ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis, in its dialectical way of thinking, may go even so far as to maintain that a positive and a negative attitude to the same fact are psychologically equivalent. The psychoanalytic explanations of art as a means of sublimation, symbolization, or substitutive gratification have one essential feature in common, namely, the dynamic character of artistic creativity. The antagonism of artistic styles received a stricter definition and, to some extent, a deflection from its original meaning from a group of British analysts, who explained the rejection of or the submission to reality in art by destructive or restitutory tendencies. Even non-formalists will prefer a definition that includes the autonomy of the work of art at least as an aspect, and the principle of l’art pour l’art as at least a possible approach. Sigmund Freud description of art as result of the individuals disturbed relationship to reality is, no doubt, a sweeping statement.
