ABSTRACT
The word empathy was first used to describe the specific quality that allows one to appreciate art. Although empathy is inextricably associated with the analyst's functioning in analysis, its importance as a specific component of the psychoanalytic interpretive process is only now gaining clarity. Art appreciation is viewed as the dialectic of art's evocative power and the viewer's empathic intricacies, enhanced by historical knowledge about the piece and the artist. In dream interpretation the dream and the dreamer change; in art appreciation only the viewer changes. Psychoanalytic studies of artists illuminate the relation of a piece, style, or genre to determining events of conscious and unconscious significance in the artist's personality. The study of religion and mythology increases people recognition of the recurrent themes of human development and life's travails that by and large compose the underlying themes of the formative arts. As condensations, art images, like dream images, contain the topical, the personal, and the archetypal in varying predominances.
