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PARTISAN REVIEW
enlarge our understanding of the play, it is not, in itself, a first–
rate example of literary criticism or of aesthetics.
Freud's few attempts to explain
the
nature
of
art
are
not very
impressive, though of course Freud himself-like most outstanding
thinkers-was superior not only to
his
followers, but often to
his
own theories. Perhaps the least impressive of Freud's observations
was that it was the desire for f.a.me, power, and the love of women
that lay behind the creative will of the writer. Nor
do
I find
a
satisfactory explanation of the creative act in the analogies to day–
dreaming and fantasy-building noted by Freud. AB for the
origin
of the creative gift, Freud insisted on many occasions that psy–
choanalysis had no special explanation for this mysterious force,
though the concept of sublimation would suggest that
all
the
achievements of civilization come from the taming of the id. Freud's
contribution to the problem of art lies mainly, I think,
in
the
examples he set in his profound essays on such figures as Dostoevsky
and Leonardo, where he made a number of interesting correla–
tions between the neurotic pattern of these artists' lives and the
content of their works, touching on the meaning of those correlations
in a purely speculative and tentative manner.
Any total approach to art that sees the creative gift or process
as a form of neurosis is bound to produce a lopsided and absurd
theory.
If
art
is
considered as a form of sublimation, or a variety
of dream or fantasy, or even as a therapeutic activity, then we
have no criteria for judging it, nor any way of distinguishing it from
other kinds of dream or fantasy, or therapy. And as for the many
ingenious exercises, revealing art to be oral or anal, sadistic or
masochistic, narcissistic, totemic, the best that can be said of them
is
that they apply equally well to a doodle, a Grandma Moses,
or a Jackson Pollock, though, of course, they cover more of the
doodle. Nor can we attribute the power or significance of a work
of art to the neurosis of the author, for then we would have to assume
that its meaning lay wholly in its psychological content, which
corresponded not only to the neuroses of the author, but to those
of the audience as well. Such a novel as
The Possessed
would have to
be read merely as a story of the criminal mind, and we could not
account for its stature as a political novel.
