ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the relationship between psychoanalysis and those arts we usually designate as “creative”—music, painting, sculpture, and imaginative literature (poetry, drama, and the novel). That such a rela tionship exists is generally recognized. Its nature, however, has not been sufficiently examined or understood. There is frequent confusion between these arts and their sister arts of criticism, cultural history, and biographyin a word, the analytical arts-where the influence of psychoanalysis is pro found and palpable. Confusion has further been created by the use of su perficial psychoanalytical formulations on the stage, or in such novels as the once-sensational Snake Pit or in so airy a trifle as Lady in the Dark, the popular musical about dreams of a quarter of a century ago. This kind of “influence,” however, does not suggest for a moment the fundamental rela tionship between the original Freudian search for the meaning of our sub terranean dream life and the effects of Freud's discoveries on the dominat ing arts-those arts which must exist before criticism and cultural history are even possible.
