When Art Takes Hold (Apropos the Arts)

 

Spitz, EH. When Art Takes Hold. (Apropos the Arts) American Imago: Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences, Vol. 65, No. 2, 291-296. The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Some art works take hold of us, grasp us, and teach us, although precisely what they teach us is elusive and hard to name: they alter something in the way a therapist does, perhaps. Ernst Kris writes persuasively about such phenomena in his justly celebrated essay on aesthetic ambiguity (1948). There he speaks about the communicative function of art and offers the notion of the potential of a symbol to set mental processes in motion. artistic communication, he holds, entails the active participation of beholders who actually re-create works for themselves in their own terms in the presence of the works rather than react passively to them. 

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