Art is the Symptom of Dream

I. Introduction

In looking at a painting by Picasso, perhaps his “Old Guitarist” painted in 1903, a conversation about art might emerge and could move in several directions. Viewers can comment on the form, color, stroke, composition, and other formal elements of the painting. They might engage in discussions about their reactions to the work, the feeling it evokes, the memories it stirs, and connections it makes in their minds. Upon more thought and consideration, a third conversation about the meaning of the piece might emerge, enriching a discussion about artist intent and expression. And given enough time and thought, the observers might reflect on what art means in general, how this piece accretes with the other pieces hanging in the gallery or museum to make it a cultural and physical space for art, and what impact that has in helping people understand themselves, the world around them, and the truth of lived experience and feeling.

That fourth conversation is difficult to engage in without understanding some of the perspectives and ideas from history’s bright thinkers and philosophers. One such figure, Sigmund Freud, viewed art through the lens of psychoanalysis and psychodynamic theory, fields of thought that attempted to provide a theory for culture, symbols, and human behavior. Freud’s central claim is that art—specifically writing but applicable to all art—is that art is a type of parapraxis—the spontaneous manifestation of repressed desire in an individual, a form of highly stylized dream and wish fulfillment as expressed in his essay, “The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming.” This is close to the truth. In this paper, Freud’s assertion about art will be dissected to remove the insight from some of the misconstrued ideas that came out of Freud’s psychoanalysis. While much of Freud’s work has been dismissed, especially as it concerns modern psychology and psychiatry, his keen insight into behavior and the interaction of people in their environment through the manifestation of behavior and culture, helps illuminate one aspect of art as it relates to human expression. Drawing upon the ideas about art from thinkers such as Kant, Tolstoy, Aristotle, and others, it becomes possible to illuminate the genius in Freud’s belief about art as a manifestation of dreams and wishes.

II. Context for Psychoanalysis and the Beginning of the 20th Century

In order to help readers understand Freud’s position in regard to the arts and the aspects of art that he focused on, it becomes important to understand some of the social, scientific, and historical context of the early 20th century as well as some of Freud’s background. Scientists had recently discovered the X-ray and created machines of radiography, and early Modern writers such as Henry James and Kate Chopin were writing about the interior life and mind, something that was not a common element of fiction previously. Psychology and a study of the mind was a new and exciting field of science, and Freud’s work in psychoanalysis was significant because it was an attempt at a type of “unification theory” for science, culture, and art.

Freud classified the psyche in three parts: the ego, the superego, and the id. The id is the basic part of the brain that contains instinctual drives. Freud describes it as:The dark, inaccessible part of our personality… most of that is of a negative character and can be described only as a contrast to the ego. We approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations.... It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle. (105–106)

The superego is the part of the psyche that has been civilized by culture, the internal voice that engages us with thoughts about our actions, such as guilt for hurting someone’s feelings or pride for helping a neighbor. In Freud’s view, the superego strives for perfection. The ego, then, struggles between the id and the superego. Freud’s idea of the ego changed as he sought to define it more precisely, but it basically represents elements of reason, sense, judgment, synthesis, and memory.

Psychology has changed since Freud’s time, thanks to advances in science that help scientists understand brain function better and in refinements and breakthroughs in the thinking about mental illness and mental health. However, Freud’s ideas about the id, ego, and superego are relevant enough to describe human behavior and experience so long as it is not strictly within the realm of mental health. Likewise, his work analyzing the individual in society was incredibly prescient in his later work, Civilization and Its Discontent, that looked at the conflicting struggle people faced wanting to be part of society and constantly being repressed by it in some way, such as a man repressing his desire to murder his neighbor in order to have his neighbor’s property and access to his neighbor’s wife.

In a less darkly themed vein, his essay on the nature of art discussed more ephemeral aspects of the psyche, namely day-dreaming and phantasy. For Freud, the arts, particularly literature, reflects one of two groups of phantasy, phantasy that are “ambitious wishes, serving to exalt the person creating them,” or else phantasy that is erotic (108). Most everyone can relate to having daydreams of being the best at something, having super powers, being rich and famous, and of course, some occasional day-dream involving an erotic component, and sometimes the two are intertwined. Freud’s work is characterized by the preoccupation with the erotic thoughts and neuroses of women, and it finds itself manifest here in suggesting that women mostly have erotic phantasy while men mostly have egotistical phantasy (108). Regardless of the validity of his engendering of the results, it is clear that Freud has tapped into two major themes of day-dreaming, thus setting up the context for the type of art that people find pleasurable, becomes popular, and is the type of art they look to discover.

Freud creates an apparatus by which he explains the nature of phantasy and day-dreaming that involves accessing memory and desire from different eras and ages in a person’s life: The activity of phantasy in the mind is lined up with some current impression, occasioned by some event in the present, which had the power to rouse an intense desire. From there it wanders back to the memory of an early experience, generally belonging to infancy, in which the wish was fulfilled. Then it creates for itself a situation which is to emerge in the future, representing the fulfillment of the wish—this is the daydream or phantasy, which now carries in it traces both of the occasion which engendered it and of some past memory. (109)

In other words, Freud is saying day-dreams and phantasies need some context upon which to build—some root desire or unfulfilled wish that resonates and exists in a certain period of time in a person’s life, typically childhood, and which can be evoked through some connection, either physical, emotional, or thematic. Walking by a sign advertising a $200 million lottery jackpot might trigger someone to have phantasies of being rich and buying a house with an indoor pool like the one that person saw in a magazine when he or she was younger. That particular phantasy satisfies a longstanding desire from childhood that has manifest itself as a certain symbol or physical representation—in this case, it’s an indoor pool. However, this thing that is lacking can change, and it is to some degree that this object of desire and manifestation is part of Freud’s interpretation of what art is.

Therefore, it is within this context that one is able to understand the focus of Freud’s work as it relates to an understanding of human nature and behavior, especially in regard to the world. While his ideas often placed more important of the sexual component or relationship to situations and cultural artifacts, Freud astutely saw how human behavior, desire for the immediate, and a desire to have our sense of selves validated and our wills manifest must often be repressed, compromised, or negotiated in culture. As the rational light of science was shining ever brighter in the 20th century, Sigmund Freud was peering into the darkest parts of the human psyche, hoping to find the mysteries by which the greatest and most common of human experience, from literary art to lust and self-loathing, could be explained. His study of art shows both his astounding insight and some of his own bias about the desires and motivations people have, whether they are conscious of them or not.

III. Freud’s Position on Art

Freud’s seminal work on art comes from his essay, “The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming.” In it Freud posits the issue of where artistic expression and ideas come from, though he never quite gets around to answering the question. Still, Freud says the problem is a problem because artists themselves are often incapable of giving a straight answer, which is intriguing, and through which Freud thought examination of inspiration and art “some insight into the creative powers of imaginative writers” (108). Such a topic has been a pursuit of inquiry through history, beginning in western culture with the idea of the muses. Even today, the inspiration’s genesis is enigmatic, so Freud was not the first nor will he be the last to struggle with such an intriguing idea.

Freud believed that dreams, daydreams, and fantasies were manifestations of unconscious desire, an idea common in much of his writing. In fact, much of Freud’s attention was focused on the interplay between desire and action, both on a subconscious versus conscious level and on the level of an individual versus society. In this work, Freud links artistic expression to that interplay and friction between desire and conscious action. Of course, Freud makes some distinction between art and daydreaming, noting that most daydreams are not art (110). Furthermore, Freud makes a distinction between artists who are “esteemed by critics” and “take over their material ready-made” from those who “seem to create their material spontaneously” (110). What Freud means by “material ready-made” are the symbols and myths that exist in a particular culture and society (what Freud refers archaically to as “race”) (111).

In United States culture, the story of Horatio Alger is a myth upon which writers and artists draw inspiration, whether in using to critique or subvert the myth in some way (as with the character of Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby), or to act out the myth in quasi political theater, such as the common “origin story” for Republican presidential candidates—all self-made men. Freud’s “racial myths” are the cultural stories from which we derive our values and through which we ascribe meaning in the world. Writers who access this ready-made material, then, because their work is more like craft, reshaping an old idea in a new form through elements such as setting and character—taking Horatio Alger out of America and placing him on Tatooine and giving him the name Luke Skywalker.

Freud describes certain specific traits to the type of literary art to which he is referring. First, the protagonist is a “hero” who is “protected by a divine providence,” by which Freud means he cannot suffer unduly, making him both sympathetic and admirable (110). The women of these novels fall in love with the main character, and the world is clearly divided into elements of “good” and “evil” that the hero has no trouble discerning or, in the case of evil, defeating (110). These traits constitute an ideal state that Freud asserts is analogous to day-dreams. For novels that Freud refers to as “psychological novels”—novels which can be assumed to have some degree of interiority and description of the protagonist’s thought processes and emotional states—Freud states they seem to be reflections of different components of the writer’s psyche dramatized on the page (111). Freud dismisses novels that do not fit what he has described as the norm by stating that proper analysis of the novels and their authors would show that the authors have similar ego structures as their novels and are themselves, somewhat deviant (111).

It’s a convenient analysis that one must take on face value, but Freud does accurately describe a type of fiction that has been ever present and does seem to exemplify that egotistical type of wish fulfillment. The characters in this type of fiction are called “Mary Sue,” and are believed to represent hyper idealized versions of the author (Mary Sue”). Typically, this type of writing and these types of characters are looked down upon as uninteresting and the flaws of a novice or non-serious writer. It is a low form of art, though it is a more unvarnished form of artistic expression, unconscious desire dramatized in the production of something new if not terribly interesting or good. The opinion of this type of art today also reinforces Freud’s position in that Mary Sue art that is produced is juvenile and considered the work of a child. Frequently this type of character is present in the early work of young writers who are expressing their idealizations, often over the form of established art. For example, the name from which Mary Sue comes from is in reference to parody fan fiction written about the 1960s television show Star Trek (“Mary Sue”). It proves Freud’s point by changing what many would consider legitimate art (Star Trek) into day-dream phantasy through the insertion of an idealized ego of the writer into a fictive world that had been previously established.

Freud shifts his argument slightly to address the act of writing as a process by which writers create content based on the interplay between experience, memory, and childhood desire as a part of wish fulfillment. Freud writes:Some actual experience which made a strong impression on the writer had stirred up a memory of an earlier experience, generally belonging to childhood, which then arouses a wish that find a fulfillment in the work in question, and in which elements of the recent event and the old memory should be discernable. (111)

What Freud is describing is accurately part of many novels, which is the inclusion of childhood memories and experiences that writers transmute and transform to fit into a depiction of life and human experience. Some of it may indeed be a type of wish fulfillment, and the idea of the cathartic act of writing is not new. Therefore, art in Freud’s view, is in some ways the life history of the artist and the unfulfilled desires from childhood intertwined with experience is seen to be fulfilled on the page of these novels. For example, many debut novels from writers are often suggested or seen to contain anecdotes and examples form the author’s early life. Author Ray Bradbury wrote such a novel, Dandelion Wine, that he explained as, “my most deeply personal work and brings back memories of sheer joy as well as terror. This is the story of me as a young boy and the magic of an unforgettable summer which still holds a mystical power over me” (Temple). Bradbury’s description of his early novel almost mirrors perfectly Freud’s assertion that the novel is an emotional reckoning of the psyche and a match of childhood events and current time events that the writer processes. Of course, the autobiographical or semi-autobiographical novel is a genre that lends itself to an easier interpretation than some of Bradbury’s other works, but it’s possible Freud would view Bradbury’s science fiction realities as more phantasy and day-dream by which Bradbury wished to change the very nature of society.

Freud then turns form the nature of the artist to the nature of the pleasure that readers experience as they read. Freud analyzes the reading process and enjoyment of literature (art) as being mostly about how readers are seduced. According to Freud, two things happen. First, the writer, “softens the egotistical character of the day-dream by changes and disguises, and he bribes us the offer of a purely formal, that is, aesthetic, pleasure in the presentation of his phantasies” and also that:

[t]he increment of pleasure which is offered is in order to releaser even greater pleasure arising from deeper sources in the mind is called an ‘incitement premium’ or technically, ‘fore-pleasure’… and that the true enjoyment of literature… consists in the writer’s putting us into a position in which we can enjoy our own day-dreams without reproach or shame. (112)

For the first point, Freud makes the distinction that some formal skill is necessary in order to entice a reader to find pleasure in the writer’s daydream. Again, using the example of the “Mary Sue” character, the characters are usually rendered as perfect and infallible, making them uninteresting because of the lack of variation in the character’s personality and in the inability for the character to face a setback or challenge. In other words, the “Mary Sue” character is just inelegant wish fulfillment and without capacity for readers to share in their own wish fulfillment because the author has left no room in the story—the wish is fully realized and the character is lacking formal skill and therefore is repulsive. For the second point, the expression “getting lost in a book” would be applicable in demonstrating Freud’s point. This is perhaps truer today with media such as movies and television shows, which have access to a collaborative group of talent and multimedia elements to collectively share a mutli-sensory phantasy with the viewer.

Some directors, such as Stephen Spielberg are unnervingly talented in their ability to emotionally manipulate audiences, tapping in to a variety of symbols, signifiers, and phantasies and day-dreams to take the audience on a magical bike ride with an alien from another world, lead them on an adventure against Nazis, or go after a private during World War II. Spielberg would represent one of the artists who draw upon “the age-long dreams of young humanity” (111) in the creation of his art. Of course, Spielberg’s work is meticulous and practiced, and Freud is mostly concerned with the parapraxis of spontaneous art, something more Warhol-esque or perhaps written and directed by John Waters. Yet in some ways, it is only through practice and talent that writers are able to incite the most “fore-pleasure” in readers.

IV. Freud’s Errors in Thinking

Freud’s work is not without issues of error in terms of his understanding of the production of art and culture. His analysis rests too much on his idea that the id the most responsible for the production of “spontaneous” art and is therefore incorrect in a few places within his essay.

One point to consider is that Freud is basing his interpretation of art on late 19th century and early 20th century popular works of fiction. Just as today, writers of all levels published, and there were esteemed and academic writers, poets of note, and people who were popular but not very good. It is this last group that Freud describes as follows:

There is one very marked characteristic in the productions of these writers which must strike us all: they all have a hero who is the centre of interest, for whom the author tries to win our sympathy by every possible means, and whom he places under the protection of a special providence. If at the end of one chapter the hero is left unconscious and bleeding from severe wounds, I am sure to find him art the beginning of the next being carefully tended and on the way to recovery; if the first volume ends in the hero being shipwrecked in a storm at sea, I am certain to hear at the beginning of the next of his hair-breadth escape—otherwise, indeed, the story could not continue. (110).

This is a common trope of fiction, but it is a trope—a decision made in some consideration to storytelling elements and common form, not just a manifestation of the subconscious. Indeed, the modern book series A Game of Thrones has become notorious for killing off the heroes, subverting the trope and subsequently creating a variation of the novel that is, well, novel. Freud is onto something with the idea that phantasy and wish fulfillment are commonly found in daydreams and in some cheap novels, but the connection between the two is not as strong as infers because he is reflecting on a specific type of story structure. The fact that the story needs a protagonist is a self-evident fact that Freud acknowledges, but he moves past it quickly and shuffles it into a manifestation of the ego.

Freud also asserts that popular writers write in an attempt to return to their childhood (111). It is true that engaging in artistic endeavor can elicit a sense of freedom and excitement that is like carefree play at times, but anyone familiar with the writing and production of a book knows that the inspiration and flights of fancy that often go into the first draft are just the beginning of a long process of drafts, revisions, and other publishing concerns. Writing for a living is like doing anything for a living and requires a certain amount of professional skill, judgment, and collaboration among other things—in other words the production of a novel, even one that Freud might consider trashy (though Fifty Shades of Gray might have been a goldmine for him), requires use of the ego and superego, not just the id. Therefore, it becomes a stretch to say writing and the making of art, even by novice or lesser artists, is a continuation of child’s play.

Finally, Freud insists correctly that people really dislike hearing most other people’s dreams or wishes or even stories about their days, though he does not express why. Instead, Freud states that the artist uses a type of “fore-pleasure” to present his phantasy in a way that pleases readers because there is a release of tension (112). The language Freud is using is thinly coded sexual language, and there is definitely a cathartic experience one has when reading a great book or watching an amazing film.

However, it’s not because of some latent erotic level that these transactions for pleasure and enjoyment are occurring. People typically don’t like to hear other people’s stories because most people do not know how to tell a good story. The events may be just as real, the emotions as powerful, but if the content is not delivered in the correct form, the act of telling becomes boring or potentially alienating. Freud acknowledges that there’s an aesthetic (formal) element to storytelling, but he underplays it again in lieu of unconscious desire (112). Freud does acknowledge that literature can be a type of escape fantasy, and in such a case, the role that unconscious desire plays in the enjoyment of that type of art is perhaps more relevant and significant to Freud’s discussion.

V. Kant and Freud

Philosophy, like art, is informed by context, and thus it makes sense to examine Freud’s theory and assumptions about art in context of other philosophers who have written about the topic to some degree or another. This comparison begins with fellow German philosopher Immanuel Kant, a philosopher integral to the discipline who lived during the 18th and early 19th centuries. Kant’s work that is relevant to this discussion is his Critique of Judgment, in which he addressed several important facets of human analysis and judgment of what art and beauty signified.

Kant was primarily focused on understanding how people come about different types of judgment, but his view on what constitutes art is of interest as it relates to Freud’s ideas. Kant believed art was anything that affected people as if there were a purpose to the art being made, though no practical purpose exists (Kant). A beautiful painting is art even though there is no reason for that painting to be. It evokes an emotional response and is beautiful and art if the viewer enjoys the painting as if it were purposeful and meaningful, though its purpose beyond being beautiful cannot be known (Kant). Because Kant believed there had to be significance to an object or experience in order for it to be moving and emotionally resonant or significant, he transferred significance to art and the experience of viewing it, interpreting it, and finally accepting it.

Kant’s position supports what Freud states—that art affects viewers as if it were something purposeful made manifest, such as the unconscious desire made manifest in a painting that evokes emotional reaction. Good and worthy art is an aesthetically successful rendering of one’s day-dream, and since it is wish fulfillment, the viewer or reader identifies the wish fulfillment pleasure and treats the art as if it had made the wish or desire a reality. For example, consider the acclaimed 1996 graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller. By most accounts, it is enjoyable and beautiful as defined by Kant using appropriate judgment. It is not practical and has no purpose other than to be a graphic novel; however, it is a story of a hero who is past his prime but can summon the tenacity and fighting will to overcome, who is protected by a certain level of providence and exists in a world that is clearly good or bad (though the hero himself exists in a state of gray). It is a type of day-dream that Freud states is indicative of popular art, and that escapism into the daydream world of being the Batman and of being able to overcome all odds is the purposefulness that Kant ascribes to art.

VI. Schopenhauer and Freud

Arthur Schopenhauer, a fellow German philosopher who lived during the 18th and 19th centuries and whose best-known work is The World as Will and Representation, presented his thesis that the world is driven by a will that is always in need of being satisfied but is never fully so.

Schopenhauer believed, like Freud, that repressed yet active desire was a part of the human condition. He also believed that art was able to fulfill that desire, though his description of it differs from Freud’s in terms of what that desire and what the fulfillment actually represent. For Schopenhauer, who studied Kant, the desire that was satiated from witnessing art was the desire of knowingness, and that the sense of self could be lost while viewing the art:

Not merely philosophy but also the fine arts work at bottom towards the solution of the problem of existence. For in every mind that once gives itself up to the purely objective contemplation of nature a desire has been excited, however concealed and unconscious it may be, to comprehend the true nature of things, of life and existence. (Schopenhauer)

Schopenhauer’s “true nature of things” is Freud’s wish-fulfillment of the ego, from which all knowledge has been obtained, and the psyche is whole or without struggle. Freud’s analysis has more sexuality and inner conflict between the components of the psyche than Schopenhauer’s analysis, but they both arrive to a similar conclusion about that sense of release and relief one experiences when viewing art that is beautiful or sublime. Schopenhauer believes there is something lightly more mystical in art, or at least he is referring to the type of art that Freud set aside in his essay—the art of those whom the critics hold in high esteem. Some artists—painters, writers, musicians—can change the way a person views the world by exposing them to an idea or condition presented in a novel and surprising way. Schopenauer is describing the reaction of that person who is moved to sublime tears by the execution of a perfect novel and brings the reader to a brief and exalted understanding of the true nature of things.

VII. Nietzche and Freud

Frederich Nietzsche, the final German philosopher in this discussion, lived during the 19th century and was important for a number of ideas about the nature of art, culture, the military, religion, and so on. His discussion about art is found in his Birth of Tragedy, in which Nietzche creates a dichotomy between Dionysus and Apollo, akin to what Freud might call the id and the ego. For Nietzche, people must embrace their Dionysian side in order to experience salvation, but required the Apollo side to interpret (Nietzche). In fact, Nietzche’s description of the artist and dreamer is in synch with Freud’s discussion of the day-dream and the role of art to manifest the phantasy of the writer and reader:

If we recall how the dreamer, in the middle of his illusory dream world, calls out to himself, without destroying that world, ‘It is a dream. I want to continue dreaming, and if we can infer, on the one hand, a deep inner delight at the contemplation of dreams, and, on the other, that he must have completely forgotten the pressing problems of his daily life, in order to be capable of dreaming at all with such an inner contemplative joy, then we may interpret all these phenomena, with the guidance of Apollo, the interpreter of dreams, in something like the manner which follows below.

Nietzche is also stating Freud’s assertion that the artist is a type of dreamer whose spontaneity of art is pleasurable and therefore something the writer wishes to continue. This product of art is the aesthetically pleasing phantasy that the artist shares with the world, and in it is the power to draw witnesses to the art into the dream, the “inner contemplative joy” that Freud might describe as the wish fulfillment of childhood and the id. Apollo for Nietzche is the Ego for Freud, and it is through the ego that the interpretation of the wish is interpreted and validated.

For Nietzche, at least in the romantic mood that this book found him in, day-dreaming and phantasy are part of the Dionysus dichotomy, but it is up to Apollo to make sense of the experience. In this way it is similar to Freud’s narrative that the desire begins at childhood and is manifest and resolved at a point later in life, the younger self being Dionysus and the odler self being Apollo. The day-dream and phantasy can give access to the sublime inner consciousness, again through the physical representation of art, whether visual, literature, or music.

Conclusion

Sigmund Freud had an uncanny ability to presciently observe human behavior and articulate it according to a system of concepts and language he helped develop and sharpen called psychoanalysis. His work and thinking has impacted several fields of study, including psychology, philosophy, and English—indeed much of the humanities involved in critical thinking and pondering the complexity of the world and the people living in it. It is fitting, then, that such a master thinker would turn his considerable intellect toward the study of the nature of art. His seminal work on the subject, “The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming,” uses Freud’s framework of psychoanalysis to unpack the significance of art, the artistic process, and to delve deeper into the mind and psyche of poets and other artists in order to better understand where both the spark of genius and the impulse to share it through the creation of art could come from. Freud sees art as both a symptom of the unfulfilled psyche and also as the salvation through which artists and viewers can find release from their struggle in the pleasurable interaction with art.

Works Cited

Freud, Sigmund. New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. New York: Penguin, 1993. 105-106. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. “The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming.” The Nature of Art, 3rd edition. Ed. Thomas Wartenberg. New York: Cengage, 2007. 108–112. Print.

Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgment. Web. 5 October 2013.

“Mary Sue.” Know Your Meme. Cheezeburger, Inc. 2012. Web. 6 October 2013.

Neitzche, Frederich. “The Birth of Tragedy.” Web. 8 October 2013.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. “The World As Will and Representation.” The Nature of Art, 3rd edition. Ed. Thomas Wartenberg. New York: Cengage, 20087. 64–70. Print.

Temple, Emily. “The Art of the Semi-Autobiographical Novel.” Flavorwire. Flavorpill Productions, 18 November 2011. Web. 8 October 2013.