The Sources of the Psychology of Art and Its Place among the Disciplines That Study Art and Creativity

Abstract

The goal of this article is to analyze, on the basis of today’s research strategies and the sources that deal with the psychology of Western art during the 20th century, the emerging field of the psychology of art and of its component, the psychology of the creative process, in different national traditions and in various fields of the humanities (aesthetics, the philosophy of art, experimental and general psychology, physiology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, art history). Through comparative analysis, this article reveals how German-speaking countries, France, Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union changed their attitude toward the artist, his creative potential, creative work, the creative process, and other problems of the psychology of art. The author devotes special attention to highlighting the distinctive ideas, theoretical positions, and main categories of the psychology of art in the West and in the great civilizations of the East (India, China, Japan). All of this has acquired exceptional importance in today’s metacivilizational culture, in which, as never before, there is active interaction between the ideas of various Eastern and Western peoples about the psychology of art. Finally, on the basis of a comparative analysis of today’s main national traditions relating to the psychology of art, this article highlights its place, functions, and role in the disciplines that study art.

1. Foreword

The rapidly growing interest during recent decades of scholars in various countries and fields in the psychology of art and the creative process has been determined by many different factors. This interest is primarily connected with the tendencies that are changing today’s metacivilization—the spread of a technogenic epoch (robotization, artificial intelligence, information technologies) and the growing power of the media. These tendencies have prompted specialists in various fields of the humanities to seek a better understanding of the underlying heuristic aspects of human creativity and of the most important factors and motives that promote or limit personal creativity. The growing relevance of the psychology of art and of its component, the psychology of the creative process, has also sprung from a reaction against postmodern commercialized mass culture, from whose leveling influence critically thinking creators seek to free themselves. Also directly connected with this reaction are the spread of new humanistic tendencies in today’s postmodern culture and the growing interest in the creative personality, its potential, and the characteristics of the creative.

The author of this article, while analyzing the problems of the psychology of art, relies primarily on many years of creative and pedagogical experience researching the history of culture, aesthetics, and art and on long years of studying a huge mass of primary sources. In this text, he discusses the psychology of art and the creative process and the psychopathology of art not from the viewpoint of a psychologist or physician, but primarily from that of a specialist in aesthetics and the philosophy of art. He does not seek to analyze the psychograms and medical histories of specific artists or to describe their symptomologies. Such intentions are foreign to this author because they can explain medical aspects, but not the ones connected with the aesthetic and art-historical problems that interest him the most and that involve understanding the psychology of art, the artist’s creative potential, the creative process, and works created by the artist (Andrijauskas 2019).

This relevant field of research into the psychology of the creative personality and of the world of art has long been unjustly ignored by the excessively rationalistic classical metaphysics of the West; therefore, in many countries it has until now remained insufficiently valued as a field of scholarly research. Attention to these problems is a reliable indicator attesting to the level of cultural development achieved by a specific nation. Those countries that understand the need to develop and teach ideas about the psychology of art achieve better results in higher education and in various fields of aesthetic development and artistic culture. Those artists who know the psychological subtleties of the creative process usually recognize their importance for their own work and for a better understanding of the inner stimuli and mechanisms of creative work.

Moreover, the psychology of art and the complex of other social and humane disciplines genetically connected with it have an undoubtedly practical significance because they help select talents, purposefully nurture them, perfect their artistry, and even diagnose the people who enroll in different types of art school. Thus, on the basis of more or less clearly formulated criteria they help assess real creative potential and artistic ability and correctly recommend the choice of a specific course of study or specialization. In addition, those creators who are interested in the subtleties of the psychology of art and the creative process usually acknowledge their importance for the better development of inner creative impulses and possibilities and of patterns in the creative process.

Finally, many brilliant people of exceptional talent who have created unique works of art and distinguished themselves for their exceptional originality have often been considered eccentric, mentally ill, or indeed suffered from psychiatric disorders. A perfunctory attitude toward the psychology of art and of its component, the creative process, has also ensued from the deep-rooted conviction that objective knowledge about them is not possible because the secrets of artistic creation are, as it were, profoundly hermetic and not subject to rational, systematic scholarly analysis.

However, time has passed, and scholarly knowledge has inexorably moved forward; with the intensive growth during the 20th century of achievements in the psychology of art, what was formerly considered mysterious and unknowable has revealed new and unexpected facets. As psychology has interacted with other disciplines that study art, there have crystallized new interdisciplinary fields of scholarly knowledge and subdisciplines whose supporters, armed with various research strategies and methods, have ever more clearly examined the objects and problematic fields of their research and have perfected their cognitive toolkit. Thus, many of the relationships that had formerly been on the fringes of scholarly research, involving the creative potential of the artist, the psychology of the creative process, genius, creativity, and psychopathology, and many other problems of the psychology of art have lost their mantle of seeming mystery. Because it was precisely in the interaction during the 20th century between psychology and different cognitive fields of the social sciences and humanities that the basic spectrum developed of the now dominant trends and conceptions in the psychology of art with their different theoretical and methodological approaches, in this article we will focus on a concise discussion of these developments.

2. Differences in the Approaches of Eastern and Western Peoples toward the Psychology of Art

Thomas Munro aptly observed that for a long time Western aesthetics has relied on only a few basic ideas inherited from Greek, Roman, and other Western cultures and their art. This inheritance grounded the general thinking about “theories of the art created by mankind, of universal aesthetic experience, of universal artistic values” (Munro 1965, pp. 6–7). What mainly hinders overcoming Eurocentric attitudes is that, when scholars deal with the ideas about aesthetics and the philosophy and psychology of art that have evolved in other, non-European civilizations, they forthrightly rely on the ideas, schemata, criteria, and categories dominant in the Western tradition and ignore the distinctiveness and unique systems of the worldviews and learned categories that have formed in the civilizations of India, China, Japan, and the Arab-Islamic world. For this reason, secondary but similar and identical aspects are often elevated, while the most original ideas about aesthetics and the psychology of art in other civilizations as well as the experience that does not fit into the stereotypical schemata of Western thought slip out of researchers’ field of vision.

When we compare the processes forming the beginnings of the psychology of art in the East and the West, we get the impression that in early antiquity a weightier contribution to this problem was already being made by Eastern civilizations. Jung, who not by chance devoted great attention to comparative studies of the psychology of Eastern and Western peoples, assessed the achievements of psychoanalysis as only an elementary textbook when compared with the methods mastered in the traditional psychological systems of Eastern peoples. The real reasons for this phenomenon are not easy to explain unambiguously. In different civilizations, the distinctive ways in which the ideas and concepts of psychology and the psychology of art emerged were determined by the characteristics of their individual cultural development—primarily, by the different dominant relationships between the subject (creator) and the object (natural world) surrounding him.

Jung drew attention to the different interpretations of “psychic reality” in the Eastern and Western traditions of psychology. He associated the distinctive feature of the Eastern tradition with introversion and an attitude toward psychic reality as the main characteristic of essence and that of the Western one with extraversion and a detached attitude toward complex psychic phenomena. Thus, “extraversion,” he maintained, “may be considered the Western ‘style,’ which regards introversion as a deviation from the norm, a pathology, something to be condemned” (Jung 1967, p. 6). Jung interpreted Eastern civilizations as introverted toward man’s inner world, as types of a culture directed toward spiritual experiences. The opposition between subject and object was foreign to them because they were oriented not toward knowledge and mastery of the outer world but primarily toward man’s inner world. This fact explains the special attention that Eastern followers of aesthetics and the psychology of art devote to various meditation practices and psychological states that help establish the creator’s introverted orientation.

When we look at the Eastern and Western traditions that formed philosophical, aesthetic, art-historical, and psychological thought, we can see that in Europe, already since Antiquity, in comparison to the great civilizations that unfolded in Asia, rationalistic attitudes have been stronger, especially under the powerful influence of Aristotle and, later, of Kant’s and Hegel’s rationalism. And indeed, in Asia, where the distinctive traditions of the Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and Islamic worlds unfolded, especially in Indian and Japanese culture, what became dominant was an emphasis on the emotional, which was strongly influenced in these civilizations by deep-rooted psychological, sensualist tendencies. An inclination toward the emotional, a delving into a person’s inner world, and the dominance of the great Asian civilizations during the early stage of development of world civilization—these are the reasons why during the formative beginnings of the psychology of art Eastern civilizations were leaders with their psychological conceptions of aesthetics and art history.

For example, drama, which the Indian aesthetic tradition regarded as the highest and most universal art, was precisely the field in which first place was occupied by the complex problems of the psychology of artistic creation and by reflection on the creative process and the apprehension of works of art. In India these problems are analyzed in a treatise that is unique in its scope and the depth with which it deals with the psychology of art—the Nāṭyaśāstra (1st cent. BCE). In it, special importance is given to a discussion of the psychology of the creative process, a discussion that was consistently developed in the entire later tradition of Indian psychological aesthetics. Here, the psychologization of aesthetics and art is obvious even in the fundamental categories of the classical Indian theory of aesthetics and art—rasa (aesthetic mood), bhāva (feeling), and dhvani (hidden meaning of a work of art). In explicating the problems of the artist’s creative potential and of the creative process, the tradition delineated in the Nāṭyaśāstra of psychologizing aesthetics and art is apparent in the famous schools of Alaṃkāra (Bhāmaha, Daṇḍin, Vāmana) and Kashmir Symbolic Poetics (Ānandavardhana, Abhinavagupta, Mammaṭa) (Daumal 1982; Wallace 1963).

Chinese aesthetics and psychology of art are an uncommonly distinctive cultural phenomenon created by the spiritual values of a great civilization. China is where many fundamental ideas formed that determined the main features of Far Eastern aesthetics, psychology of art and art. When we compare the aesthetics and psychology of art of China with that of other great Eastern civilizations, we can distinguish some characteristic features. First of all, the Chinese and Indian psychologies of art are connected by a sustained continuity of ideas determined by equally rich unbroken traditions in the development of spiritual culture.

On the other hand, unlike India, where normative treatises on poetry and dramatic art are dominant, in China—because of the visual-associative apprehension of reality characteristic of a pictographic culture—aesthetic works on painting and calligraphy stand out (Traités Chinois de Peinture et de Calligraphie 2003–2010). In Japan, thought about aesthetics and the psychology of art is more sensitive to external influences, experiences more transformations, and more easily adopts innovations. In China, however, we can see the incomparably stronger influence of traditions formed over centuries in aesthetics, the psychology of art, and art.

The cultural, aesthetic, psychological, and artistic strata, movements, themes, and leitmotifs that crystallized in China obeyed, as it were, a law of undulating change. Here, traditionalism, the search for something new, and the constant remining of the cultural lodes of the past always progressed together. The cultural tradition was open, plastic, and dynamic, strong enough to adapt to the needs of the day, and capable of integrating not only new forms, themes, and motifs but also entire socially important strata of spiritual culture.

Unlike the Western tradition of aesthetics and the psychology of art, where the development of terminology and basic concepts is promoted by ideas, in China this important function is usually performed by different situational and contextual categories (Escande and Sers 2003).

In East Asia, as on the Indian subcontinent, under the influence of Daoist, Chan, and Zen aesthetic traditions, in discussions of the artist’s creative potential and the creative process, special attention was devoted to various problems of the artist’s psychological preparation and to meditation practices connected with entering the creative process. In China and Japan, unlike India with its characteristic cult of poetry and drama, the hierarchy of arts was dominated (their rank changing during different historical periods) by the so-called “three great arts”—calligraphy, painting, and poetry. Their interconnection and interpenetration were distinctively manifested in traditional Chinese aesthetics, which devoted special attention to the mastery of the artist’s creative potential, his relationship with nature, the fundamental psychological problems of the creative process, and various meditation principles (Esthétique et peinture de paysage en Chine 1982).

The psychologized aesthetics of Japan, unlike that of India and China, did not have such millennia-old traditions. After periodically adopting powerful impulses from Chinese civilization, Japanese culture went its own way and created many unique forms of culture, aesthetic thought, and art whose refinement often surpassed the achievements of its former teachers. Japanese aestheticians typically distrust the analytical power of the intellect and the principle of the logos in general. They understand the limitations of the rational mind and of abstract theories in trying to know the most complex forms of aesthetic experience and art. This attitude determined their view of the rational mind as an instrument that constructs and deconstructs the primordial wholeness of the world of beauty. The underlying essence of beauty, the Japanese are convinced, is understood not with the mind, but through intuition and the subtlest emotional experiences, which are not subject to rational verbal description. For this reason, Japanese aesthetic assessments are characterized by sensualism and special attention to the problems of the psychology of art and of aesthetic apprehension (Hisamatsu 1974, pp. 28–44, 53–68).

In the Land of the Rising Sun, the development of psychologized aesthetic thought created a world of emotional categories and distinctive principles of aesthetic apprehension and artistic assessment. In no other country were psychologized aesthetic feeling and artistic values so able to establish themselves in people’s everyday lives. One of the most distinctive features of Japanese culture and aesthetic consciousness is that fields of human creative expression that have remained on the margins of other cultures are extremely important in Japan and are found at the center of intense psychological reflection and artistic creation.

Japanese aesthetic ideals are expressed in psychologized situational and contextual categories that are difficult to define. The most important of these are makoto (truth, natural sincerity), aware (enchantment), okashi (charm of playful humor), yūgen (mysterious beauty), sabi (patina of antiquity), wabi (restrained beauty), shibui (aristocratic simplicity), en (charm), miyabi (tranquility), hosomi (subtlety, fragility), karumi (lightness), yūbi (elegance), sōbi (grandeur), and mei (purity, nobility). The basis for these syncretic constructs—conceptual categories that have emotional hues and unite thought and image—is not abstract theoretical reflection, but a sensitive psychological emotional response. Subjectively emphasized in aesthetic assessments, the psychological gradation of aesthetic hues highlights the relationship between Japanese aesthetic categories and the fundamental psychologized Indian aesthetic categories rasa and dhvani.

In the West, the psychology of art formed historically later as an interdisciplinary field of knowledge where philosophical disciplines (aesthetics, the philosophy of art), physiology, psychiatry, literary theory, music theory, experimental psychology, general psychology, and other disciplines intersect. After all, many 20th-century tendencies in the humanities, when the psychology of art was forming in the West into a relatively independent field of scholarly knowledge, were permeated with various rationalistic and experimental attitudes. The followers of these tendencies highlighted, on the basis of scientific principles, how specific creators, their types, thoughts, and actions are influenced by various conscious or subconscious motives for their personal artistic activity.

3. The Influence of German Nonclassical and Experimental Aesthetics on the Emergence of the Psychology of Art

When examining the genesis of the psychology of art in Western civilization, we should speak, first of all, about its historical connections with two closely related philosophical disciplines, aesthetics and the philosophy of art, as well as with physiology, psychiatry, experimental aesthetics, psychological aesthetics, experimental psychology, general psychology, psychoanalysis, the system of art-historical disciplines, and other present-day humane fields as well as interdisciplinary subdisciplines.

The early stage in the emergence of the ideas, fundamental categories, and problems of the psychology of art was connected with the psychologization of aesthetics and the philosophy of art and their followers’ interest in the inner world of the artist, his emotional experiences, creative potential, and forms of artistic expression, the creative process, and the problems of apprehending the products of artistic creation. These tendencies, in opposition to Kant’s and Hegel’s rationalism, emerged in nonclassical or irrationalist aesthetics and art philosophy (Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche), in which there was a growing interest in voluntarism, the phenomenon of genius, the artist’s creative potential, and the creative process as well as in various psychopathological aspects of artistic activity.

The Romantics already considered madness a sign of genius and the true source of authentic artistic creation. Agreeing with their view, Schopenhauer accomplished much in the psychologization of the aesthetic sphere. He discerned a direct connection between the uniqueness of the genius-artist and psychopathologies, and he maintained that a genius, in all his activity and behavior, is similar to a mental patient, for both one and the other have lost the usual social ties and are, as it were, aliens from another planet. They are especially sensitive and more keenly apprehend the surrounding world. “Genius and madness,” this originator of voluntarism stated, “have a side where they border each other, indeed merge....” (Schopenhauer 2019, p. 155).

Schopenhauer’s follower and another subtle psychologist, Nietzsche, characterized genius by comparing it to an evil demonic being, a centaur—half beast, half human, adorned with an angel’s wings. However, alongside the demonic first principle in the personality of the genius, Nietzsche discerned something infantile, childish, although also pathological, highly vulnerable. Hence—his view of genius as a most truly perfect mechanism as well as one most sensitive to breakdowns (Nietzsche 2014, p. 241). These thoughts promoted the spread of various ideas connected with physiology and psychiatry.

Along with the theories of nonclassical aesthetics and art philosophy, the formation of the complex of ideas of the psychology of art was influenced by the German founders of positivist experimental psychology, which was directed against speculative metaphysics (Robert Vischer, Gustav Theodor Fechner, Theodor Lipps, Wilhelm Wundt, Johannes Volkelt). Being closely connected with the development of general psychology and physiology, they laid the theoretical and methodological foundations for psychological aesthetics and the psychology of art, which was crystallizing in it. The father of experimental aesthetics, Fechner, negated metaphysical speculative “aesthetics from above” (von oben) and elevated the principles of positivist “aesthetics from below” (von unten), which was based on empirical facts, observation, and experiments (Fechner 1876, vol. 1, pp. 5–6).

Another representative of the shift toward experimental aesthetics, Lipps, sought to more clearly delimit psychology from the influence of philosophy and developed the theory of Einfühlung, which denotes a special psychic act in which a subject apprehends a specific real object and projects into it his own personal feelings, associations, and experiences. Here, empathy emerges as “a distinctive act, completely independent of ideas and associations and deeply rooted in the structure of the human psyche” (Lipps 1903, p. 112). Further ideas that gradually transformed psychological aesthetics into the psychology of art were developed by Wundt, who in 1879, at the University of Leipzig, established the first psychology laboratory. Its appearance in the academic world is considered the beginning of the institutionalization of psychology as a university discipline. He began the systematic study not only of the laws of human inner life, of human experience, thinking, memory, imagination, and associations but also of the expression of these laws in artistic activity, thus laying the foundations for a relatively autonomous psychology of art.

When the genesis of the psychology of art is examined, it is also necessary to talk about the growing authority of psychology as a discipline, about its penetration into the status of a university discipline. Undoubtedly, the general psychology that evolved from experimental psychology became the theoretical and methodological basis for the system of fundamental categories and concepts of all other branches of psychology. By studying general patterns in the mental activity of animals and people, it had a strong influence on the further development of the ideas and methodological approaches of the psychology of art.

In psychological aesthetics and the closely allied field of general psychology, shortcomings soon became clear that are typical of all theories with a positivist orientation. The growing differentiation of conceptions for knowing art and increasing pluralism caused a crisis of principles in the systematic analysis of art. With the loss of a system, the empirical study of the problems of the psychology of art lost a clear methodological basis. In place of classical all-encompassing psychologized systems of aesthetics and the philosophy of art, a multitude of contradictory theories began to form. Individual, mainly eclectic schools, groups, and conceptions embraced only a narrow field of specific problems in the psychology of art and drowned in a sea of empirical research. However, many of the trends in psychological aesthetics and the philosophy of art were directly related to parallel research in physiology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, Gestalt psychology, behaviorism, and other fields.

4. The Influence of Psychiatry, Psycho(patho)logy, and Psychoanalysis

Eventually, along with concepts of psychological aesthetics, the process of forming ideas about the psychology of art was joined by those who supported psychiatry, which was developing intensively at the beginning of the 20th century, and who studied various aspects of the influence of human mental disturbances on creative activity. We will recall that already during the 19th century, in various major clinics for the treatment of mental patients in France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Italy, research was developing on psychiatry and on the influence of various forms of mental pathology on creativity and artistic activity. Later, this psychiatric research became intertwined with psycho(patho)logical studies on the interaction of genius, mental disturbances, and artistic activity.

Another significant impulse to the growing relevance of research into the psychology and psychopathology of art arose from the studies of high nervous activity undertaken in physiology, which emerged as a science that researches the physical, biochemical, and information-processing functions of living organisms. Physiologists have traditionally dealt with the functional adaptability of plant and animal organisms, which include the one with the most complex psychic structure—man. They have relied on the same universal physiological principles that characterize all living organisms. In explaining the functions and structure of a healthy organism and the various mechanisms that regulate it, they have drawn on the achievements of anatomy, biochemistry, biophysics, genetics, and other sciences. The main object of research into human physiology has been that the living organism of a human body and psyche with its structural parts (organ systems, organs, tissues, cells) has helped us understand the ability of a healthy organism to adapt to a constantly changing outer environment without changing the composition of its inner environment. In this way, physiology has created a theoretical and practical basis for examining the processes, both regular and pathological, that take place in an organism.

Here, it is also worthwhile to remember that what follows from the problems of general psychology is the narrower physiological field of the problems of the psychology of art, the core of which became the study of the artist’s personality, his creative potential, and the creative process. Psychology, according to an apt observation by the German psychologist H. J. Eysenck, was actually the creation of two different parents: philosophy, which raised many of its initial questions, and physiology, which proposed many of the initial approaches and methods for studying the creative personality. Philosophers were always interested in the cognitive powers of the mind, i.e., in the ones that manifest themselves in creative activity by thinking and apprehending the external world, while to the first physiologists it seemed that perhaps some physiological phenomena, like the relative speed of nerve impulses in the central nervous system, can be explained by differences in intellectual powers (Eysenck [1962] 2001, p. 8).

A perceptible influence on the further evolution of the psychology of art was exerted by the followers (Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours, Cesare Lambroso, Max Nordau, Marcel Réja, Wilhelm Lange-Eichbaum, Ernst Kretschmer) of psycho(patho)logical theories that developed the ideas of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. In geniuses and personalities of exceptional talent, in their creative potential, manner of behavior, style of thinking, relations with socially established norms, and the nature of their creative activity, they discerned direct connections with people suffering from various mental illnesses. Therefore, they regarded the creative sources of brilliant artists and the phenomenon of genius as a manifestation of various forms of mental pathology (manias, schizophrenia, somnambulism, demonism, etc.).

What became the main leitmotifs of such research into the psychopathology of art was not the clinical history of the artist, but what was interpreted from a psychopathological viewpoint: his creative potential, the characteristics of his creative process, and the resulting works of art as well as various memoiristic literature that explains the specific nature of these works and the circumstances under which they were created—letters, diaries, biographies, autobiographies, surviving texts, commentaries, rough drafts of works of art, various working notes, and the testimonies of people close to the artist and of his contemporaries who provided valuable material for reflection on this theme. Karl Jaspers, who accomplished much in the field of research into mental pathologies, emphasized that the object of research into psychopathology is real spiritual processes, their circumstances, causes, and consequences (Jaspers 1997, p. 27).

In the West, important new fields for researching psychological problems opened up when the subconscious mechanisms of human mental functioning were recognized. Here, the greatest contribution was made by followers of psychoanalysis, which arose from the ideas of the Austrian psychologist and therapist Sigmund Freud. These people emphasized the importance of the subconscious, sexual instincts, spiritual traumas, and psychological complexes. At the center of their interest were hidden subconscious factors—motives, dreams, fantasies, psychological traumas, unconscious conflicts, neuroses, and other important aspects of the psychology of art.

Another influential Austrian psychologist was Alfred Adler, who began his career path as a follower of Freud and eventually originated so-called individual psychology. He worked with the assumption that the foundations of a person’s psychic structure (individuality) are formed during childhood (by the age of five) and have a strong influence on an artist’s later life, the characteristics of his creative work, and his tendency to become neurotic. These views later became an organic part of many concepts about the psychology of art and creativity.

Another former pupil of Freud’s and the founder of analytical psychology, Carl Gustav Jung sought to combine into a unified whole the various subconscious factors involved in the functioning of the human psyche and show their importance when examining the main hidden mechanisms of the artist’s creative potential and the creative process. He formulated the theories of extraversion, introversion, and psychological types, which had a huge influence on the development of the psychology of art, and especially emphasized the exceptional importance in all forms of artistic work of the “collective unconscious” and archaic archetypal images.

And finally, in France, another founder of psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan (1973), greatly influenced the postmodernist theories of the creative expression of unconsciousness and imagination in the psychology of art by fundamentally correcting the ideas of classical psychoanalysis. He also expanded the influence of Freudian “dream laws” by moving them to the state of conscious wakefulness. Moreover, like Daoist theoreticians, he brought together and even put an equals sign between dreaming and wakeful states. Lacan based his position on the thesis that in all instances the ultimate results of human creative activity are determined by the pulsation of unconscious impulses and desires that in their nature are similar to neuroses and other psychopathological states.

5. The Influence of Art-Historical Disciplines on the Psychology of Art

Alongside research on aesthetics, the philosophy of art, physiology, and psychiatry, the emergence of the psychology of art was also influenced by relations with the art-historical disciplines, which were changing their shape and becoming modern. Here, too, there was growing interest in the new psychological aspects of research, in nonclassical viewpoints, and in the reinterpretation of many of the most important art-historical ideas of the past. In psychologized studies about art-historical thought, marginalism, unique ideomas about art, and their comparative analysis were more and more often opposed to a hierarchy of settled values and to universally recognized schematizations of art history. In the development of ideas about the psychology of art, a markedly growing influence was exerted by the followers of Gestalt psychology (Fritz Perls, Paul Goodman, Ralph Hefferline). There was likewise a rebirth of psychoanalytical theories, which after 1970, with the rise of postmodern aesthetics (Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard), were ever more obviously connected with the growing influence of phenomenological, hermeneutic, and comparativist ideas.

As the transition emerged from traditional art history (which focused on the form of a work of art, the description of its iconographic elements, and the morphology of its style and upheld attitudes of the autonomy of art) to new art history, critical art history, radical art history, contextual art history, and the postmodern art history known by a multitude of other names, not only did the objects of analysis change but also some of the fundamental attitudes, research strategies, and methods of the academic art history that had until recently been dominant (Harris 2001, p. 6).

The art histories that had blossomed in the Anglo-Saxon countries and were called new, critical, radical, or some other high-sounding epithet usually emerged, in parallel, in France and in countries under its cultural influence, in the works of Georges Didi-Huberman (1990, 2019); Jacques Rancière (2001); Jean-Pierre Cometti (2009); Jean-Marie Schaeffer (2015), and others, as a growing reaction of postmodernist ideology against the attitudes of classical aesthetics and art history. In France, noted for its rich traditions of artistic culture, there rose to first place an intertwining of a humane cultural context with various psychological, psychoanalytical, structuralist, phenomenological, and hermeneutic tendencies and a rise of new contextual and interdisciplinary research strategies marked by the influence of postmodernist ideology.

In the relationship of the psychology of art to a complex of empirical art-historical disciplines (the history, theory, criticism, sociology, metrics, and semiotics of art, etc.), we would like to direct our attention to the relationship with art criticism, the spontaneous, diverse assessment of the relevant process in the development of art, when during the course of primary analysis there constantly and unexpectedly emerged many psychological aspects of creative work, and there were detailed discussions of analysis, assessment, criticism, inclusion in various traditions, diffusion, functioning, and other questions that were ever more widely included in the purview of the psychology of art at that time.

During recent decades, in various countries, there have been fundamental changes in the conceptual applied attitudes of the psychology of art. It has come ever closer to the sociology of art; new fields of research and problems have arisen; the inner differentiation of research into art and scholarly specialization in specific fields of research have increased. Interdisciplinary interests have grown stronger, and contacts have intensified between students of the psychology of art and other social and humane fields of learning. The role of formerly ignored economists and statisticians has grown in research on the psychology of art that has been influenced by sociological methods, for example, in the research that has become popular into the economic activities of art markets (art industries, various museums and galleries) and of numerous intermediaries (dealers, collectors, experts, etc.).

Obviously, in today’s psychology of art, which relies on interdisciplinary attitudes and a totality of complex research strategies and methodological approaches, the relationship of the researcher to the material being researched is also changing. The work of art is regarded not as a stable self-enclosed and unchanging monad, but as a structure that is open to apprehension and distinguished by a multitude of possible interpretations, as a representation of various intended aspects and symbolical meanings. Thus, proponents of the psychology of art look at a work of art as in principle an ambiguous phenomenon that, depending on the interactive position of the work and its apprehender or on the coherent cultural context that gave birth to it and on an analysis of the fundamental categories of thought and artistic creation, can acquire entirely different symbolical meanings.

6. The Spread of Ideas about the Psychology of Art in France

Because of an aversion to metaphysical speculation and an attraction to a closer interaction between the theory and practice of art, the French 20th-century tradition of developing ideas about the psychology of art followed a different path from the German and Anglo-Saxon ones. In France, empiricism was eventually overshadowed by these questions: What place does the psychology of art occupy among the humanities? What distinguishes its research strategies and its theoretical and methodological approaches? How do the psychological, social, and other aspects of a work of art interact? The quest for answers to these questions helped the French tradition of the psychology of art preserve close ties with the main tendencies in the development of the various humanities and social sciences. Thus, even the empirical one-sidedness that emerged during the second wave of psychological positivism (Eugène Véron, Gabriel de Tarde, Théodule Ribot, Alfred Binet, Victor Bach) was dampened by authoritative practitioners of art—writers, poets, painters (Paul Valéry, Paul Claudel, Guillaume Apollinaire, Marcel Proust, Albert Gleizes, Georges Bataille, Michel Butor, Nathalie Sarraute, etc.)—whose theoretical reflections exerted a powerful influence on the spread of ideas about the psychology of art.

When discussing the influence of the French psychology of art on research into creativity, we should mention Ribot’s pupil Binet, who, while working at famous neurological clinics and at the Experimental Psychology Laboratory of Sorbonne University, concentrated on experimental research into the subconscious, creativity, and the level of intellectual development of various mental patients and crowned these studies with a unified scale for testing people’s intelligence quotient. This scale consisted of a meticulously designed series of thirty tests that gradually assigned more and more complex tasks for the people being tested. Their consistent solution required more and more intellectual effort from the person being tested when performing specific tasks intended to measure creativity (Binet 1903). This research into creativity later became the point of departure for the testing tradition that developed in the United States during the second half of the 20th century, especially for determining intelligence quotients (IQs).

Later, there arose a new group of scholars who developed ideas of a broad humane orientation about aesthetics and the psychology of art. This group was represented by Eugène Véron, who delved into that aspect of the psychology of art that is characteristic of associative psychology. The shift from positivism to more broadly humane concepts of the psychology of art became clear in the work of another French authority in this field, Henri Delacroix (Delacroix 1927, p. 184). His theories about the creative potential and activity of the artist and the characteristics of the creative process represented the most substantial achievements in the academic psychology of art of that time.

Here, it would also be worthwhile to mention a symbol of French intellectual culture and connoisseur of the subtlest non-European artistic traditions of the past century, André Malraux, whose concept was close to the existential psychology of art and eventually acquired widespread international recognition. This famous philosopher of art, Orientalist, and leader in French literature had little interest in the systematic theoretical and methodological problems of the psychology of art. He regarded the psychology of art as an inseparable part of the universal humane philosophy of art, at the center of which were the psychological aspects of apprehending artistic creation and works of art. For this follower of Nietzsche and the existential worldview, artistic creation became a symbol of the Promethean struggle with destiny, in which art acquires the meaning of “anti-destiny” (antidestin) (Malraux 1948, pp. 144–45).

Unlike Malraux, Denis Huisman devoted special attention to researching the object of the psychology of art, the field of fundamental problems, and creativity. He distinguished three main problematic fields in the psychology of art: apprehension, artistic creation, and artistic performance. This partisan of a holistic approach was convinced that the psychology of artistic creation can encompass the consciousness of the creator only in a unified manner, without breaking down into separate parts the sources and process of creation (Huisman 1954, p. 83). The tradition of his theoretical and methodological positions and of researching interdisciplinary interactions was continued by two other French representatives of the psychology of art—the supporter of psychoanalysis Jean-Paul Weber and Robert Francès, who both also devoted great attention to solving these problems. The former relied on the ideas of psychoanalysis, while the latter sought to separate the psychology of art from psychologie de l’esthétique (the psychology of aesthetics) (Francès 1968, pp. 1–2).

When summarizing the development of the French psychology of art and comparing it to the German tradition, we can state that the episodic interest in empirical experimental research did not become established in French psychological aesthetics and in the psychology of art that followed from it. Here, the process by which the psychology of art became a separate and independent field mainly unfolded in an interdisciplinary environment of close interaction among the ideas of aesthetics, the philosophy of art, general psychology, and art criticism. This organic combination of theoretical thought and artistic practice was fruitful for the entrenchment of concepts of a broad humane type about the psychology of art.

7. The Distinctive Tradition of the British and American Psychology of Art

Alongside the German and French traditions that were dominant during the 20th century, a more modest contribution to the growing independence of the psychology of art was made by British scholars whose works distinctively developed the ideas that had matured in continental Europe. When talking about the contribution of British scholars, we must distinguish two main figures: Vernon Lee (whose real name was Violet Paget) and the Swiss-born psychologist and philosopher of art Edward Bullough, the latter of whom accomplished much in the British academic system by raising the status of the psychology of art. Lee expanded the field of empathy theory in the British psychology of art by directly connecting it with imagination, empathetic affinity, and various sensations and associations spontaneously born in the consciousness of the apprehender, while Bullough’s theory of aesthetic experience and aesthetic distance gained special popularity in Britain and the United States. This distance, Bullough emphasized, hovers, as it were, between our own ego and what affects us in the very broadest sense (Bullough 1995).

The theories of these authors oriented other British and American scholars interested in the psychology of art toward studying the problems of apprehension, while the world of art and the psychological problems of the creative process connected with it were regarded as only an auxiliary field. In this, the British tradition of the psychology of art was fundamentally different from the more flexible and many-sided French one that combined the theory and practice of art and the German one that claimed to be systematic and preserved elements of metaphysical-philosophical speculation.

Out of Lee’s theory, which exalted the importance of empathy, and Ernst Cassirer’s symbolic philosophy of forms there eventually evolved the influential American aesthetician Susanne Langer’s theory of symbolic discourse, which became popular in studies about various problems in the psychology of art. In any discussion about the later rebirth and development of empathy theory in English-speaking countries, it is worthwhile to mention Gordon W. Allport, Harold Rugg, and Arthur Kaestler, whose works appeared one after another. Their writings contain what is characteristic of the later development of the psychology of art: the universalization of the concept of empathy, the expansion of its field of semantic meanings, and the shift of researchers’ center of attention to the increasingly relevant psychological problems of the creative process.

Closely related to the British tradition of the psychology of art were the studies of the psychology of creativity that spread in the United States during the second half of the 20th century. In the psychology of the Anglo-Saxon countries, in comparison to continental Europe, what were stronger when dealing with the problems of creativity that are fundamental to the psychology of art were Francis Galton’s views about bringing art and science together and, what followed from Alfred Binet’s works, his search for reliable models for intelligence quotients. Such an attitude toward the problems that had come to the fore in the psychology of creativity is understandable because Great Britain and the United States did not have the deep traditions, characteristic of France and Germany, of humane disciplines, of academic psychological research, and of the theoretical reception of the latest trends in the development of artistic culture. Hence arose several important differences between Anglo-Saxon research into the psychology of art and the traditions of continental Europe: primarily, the entrenchment of various scientistic and positivist ideas that put down deep roots here.

This situation determined the special interest of British and American scholars in various psychological research based on empiricism, questionnaires, interviews, conversations, and tests and intertwined with sociological methods. Moreover, because of the pragmatic aesthetics typical of Americans, this research was oriented toward the present and toward tangible results, either immediately or in the near future. Hence arise what are typical of the American tradition of the psychology of art: dissociation from a more exhaustive historical analysis and from reflection on the processes of the past and the American concentration on solving the most relevant problems of the present.

The fundamental difference between the American tradition of the psychology of art with its focus on the problems of creativity and all the continental ones, to a lesser extent the British one, is that the problem of the psychology of creativity is ever more closely connected with the problems of scientific creative work. And finally, one more specific feature directly connected with the practical tendency to commission that formed in the United States during the postwar years and was supported with the abundant financial resources of strategic and private foundations was that what occupied scholarly attention during the Cold War and fierce ideological confrontation with the Soviet Union were the problems of creativity in general, which were directly connected with the development of new technologies and natural sciences and which were dealt with by American representatives of the psychology of creativity. Thus, for example, the works of Anne Roe focus on researching the hidden sources of creativity (Roe 1953), and those of Frank X. Barron—recognizing the most characteristic distinguishing features of creative people (Barron and Harrington 1981), while Joy Paul Guilford concentrated on the basic indicators of creativity and on creating a psychometric model of the structures of the intellect (Guilford 1967).

Unlike continental Europe, in the United States, in research on creativity, a different understanding of genius emerged because, as Étienne Souriau aptly observed, American psychologists gave this concept “a meaning at once experimental, intellectual, and quantitative” (Souriau 1975, p. 131). Here, creative genius was usually attributed to those scientists and artists who, when creative and mental indicators were tested, got the highest statistical results. In the tradition of American psychology, such a view led to the special attention given to the methods invented by Alfred Binet for determining intelligence quotients. Thus, the humane tradition of the psychology of art that was dominant in France and Germany with its powerful charge of the philosophy of art and of empirical art-historical disciplines did not catch on in American institutions and was overwhelmed by local approaches with their scientistic and pragmatic ideas and methodologies.

In this dominant American tradition of the psychology of art with its focus on the problems of creativity, Rudolf Arnheim’s concept manifestly stood out with its vast humane and artistic erudition. This fact can be explained by his close ties with the continental tradition, for during his youth this scholar lived and matured in Germany with its local torrent of ideas about the psychology of art. Not by accident, under the influence of Gestalt psychology, Arnheim became the leading figure who, with his numerous works devoted to the problems of the psychology of art, sought to establish the status of this discipline in English-speaking countries. His books are enriched with factographic data from the history of the philosophy of art, the psychology of visual perception, art history, physiology, psychological aesthetics, pedagogy, and other fields of scholarly knowledge. He also devoted great attention to analyzing the relationship between genius and psychic pathology and maintained that this relationship is especially complicated.

In competition with the Gestalt psychology represented by Arnheim and his pupils, in the Anglo-Saxon cultural space, was behaviorism, whose partisans (John B. Watson, B. F. Skinner) maintained that the only thing worth studying is human behavior and speech, while making assumptions about the underlying processes of the psyche is not possible. On the basis of this programmatic position, in their research on the psychology of art, they shifted their attention to the analysis of speech, which they regarded as a certain collection of reflexes. Moreover, they focused especially on effective methods for studying the psyche and the nervous system, and on the basis of empirical research, they described in detail many of the most complex phenomena of the psyche and the creative process.

The representatives of another movement in humanistic psychology, Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, relied on the ideas of existentialist thinkers (Kierkegaard, Heidegger) and focused on the essence of man’s life and creative work, his creative potential, and various humanistic aspects of the psychology of art connected with man’s existence and the harmonious unfolding of his creative abilities. If Rogers delved single-mindedly into researching a person’s creative potential and process, psychological attitude and freedom, and various existential motives Maslow sought to apply the principles of holistic methodology to analyzing the feelings of fullness of being connected with the culminating phases of creative processes (Maslow 1966).

Later, when the Soviet empire collapsed and the United States became dominant, competition with a weakened Russia lost its relevance, but there was rapid growth in China’s economic and geopolitical power and in the problems connected with this growth, which in the near future will inevitably make studies in comparative psychology important. Moreover, it is now ever more clearly understood that with the rapid development of the latest technologies, which demand at one and the same time deep competence in various fields of knowledge that are often very far apart, radical breakthroughs can be made not by individual, even highly creative scientists, but only by mixed collectives of specialists assembled at elite universities and scientific centers with abundant workforces in order to solve specific problems in various interdisciplinary fields of scientific research—modern information communications technologies, the modeling of higher-level creative thinking, physics, biopsychology, heuristics, etc. Thus, research into the problems of creativity connected with the personality of a specific psychological type of artist or scientist gradually loses its former relevance and, as it were, slips into the background.

8. The Development of Ideas about the Psychology of Art in the Soviet Union

In its fundamental theoretical and methodological positions, the Soviet and Russian tradition of the psychology of art has been closely connected with the German and French ones since the late 19th century. Here, the first significant works already appeared by the end of the 19th century, but their clear-cut rise did not emerge until the 1920s, when one after another various schools and movements unfolded. The weightiest achievements in the Russian psychology of art were represented by Lev Vygotsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Aleksei Leontyev, whose works in their originality and high scholarly level were in no way inferior to the world’s best research published in this field at that time. The distinguishing feature of the Russian tradition in the psychology of art is an orientation emphatically centered on literature, which was determined by the grand tradition of psychology in Russian literature. I personally attended lectures given by Bakhtin and Leontyev while I was studying at Lomonosov University in Moscow, and I associated with Boris Meilakh during the conferences devoted to the problems of the creative process that he organized in Leningrad.

The leading representative of this tradition, Vygotsky, was an outstanding expert on the German and French traditions of the psychology of art, which he sought to reform by creating a new, unified system of the science of the psychology of art. Already prepared for printing in 1925–1926, his texts were published in the work The Psychology of Art only in 1965, four decades after they were written. In their maturity and many-sided treatment of the problems of the psychology of art, these were unique texts. Emphasizing the need to implement his ambitious task of reforming the psychology of art, Vygotsky maintained that, on the one hand, art history feels an increasingly strong need for a theoretical grounding and, on the other, psychology, too, by seeking to explain human and artistic behavior, tends toward aesthetic psychologism. Hence arose the main goal of his research: the creation of a qualitatively new psychology of art. Appealing to the universality of his goals, he called this task “synthetic” (Vygotsky 1986, p. 17).

In his concept of the psychology of art, Vygotsky focused especially not only on the tasks, structure, and main categories of this discipline, but also on the problems of creativity, which were later thoroughly analyzed by the American scientists Roe, Barron, Maslow, Guilford, and others. Vygotsky maintained that the creative act is universal.

Vygotsky’s most talented pupil and disciple was Аleksey Nikolaevich Leontyev (1983), who not only taught various courses in psychology that were broadly humane in nature and included the problems of the psychology of art, but also published his material in various publications. He mainly devoted his attention to the history of the psychology of art, the evolution of the psyche, and the creative personality’s abilities, activity, memory, will, emotions, and concentration of attention; he discussed in detail the ideas about the psychology of art held by Freud, Adler, Jung, Arnheim, and other influential Western psychologists. He was a scientist who critically viewed the positions stated in his earlier works and considered the evolution of ideas an entirely natural matter. Like Vygotsky, when writing about artists’ creativity, he acknowledged the importance of their inborn creative potential and of the purposeful development of these inborn abilities. He was convinced that these abilities develop in the course of human interaction with the surrounding world.

The works he devoted to the problems of the psychology of art, like those by Vygotsky and Bakhtin, were enriched with many extracts from Russian literature. These tendencies were also reflected in his study “Tolstoy as a Psychologist,” which provides an exhaustive psychological analysis of various aspects of his heroes’ spiritual lives and of the distinctive character of inner monologues, feelings, dreams, and descriptions of natural scenery.

Another great world-class and ill-fated representative of the Soviet Russian psychology of art was the talented philosopher, aesthetician, literary critic, semiotician, and student of culture Mikhail Bakhtin. He spent almost his entire adult life on the fringes of the academic world; the most fruitful years of his creative work were passed in a gloomy province, and he won recognition with difficulty. He became famous only after many years, after his unique research devoted to the works of Dostoyevsky and Rabelais, to semiotics, aesthetics, and the psychology of art were published. He was a profound scholar of broad humane culture whose innovativeness was revealed in the many fields of his creative expression.

Reflected in his concept of the psychology of art were theories of empathy and ideas about inner imitation (Karl Groos), play and illusion (Groos, Carl Lange), and Hermann Cohen’s aesthetics as well as, in part, those of Schopenhauer and Bergson, which he summarized as “expressive aesthetics” and connected with an expression of inner states of a person’s spirit. In essence, he separated this movement from the formal school opposed to it (Konrad Fiedler, Adolf Hildebrand, Eduard Hanslick, Alois Riegl), whose attention was centered on the problems of the form of a work of art. At the center of his interest in the psychology of art were the fundamental problems of the subject (author) of artistic creation, of his creative potential, and of the creative process.

Relying on an analysis of works by Pushkin and Dostoyevsky, Bakhtin distinguished different types of relationships between an author and his hero. The first occurs when the hero takes hold of the author, that is, when the hero’s emotional, voluntary, objective attitude, his cognitive ethical position in the world become so authoritative for the author that he cannot fail to see the real world only through the hero’s eyes and cannot experience the events of his life only from within: the author cannot find reliable and stable support outside of the hero (Bakhtin 1979, p. 18). In such a conception, there is nothing stable outside of the bounds of the hero and his consciousness; values are centered in the problems under discussion; there is no unified picture of the author; it is diffused or only conditionally personal. To this type, Bakhtin attributed almost all of Dostoyevsky’s heroes and some of Tolstoy’s, Kierkegaard’s, and Stendhal’s.

The second type of relationship between author and hero occurs when the author completely masters his hero and adds the final touches to his inner life. In this type, the author’s relationship with his hero becomes, in part, the hero’s relationship with himself. The hero begins to form himself, while the author’s reflex is to the hero’s spirit or his lips. And finally, the third possible type occurs when the hero himself becomes his own author and aesthetically reflects on his life, as it were, playing his own role. Unlike Dostoyevsky’s endlessly Romantic hero, who has not atoned for his sin, such a hero is satisfied with himself and is completely finished (Bakhtin 1979, p. 21). Summarizing this research, as it were, Bakhtin maintained that art gives him the opportunity to live several lives instead of just one and, at the same time, to enrich the experience of his real life, to approach another life from within, in the name of his own.

With the rebirth of Vygotsky’s ideas, from the 1960s to the late 1980s there emerged in the country a powerful new wave of interest in the psychology of art and the creative process. In Leningrad, A. N. Sochor and B. S. Meilakh became the main ideologues of this wave. They organized many scholarly conferences devoted to these problems and important collective publications edited by specialists in various fields of learning. The participants in this lively intellectual movement promoted the inclusion of the psychology of art and artistic creation in the teaching programs of various scholarly institutions and schools of higher education, especially art schools.

Another important Soviet center for the study of psychology and the psychology of art was established in Georgia, where the focus was on the study of subconscious processes. Here, alongside many specialized studies, through the efforts of A. S. Prangishvili and A. E. Sherozia, a unique collection of articles by scientists from various countries was published during 1978–1985 in four volumes: The Unconscious: Nature, Functions, Methods of Study. Of huge scope and without any analogue in the world, these articles discussed in detail dreams, creative work, and clinical problems. In recent decades, various Russian scientists have devoted great attention to the problems of the psychology of art and have published significant research on this subject. The most important works have been by Aleksei Leontyev’s grandson Dmitry Leontyev (1998); Krivtsun (2000); Basin (2000); Basin and Krutous (2007); and Nagibina (2011).

9. The Object of the Psychology of Art, Its Structure, and Its Main Fields of Research

When studying the historical beginnings of the psychology of art, we became convinced that this field of scientific knowledge historically developed in three basic streams: in the cognitive systems of psychology, psychiatry, and art history. In the first instance, it functioned in the system of categories of psychological knowledge as an integral part of the science of general psychology, i.e., the psychology of art; in the second—in the system of medical knowledge as an integral part of the fields that study psychiatric and other psychopathological problems, i.e., the psycho(patho)logy of art; and in the third—as an integral part of the complex of art-historical disciplines, at the center of which is the psychology of art. In the first instance, we emphasize the second part of this construct, and in the third—the first.

When explaining the functions of the psychology of art in today’s humanities and the distinctiveness of its structure and object of research, some questions naturally arise: What are the main differences between its object, structure, and fields of research when compared to other disciplines that research the psychological aspects of the artist and the art he has created? Where should one seek the core that links together the object and structure of the psychology of art? To what areas of today’s humanities is the psychology of art closest in the goals and tasks of its research, its object, structure, problems, and methodological instruments of knowledge? What is its relationship to allied disciplines? In the psychology of art, how do two closely related fields of research interact: the artist (creator, performer) and the apprehender-consumer (observer, viewer, listener, reader, user, evaluator)? What is the connection between the psyches of the artists who create works of art and those of the people who apprehend these products of artistic creation?

These are complex questions to which there are no unequivocal answers. When seeking answers to these and other similar questions, we must first clearly understand that the object of study of the psychology of art is interdisciplinary, in other words, multifaceted, in a certain sense, even amorphous, because this discipline, being rather young, is still in the formative stage of its structure, problematic fields, and theoretical and methodological approaches. Its focus is on the complex world of human emotional experiences, which is connected with the study of the many psychological problems of the artist’s creative potential and creative process as well as of aspects of the products of creative activity—works of art—and their apprehension.

The study of the psychology of art is divided into two main clusters of problems: the first covers a broad range of internal, subjective processes (including hallucinations), and the second—those collective processes of thought and apprehension that we can observe, perceive, analyze, and empirically describe. This latter approach can involve introspection and the recording and description of feelings, thoughts, and the subtlest changes in spirit. The method of introspection was later rejected as unreliable by the adherents of behaviorism, and the adepts of the psychoanalytic, depth, analytical, and existential psychology of art stressed the importance of powerful subconscious and unconscious processes and constantly emphasized the complexity of knowing the processes of mental life and its importance for the existence of the artist.

Historical analysis shows that attitudes toward the object, structure, tasks, and functions of the psychology of art are perceptibly different in works by representatives of different movements and schools in this field. Some regard it as a broadly humane discipline that has traditionally coalesced with the psychological aspects of philosophical metaphysics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of art. The tasks of this discipline, according to them, are connected with the emotional aspects of the psyche of the artist and the apprehender, with the imagination, senses, and other physiological and psychopathological processes that take place in people’s consciousness and subconscious. Others connect the psychology of art with knowledge of the psychological patterns in the artist, his creative potential, and the creative process as well as of the products of creative activity. This latter attitude is more characteristic of the German-speaking, French-speaking, and Russian-speaking traditions of the psychology of art. However, a multitude of other attitudes also exists.

Moreover, the structure of the psychology of art and the field of its basic concepts and problems unfolded under the influence of the theoretical positions of various national scientific traditions and their dominant methodological approaches. When formulating the tasks, structure, interconnections, and basic tenets of their concepts of the psychology of art, different scholars often emphasize some of its components and, conversely, minimize or completely ignore others. Usually, today’s concepts of the psychology of art focus on these aspects: (1) the human mental functions related to the world of art (emotional experiences, perception, imagination, intuition, flights of creative thought, etc.), i.e., those features of artistic activity that combine into a unified whole the creation of works of art and their apprehension; (2) these psychological problems include those of cognition in various fields of art and historical stages of development, questions of the creation and apprehension of artistic visual systems, the sources of creative thinking, the factors and ways of expression influencing it, and other psychological problems of artistic creation or, more narrowly, of creative processes; (3) psychological questions about the subject of artistic creation (the artist, his talent, genius); (4) the psychological problems of artistic form (genre, the internal architectonics of form, the style of the individual and of the epoch); (5) the psychological visual structures of a work of art; (6) the psychological questions about artistic apprehension.

In today’s psychology of art, we can distinguish a relatively independent part of its structure or subdiscipline—the psychology of creative processes, which has historically formed in the interactive territories of aesthetics, the psychology of art, general psychology, physiology, psychiatry, and the ideas of other sciences. Thus, the objects of their research, the fields of problems, and the theoretical and methodological approaches are similar, but the object of the psychology of art is broader, and that of the psychology of creative processes—narrower.

In the psychology of the creative process, the focus of a scientist’s attention is on a five-part system: reality—the artist—the creative process—the work of art—apprehension. The most important organizing link in this field of scientific knowledge and the main concept in this system of categories is the creative process, which is examined dynamically. This examination starts with the early objective and subjective rudiments that are burgeoning into an artistic idea in the mists of the subconscious. It passes through the birth of primary impulses, the crystallization of ideas and images into certain blocks, and a multitude of the most diverse intermediate stages until it reaches the phase that crowns the emergence of a work of art. This analysis is complex because among the many phases of the creative process there are no clearly fixed boundaries. In each instance of a specific creative process, these phases intertwine in the most diverse ways and merge into one another.

When dealing with the artistic dynamics of the creative process, different authors have distinguished different phases of these dynamics, which can be designated by many different names. Instead of going into a critical discussion of these various approaches, we will present our own scheme, which we have developed during many years of creative work: (1) the phase of accumulating or incubating the material; (2) the formative, rudimentary stage, in which there become clear, as yet only in embryonic form, the contours of the future idea, the main lines of the plot, the most characteristic strokes of the images, and the general emotional-tonal system of the work; (3) the practical materialization of an idea—making sketches, creating various rough drafts, plans, schemes, and annotations, highlighting individual themes and segments, combining the rough drafts of various main and secondary lines, correcting them, and creating new visual systems; (4) critically sifting the material and forming the body of a common idea (at this stage, it is not uncommon to move forward through trial and error); (5) synthesizing the fabric and structure of the final work of art and revising and adjusting various minute details.

10. The Interdisciplinary Nature of the Psychology of Art and the Possibilities of an Integrated Analysis

As can be seen from our analysis, the historical features of the formation of the psychology of art determined its interdisciplinary nature because it was formed primarily by combining in itself the knowledge accumulated by the social and humane disciplines and subdisciplines that study different psychological aspects of art and, moreover, because it absorbed and adapted to its needs the methodological instruments that these other fields had tested. Thus, the psychology of art has historically unfolded as an interdisciplinary field of research whose tasks, object, structure, main field of problems analyzed, and theoretical and methodological approaches have been formed in the intermediate territories of interaction between different psychological and other disciplines. These territories have included questions that were fully discussed in their psychological, psychopathological, and art-historical aspects and that lie at the intersection of the artist’s creative potential, the creative process, the products of artistic creation, their apprehension, and the many other problems mentioned above. Thus, the object and structure of this research unfolded at the point of contact between general psychology and various other disciplines, specifically, philosophy (philosophical aesthetics, the philosophy of art), cultural studies (the history, anthropology, psychology of culture, etc.), art studies (art history, art theory, art criticism), literary studies (literary history, literary theory, literary criticism, etc.), and medicine (neurology, psychiatry).

In all the dominant national traditions—German, French, British, American, and Soviet (Russian)—of the psychology of art, an interdisciplinary approach in specific concepts and schools spread in different forms and under the influence of various theoretical and methodological positions. In some places, we see the predominance of positivism, in others—of empiricism, of an applied nature, and in yet others—of concepts of a broad humane cultural orientation. In some, we sense the influence of philosophy, in others—that of art history, and in still others—that of psychology. Some develop under the influence of associative psychology, others—under that of Gestalt psychology, and still others—under that of psychoanalytic theories and similar methodological positions and research strategies. In specific manifestations of the spread of its theoretical positions, the emergence of the psychology of art was distinguished by a stunning variety of ideas, concepts, schools, and movements and of the methodological approaches and research strategies characteristic of them. This process is continuous because new interdisciplinary and applied fields of scientific knowledge are constantly emerging and developing.

When we study the current problems of the psychology of art, the complicated processes of artistic creation, and their hidden mechanisms, a comprehensive methodology and the systematic method closely connected with it become a holistically effective principle for knowing the complicated totality of the theoretical and empirical psychological problems of artistic creation. This principle helps recreate a complex picture of the processes of artistic creation at a single glance that encompasses their various phases, their driving forces, and a multitude of objective and subjective factors of varying importance. In this way, an opportunity arises to study this complex of the problems of artistic creation not sporadically, by jumping about from one suggestive element or aspect to another, but according to the internal logic of their development or their hierarchy of structural levels, by moving sequentially in the process of recognition from more general problems to details or vice versa.

The first level of morphological analysis in the so-understood comprehensive methodology for knowing the psychology of art and its component part, the creative process, is the study of an individual work of art from the birth of an idea in its creator’s head through various intermediate phases to the final realization of this idea. The second is the study of an individual artist’s creative process in all the diversity of its unfolding. At the same time, the preconditions are created for making broader theoretical generalizations about patterns in the psychology not only of a specific artist but also of the creative process. And finally, the third—a higher level of structural analysis of the systematic methodology in this hierarchy—is a comparative analysis of the creative processes of several different authors according to specific features formulated in a clearly defined program. Indeed, the creative process of each different artist, despite his individuality, is also distinguished by certain typological features characteristic of the creative process in general, the summation of which provides the researcher with an opportunity to raise his observations and generalizations to a higher level of theoretical synthesis.

11. Conclusions

Thus, the main object of research into the psychology of art as an integral part of the system of psychological knowledge and a more or less autonomous discipline that developed primarily from German psychological aesthetics consisted of the various characteristics of a creative personality as recorded and described by psychological methods—conscious and subconscious states, will, memory, imagination, and the mechanisms of innate and acquired abilities and similar functioning, all of which unfolded during the creation and apprehension of artistic values. This discipline was also interested in the influence of artistic values on various psychological aspects of the artist’s life and creative activity. What became the main object of research into the psychology of art as an integral part of the system of art-historical knowledge that emerged from reflection on aesthetics, the philosophy of art, physiology, psychiatry, art history and theory, and other social sciences and humane fields were various patterns recorded and described by art-historical methods and primarily psychological-subjective—the artist’s creative potential, the creative process, and its products, i.e., the emergence of works of art. In the specific concepts and schools of today’s psychology of art, these two different currents in its emergence became intertwined in the strangest way, and there appeared a third one related to the less significant problems of the psychopathology of art. This situation was also influenced by the boundaries, artificially drawn by universities, between different scientific disciplines, the leveling, even decay, of systems of categories in the postmodern humanities, and the emergence of new interactive and interdisciplinary research strategies and methods.

In this area, early studies of individual problems in the psychology of art were already distinguished by their interdisciplinary nature. The existence of a multitude of the most complex factors affecting the creative process makes it necessary for the researcher into the problems of the psychology of art and the creative process to study these factors comprehensively with the help of the opportunities and cognitive instruments provided by various social sciences and humanities. A comprehensive knowledge of the creative process organically combines aspects of cultural studies, philosophy, aesthetics, empirical art history, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and other fields.

Thus, the psychology of art is an interdisciplinary field that has evolved from the interaction of different types of learning (psychology, philosophy, physiology, aesthetics, art history, etc.). Its main object of research is the most general patterns in various areas of artistic creation as well as the potential, characteristics, and states of the artist’s personality (experiences, emotions, hidden conflicts, worldview, interpersonal relationships), all of which determine the various conscious and mysterious subconscious aspects of the artist’s creative process, of the creation of works of art, of their influence on specific people, and of their apprehension. Because in art a person knows the surrounding world through images and forms, the psychology of art distinguishes the main mechanisms in this process by relying on other components of culture (forms, symbols, language, concepts, images, sounds, colors, etc.).