Where Art Was, There Truth Shall Be: A Brief Analysis of Artists, Selfhood, and Liberation in Freud’s Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis Melissa Needlman College

At the end of his lecture entitled “The Paths to the Formation of Symptoms,” Freud addresses the artist as a psychoanalytic subject in a brief but intriguing tangent. Though artists are never again discussed after this brief passage, Freud’s portrayal of the artist deserves a closer look, as it serves as a tool for grasping a psychoanalytic understanding of self-liberation. Using therapy, the psychoanalyst frees his patient from the grip of her neurotic symptoms by helping her reconcile herself with urges and drives that her mind had previously resisted.

Freud’s artist uses art in a manner similar to therapy, but with a wider reaching and more diffuse set of results. By making a skillful effort to portray his base fantasies through an artistic medium, the artist “lifts” and “outweighs” the repressions contributing to his neurosis (Freud, 468). Because the artist “understands how to work over his day-dreams in such a way as to make them lose what is too personal about them,” he creates an opportunity through his work for viewers to “lift” their own repressions and experience pleasure that previously had been made “inaccessible” by their own mental mechanisms of self-censorship (Freud, 468). The framework of psychoanalysis...