ABSTRACT
This chapter explores psychoanalytic theories, ideas and categories relating to the unconscious and how such might be used to explore and evaluate art and the creative process. For Freud, art, culture and social norms arise from the sublimation of these instinctual energies, beliefs outlined in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Adrian Stokes was a painter, critic and art theorist who made extensive use of psychoanalysis in his own work. The late art critic and broadcaster Peter Fuller acknowledged the ideas of Stokes, and in turn applied psychoanalytic ideas to the creation and critical response to art. Fuller believed that psychoanalysis had a valuable contribution to make to issues of aesthetic experience and aesthetic value, which more orthodox or instrumental theories had ignored. Sigmund Freud's study of mental disorders and their physical manifestations has provided the foundational theories of psychoanalysis. Many artists, critics and theorists have appropriated aspects of psychoanalytic theory and the implications arising from its use.
