Chapter Four

The Play_Impulse And Aesthetic Pleasure

All fine imaginative work is selfconscious and deliberate. No poet sings because he must sing. At least, no great poet does. It is so now, and it has always been so.... There is no fine art without selfconsciousness.

Oscar WILDE (The Critic as Artist)

A long and intricate path leads from the individual’s creative will-to-art, through all the preliminary stages of creation and the artistic creative act itself, to the finished work which, released from its creator, produces in the recipient that which is called zsthetic pleasure. Along this path lie, on the one hand, all the complex problems of the psychology of creative personality, and, on the other, the artistic choice of material which, through sketches and studies, struggles to find the ideologically adequate expression. There is also, however, the question of esthetic effect as well as that of the critic’s appreciation of the work. And, finally, there is the general valuation of it by contemporaries and posterity, which we summarize in the term “ fame.” Now that we have gained some insight into the artist’s personality and have fully recognized the mixture of individual and collective ideologies which is characteristic of the art-form, we may turn to the purely psychological aspect of the problems of art. In so doing we have, as has been pointed out, to avoid studying the psychological problem one-sidedly on the strength of its esthetic effect and so neglecting the primary urge for expression in the creator. The dualism for which we have here to account by presenting both aspects at once is thus one of dynamic expression and esthetic enjoyment, the one being manifested in the psychology of the creator, and the other in that of the recipient. Worringer has very rightly objected that art has up to now been studied far too much from the standpoint of the esthetic effect of the finished product, in the case of the Classical above all. The catchword of this method of criticism was “ intuition (Einfihlung),” a word minted by Theodor Lipps, which, according to Worringer, stops short at the psychology of Classical art. To this intuitive esthetic of Classical art he opposes the abstraction-character of primitive art, which produces pure style-forms where the craving for “ feeling oneself into ” leads to naturalism. But valuable as this critical demarcation of the Classical art-feeling may be, Worringer’s application of his psychology of style to the problem has not enabled him to grasp the spiritual part played in the forming of style by the individual’s urge to artistic creativity." He takes a step in that direction by regarding a kind of fear in primitive man, which he characterizes as “ space-fear (Raumangst),” as the psychological motive for abstraction, but this theory seems to me on various accounts to require questioning and supplementing. That abstract form is evolved, psychologically, under the influence of a fear that drives men to seek safety in the eternal (and, I might add, in the self-willed) seems to me correct. But to regard this as being also the beginning of all artistic creativity is, I feel, an unjustified and also unnecessary piece of “ historization,” quite apart from the fact that it ascribes to the primitive a “prime fear” which I should take to belong rather to our own psychology than to his world-outlook. But of this more later. In any case the earliest art-form of which we have so far heard — the “ naturalism ” of palzolithic man — is not abstract; neither does it appear to spring from any primitive fear, but rather from a naive feeling of superiority at being able to control nature. Worringer’s zsthetic development of the Riegl theory, therefore, in making clear its central point, has brought out its weakness also. In the first place, we see no ethnological or psychological justification for the actual fear ascribed to the primitive, whose psychology is here based on a timeless abstraction-style.

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1 Karl Schultze-Jahde warns us of the necessity of separating style.as regards object from style as regards modes of expression CAusdruckswerk und Stilbegriff ; Berlin, 1930).

The collective ideology underlying abstract art-forms is undoubtedly based on a sense of fear; but the first product of this is a belief in the soul — in fact, religion — and not, at that stage, artistic creativity, which appears to arise only out of an individual self-assertion against that fear. It is this individual need for expression that is overlooked by all zsthetic, including Worringer’s.. Yet this exists in the individual of every age just as definitely as does the frightened feeling of dependence which leads to collective immortality-ideologies, whereas art, how much it may employ collective style-forms, is derived from the personal urge to immortalization. Only, at certain times and in certain situations this feeling of terrified dependence gains the upper hand and urges the creative individual to make use, like the rest, of the collective forms produced by the religious and social ideologies of such periods as a means to express his personal urge to immortalization. On the other hand, periods of superlative self-confidence produce a naturalistic art-form as a manifestation of command over nature. And even if both style-forms are based, as Worringer maintains, on the need for self-renunciation, yet we must not overlook the equally strong tendency to self-affirmation which may express itself, at one time directly as supremacy over nature, and at another indirectly as an ideological freeing from her dependence. In naturalistic art, which is born, not of fear, but of man’s sense of superiority (whether imaginary or justified), man rises to an imitative command of his world-around; on the contrary, in abstract art, which is born of a sense of dependence, he appears as self-creative.

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1 For this reason the one attempt (unique, so far as I am aware) to construct a general zsthetic on the fear of the ego (in Worringet’s sense) was bound to be unconvincing on the main issue, although many hitherto neglected points were usefully emphasized. I allude to Erich Major's Versuch einer neuen Aesthetik (1913). The author assumes ‘‘the sources of artistic creativity’’ to lie in the ‘will to immortalize,”’ which he derives from the fear of external dangers. It is a pity that he places his theory of fear in essential opposition to the psycho-analytical erotization of artistic creativity and does not advance beyond this controversy to the creative will-power which is already beyond sex and fear (see also above).

But this creative self-afirmation is as little the specific essence of artistic creativity as self-renunciation is that of esthetic experience. For, as Worringer himself suggests, abstraction and intuition are not specifically characteristic of artistic experience, but are general psychological attitudes towards the world, and they also manifest themselves in correspondingly varied art-forms and artistic expressions. What, then, is this art-form-in-itself, which the will creates, now by abstraction, now by naturalistic introjection, and now again by selfprojection into nature? To answer this question we must turn again from the esthetic criticism of style to psychology on the one hand and to philosophy and the genetics of Culture on the other; for only so shall we understand the need for self-renunciation or self-assertion in one form or another. Riegl’s assumption of an absolute will-to-form, though it has been of such immense value to the science of art, does not, psychologically, solve this spiritual problem, but rather obscures it. For this absolute will-to-art is regarded even by Worringer as corresponding to a universal creative instinct in nature, which can produce mineral crystals and primitive ornament alike. And yet between these there is precisely the difference that’ exists between nature and spirit. And this is no esthetic difference, for an elaborate crystal structure may arouse precisely as much admiration as a perfect picture. It is an essential difference, consisting in the fact that the crystal has grown and is a part of nature, while the work of art produced by human hands belongs to a second, super-real world, which is just what we instinctively feel art in its higher stages to be. In spite of — or perhaps because of — his nearness to nature, the primitive spends a far greater portion of his total life than we do on a super-real plane, to which he is elevated by his magical conception of the world. We know now that not only his art but his whole attitude towards life is abstract, based as it is on a naive belief in the soul. With the primitive, therefore, art cannot be detached from his supernatural conception of the world, for it remains — as, for that matter, even in highly developed communities —an essential and inseparable part of the collective life as a whole. It is only not so for us, whose whole world-picture is realistic and becomes from day to day more concrete, and for whom art (side by side with the scanty shreds of religious feeling that remain to us) is only a last remnant of that super-real world which it formerly objectified and of which it was a part. In this magical world-picture, to which art also belonged, the need for self-renunciation, as we understand it, had no place; for it only appears when there is a dualism of two worlds to promote a desire to flee from one into the other. This urge of ours to the renunciation of self, which finds its esthetic satisfaction in art, we have already contrasted with the religious and the erotic renunciations of self which are achieved respectively through collective and through individualistic ideologies. The esthetic selfrenunciation, similarly, is founded on what we may call a “social” ideology, since the work of art, for all its personal dynamic expression, always strives to make an effect on others, whether it adopts more or less collective style-forms for the purpose. But the central question of all esthetic is: how does the artist achieve this effect, that enables so many others to identify themselves with his work? The older exsthetic answered this by referring it to nature-imitation. The creative artist, one was told, identified himself so extensively with nature that he was able to imitate it, and this human imitation of nature, again, made it possible for the non-productive person to identify himself at least with this imitated nature. But the explanation is so unsatisfactory and presumes so many psychological improbabilities that it could not survive the critical analysis of modern esthetics, and already it is considered as definitely refuted. Once it had been established, however, that art had nothing to do with imitating nature, a new theory of its aims became necessary. For to the nature-imitation theorists art must have seemed an aimless pastime, an ideal vision —as the Classicist esthetic tried to define it — soaring above all utilitarian criteria. Today we know, for instance, that the aims of primitive art were, though definite, not directly practical; they began by being ideal aims and only thereafter, through religious ritual and wonder-working magic, decisively influenced man and his destiny. The first formula that we found for primitive art followed from our view of it as a concrete presentation of the abstraction underlying the magical worldoutlook, of which the essence is the soul-concept. Here art still coincides almost completely with religion, but this means, not that it is identical with the transcendent, but that — now as later — it is the objectification thereof. If belief in the soul may be taken as religion, or at any rate as the preliminary stage of it, we must admit that art was at first, and for a long time to come, the handmaid of religion. Its “aim” was to prove the existence of the soul by concretizing it, and it achieved this by presenting the abstract in abstract form— that is, by imitating as faithfully as possible, not reality, but unreality. Thus we can detect both the imitative instinct of artistic creativity and the practical aimlessness of art even in these primitive stages. The imitation, however, concerns the unreal, which later becomes steadily more naturalized and humanized, while the aimlessness concerns reality—a fact which esthetics has, strangely enough, inverted by looking for imitativeness, vis-avis reality, in which domain it has no purpose — and so being led to deny that art has any aim except that of esthetic gratification. This error must mean something, as does every error, including these views of mine, should they prove to be such. For even an error contains a possibility of thought, and every possibility of thought contains a possibility of being. There may be people today who feel themselves so scientifically enlightened that they can regard the whole of religion as one monstrous “error” of mankind, one of its most dangerous illusions. Yet this error has greater significance, even today, than their “truth,” if it were truth. The most probable and also the most consoling explanation of this contradiction would be a historical one. It seems to us certain now that primitive art was no imitation of nature, but something serving quite definite ideal purposes; this would not, however, exclude the possibility that it took its pleasure later in a purposeless imitation of nature, and for proofs of this we might point to periods of extreme realism. Yet even if these are not to be regarded as the expression of an individualist art-ideology, as we have suggested, there would still be another way of accounting for them. Could we not say that, actually, art never did in fact set out to imitate nature aimlessly, but that the men of a certain epoch interpreted it as doing so when they described this imitation historically as art’s origin and ideologically as its mission? This explanation, be it remarked, would suit all alternatives, whether art was really this or only appeared to be so to the eyes of the esthetic. It is at least a possible interpretation and is also certainly a possible ideology of art, apart from the fact that we know exactly what an immense influence this Classicist esthetic had on the artistic creativity of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In other words, the problem is: how could such an obviously false ideology of art arise at all in connexion with primitive art? And why was it accepted by the artists of a certain epoch with apparently overmuch eagerness? Fundamentally this seems to me a question for cultural philosophy, the true answer to which must be deferred until we have disposed of some of the problems of individual psychology more relevant to the title of this section. For we can only approach the esthetic element characteristic of art, which is predominantly a psychological problem, by analysis of the individual as we have opportunity to study him today." We must of course bear in mind the sources of error which are found in every individual psychological investigation, and especially in one undertaken with the object of understanding historical phenomena. But no other course is open to us, and we can only hope in the first place to probe deeply enough into the individual to be able to grasp certain general human elements, the value of which as aids to an understanding of artistic creativity and pleasure we can then put to the test.

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1 And, after all, does not the prevailing theory of zsthetic come from a psychologist (Lipps)? His Eénfublung, translated here ‘‘intuition,’’ means really ‘feeling oneself into.”

In any case we may expect to glean something about the modern artist-type in the process, which may possibly throw light (or fresh light) on the esthetic problems of Classical and even primitive art. We may well take warning, however, by the exaggerations of the Classicist esthetics which sought to reduce all artistic creation to the formula of a particular epoch, even though we are of opinion that art must contain essential elements that are common to all the ideologies of the various generations and epochs. Now, there is one esthetic theory, which comes from one of the greatest Classical artists of all time — namely, Schiller — that makes a bold bid to solve simultaneously the problem of artistic creativity and that of esthetic gratification. This derivation of the problem of art from the play-instinct seems to me, even at the present day, to be a safe starting-point for a psychological voyage of discovery into the dark realm of esthetic. In his famous letters: Uber die dsthetische Erziehung des Menschen, Schiller places the individual between the two worlds of the senses (reality) and the will (moral), to which he ascribes, on the one hand, the material-instinct, and, on the other, the form-instinct. The play-instinct gives expression and life to both in harmonious union, and the result is beauty. From this height of zsthetic-philosophic contemplation it only remains to flash a light into spiritual abysses, as did Nietzsche in his Birth of Tragedy, or to descend oneself into the depths of psycho-biological processes, after the manner of the psychoanalytical treatment of art. But today what even Classical antiquity, which produced so many masters, says to us about art is meaningless, be it Socrates’ moral identification of the beautiful or Aristotle’s conceptual separation of these categories, wherein he asserts an absence of will in the beautiful, but ascribes to it a direct pleasurable effect; or, yet again, other views such as those of Plato or Plotinus which, like the utterances of the Delphic priestess, sound mystical and profound, but only reveal their profundity if one can interpret them aright — or, indeed, interpret them at all. Least of all shall we glean anything from the intellectual esthetic of Baumgarten, the spiritual father of the imitation theory, to say nothing of the philosophical speculations of Romanticism. The newer art-theories, with their anthropological orientation, assign — particularly since Spencer’s acceptance of the Schiller view — a special réle to the variously interpreted playinstinct, although insisting at the same time upon the imitative instinct and on a “preservative instinct,’ which obviously corresponds to our immortalization-tendency. But the playinstinct itself, which Schiller had so incomparably described as a harmonious phenomenon binding the two human worlds, presently became the object of anthropological, sociological, biological, and psychological analysis, without, however, becoming much more intelligible from the esthetic standpoint. Spencer himself regards play as the outlet for superfluous energy; Lazarus, as recuperation after the fatigue of real life; Groos, as exercise preparatory to these; and, lastly, Wundt emphasizes the “unconscious or conscious imitation of purposeful actions” as well as the “ pleasing effect” of play, and the “ re-formation of the original aims in imaginary ones.” If we applied this to art, therefore, we should find ourselves back at the theory of aimless imitation, whereas the unsoundness of that theory (however undeniable its right to exist) was the very starting-point of our discussion. It only shows, once more, that all our anthropology, sociology, biology — yes, and psychology — do not at bottom get beyond reality as the ultimate explanatory principle and can only understand even a make believe action (Spencer), such as play presents, as an imitation of a real activity. Neither does psycho-analysis, with its medical-anthropological attitude, take us any further in this, as we see from the isolated example of Pfeifer’s crude application of the infantileerotic complexes to the existing theories of play (Imago, V, 1917). The little that Freud himself has said about art does not go beyond a comparison of poetic imagination and play,” while, later, he defines play as a “ motoric hallucination” (Totem und Tabu, 1913). This definition, which requires a definition of hallucination itself if it is to be intelligible, probably amounts to no more than the theory of wish-fulfilment. But this theory stops short at the problem of will, and the particular character of wish-fulfilment which distinguishes hallucination from dreams, play, art, and, indeed, religion is left unexplained by psycho-analysis. We are, therefore, at once driven back on will-psychology, at least for our starting-point towards a deeper insight into the general problem of the play-instinct and zsthetic gratification. Now, I have already, in another connexion, starting from the psychology of the neurotic and discussing psychotherapeutic possibilities of curing him,” emphasized the therapeutic and indeed absolutely vital character of illusions in contrast to Freud, who regards them (even from a historical point of view) merely as infantile wish-fulfilments which we have to outgrow.° I believe, however, that everything that is consoling in life—that is, everything therapeutical in the broader sense —can only be illusional, and even the therapeutic effect of analysis I have tried to explain in my latest “technical ” work by the unreality of the analytical situation.* To understand the work of art in its specific import, then, we have not only to advance, in our search for an explanation of creative imagination, from the wish-fufilment theory to willpsychology, but also to get hold of the negative aspect of the immortality-ideology in the fear-problem of the neurotic. Now, I have always regarded the neurotic as a failed artist. In other words, to the eternalizing tendency of the individual will (as manifested collectively in religion and personally in the loveexperience) there must be superadded a particular kind of overcoming of fear; and this we can certainly study better in the failed neurotic with his thwarted productivity than in the creative artist.

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1 Der Dichter und das Phantasieren (1908).

2 Wahrheit und Wirklichkeit (1929). 8 For in Freud's The Future of an Illusion art still offers ‘‘ substitute satisfactions” for the oldest cultural abnegations (in imagination). a ap Analyse des Analytikers und seiner Rolle in der analytischen Situation, 1930 (Technik, I0O U1).

For the artist overcomes this isolating fear socially, by getting society’s sanction for his personal immortalitysymbolism, whereas the neurotic fails to overcome his mortal fear because he has nothing to compensate it, either individually (in love), collectively (in religion), or, least of all, socially. Now, the study of neurotic fear has led to the conclusion that the general problem of fear, in whatever form we encounter it, cannot be handled and explained as a problem of reality, but at bottom represents an irrational phenomenon. Herein, incidentally, lies the very pardonable error of the Worringer concept of fear, which is far too realist to explain the abstract urge to art. For external fear no more leads to compensatory artistic activity than real sex-impulse does so. This unreality of fear is also confirmed by the better comprehension that we now have of the primitive world-attitude, for the primitive’s fear relates to the irrational and not to the real; we believe that we can fairly say, therefore, that this immortality-ideology of his on which the religious, artistic, and social creations are founded has been determined, not by actual fear —fear of external dangers — but by inward fear of the unreal, and precisely because of its intangibility.’ Fear is, in contrast to fright, not a real phenomenon: it cannot be traced to and explained (as psycho-analysis has attempted to explain it) by any real danger, even such an internal danger as one might postulate, for example, in the individual’s own insistent impulses (Freud). For every adequate cause of fear that we find, without or within, merely gives it the impress of fright, without touching the prime phenomenon of human fear of the unreal and irrational. Indeed, the linking of this prime fear even with the notion of death — unreal as this must be to our ignorance, and peculiarly close as it stands to the prime fear — seems a sort of tacking-on by way of afterthought. The prime phenomenon itself I characterized in another connexion (Technik, III) as “ life-fear,” because seemingly it is something given along with the life process itself and working against the individual’s fear of losing himself in life.

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1See: Seelenglaube und Psychologie (1930).

In so far, therefore, as the negative-inhibitive fear of life, as well as the positive will to perpetuation, acts in the creation of ideologies (including artistic ideologies), we have to deal with a second unreal factor. To put it in another way, the fear that urges towards perpetuity is precisely as unreal — or, shall we say, illusory or fantastic —as the positive will-to-art that builds up for itself a second reality next above, parallel with, or inside the first. But neither of these two tendencies alone is capable of constructing an ideology, be it of a religious, an artistic, or a social character; it requires the two together, cooperating according to the needs of the moment, to do that. Yet they are not one, they are not causally connected in such a way that the fear of death leads to the will to eternalization, or the complete achievement of the will to eternalization leads to the fear of life. This may seem to happen, or actually happen, even at a later stage in that which I have called the creative sense of guilt; but also it may only emerge from the attempt to overcome this fundamental dualism in the individual. Originally the positive will to eternalization seems to have led by itself only to actions of a predominantly magical order which, in the course of ritual development, became pre-artistic expressions of a “ practical ” sort (dance, and eventually instrumental music and song), while the restraining fear led solely to magical hush-ceremonies which we meet later in religious (like neurotic) ceremonial. Only a combination of the two—in other words, a volitional grip on, and conquest of, the fearphenomenon — leads to the creation of ideologies in which the will to eternalization satisfies itself (in the first instance) collectively, and individual fear is suspended or at least temporarily mitigated. Yet not only is the unreal character of these ideologies obvious, but (after what has been said) their unreal origin also: that is, the unreal motivation which they have in the individual. Thus, at the very commencement of human development —then, indeed, in far greater measure than subsequently — we have the unreal element as the decisive factor which led to expression in art. But if religion is originally unreal, and the (psychologically speaking) equivalent love-experience at the other end of the scale is predominantly real, art stands in the middle, realizing the unreal and rendering it concrete. In so doing, it merely follows a universal law of development which I have formulated in my Seelenglaube und Psychologie: namely, that human development consists in a continuously progressive concretization of phenomena that were originally purely ideal or spiritual. In this sense the whole of cultural development is an artistic, or at least artificial, attempt to objectify human ideologies. Nevertheless, art does stand out from the general line of development by the fact that it retains a substantial element of the original unreal character. Indeed, in certain artistic tendencies, and, for that matter, in its general development, it even emphasizes the unreal and spiritual element in contrast to this universal concretization-tendency and tries to protect itself against being pulled down to the levels of actual use. Herein, we may fairly say, lies one of the motives for the esthetic theory of the “ purposelessness” of art: art in fact should represent this unreal ideality in an increasingly concretized world; while, on the other hand, the imitative principle (as we shall see) appears as a reaction of the creative sense of guilt, driving the individual out of his unreal world and back to nature. Throughout the steady concretization-process of the superreal ideologies — which become ever more earthly and end by actually humanizing the creative god in the artist — art conserves the irrational principle which finds expression in the individual creative will on the one hand and the esthetic immortality-concept on the other. It refuses to conserve the human being by imitating nature and man; neither does it console by offering substitutes for what is unattainable or has been renounced, in reality: what it seeks is to prove by objectification the emotional reality of what has never been real and can never be made real. This psychic actuality is not, however (as analysis would have it), a precipitate of the real, but an idealism a@ priori anchored beyond all reality, which the will to eternalize objectifies in the artistic immortality-concept. This specifically artistic immortality-ideology renders its creator immortal along with his work, by putting, on a work which expresses the prevailing collective ideology, the stamp of the individual artistpersonality. This intermediate character of the work of art, which links the world of subjective unreality with that of objective reality — harmoniously fusing the edges of each without confusing them—has been superbly turned to account by the play-instinct, as Schiller zsthetically conceived it. The only question is whether the esthetic play-instinct, which transfers a conception taken from play to art and artistic productivity, really produces the latter or merely accounts for its pleasurable effect. For play, after all, differs not only conceptually, but factually, from art. It has in common with art the combination of the real and the apparent; yet it is not merely fancy objectivized, but fancy translated into reality, acted and lived. It shares with art the double consciousness of appearance and reality, yet it has more of reality, while art is content with the appearance. Here we are reminded of Plato’s definition, or, rather, poetic description, of art — which is really but the reflection of his whole picture of life; for does he not explain daily life as the shadow of an actual reality, which he calls the Idea, and does not art therefore naturally represent for him only a shadow of that shadow, a copy of a copy? Had he meant that this artificial image of our shadow reality might have caught something of the original idea underlying it in the process, his conception would be so far removed from his ascription of an imitative character to art that we should be able to accept that conception. It would not appear to be so, however. For art to him is imitation (ulunows), and play, which for the Greeks was such an outstanding cultural factor, he seems to have regarded, quite generally, as just such a copy of real life.

But as we shall discuss in a later section the origin and significance of human play, as a problem of folk-psychology which is allied to, but by no means identical with, artistic creativity, we will now return to the pleasure-giving character that is common, as it seems, to art and play. It seems to us that Schiller in his treatise contributed more to this purely zsthetic problem of satisfaction or pleasure than to the problem of artistic creativity proper — particularly in that he was able to regard the notion of the beautiful, which so greatly exercised esthetic, as the result of the harmonization between the material-instinct and the form-instinct. But the contemplation of the beautiful aroused pleasure, satisfaction, or liking, and the central problem of scientific esthetic is to find out why and how this happens. This, however, takes it for granted that the artist creates the beautiful that thereupon arouses pleasure in the enjoyer, a conclusion which seems an arbitrary assumption based on the effect of the work of art upon us. In other words, it is assumed in esthetic that the artist desires to create the beautiful and, in so doing, enjoys a pleasure corresponding to that of the spectator or listener. Yet that is just what we do not know, so that we can only say that we call a work beautiful when we get some pleasure-value or other out of it. Herein perhaps is to be found the origin of Socrates’ ranking of the beautiful on a level with the good and the useful, and of Plato’s identification of it with the true — in the sense of his doctrine of Ideas, which leads him to interpret the soul’s intuition of a self-beauty (ai7o caddy) as the recollection of its prenatal existence. And so we find the link with our previously outlined explanation of the beauty-concept as a derivative of the soulconcept, and also the relation with the immortality-concept, by bringing the prenatal —that is, a supernatural — state into the account.”

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1 have already in my Trauma of Birth (1924) tried to work out the psychological significance of this prenatal condition to artistic creativity and particularly to Greek art. See the section on “Artistic Sublimation.’’

At this point we can consider also the psychological significance of esthetic pleasure in the beautiful, whether felt by the artist himself or put into the work by the enjoyer. In spite of the difference between art and play, there is this element common to both, that they operate on a plane of illusion, which has its setting and its pattern in our own soul-life. Analysis of the modern human type, moreover, has taught us ta understand the emotional life (Gefthlsleben) as such an inner plane of illusion on which all experience is played out more or less potentially, without actual happening (Technik, III).’ This provides us in principle with an internal phantom existence without actualized experience, but one in which the individual does not necessarily become conscious of its illusory nature. It is only by looking at the matter thus that we can understand dream-life as an artificial phantom life on the illusionist plane of the emotions (“life is a dream”). In play and in art the individual is able, by the aid of a collective or social ideology, to find such an illusory plane, whereon he can live potentially or symbolically without doing so in reality. The pleasure that he finds in this phantom life on an illusory plane lies in the fact that it enables one to avoid the expenditure of real life, which is, basically, in the escape that it provides from life itself and, behind all, from the fear that is inseparable from real life and experience. Freud was the first to recognize the saving of energy as essential to the pleasure derived from wit and, eventually, to all esthetic pleasure,” but his view of energy as libidinous prevented him from extending this conception to the nature of pleasure generally, the purest form of which is, from a philosophic point of view, esthetic pleasure.

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1 I should like to refer my readers here to an older interpretation in a book to which I have not been able to gain access: Alexander Bain’s The Emotions and the Will. The special nature of artistic emotion is there discussed in a chapter on ‘‘The Asthetic Emotions.”’ >

2 Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious (1905; English translation, 1916). As I understand it, Freud in his Theory of Sex (written at the same time) takes the partial character of pleasure into account in his notion of “‘pre-pleasure’’; in this case the final pleasure, in our sense, would correspond to the sum of one’s satisfaction in successful partializing and the output economized.

But if, as Schopenhauer was perhaps the first to recognize, pleasure is not only nourished from positive sources but may even be just a condition characterized by the absence of fear or guilt, then the belief in the sexual origin of all pleasure, commonly assumed with the scientific support of psycho-analysis, becomes at least questionable. Actually I have already dealt with the problem of pleasure and non-pleasure in its relation to the time factor in my Wahrheit und Wirklichkeit (1929, p. 102), where I suggested that the essence of pleasure lay in a certain brevity, and that of non-pleasure in the prolongation of any state, even one that was at first pleasurable. If we combine this factor of temporariness with the quantitative principle of economy, it would seem that pleasure is not only relatively short, but also relatively small—in fact, partial. From this view of zsthetic pleasure we should thus arrive at the general formula: pleasure is the result of a successful “ partialization,” in which avoidance of fear, which element would necessarily be present in a totality of experience, acts to enhance pleasurable emotions. Every pleasurable feeling would therefore include, besides positive satisfaction (successful partialization), a being-spared (from fear, totality, life, and so on). And this again brings us to the view that aesthetic pleasure is not sexual,’ but that, on the other hand, sexual pleasure may also be termed “ zsthetic ” in so far as it is momentary and partial — the two qualities which seem to us to sum up every pleasurable emotional experience. The greater the economy, the greater the pleasure — provided always that this saving can be made in a relatively short space of time, for the neurotic, too, goes cautiously with life and seeks to conserve vital strength, only he is always saving and his mere hoarding gives him no pleasure. ZEsthetic pleasure is the highest or purest form of pleasure just because it supposes reception and gain, but not giving. But this clearly applies only to the one who enjoys the work of art and not to the creative artist.

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1Cf. Arthur Kronfeld’s Sexualitat und aesthetisches Empfinden in ihrem genetischen Zusammenbange (second edition, Strassburg, 1906), though his work has now been superseded.

For him, therefore, a different psychology from the gzsthetic must be found. For the artist is also sparing of life in that he substitutes creation; but then, again, he also wastes as he creates and this brings him new conflicts, from which again he seeks to escape by living. In this sense all doing and feeling which fall within the province of sublimation, from the purely esthetic to the simple emotional, would not be substitutes for real life and experience imposed from without — no consequence of deprivation, that is—but the deliberate creation of a plane of illusion, on which there is the possibility of a seeming life, entailing less expenditure and therefore less fear, and therefore again a surplus of pleasure. Here the theory of the draining-off of superfluous energy in play is inverted: since now it is the play—that is, the attitude of make-believe — that releases forces which are set free by the saving of life. With this we have found the key to a fundamental problem of life, to understand which is of far-reaching importance also for the psychological and ideological significance of artist and art. I have discussed this problem of partial and total experience in another connexion (Technik, III): namely, in relation to the hindrance of fear which thwarts the neurotic equally in his life and his work. The productive aspects of this conflict I was only able to touch upon briefly, but in any case the neurotic presented itself to me as a type predisposed to total experience and hindered only by fear — which in him is also total — from productively and constructively following up this tendency. The result is, not only that he checks all manifestations of life because their totality would let loose fear (that is, fear of death), but that the check is excessive (because total), and he only creates more fear, which manifests itself as fear of life. His only thought, one may say, is to save life and life-force, but this saving brings him no esthetic pleasure, but neurotic dissatisfaction, because it dreads every sort of spending, even spending on a plane of illusion. From the therapy of such cases it has emerged that the neurotic must first learn to live playfully, illusorily, unreally, on some plane of illusion — first of all on the inner emotional plane. This is a gift which the artist as an allied type, seems to possess from the outset, and in an even higher degree than the average person possesses it. For the artist too is a totalist type that, unlike the average, cannot live in perpetual “ partialization,” but is forced to totalize every act of life. And on the artistic plane of illusion, in the act of creating — which is at once appearance and reality, a part and a whole —he finds it possible to conquer creatively this fundamental human dualism and to derive pleasure therefrom. For when he creates, the artist uses the whole of himself without being in danger of losing that self therein, for it is certain that the work itself, from his point of view, represents only a part of his ego, although it does in fact represent che whole artist and his personality. It is just, like every good symbol, a pars pro toto solution, in which, however, the artist does not go charily with his life, like the neurotic, but positively spends it as he creates. This again he does not actually, but essentially — that is, he puts into it his being, his “soul,” as we say — and this then stands for the whole living ego, just as the abstract soul in primitive and later immortality-beliefs represents not only the whole individual, but even more than that: his essence, and with it the essence of man and of humanness in general. Once more we find art expressing the same thing as the abstract-soul concept, only in an objectified form, which we call beautiful precisely in so far as it is unreal, “ more than earthly.” For this very essence of a man, his soul, which the artist puts into his work and which is represented by it, is found again in the work by the enjoyer, just as the believer finds his soul in religion or in God, with whom he feels himself to be one. It is on this identity of the spiritual, which underlies the concept of collective religion, and not on a psychological identification with the artist, that the pleasurable effect of the work of art ultimately depends, and the effect is, in this sense, one of deliverance. The self-renunciation which the artist feels when creating is relieved when he finds himself again in his accomplished work, and the self-renunciation which raises the enjoyer above the limitations of his individuality becomes, through, not identification, but the feeling of oneness with the soul living in the work of art, a greater and higher entity. Thus the willto-form of the artist gives objective expression, in his work, to the soul’s tendency to selfeternalization, while the esthetic pleasure of the enjoyer is enabled, by his oneness with it, to participate in this objectivization of immortality. But both of them, in the simultaneous dissolution of their individuality in a greater whole, enjoy, as high pleasure, the personal enrichment of that individuality through this feeling of oneness. They have yielded up their mortal ego for a moment, fearlessly and even joyfully, to receive it back in the next, the richer for this universal feeling.