The Childhood of Art: An Interpretation of Freud's Aesthetics

Description

The book is composed as a series of commentaries on Freud's texts as they touch on questions of art, literature, and the "aesthetic realm." These commentaries are also meant to raise a more general question about how Freud is to be read. Her immediate aim is to get us to see more clearly the "functioning of the opposition between what is openly declared and what is masked in Freud's dis- course" (p. 6). […] Kofman tries to read Freud's texts against them- selves, not in order to reduce their range of insight and provocation but to enhance it. Her aim is not primarily to use Freud to produce illumination about art and aesthetics. Nor is she trying to systematize or to bolster a Freudian approach to aesthetics. (To that extent, the subtitle, "an interpretation of Freud's aesthetics"-which was apparently added in the English translation is somewhat misleading.) Her aim is rather to take Freud's various writings about the arts and literature as a series of excavations, whose traces Freud was at some pains to erase or at least to rearrange and tidy up. Both in her over-arching argument and in the individual readings, she follows out her sense that Freud's engagements with the world of art go well beyond the relatively circumspect boundaries that Freud often seems to set for himself and for his discipline. Writers who orient themselves by Freud's texts and methods tend to imagine them- selves judiciously placed in relation to other disciplines and activities. Kofman discerns in psychoanalysis a compromise between a will to self-sufficiency and a deep wish to transgress the boundaries of the other humanistic (and medical) disciplines. This compromise yields, among other things, a peculiar blend of insularity and disciplinary imperialism, which is far from being the exclusive property of psychoanalytic writing. --Timothy Gould Contents 1. The Double Reading: The "Application" of Psychoanalysis to Art 2. Fascination by Art: Art as a Cognitive Model of Psychic Processes 3. Freud's Method of Reading: The Work of Art as a Text to Decipher 4. Art in the Economy of Life: The Metapsychological Point of View 5. From Artistic Creation to Procreation: The Limits of a Pyschoanalysis of Art Notes Works of Freud Cited Index