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fear, how Aristotle (Poetics , c6) defines tragedy, requires internalizable images of doom in order to give containing form to one's own.
VII. Ab. Art as a Multi-Symbolic Interplay Gilbert Rose (1999) posits that artists possess the special ability to symbolize simultaneously our two modes of apprehending reality, essentially corresponding to primary- process and secondary-process modes of feeling, thinking, and perceiving. The emphasis is on their interplay and mutual development and fortification. While many others make this point implicitly in their writings on the subject of literary and visual arts (Blum 2011, 2012, 2013; Chessick 2001, Wilson 2003, Papiasvili 2020), for Rose, the nature of the symbolic interplay is the focus. According to this author, dual orientation of art is embodied in the tensions and balances of pictorial form itself, which distills and freezes artist’s fluid psychological experience. Art safely promotes a heightened self-awareness, fosters the reconciliation of primitive and mature self and object representations, and, by providing a channel for symbolic repetition and reexperiencing, art continues a biological function of early mothering. Its holding presence and containment of reliably balanced tension and release encourages affects to build up with modulated intensity and thus continue to differentiate. Taking off from numerous historical accounts of creative productions that first occurred as visual symbols in dreams (Asimov 1982), as well as psychoanalytic writings crediting dreams with a special value in genesis of creativity (Freud 1900; Noy 1979), Eva Papiasvili and Linda Mayers conducted an interdisciplinary psychoanalytic developmental study of symbolic processes “From Dreams to Creativity” (2012/2014). As part of their broader inquiry into the creative processes throughout development, the authors tracked progressive transformative interplay between primary and secondary processes and symbolisms (Freud 1938; Arieti 1980; Rose 1999). They subjected the production of international “My Dream” art competition participants from 3 to 26 years of age to process and content analysis, using individually tailored interviews along with free associations. As a complexly motivated preconscious treatment of an unconscious process (Freud 1938), dream art was conceptualized as a multiply condensed exposition of the dream, containing “movement” as an additional transformative (rotational) perspective and communicative property, evocative of an aesthetic- affective response in the viewer. The results demonstrated that the rudimentary sublimation (use of creative activity to deal with one’s inner experience), and the rudimentary evocative-communicative properties of dream art are apparent already between ages 3.5 and 5. During early latency years, multiple perspectives and (their) condensations appear for the first time, possibly ushering in Piaget’s (1929) stage of Concrete Operations. As the alteration of perspective occurs first in the dream, it would appear that the pre-communicative stage of creativity does indeed already begin on the level of the dream, during early latency. All the prerequisites of the full visual art production – the sublimatory capacity; taking a reflective “second look”, construction of multiple
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