ABSTRACT
For someone like Sigmund Freud, very much involved with the art world of his time, it is perhaps no surprise that he extended psychoanalysis beyond its clinical practice in writing about artists and writers, the content of their work, and its impact. Nor is it any surprise that, influenced by Freud, others have used his psychoanalytic ideas in creating, thinking, and writing about art, literature, and film. In applying his clinically based psychoanalytic ideas to artists and creative writers, Freud emphasized the fantasy-based inspiration of their work. He also wrote about art involving the sublimation by its creators of their sexual instinct or drive in pursuit of ‘higher aims’ than sex. Writing more generally about the impact on him of works of art, Freud observed, works of art do exercise a powerful effect on him, especially those of literature and sculpture, less often of painting. Others focused on the impact on artists and their public of the physical stuff of art.
