ALTHOUGH FREUD’S WRITINGS on art and artists constitute a comparatively small fraction of his total output, the editors of the English Standard Edition list twenty-two references to writings “dealing mainly or largely with Art, Literature or the theory of Aesthetics.”1 Freud’s papers “Leonardo da Vinci,” “The Moses of Michelangelo,” and “Dostoevsky and Parricide” will be known to every student of his work.
There is no doubt that Freud had a deep appreciation, and love, of poetry and other forms of literature. His schooling had made him familiar with the Latin and Greek classics, and, throughout his life, he read widely, not only in German, but also in English, French, Italian, and Spanish. After Freud abandoned neuropathology for the study and treatment of neuroses, his writings contain far more references to novelists and playwrights, more especially to Shakespeare and to Goethe, than to the writings of other psychiatrists.
Freud’s own talent as a writer was recognized early in his life. When he was only seventeen, he wrote to his friend Emil Fluss:
At the same time my professor told me—and he is the first person who ventured to tell me this—that I had what Herder so neatly calls an “idiotic” style, i.e. a style at once correct and characteristic. I was duly surprised at this amazing fact and hasten to spread the news of this happy event abroad as far and wide as possible—the first of its kind. To you, for instance, who, I am sure, have until now not been aware that you are exchanging letters with a German stylist. So now I would counsel you, as a friend, not as one with a vested interest—preserve them—bind them together—guard them well—you never know.2
In 1930, Freud became the fourth recipient of the Goethe Prize for Literature awarded by the city of Frankfurt. He could hardly have written so well himself if he had been unable to appreciate style in literature, but his aesthetic appreciation of the other arts was far more limited. Music, for example, was actually distasteful to him. When Freud was a boy, his sister Anna began to have music lessons. But the sound of her practicing disturbed the studies of the wunderkind and Freud’s parents had the offending piano removed from the apartment. Freud’s own children were not allowed to pursue music in the home, and his nephew Harry wrote of him: “He despised music and considered it solely as an intrusion.… He never went to a concert and hardly to the theater.”3 Had Freud been musical, he would have been forced to pay more attention to aesthetic form, since the content of music cannot be verbally defined with any precision, while its effect, at any rate in classical music, is highly dependent upon the forms chosen by the composer. However, as Freud modestly acknowledged in his paper “The Moses of Michelangelo,” aesthetic form remained a puzzle to him:
I may say at once that I am no connoisseur in art, but simply a layman. I have often observed that the subject-matter of works of art has a stronger attraction for me than their formal and technical qualities, though to the artist their value lies first and foremost in these latter. I am unable rightly to appreciate many of the methods used and the effects obtained in art. I state this so as to secure the reader’s indulgence for the attempt I propose to make here.
Nevertheless, works of art do exercise a powerful effect on me, especially those of literature and sculpture, less often of painting. This has occasioned me, when I have been contemplating such things, to spend a long time before them trying to apprehend them in my own way, i.e. to explain to myself what their effect is due to. Wherever I cannot do this, as for instance with music, I am almost incapable of obtaining any pleasure. Some rationalistic, or perhaps analytic, turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected and what it is that affects me.
This has brought me to recognize the apparently paradoxical fact that precisely some of the grandest and most overwhelming creations of art are still unresolved riddles to our understanding. We admire them, we feel overawed by them, but we are unable to say what they represent to us. I am not sufficiently well-informed to know whether this fact has already been remarked upon; possibly, indeed, some writer on aesthetics has discovered that this state of intellectual bewilderment is a necessary condition when a work of art is to achieve its greatest effects. It would only be with the greatest reluctance that I could bring myself to believe in any such necessity.4
Freud’s disclaimer was not false modesty. His lack of aesthetic appreciation of the visual arts is attested from another source. Freud was a passionate collector of antiquities, especially of Roman, Etruscan, Assyrian, and Egyptian statuettes. In May 1938, a few days before Freud’s journey to England from Nazi-occupied Vienna on June 4, the photographer Edmund Engelman recorded for posterity the appearance of that famous apartment at Berggasse 19.5 Freud’s consulting room and study are overflowing with an unbelievable number of antique statuettes, crowded together so closely that the outline of any individual piece is hardly discernible. These are not the rooms of an aesthete, but those of a compulsive collector. Freud once told Jung that, were he to suffer from a neurosis, it would be of obsessional type. His accumulation of objects and the manner in which he arranged them bears this out.
Freud’s principal interest, therefore, was in the subject matter of works of art, not in the skill, style, or manner in which they were presented. In An Autobiographical Study, Freud wrote that analysis “can do nothing toward elucidating the nature of the artistic gift, nor can it explain the means by which the artist works—artistic technique.”6 And in his paper on Dostoyevsky, he wrote, “Before the problem of the creative artist analysis must, alas, lay down its arms.”7
Since content, rather than style, was the problem to which Freud addressed himself, it was reasonable that he should apply the same method of interpretation to works of art as he did to dreams, fantasies, and neurotic symptoms. The subjects which an artist selects, and the ways in which he chooses to present those subjects are, of course, partly dictated by the conventions of his time. But his choices are also determined partly by his personality and by his personal history, even though, in some instances, he may himself be unconscious of the connection.
As an example of Freud’s procedure, one cannot do better than turn to his essay on Leonardo. In recent years, this monograph of 1910 has been somewhat discredited, since Freud’s interpretation of a fantasy memory of Leonardo’s, in which a bird is supposed to have struck his lips with its tail, has been shown to be based upon a mistranslation. The bird was a kite and not a vulture; and whereas vultures can be shown to have mythological connections with the mother, kites cannot. However, this error of Freud’s does not invalidate the other interpretations which he advances.
Freud is careful to point out that he does not regard Leonardo as a neurotic, although he suggests that he may have had some obsessional traits of character. On the basis of slender information, Freud nevertheless builds up a convincing explanation of Leonardo’s homosexual orientation. Leonardo was an illegitimate child, and for his first few years lived only with his mother. Freud supposes, with reason, that the absence of a father combined with the excessive caresses of a lonely mother might well have made heterosexuality difficult of achievement. When Freud comes to discuss Leonardo’s paintings, what interests him is the presumed relation of their content to the circumstances of Leonardo’s childhood. The famous, ambiguous smile which appears on the faces of some of Leonardo’s subjects is traced back to a presumedly similar smile on the face of the artist’s mother; and the androgynous appearance of some of his portraits is attributed to Leonardo’s homosexuality. Freud comments at some length upon the picture of the Virgin and Child with St. Anne.8 As many critics have observed, St. Anne seems hardly older than her daughter, the Virgin Mary. Freud first notes that the subject of mother, grandmother, and child may have suggested itself to Leonardo because, once he had been removed from the sole care of his mother, he was brought up in a household which included his paternal grandmother as well as his stepmother. Freud goes on to suggest that the similarity in age between the Virgin and St. Anne may be a reflection of the fact that Leonardo did, in effect, have two mothers: his real mother and then his stepmother, who was also supposed to have been devoted to him. As it appears that this subject is one rarely chosen by artists, Freud’s interpretations carry conviction. However, this method of interpretation can only be applied to representational art. What, one wonders, would Freud have said if he had been confronted by a canvas of Mark Rothko’s? It can also be said, with justice, that Freudian interpretation always leads back to the artist’s personality: that is, it may reveal something about the artist, but does not tell us much about the work of art itself.
It has sometimes been alleged that, because Freud used the same methods of interpretation for works of art as he did for neurotic symptoms, he did not distinguish between the two. But it must be remembered, as Richard Wollheim has pointed out in a lecture on Freud and the interpretation of art, that Freud was aiming at a general theory of how the mind works, and that his interpretation of art appears, at any rate at first sight, to be consistent with such a theory. We all express, in our speech and in our actions, desires and wishes of which we are only partially conscious, to which psychoanalytic interpretation can be applied. There is no reason to exclude works of art from this kind of scrutiny. In the Freudian scheme, works of art are regarded as being largely the result of sublimation; that is, of a mechanism by which instinctual impulses are diverted from direct expression and transformed into something more acceptable to society. Although sublimation is technically classified as a mechanism of defense, it is described by Anna Freud as pertaining “more to the study of the normal than to that of neurosis.”9 However, although sublimation is a mechanism of defense employed by normal people, Freud was evidently of the opinion that artists needed to, or were driven to, employ sublimation more than most of us, and were therefore closer to neurosis than the average. As late as 1917, in the twenty-third Introductory Lecture on Psycho-Analysis, Freud wrote:
An artist is once more in rudiments an introvert, not far removed from neurosis. He is oppressed by excessively powerful instinctual needs. He desires to win honour, power, wealth, fame and the love of women; but he lacks the means for achieving these satisfactions. Consequently, like any other unsatisfied man, he turns away from reality and transfers all his interest, and his libido too, to the wishful constructions of his life of phantasy, whence the path might lead to neurosis.10
Freud considered that fantasy was derived from play, and regarded both activities in a negative light since they were, in his view, a denial of, or turning away from, reality:
The growing child, when he stops playing, gives up nothing but the link with real objects; instead of playing, he now phantasies. He builds castles in the air and creates what are called daydreams.11
The creative writer does the same as the child at play. He creates a world of phantasy which he takes very seriously—that is which he invests with large amounts of emotion—while separating it sharply from reality.12
Freud proceeds to consider the nature of fantasy:
We may lay it down that a happy person never phantasies, only an unsatisfied one. The motive forces of phantasies are unsatisfied wishes, and every single phantasy is the fulfilment of a wish, a correction of an unsatisfying reality.13
Although not everyone who engages in fantasy becomes neurotic, and, as we shall see, creative people are a special case because their creative abilities make it possible for them to link their fantasies with reality, fantasy is a dangerous activity. For “neurotics turn away from reality because they find it unbearable—either the whole or parts of it.”14
Freud conceived that, at the beginning of life, the infant was dominated by the pleasure principle and that the pleasures sought were entirely sensual in nature. From time to time, the Nirvana-like bliss of the satisfied infant would be disturbed by “the peremptory demands of internal needs”15 for food, for warmth, and so on. Freud goes on:
When this happened, whatever was thought of (wished for) was simply presented in a hallucinatory manner, just as still happens today with our dream-thoughts every night. It was only the non-occurrence of the expected satisfaction, the disappointment experienced, that led to the abandonment of this attempt at satisfaction by means of hallucination. Instead of it, the psychical apparatus had to decide to form a conception of the real circumstances in the external world and to endeavour to make a real alteration in them. A new principle of mental functioning was introduced; what was presented to the mind was no longer what was agreeable but what was real, even if it happened to be disagreeable. This setting-up of the reality principle proved to be a momentous step.16
So, fantasy is equated with hallucination, with dreaming, with turning away from reality, with the persistence of an infantile mode of mental functioning which Freud called “primary process.” Proper adaptation to the external world is by means of deliberate thought and planning; by postponement of immediate satisfaction; by the abandonment of wish-fulfilling fantasy. Freud wrote:
Art brings about a reconciliation between the two principles in a peculiar way. An artist is originally a man who turns away from reality because he cannot come to terms with the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction which it at first demands, and who allows his erotic and ambitious wishes full play in the life of phantasy. He finds a way back to reality, however, from this world of phantasy by making use of special gifts to mould his phantasies into truths of a new kind, which are valued by men as precious reflections of reality. Thus in a certain fashion, he actually becomes the hero, the king, the creator, or the favourite he desired to be, without following the long roundabout path of making alterations in the external world. But he can only achieve this because other men feel the same dissatisfaction as he does with the renunciation demanded by reality, and because that dissatisfaction, which results from the replacement of the pleasure principle by the reality principle, is itself a part of reality.17
This is surely a strange conception of both art and artist. It implies that, though the artist wins out in the end, and may even escape neurosis, his art is still an indirect way of obtaining satisfactions which, if he was fully adapted to reality, would be unnecessary. Even those who admire and enjoy what the artist has produced are still turning away from reality in the direction of fantasy. The implication must be that art is primarily escapist and that, in an ideal world in which everyone had matured sufficiently to replace the pleasure principle by the reality principle, there would be no place for art.
Yet, in an earlier paper Freud had written:
But creative writers are valuable allies and their evidence is to be prized highly, for they are apt to know a whole host of things between heaven and earth of which our philosophy has not yet let us dream. In their knowledge of the mind they are far in advance of us everyday people, for they draw upon sources which we have not yet opened up for science.18
This is, perhaps, not quite such a positive view of the artist as it appears, since Freud is hinting that, once the sources upon which the artist draws have been opened up by science, so much will be known about the mind that the creative writer’s art will not be needed. This is borne out by what Freud says about science in that same paper on the two principles of mental functioning from which I have already quoted. After noting that religions, also, advocate the postponement of immediate satisfaction, Freud writes:
Religions have been able to effect absolute renunciation of pleasures in this life by means of the promise of compensation in a future existence; but they have not by this means achieved a conquest of the pleasure principle. It is science which comes nearest to succeeding in that conquest; science too, however, offers intellectual pleasures during its work and promises practical gain in the end.19
So science is to be equated with the abandonment of fantasy; with postponement of immediate satisfaction; with “secondary process” mental functioning; with thinking that is adapted to reality. Freud states that thinking acts as a restraint upon discharge:
Thinking was endowed with characteristics which made it possible for the mental apparatus to tolerate an increased tension of stimulus whilst the process of discharge was postponed. It is essentially an experimental kind of acting, accompanied by displacement of relatively small quantities of cathexis together with less expenditure (discharge) of them.20
Freud also wrote, “It is one of the principal functions of our thinking to master the material of the external world psychically.”21
Freud was certainly right in assuming that intellectual functioning is related to the ability to postpone responses to immediate stimuli. David Stenhouse, in his book The Evolution of Intelligence, defines intelligent behavior as “behaviour that is adaptively variable within the lifetime of the individual.”22 The lower we descend down the evolutionary scale, the more likely we are to find that behavior is not variable, but rather consists of preprogrammed, rigid, invariable responses to incoming stimuli. Stenhouse suggests that, if the evolution of intelligent behavior is to occur,
the most important factor is that which gives the individual animal the power not to respond in the usual way to the stimulus-situation which previously initiated an instinctive sequence culminating in a consummatory act. This power not to respond may be absolute, or may be merely the ability to delay the response—withhold it provisionally as it were—but its absence would negate the very possibility of adaptive variability in behaviour.23
But is scientific thinking really so removed from the sphere of fantasy as Freud assumes? It is clear that, if scientific hypotheses are to gain acceptance, they must be related to the real world, and be proven to increase our understanding of how the real world functions. Although science progresses by the refutation of hypotheses, and each scientific theory is ultimately supplanted by another which includes still more phenomena within its grasp, yet each theory has to be proven by experiment and shown to correspond with external reality. But proving a scientific hypothesis is secondary. Scientific thinking takes its origin from fantasy in exactly the same way as telling stories or any other creative activity. Einstein attributed his creative success not to his abilities as a mathematician and physicist, but to his imagination. Einstein’s own attempt to define “thinking” is worth quoting:
What, precisely, is thinking? When at the reception of sense-impressions, memory pictures emerge, this is not yet “thinking.” When, however, a certain picture turns up in many such series, then—precisely through such return—it becomes an ordering element for such series in that it connects series which in themselves are unconnected. Such an element becomes an instrument, a concept. I think that the transition from free association or “dreaming” to thinking is characterized by the more or less dominating role which the “concept” plays in it. It is by no means necessary that a concept must be connected with a sensorily cognizable and reproducible sign (word); but when this is the case thinking becomes by means of that fact communicable.24
Einstein goes on to say that thinking is “a free play with concepts,” and that the justification for this kind of thinking, far removed as it may still be from any consensus of what constitutes “truth,” is that in this way the thinker can emancipate himself from the experience of the senses. In his Notes for an Obituary, Einstein wrote, “Perception of this world by thought, leaving out everything subjective, became, partly consciously, partly unconsciously, my supreme aim.”25 Einstein was sure that most thinking went on without the use of words and that it was, to a considerable degree, unconscious. Freud would have agreed with this part of Einstein’s statement. Indeed, he wrote, “It is probable that thinking was originally unconscious, in so far as it went beyond mere ideational presentations and was directed to the relations between impressions of objects, and that it did not acquire further qualities, perceptible to consciousness, until it became connected with verbal residues.”26 But Freud goes on to say:
With the introduction of the reality principle one species of thought-activity was split off; it was kept free from reality-testing and remained subordinated to the pleasure-principle alone. This activity is phantasying, which begins already in children’s play, and later, continued as day-dreaming, abandons dependence on real objects.27
But are not the greatest achievements of the human mind only possible because human beings are capable of abandoning dependence on real objects, in other words, capable of fantasy? Is not Einstein’s definition of thinking as “a free play with concepts” a form of what Freud pejoratively dismissed as fantasy? Freud treated fantasy as though it was always escapist, but this is not necessarily the case; nor is it true of dreams.
Freud, I believe, was never at ease when thinking strayed too far from the body and physical sensation, which seemed to him to constitute reality. Freudian interpretation always strives to reduce abstractions, such as the notion of beauty, to something physical. For example, Freud writes, “There is to my mind no doubt that the concept of ‘beautiful’ had its roots in sexual excitation and that its original meaning was ‘sexually stimulating.’”28
For Einstein, creative thinking had to be as far removed from sense impressions as possible, since he regarded the latter as unreliable. Einstein wrote, “I believe that the first step in the setting up of a ‘real external world’ is the formation of the concept of bodily objects of various kinds.” So far, Freud would have agreed with him. But Einstein goes on:
The second step is to be found in the fact that, in our thinking (which determines our expectation), we attribute to this concept of the bodily object a significance, which is to a high degree independent of the sense impression which originally gives rise to it. This is what we mean when we attribute to the bodily object “a real existence.” The justification of such a setting rests exclusively on the fact that, by means of such concepts and mental relations between them, we are able to orient ourselves in the labyrinth of sense impressions. These notions and relations, although free statements of our thoughts, appear to us as stronger and more alterable than the individual sense experience itself, the character of which as anything other than the result of an illusion or hallucination is never completely guaranteed.29
Einstein’s new model of the universe depended upon his being able to emancipate himself from “real objects.” Indeed, in order to conceive the special theory of relativity, he had to free himself from the subjective prejudice implicit in being a dweller upon earth, and imagine how the universe would appear to an observer traveling at near the speed of light. Is not this fantasy, albeit fantasy which was later shown by experiment to explain phenomena which did not fit in with Newton’s model?
It might be affirmed that my disagreement with Freud is no more than a semantic issue. Perhaps he is using the word fantasy in one sense, while I am using it in another. It is certainly true that there are such things as escapist fantasies and idle daydreams. These play their part in rather lowly forms of creative activity like “romantic” fiction or the James Bond novels of Ian Fleming. But not all fantasies are of this kind. Freud was convinced that all mental activity which was not dependent on “real objects” was mere wish fulfillment. Yet, just as play can be preparatory for, and hence directed toward, adult activities like fighting, hunting, and sexual intercourse, so daydreaming can also be a form of anticipatory practice. I have often daydreamed about the formidable task of delivering a lecture, and my fantasies about my auditors’ shafts of criticism and expert scrutiny have made me more scrupulous in my presentation than I might otherwise have been.
Freud’s theory of dreams is equally open to question. Freud was particularly enthusiastic about his dream theory. In his preface to the third English edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, he wrote, “Insight such as this falls to one’s lot but once in a lifetime.”30 He even allowed himself the fantasy that, one day, a marble tablet would be placed on the house in which he first studied dreams seriously. This would read, “Here the secret of dreams was revealed to Dr. Sigm. Freud on July 24, 1895.”31 It is ironic that the discovery of which Freud was proudest does not withstand critical scrutiny. Freud’s mature theory of dreams claims that every dream, even a nightmare or an anxiety dream, is an attempt to fulfill a wish; and that every dream represents a wish fulfillment dating from early childhood as well as a wish fulfillment from current mental life. Because these wishes are for the most part unacceptable, they appear in dreams in disguised form. Hence, what the dreamer actually recalls is only the “manifest content” of the dream. The true meaning of the dream, its so-called “latent content,” can only be revealed when the dreamer’s associations to the images in the dream have been subjected to psychoanalytical scrutiny and interpretation.
The function of the dream, Freud believed, was to preserve sleep by giving disguised expression to wishes of an aggressive or sexual kind which, if they had been allowed to occur to the dreamer in undisguised form, would have been likely to have wakened him.
Although dreams are not couched in the language of everyday speech, there is really no evidence that all dreams are concealing something unacceptable. Nor is there sufficient reason to believe that all dreams represent unfulfilled wishes, although this is certainly true of some. Freud himself recognized that an exception had to be made when considering the dreams of people who have been subjected to some “traumatic” incident, like an accident or an explosion. Such people often have dreams in which the incident itself recurs in undisguised form. Freud guessed that, in such cases, the dream might be an attempt at coming to terms with, or mastering, a disturbing stimulus; a way of looking at dreams which is actually more fruitful than Freud’s original theory.
Jung, who cooperated with Freud for some years in the early 1900s, but who then parted company with him to found his own school, took a very different view of dreams. He did not consider that dreams were concealments, but rather that they were expressed in a symbolic language, which, though it might be difficult to understand, was, in essence, a natural form of human expression. Poetry is another kind of human utterance in which symbol and metaphor play a predominant role, but we do not think of most poetry as willfully obscure on this account.
Dreams seem frequently to be concerned with unsolved problems. A man I knew once dreamed that he was looking into the window of a shop. Inside was a statuette of a beautiful woman standing upon a square base. Since both the statuette and its base were made of some translucent material, the dreamer could see that there were letters carved upon the underside of the base. He knew that what was written there was “The Secret of Life.” But because from his viewpoint the letters were both upside down and the wrong way round, he could not read them. A dream with an extraordinarily similar theme is reported by Dr. Rycroft in his book The Innocence of Dreams.32 A man dreamed that he noticed in the window of an antique shop an old book which he knew contained “The Truth.” On inquiring inside, he was told that the book was the only copy of an otherwise unknown work of Immanuel Kant. But it was written in a language which no one could understand.
These dreams do not provide solutions to the problems which they raise. Although most creative inspiration comes to people when they are in a state of reverie rather than actually asleep, there are a number of authentic instances of problem-solving during sleep, or of new ideas coming out of a dream. In one experiment, students were presented with a variety of difficult problems which they were required to study for fifteen minutes before going to sleep. Many had dreams related to the problems, and a few reported finding solutions. People have reported dreams in which a game of chess was played, an algebraic problem solved, and a bookkeeping error detected. Robert Louis Stevenson said that the plot of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde came to him in a dream; and the composer Tartini named a composition “The Devil’s Trill Sonata” because he had a dream in which the Devil took up a violin and played it to him.
Stanley Palombo, in his book Dreaming and Memory,33 suggests that dreaming is a way of processing information. During the day, every one of us is exposed to a vast number of incoming stimuli and presented with a mass of “information.” Only a small proportion of this information will be remembered, even for a short time, and still less will be transferred from the short-term memory system to the long-term memory store. However, our adaptation to the environment is largely dependent upon our being able to compare our current experience with our past experience, which is stored in the memory. It is the unfamiliar which engages our attention, while we take the familiar for granted; but we only recognize the unfamiliar as being so because we have a memory of what has gone before. Palombo thinks that dreams are one way in which the experience of the day is matched with the residues of previous experience before being assigned to the long-term memory.
This theory of dreams goes some way to explaining why it is that dreams so often seem to be such a curious mixture of events of the previous day with memories from the remote past. There is a kind of scanning process going on, perhaps selecting things which go together because they share a similar emotional tone rather than because they happened together in time.
If we try to put together these varying notions of dreams—that they are concerned with mastering disturbing experiences; that they are sometimes attempts at solving problems; and that they may be a way of processing information—we might hazard the proposition that dreams are in some way an attempt of the mind to order its own experience. This is borne out by the fact that so many dreams are cast in the form of a story which links together the various episodes of the dream, however absurd or incongruous these separate episodes may appear.
Many forms of play are also concerned with order. In his book Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga, the Dutch historian, convincingly supposes that play is the primeval soil in which all cultural manifestations are rooted. Without play, we should have neither craft nor art, neither poetry nor music. Huizinga points out that
in some languages the manipulation of musical instruments is called “playing,” to wit, in the Arabic language on the one hand and the Germanic and Slavonic on the other. Since this semantic understanding between East and West can hardly be ascribed to borrowing or coincidence, we have to assume some deep-rooted psychological reason for so remarkable a symbol of the affinity between music and play.34
Games, also, are a way of ordering experience. Games allow for the controlled expression and mastery of competitive and aggressive impulses within a structure of rules and defined area or framework like a playing field.
So it appears that the three activities, play, fantasy, and dreaming, which Freud linked together as escapist or hallucinatory, can equally well be regarded as adaptive; as attempts to come to terms with reality, rather than to escape from it; as ways of selecting from, and making new combinations out of, our experience of both the external world and the inner world of the psyche. None of these activities is as far removed from “thinking” as they appeared to him; and, as we have seen, Freud considered that a principal function of thinking was to master the material of the external world psychically.
If Freud had been able to accept that play, fantasy, and dreaming were attempts to come to terms with, and master, reality rather than to escape from it, he would not have had to lay down his arms before the problem of the creative artist nor have felt that the grandest creations of art were unsolved riddles to his understanding. Art and science, though very different activities, have certain aims in common. Both are concerned with seeking order in complexity, and unity in diversity. As the Gestalt psychologists were the first to affirm, the human tendency toward pattern-making is inborn and inescapable. We cannot see three dots but that we make them into a triangle. Human beings have to order their experience, both spatially and temporally, as part of their biological adaptation to reality, and the forces which impel them to do so are just as “instinctive” as sex. Although Freud did not call it that, I am sure that he appreciated the aesthetic aspect of scientific discovery; the intense satisfaction which accompanies solving a problem or inventing a new explanatory principle. The “eureka” experience is a pleasure closely allied to aesthetic appreciation; for part of what we admire about a painting or a piece of music is the order which the artist has imposed upon what would otherwise have appeared disconnected or chaotic. The nearest Freud comes to acknowledging this kind of pleasure is in his book on jokes. Having recognized that all jokes are tendentious, that is, ways of expressing sexual or aggressive feelings, he reluctantly admits that the techniques of jokes are themselves sources of pleasure. When things which appear incongruous are linked together, Freud supposes that we are economizing our expenditure of psychic energy. This brings pleasure, but of a rather minor variety. Freud calls it a “fore-pleasure”; that is, a slight pleasure which leads on to and makes possible a much greater pleasure. Freud supposes that the form in which writers dress up their fantasies is a kind of fore-pleasure or “incentive bonus” designed to bribe the reader into enjoying something much deeper; the work’s imaginative content, which the writer had to clothe in enticing form in order to make it acceptable.
Because Freud thought of the id as a chaotic cauldron of seething instincts entirely governed by the pleasure principle, in which form was notably lacking, he regarded the need to select, to order, and to impose form upon experience as predominantly a conscious, rational phenomenon. Modern psychoanalysts, particularly Marion Milner and Anton Ehrenzweig, have realized that the drive toward order arises unconsciously. Indeed, Ehrenzweig called his last, posthumously published book The Hidden Order of Art.35
Sir Ernst Gombrich, in his book The Sense of Order,36 links man’s need for pattern-making with his exploratory tendencies. In discovering more about our environment we create internal patterns or schemata. By doing so, we reduce the need to pay equal attention to every impinging stimulus, and only need to take notice of those stimuli which are novel; that is, those which do not fit in with our preformed schemata. A simple instance of this is descending a straight staircase. We only need to pay detailed attention to where it begins and ends, because we assume that each stair will be the same height and width as its fellows. Information theory, originally derived from practical work with telephone cables and other carriers of information, has thrown light on how we economize our intake by taking parts for wholes, and only pay attention to the unexpected. If we had no prior conception of regularity, we could not begin to make corrections to it; and if there were no regularities at all, our environment would be entirely unpredictable; a nightmare, as Gombrich calls it. One modern theory of schizophrenia suggests that sufferers lack some aspect of selective discrimination. Overwhelmed by stimuli which they can neither order nor disregard, they are compelled to withdraw as far as possible from the impact of the world.
As we have seen, Freud’s idea was that the motivation of the artist and the motivation of the scientist could be sharply distinguished. The driving force behind the artist’s need to create was unsatisfied instinct, expressing itself originally in escapist fantasy. The driving force behind the scientist’s activity (about which Freud says little) is to master the material of the external world psychically. I hope I have convinced you that these two creative activities have more in common than Freud supposed. Both artists and scientists are concerned with creating order, a basic drive or need which, because we share it, makes us able to appreciate, and perhaps envy, what the great creators achieve.
This way of looking at creative endeavor raises an obvious problem. If scientific and artistic creativity have so much in common, in what ways are they different? It is clear that a scientific hypothesis is not a work of art, nor is a work of art a scientific hypothesis.
Leonard Meyer, discussing this question in his paper “Concerning the Sciences, the Arts—AND the Humanities,”37 points out that scientists are discovering something which is already there, like the double helix, whereas artists create something which has never previously existed, like the C-sharp minor quartet of Beethoven. We assume, with good reason, that the structure of the DNA molecule was, and always has been, the same. Watson and Crick did not create its structure but discovered it. But nothing like the C-sharp minor quartet existed before Beethoven composed it. He did not discover it; he created it.
Meyer goes on to point out that there is a temporal progress in science which makes even the greatest generalizations, like Newton’s law of universal gravitation, out of date. It follows that scientists have no need to study in detail the original papers of Newton or any other innovator, since their discoveries will have become part of the general scientific edifice.
The same is not true of works of art. Although styles change in the course of time, Beethoven is not an advance on Mozart, nor Picasso on Cézanne: they are simply different. Students of music and painting need to study all four. Meyer discusses a number of other differences which I need not pursue. What I am concerned with here is the similarity between the actual process of creative discovery as it takes place in the mind of an artist and that in the mind of a scientist. A new scientific hypothesis and a new work of art have in common that both are the product of mental activity in which abstraction, fantasy, and playing with various combinations of concepts all take part. Often, both are concerned with combining and transcending opposites. In my paper “Individuation and the Creative Process,”38 I have taken as a scientific example Newton’s synthesis between the discoveries of Kepler and those of Galileo, which resulted in a theory which transcended both: the law of universal gravitation. This is a classic example of how two sets of laws which were previously thought to be entirely separate could be both reconciled and superseded by a new hypothesis.
My example from the arts was Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge,” the movement originally designed as the final movement of the Quartet in B-flat, opus 130. Martin Cooper wrote of this:
What grips the listener is the dramatic experience of forcing—for there is frequently a sense of violence in this mastery—two themes which have, by nature, nothing in common, to breed and produce a race of giants, episodes or variations that have no parallel in musical history.39
Newton’s synthesis is concerned with the facts of the external world; Beethoven’s with what he found in his internal world. It seems to me probable that the mental processes employed by each man of genius in seeking his solution were not dissimilar.
Whereas the scientist is pointed toward discovering order in the external world, the artist is directed toward creating order within: toward making sense out of his subjective experience. What points the scientist in one direction, the artist in the other, is still obscure—although Liam Hudson has thrown some light upon the subject in his studies of the temperamental differences between young people who choose the arts and those who choose the sciences as subjects of study. Both types of creativity are, I believe, motivated by a “divine discontent” which is part of man’s biological endowment. Mystery and disorder spur man to discovery, to the creation of new hypotheses which bring order and pattern to the maze of phenomena. But mystery and disorder pertain to our own natures as well as to the external world. I venture to suggest that, just as it is inconceivable that all the laws of Nature will ever be discovered, so it is equally impossible to believe that the complexities of human nature can ever be grasped in their entirety.
Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a heaven for?40
NOTES
1. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–64), 21:213–14.
2. Sigmund Freud, “Some Early Unpublished Letters,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 50 (1969):425.
3. Harry Freud, “My Uncle Sigmund,” in Freud As We Knew Him, ed. Hendrik M. Ruitenbeek (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973), p.313.
4. Freud, Standard Edition, 13:211–12.
5. Edmund Engelman, Bergasse 19: Sigmund Freud’s Home and Offices, Vienna 1938 (New York: Basic Books, 1976).
6. Freud, Standard Edition, 20:65.
7. Ibid., 21:177.
8. Ibid., 11:59–137.
9. Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (London: Hogarth Press, 1968), p. 44.
10. Freud, Standard Edition, 16:376.
11. Ibid., 9:145.
12. Ibid., 9:144.
13. Ibid., 9:146.
14. Ibid., 12:218.
15. Ibid., 12:219.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., 12:224.
18. Ibid., 9:8.
19. Ibid., 12:223–4.
20. Ibid., 12:221.
21. Ibid., 21:212.
22. David Stenhouse, The Evolution of Intelligence; A General Theory and Some of Its Implications (London: Allen and Unwin, 1974), p. 31.
23. Ibid., p. 67.
24. Quoted in Paul Arthur Schilpp, ed., Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist (Evanston, Ill.: Library of Living Philosophers, 1949), pp. 7–8.
25. Quoted in Antonina Vallentin, Einstein: A Biography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1954), p. 9.
26. Freud, Standard Edition, 12:221.
27. Ibid., 12:222.
28. Ibid., 7:156.
29. Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years (London: Greenwood Press, 1956), pp. 60–61.
30. Freud, Standard Edition, 4:xxxii.
31. Ernest Jones, The Young Freud 1856–1900, vol. 1 of Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), p. 388.
32. Charles Rycroft, The Innocence of Dreams (London: Hogarth Press, 1979), p. 124.
33. Stanley Palombo, Dreaming and Memory: A New Information-Processing Model (New York: Basic Books, 1978).
34. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1970), p. 182.
35. Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art: A Study in the Psychology of Artistic Imagination (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967).
36. Ernst Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (Oxford: Phaidon, 1979).
37. Leonard Meyer, “Concerning the Sciences, the Arts – AND the Humanities,” Critical Inquiry 1 (September 1974): 163–217.
38. Anthony Storr, “Individuation and the Creative Process,” Journal of Analytical Psychology 28 (1983):329–43.
39. Martin Cooper, Beethoven: The Last Decade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 388–89.
40. Robert Browning, Andrea del Sarto, lines 97–98.