This chapter will look at the general direction of Freud's writings on art, and its relationship to his metapsychology. My intention is to show that Freud's contribution to aesthetics, although criticised for being ambivalent and incomplete, is significant largely because it has made subsequent developments possible within the British School of Psychoanalysis.

Firstly, I shall look at Freud and 'pathography' - the viewing of art as a privileged form of neurosis where the analyst-critic explores the artwork in order to understand and unearth the vicissitudes of the creator's psychological motivations. However, I shall argue that this is a rather limited model, paying as it does, overwhelming attention to the content of the artwork and the inner world of the artist. This view is supplemented, however, by Freud's (1905) theory of the joke-mechanism and its relationship to his account of the primary and secondary processes.

relationship between the joke-mechanism and aesthetic experience,