Theoretical Preliminaries: Klein, Winnicott and Psychoanalytic Aesthetics

Abstract

Sigmund Freud’s early psychoanalytical theories were based upon his studies of hysteria and obsessional neurosis, and for all their subsequent expansion and mutation they continue to be marked, for both good and ill, by their origin in the analysis of the neuroses. This is no less true of Freud’s ventures into aesthetics or literary criticism than it is of his more strictly professional work. His clinical experience of the psychoses was minimal and even his major paper on the paranoiac Schreber is based only on the Senatspräsident’s autobiography.¹ He could accordingly never produce an adequate theory to explain the differential bases of the neuroses and the psychoses. The most significant developments in psychoanalysis outside the Freudian camp, however, have been grounded precisely in the study of psychosis, often carried out in mental asylums. For these more radical disturbances of the psyche, including schizophrenia, manic depression and paranoia, are characterised by a failure in reality-testing. Unlike the neurotic, the psychotic patient cannot know that he or she is ill; phantasy omnipotently invests the outside world and thereby becomes ‘insanity’. Carl Gustav Jung investigated schizophrenia during his nine years as an assistant in a Zurich mental hospital (1900–9), and whatever personal factors were operative in his break with Freud in 1913, the antagonism is principally that between a theorist of the neuroses and a student of psychosis.