ART AND ANXIETY
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"in the service of degradation, humiliation and deprivation." The
fundamental pattern is one of conflict and reconciliation, of separa–
tion and return, of man's fall and return to grace. It is the pattern
of analytic therapy, with the emotional transfer to the therapist, and
with the re-integrative recovery, if the analysis is successful, of lost
parts of the self.
But we also know from analysis that within this pattern many
variations and complexities are possible in the attempts to deal with
repressed material, or with internalized "bad objects" which are pro–
foundly needed but also
as~ociated
with pain and separation, as the
breast may be after weaning. W. R. D . Fairbairn shows how guilt
develops as a moral defense against the terrible aspects of parental
figures. Going further than little Hans, a child may convert an original
situation in which he is surrounded by bad objects into a new situa–
tion in which the objects are good and he himself is bad. We may
observe different forms of this process in the relations of Kafka and
Kierkegaard to their fathers, and in the way in which Dostoevsky
"converted" the cruelty with which he was treated by the Czar. And
in our time when terribleness outside us reinforces the terrible within,
and loss of faith in social reform has, for many, wiped out this hope–
ful defense against anxiety, it is easy to understand why a preoccu–
pation with sin and guilt has reappeared and why grace has been
sought in a supernatural union rather than in identification with
political movements or with socialist reconstruction. Analysts think
that such defense may take other forms, as in a sadistic, demonic
identification with bad objects, or in a despairing masochistic giving
up to them, which results in what Freud called the death wish, or an
attempt to be free of them in both their needed and repellent aspects,
by attributing magic strengths to one's own body and products,–
excrements, for instance, on an infantile level, or thoughts and words
later on.
The artist's forms of defense against anxiety, or relief from it,
are highly varied and operate on every level from that of popular
fiction which fantasies over and over again the solution of conscious
problems and the physical reunion with the beloved, to those pro–
founder works which deal symbolically and indirectly with buried
materials, and whose value and meaning have been the subjects of so
much aesthetic controversy.
Countering the fears aroused by destructive impulses and fanta–
sies are the efforts at restitution, reconstruction and reparation. The
wholeness ahd integrity of the work, on which Eliseo Vivas put such
emphasis, its separateness and identity, marked off as with the black
