ART AND ANXIETY
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giving up of oneself to the artist as through the giving up of oneself
to the analyst a transfer occurs which attaches to the present and
actual emotional meanings proper to an earlier and now buried ex–
perience.
2.
To say that art gives expression to repressed material of great
emotional significance is merely a beginning, of course, and to stop
there is to remain with the earlier Freudian interpretation of art
against which so many objections have properly been made.
If
art
is merely a substitute gratification of repressed desires in such dis–
guised form that they can get by the censor, then art is essentially the
same as a dream, even though it may, by its realism and coherence,
seem to take account of external reality. And criticism is largely a
matter of penetrating the disguises and discovering what is really
behind them. It has no criteria for the work of art as such, except
the extent of its revelation; its approach is scientific, cognitive, refer–
ential.
But such an approach was inadequate artistically because it was
inadequate psychologically. Freud so related sex, libido and love that
family and social relationships could exist only at the expense of in–
stinctual gratifications; the role of the super-ego was negative and
repressive; and although social activities could be understood as pro–
jections, displacements and transformations of instinctual and un–
conscious needs, the stages of individual psychic development were
considered fixed, phylogenetically, for all persons, and no adequate
account was taken of the reciprocal influence of individual cultures
and particular social circumstances in shaping the development, both
conscious and unconscious, of the individual.
Such ideas have been under extensive revision for years on both
sides of the Atlantic, and the value of psychiatry in understanding
the literary process need no longer be judged by the earlier inadequa–
cies of Freudian doctrine. It seems to me, for instance, that in discus–
sions of anxiety, particularly in the English psycho-analytic journals,
by writers like Melanie Klein, Ella Freeman Sharpe, W. D. R. Fair–
bairn, Edward Glover and Marjorie Brierley, we not only understand
the positive psychic role of social influences, but can analyze the con–
ditions that art which has the profoundest effect must meet in its use
of both conscious and unconscious materials. We can therefore rele–
vantly judge it, not for what it reveals, but for what it does.
Ac;
an approach to these ideas can we analyze a more sophisti-
