Dream-Work and Art-Work

If artists, art historians and critics are to benefit from Freudian psychoanalysis in any way, then they must confront the cental achievements of Freud’s work and not just his more marginal writings on art and artists. In order to explain the way in which dream images are produced, Freud introduced the concept of dream-work; it is proposed that a comparable concept—art-work—would be useful in the field of artistic production. Freud made frequent use of the pictorial analogy in discussing the mechanisms of dream construction; this paper reverses the dream —picture relationship and examines, via a number of concrete examples, the extent to which pictures can be elucidated by the terms condensation, displacement, etc. which Freud employed to explain dreams. The underlying hypothesis is that the ways in which dreams, jokes, pictorial and poetic images are constructed are fundamentally similar.