Freud on Artists

The hat doesn't make the artist, the artist makes the hat

``There is a means of return from fantasy to reality, and that is art. To begin with, the artist is an introvert, almost a neurotic. Constrained by abnormally strong impulses, he desires honor, power, wealth, fame, and the love of women; but he lacks the means to attain these satisfactions, as so, like any other unsatisfied person, turns away from reality and transfers all of his interest, together with his libido, to the wishful fantasies of his imagination, through which he may be carried actually to neurosis. Several factors must coincide if he is not to follow this course to its conclusion. In fact, it is well known how frequently artists suffer partial impairment of their powers through neurotic applications. Their constitution probably includes a strong capacity for sublimation along with a certain degree of laxity in the repressions decisive for a conflict. The artist finds the road back to reality, however, in the following way.

He is, of course, not the only one living a life of fantasy. The realm of fantasy is in fact a generally patronized resort, to which every sufferer from disappointments turns for refreshment and consolation. Those who are not artists are extremely limited, however, in their ability to derive pleasure from the wells of fantasy. The ruthlessness of their repressions compels them to make do with whatever meager daydreams they may dare to allow to become conscious. The genuine artist has more at his disposal. In the first place, he knows how to rework his daydreams in such a way that everything too personal, such as others might find offensive, is eliminated, and they become thus generally enjoyable. He knows, also, how to modify them, so that their origin in the forbidden wells is not immediately betrayed. And he possesses, further, the mysterious ability to shape some particular material into a likeness of the model drawn from his fantasy. And finally, he knows how to render so much pleasure through these figurations from his unconscious that repressions are for the moment overcome and dispelled. The one who can achieve all this, thus making it possible for others to derive against refreshment and consolation from those wellsprings of their own unconscious which had become for them inaccessible, gains their thanks and admiration, and he has thus won through his fantasy what he had originally achieved only in his fantasy; namely, honor, power, and the love of women." -Sigmund Freud, Vorlesungen zur Einfuhrung in die Psychoanalyse. Qtd. in Joseph Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space