BOOKS
ART AND ANALYSIS
THE WRITER AND PSYCHOANALYSIS. By Edmund Bergler, M. D.
Doubledoy. $3.50.
THE PSYCHOANALYST AND THE ARTIST. By Doniel E. Schneider. Farror,
Strous. $4.00.
As far as understanding of the creative process is concerned,
these books contribute very little that is at once new and plausible.
But taken together in all their fascinating contradictions they raise
some very interesting questions about psychoanalysis itself. Both Schneider
and Bergler, it is only fair to say, are rather narrow and old-fashioned
Freudians. They have no real interest in social questions as such, or in
the social direction that Freudianism has taken in the work of Karen
Horney, Erich Fromm, Abraham Kardiner, and Harry Stack Sullivan.
They totally ignore the way in which society helps to determine the
character and content not only of interpersonal but of intrapsychical
relationships. Both men, it is true, speak abstractly of the writer and
society-Schneider positively, Bergler negatively-but when they praise
Arthur Miller or condescend to Franz Kafka, centuries, institutions, and
ambiences disappear: the only significant references are to primal hordes
and the pre-oedipal mother image, "that giant ogre of the nursery."
Since it is of the essence of art to be at once public and private,
personal and social, these limitations make it impossible for Schneider
and Bergler to deal essentially with the declared subject of their books.
And yet despite their similar limitations, they are in almost complete
disagreement, not only about art as such, but about the psychoanalysis
of writers. "Analysis of writers," Bergler says, "proves in every case that
the unconscious ego resolved the infantile conflict in a masochistic way."
This conflict arises from the relation to the pre-oedipal mother, Bergler's
specialty, and "writing may thus be seen as a sublimatory self-cure" for
the sickness which this masochistic solution engenders. Nothing could be
more wrong, says Schneider, than "this tendency to look upon aptitude,
talent and genius as the result of great infantile anxiety.. , . It
is
this
attitude which, on the basis of neurotic sublimation as it appears in
certain 'symptomatic' artists, confuses the very inferior creations of
neurotic imitation with art which is the product of true genius. Every–
one has heard the banal opinion that 'all writers are severe masochists.' "
