NECESSARY ILLUSION: ART AS WITNESS.

Necessary Illusion is the last volume of a trilogy aimed at redressing the reductionism inherent in the traditional psychoanalytic "take" on art as being essentially a struggle with illness and self-healing. In contrast, the trilogy views aesthetic form as evolving within a theory of reality and perception. Art is as amenable to promoting progressive adaptation and differentiation as regression and defense.
The Power of Form (1980 [1992]) focused on the correspondence between aesthetic form and psychic process, in that each involves an interplay between holistic imagination and realistic thought and perception. Art, like ego, may serve an adaptive function of aiding orientation in an inconstant reality.
Trauma and Mastery in Life and Art (1987) concluded with the interaction between art and mind - based on their corresponding structures - as a form of resonance associated with currents of affect.
Necessary Illusion draws on both books and explores the emotional resonances to art in the light of psychoanalytic perspectives on affect and the prospect of a non-reductionist psychology of art. Tension and release constitutes the dynamic core of aesthetic structure and emotional response. This leads to an apparent attunement of art to emotion and fosters the illusion of a "witnessing presence." This amplifies responsive emotional resonances that range from the present back to the remote past. Rooted in the biological function of early mothering, it encourages further differentiation of feeling, and thus ongoing emotional development.
The trilogy as a whole returns us to art with added appreciation for its relevance to life and growth.

Gilbert J. Rose is a member of the Muriel Gardiner Program in Psychoanalysis and the Humanities at Yale.