ABSTRACT
Art history and psychoanalysis have been married and divorced several times in the past hundred years. On the face of it, these are two fields that ought to get along. Both are concerned with creativity — art history rather more with the products of creativity, psychoanalysis with its process. Both fields require a historical approach—art history to chronologies of culture, documentation, and style, and psychoanalysis to the developmental history of the individual. The first marriage of the two fields took place, when Sigmund Freud began the work that culminated in the formulation of psychoanalysis. Freud conceived of personal history in terms of archaeological layers, and in terms of individual artifacts. Of the categories of psychoanalytic thinking that have been applied to the visual arts since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, four can be readily identified. These include symbolism, sublimation, creativity, and biography and autobiography.
