This paper is about Sigmund Freud's concept of '
unconscious' and its relevance in the arts. The author discusses how Freud is commonly recognized as having invented the concept of the 'unconscious'. The author explaines that the subordination of the '
pleasure principle' by the '
reality principle' is done through a mental process that Freud refers to as sublimation. According to Sigmund Freud,
dreams and
fantasies (or phantasies) are the symbolic expression and fulfillment of wishes and desires that as a result of sublimation by the 'reality principle' cannot be fulfilled through daily life and are consequently repressed into the 'unconscious.' To Freud, "the motive forces of fantasies are unsatisfied wishes, and every single fantasy is the fulfillment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality" (Freud 485). Freud affirms that dreams are disguised, hallucinatory fulfillment's of repressed wishes. He concludes that if expressed in undisguised form, they would be so disturbing that it would wake the dreamer from sleep. Freud's fundamental assumption is that the sublimation of the artist's unsatisfied libido is responsible for producing all forms of art and literature whether it be painting, sculpting, or writing. David H. Richter notes in his introduction to "Sigmund Freud" that Freud was once criticized by Carl Gustav Jung, a fellow psychoanalytic theorist, for insinuating that artists were diseased individuals creating art out of their own personal neurotic needs. The writer feels that Freud insinuates that art is primarily an escapist method, that "in an ideal world in which everyone had matured sufficiently to replace the pleasure principle by the reality principle, there would be no need for art" (Storr 103).
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