Jasmine Baskerville- Nature of Art Ch. 9 Art as Symptom: Sigmund Freud

There is beauty in easing the mind and allowing it to rest. We go to a place almost every day where most laws of the universe do not apply. There is no concept of time or reality. Rest is essential for survival but why? The beautiful part of rest is it is truthful and boundless. It reveals our inner desires, emotions, and fears. Dreams are the channels to what we believe we understand and what we actually understand. Our conscious and unconscious minds interconnect when we dream. When we are awake we lose some access to our own truth.  Freud claims that “dreams need to be understood as camouflage wishes”… because the contents of dreams are often times something that the person who had the dream would renounce and reject when she or he were awake” (Wartenburg). When we dream, different methods of distortion and disguise permit these types of thoughts to unconsciously surface, providing satisfaction for the dreamer. In addition, dreams can create a space for unconscious desires to be acted out.
So, if art is imitation then dreams can be art because dreams can be imitations of conscious reality. For example, the common dream of showing up to school naked imitates our conscious fears. Furthermore, art is similar to dreams since art reveal unconscious fears, desires, or feelings. If dreams were visible to people other than the artist then it would be classified as art



 Works Mentioned

Wartenburg, Thomas E. "Art as Symptom: Sigmund Freud." 
     The Nature of Art, 3rd ed., Wadsworth, Engage Learning,     
     pp. 106-113.


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