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PARTISAN REVIEW
lines around a Rou,ault figure, the way it returns upon itself instead of
merging with the world outside, the realism and living quality of the
persons and things recreated in it-all these qualities strengthen both
creator and audience against ideas of dissolution and dismemberment,
ideas which are also usually expressed or implied by the work, but not
always, when an artist is as deeply repressed as, for instance, was
Cezanne. And in the design of a work, in its metrical or musical or
architectonic recurrences, there is not merely the soothing, hypnotic
maternal quality which Brill has discussed, and which facilitates
emotional transfer, but also a constant fulfilling of promises, a reliev–
ing of uncertainties and tensions, in the happy return of the expected
and desired, in the predictable completion of patterns, in the revela–
tion of something uhknown, which, as the unknown, had aroused
emotions proper to our own attempts to recover and master detached
and antagonistic elements within ourselves.
A similar analysis can be made of humor, which is only in part
the permitted social gratification of sexual or sadistic impulses. Domi–
nantly it is an attempt to relieve anxiety by minimizing the threaten–
ing aspects of the strange, the aggressive, the difficult and the obscure,
and all that recalls early painful oppressions of a paternal character.
But this humor works only under special conditions. Its depreciations
must not threaten the real social and emotional interests of its hearers,
and it needs more than most forms the reassurance of being shared,
of being approved and laughed at, to relieve the fears caused by the
cruelty and destructiveness it usually also contains. That its points
should be objectively valid, that is, should be true-is also a reas–
surance, but by no means
essentia~
any more than external plausibil–
ity was for the effectiveness of Little Red Riding Hood.
For in humor, as in other literary processes, public and intellec–
tual material derives its significance from its relation to inner conflicts
and from the way in which it socializes its materials, and only secon–
darily from the factual or theoretic soundness of what it says. Art
is a form of activity, not a form of truth, and special structures and
relationships are aspects of its functions and of the special conditions
under which it works.
It
seems to me that as a result of psychiatric
studies we are about to understand the values and forms of
art
much
more profoundly than we have been able to before. What I have
said here, of course, is abstract and hypothetical, and can be estab–
lished only by further work in psychiatry, and by much patient and
appreciative re-examination of works of art themselves. The social
and psychological aspects of art, as of individual experience, cannot
really be separated, except for convenience of discourse, and such a
