit that they exist; and as a result of this kind of repression, he may later be driven to express these unconscious feelings in artistic forms. There is much more reason to believe, however, first that most of our experiences of which we are at any moment unaware consist of fairly neutrally toned thoughts and feelings which we would not hesitate to reawaken to consciousness; and second that the unconscious experiences that artists generally employ in their productions are notably in this class of quite unrepressed ideas and emotions. Freud believed that the artist (for some mysterious reasons which he never could explain) is the type of individual who somehow is flexible about his repressions and is able to dredge up his repressed unconscious ideas and

use them effectively in his work. It would seem to be far simpler and wiser to assume, instead, that either (a) the artist is the kind of person who is less self-blaming than others and therefore likely to do less repressing; or (b) he is an individual whose "talent" or "genius" (by which may well be meant his unusually well organized brain and central nervous system) enable him in the first place to have more vital life experiences than the nonartist or the inferior artist and in the second place to dig into his unre pressed store of these experiences.

4. The Freudian notion that art is intimately related to Oedipal relationships or to repressed feelings of love and hatred for one's parents (which are ultimately transferred to other significant figures in one's life) probably has a grain-but only a grain-of truth in it. For great artists (as we shall note in more detail below) almost invariably love their work and to some degree, love (or at least seek the approval of) the audiences to which they present this work. And behind all feelings of loving, vital (absorption, and desire for the approval of others it is quite likely that there are some remnants of early attitudes and ideas which were learned in one's early family romance. To believe, however, that all emotions of love and absorption as well as those of aversion and hatred stem from a boy's originally lusting after his mother and resenting and being guilty about his resentment of his father's intrusion is to make one more of those overgeneralizations for which orthodox Freudians are unfortunately famous. Again: assuming that an artist's loves and hates significantly influence and affect his productions, there is no evidence that his repressed feelings of affection and hostility are much more important than his open and avowed feelings.

5. If the Freudian theory of art and sex sublimation were true, one would expect artists to be unusually inhibited individuals who lived ascetically in their garrets, had little or no sex love affairs, and consequently felt compelled to compensate by throwing themselves into their work. But most of the great artists of all time, as we shall indicate in a later section of this article, were reasonably happily married or engaged in distinctly more than their share of heterosexual or homosexual activities. What repressed

instinctual sex-love urges they were artistically "sublimating” is, in the light of these circumstances, difficult to imagine.

8. The Freudian notion that psychic energy. is involved in artistic creativity and that formal esthetic pleasure stems from an economy in the expenditure of this energy is particularly hard to take in the light of twentieth-century discoveries in physics and neuroanatomy. Freud's application of nineteenth-century mechanics to the psychic working of the human organism and his "explanations" of human thinking and feeling in terms of his own hypothesized system of libido economy have been much criticized by numerous modern critics of psychoanalysis; and there seems to exist little or no empirical evidence to support his highly imaginative sex-. economy theorizings (A. Ellis, 1950; Eysenck, 1953). The mere fact that a host of psychoanalysts, such as Kris (1952), Reik (1945), and Weiss (1947), have heartily endorsed Freud's notion that artistic creativity depends on the economics of the expenditure of libidinous energy by no means adds any validity to these highly theoretical constructs.

7. The view that art and neurosis are integrally related would seem, at first blush, to have some validity, since it is obvious that most great artists have been more or less emotionally disturbed and many of them have even been psy chotic (Phillips, 1957). The facts would also seem to indicate that supersensitive and emotionally aberrated individuals (for example, fixed homosexuals) are frequently more inter. ested in art than less sensitive and aberrated persons appear to be. These facts, however, seem largely to be accounted for by several understandable reasons: (a) Great artists are generally unconventional and their very unconventionality is often misinterpreted as severe disturbance. (b) Noted artists are investigated more carefully by their biographers than are hacks or nonartists; therefore we tend to know about their aberrations and to remain unaware of how disturbed were their less great contemporaries. Many outstanding artists who live regular and undistinguished lives are rarely written or talked about; while the more erratic ones, such as Gauguin and Van Gogh, are endlessly biographized. (c) We have no way of

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