Psychoanalytic Approaches to Art and Esthetics

Freud always recognized the genius of artists in perceiving deep psychic truths that psychoanalysts have rendered more explicit. This explains his interest in art, almost concomitant with the birth of psychoanalysis and developing along three main lines: the analysis of works of art, of the creative activity, and of the esthetic experience. Various authors’ theories are examined, emphasizing how we have passed from the first naïve pathobiographies (authors’ unconscious investigated through their artistic products) to the most sophisticated analysis of the structural logic of artistic texts. On the issue of creativity two main theoretic movements have appeared: the first, Kleinian, based on the idea of symbolic reparation of the object; the other closer to the most recent theories on narcissism, based on the hypothesis of an auto-reparative creativity.