Paintings and Psychoanalysis

Lee, Moo Suk

Abstract

This study suggests how to identify and understand and painters' and one's own unconscious conflicts when we appreciate works of arts. As artists born with special sensitivity to colors and objects, painters express their feelings and impressions through artistic techniques. Their paintings contain the unconscious conflicts of themselves driven from instinctual drives, infantile dependency and childwithin who might have been hurt. The conflicts are universal and common to human mind and, of course, often expressed in works of art. By appreciating a piece of art, we can meet with the conflict, which stimulates our own inner conflicts. It is the very moment when we feel the empathic response. The ego understands and integrates one's inner conflicts when it follows its association with art work through free association. This process is similar to self analysis and dream interpretation.