The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts

insight and rigour

show that the manner in which psychoanalysis offers a model of creativity conducted
at the level of utterance, is useful in addressing this problem.
in conclusion, i will show how this distinction between utterance and identity
allows for a separation of the function of psychoanalysis within arts- based research
on the one hand, and within art school- based ‘theory’ on the other. This also allows
for a reconsideration of the championing of theory in art schools undertaken by Terry
atkinson in his essay ‘phantoms of the studio’, and his assertion that ‘nowhere has the
idea of the unconscious been more symptomatically half- digested, and nowhere is it a
more entrenched agency of meaning- fixing ... than in art school teaching’ (atkinson
1990: 51).

Psychoanalysis and the creative practitioner

in his ‘ideas Concerning a descriptive and analytical psychology’, Wilhelm dilthey
expressed an ambition to ‘make accessible to conceptual analysis what the great poets,
shakespeare especially, have expressed in images’ (dilthey 1977 [1894]: 68). in this
way, dilthey expressed a recurrent theme of research in the creative arts, namely,
how does one capture the essence of the ‘lifeworld’ in which an artist and his works
are embedded, within the rigour of a conceptual analysis? as dilthey framed it, this
problem in the matching of a creative practice with an appropriate method of analysis,
would be the same for an artist or a designer analysing their own practice, as it would
be for a sociologist or an art historian conducting research within art and design fields.
here, within an acknowledgement of the genius of shakespeare, we have a discernible
shift from the uniqueness of genius to the generality of practice. as Kurt müller- Vollmer
has put it, dilthey asserted that ‘the mental constitution of the poet did not differ
fundamentally from that of other human beings ... The man of action, the philosopher,
and the poet have to rely on the same constitutive elements of experienced reality’
(müller- Vollmer 1963: 97). dilthey’s model of the self, used the idea of a preconscious,
if not a properly unconscious, notion of psychic life:

i have no need to bring to awareness the system of my professional obligations

in order to subordinate an action to it according to the prevailing situation,

and the intention contained in this system of duties continues to be effective

without my being conscious of it. in effect, diverse purposive systems^1 intersect

in every consciousness sustained by cultural relations.

(dilthey 1977 [1894]: 71)

For dilthey, the analysis of creative practice must take place with reference to
this preconscious and pre- conceptual level, in which ‘enduring relationships that go
from individual to individual ... give the practical world its stability’ (dilthey 1977
[1894]: 72). Creative works are a symbolic response to immersion within a field of life
experience, and the analysis of life experience must trace and reprise this connection
between the individual and the human world. dilthey’s model of a psychic life nexus
is at the root of standard definitions of how the term practice is commonly deployed in
the human sciences, a usage that has also filtered into art and design.