PROJECTIVE FEATURES OF CONTEMPLATIVE ARTISTIC EXPERIENCE

• Published in: American journal of orthopsychiatry 1949-01, Vol.19 (1), p.101-111
• Main Author: Lee, Harry B.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Artists; God Concepts; Human; Humans; Life Experiences; Old Medline; Projection; Reality; Religion; Theology
• ISSN: 0002-9432; 1939-0025
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1939-0025.1949.tb06563.x

This article discusses the projective features of contemplative artistic experience. viewing the outside world as a symbolic expression of inner reality, art and religion endow with form and content the need one has to identify ourselves with ideal aims. These identifications afford keenest sense of the significance of life in one's life. Culture has always endowed the church and philosophy with authority for furnishing an official directive for our thinking about art. During the middle ages, culture transferred most of this authority from theology to its handmaiden, philosophy. Since then, philosophy has maintained the ancient chaos of esthetic theories among which the only agreement lies in their conception in terms of God, and of values that transcend human life. Until as recently as the latter part of the nineteenth century, the traditional esthetic received from philosophy directed us to believe that the artist’s function was to reproduce the likeness of natural objects in order to reveal their pale reflection of an otherworldly. Freud made impressive contributions to our understanding of the subject matter of art and today it is trite to repeat that subject-matter expresses the artist’s unconscious emotional attitudes. Although the concepts that art expresses human emotion and unconscious emotional attitudes constitute a considerable advance in the history of ideas, the artist must do more than feel intensely in order to create. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)