ABSTRACT
One never, never thinks of science as preparation for art, of psychoanalysis as preliminary to Surrealism, of the revolution of psychoanalysis paving the way for the revolution of Surrealism. Quite the contrary, it is the other way around: art is propaedeutic to science. Heinz Kohut, in his “hypothesis of artistic anticipation,” gives “the great artist” credit for being “ahead of his time in focusing on the nuclear psychological problems of his era” (Kohut, 1977, p. 285), but it is “the investigative efforts of the scientific psychologist” (ibid., p. 296) that comprehensively and coherently realize the goal of understanding what the artist had only intuitively recognized. Art is reduced to (subtly trivialized as?) one among many realms of examples for psychoanalysis. Can one imagine that Surrealism might finish something that psychoanalysis began, that Surrealism might grasp the full ramifications of psychoanalysis better than psychoanalysis itself, that Surrealism might be an attempt to actualize the full potential of psychoanalysis, a potential it itself is unconscious of, or disavows through its reluctance to take a larger role for itself in society than it ordinarily has? Can one develop a “hypothesis of scientific anticipation,” giving the great scientist credit for being ahead of his time in focusing on the nuclear epistemological problem of his era—the problem of his era’s sense of reality—but holding that it is the communicative efforts of the critical-dialectical artist that reveal its dramatic lifeworld import, that is, its significance for individual and social life?
