The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts

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This emphasis on the facts of the unconscious might seem to push Freudianism
towards the notion of description appropriate to natural science, in which the utterances
of the analysand are treated as if they were a set of distinct natural objects that are made
sense of within an explanatory scheme. This is not the case, however. psychoanalysis
is not a stand- alone theory, it is a specific orientation towards the materiality of the
utterance, accompanied by a renunciation of belief in psychic freedom. This enables
a particular form of analysis or investigation to be conducted, based on the close
observation of deviations from the path of self- identity:

there has been a general refusal to recognize that psycho- analytic research

could not, like a philosophical system, produce a complete and ready- made

theoretical structure, but had to find its way step by step along the path towards

understanding the intricacies of the mind by making an analytic dissection of

both normal and abnormal phenomena.

(Freud 1961 [1923]: 35f.)

it is crucial to stress, as i have done thus far, that a psychoanalytic reading depends
not on the adoption of a particular model of research, but rather on the emergence
of an analytic position as a specific orientation of the subject. This orientation moves
away from a belief in the psychic freedom embodied in self- identity, and towards the
absence of this identity at the level of unconscious knowledge. This is the subject
of Freud’s exhortations to the Vienna psychiatric Clinic in his Introductory Lectures
in Psychoanalysis. here the possibility of analysis, research and investigation depends
upon a shift of position (towards not knowing, and the renunciation of belief in psychic
freedom) that produces an agent of research. dilthey’s psychology, on the other hand,
offers a model of research that conceals the presence of an intrusive agent of research,
and which leaves the structure of life experience intact; hence his advocacy of passive
description rather than active interpretation. Freud rejects both description and
interpretation for the abductive observation of anomalies in the efficient production
of self- identity. Thus the emergence of the researcher in the life nexus that presents a
problem for dilthey, becomes the pre- condition of psychoanalytic observation for Freud.
This establishes an important distinction between psychological and psychoanalytic
approaches to the creative subject.

a shift in the position of the subject produces a shift in the position

of the object

The rigour of the researcher that i have identified as proper to a psychoanalytic
approach to arts- based research, also produces a new orientation towards the object
of investigation. one way to approach this issue is by looking at how Freud dissects
and separates aspects of the creative subject, not in a strictly scientific sense, but as a
consequence of his adoption of a psychoanalytic viewpoint. here it is useful to contrast
dilthey’s account of shakespeare, with Freud’s essay on ‘dostoyevsky and parricide’:

Four facets may be distinguished in the rich personality of dostoyevsky:

the creative artist, the neurotic, the moralist and the sinner. how is one to