Art Brings about a reconciliation between the two principles in a peculiar way. An Artist is originally a man who turns away from reality because he cannot come to terms with the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction which it at first demands, and who allows his erotic and ambitious wishes fulplay in the life of phantasy.
He finds the way back to reality however, from this world of phantasy by making use of special gifts to mould his phantasies into truths of a new kind, which are valued by men as precious reflections of reality. Thus in a certain fashion he actually becomes the hero, the king , the creator or the favourite he desired to be, without following the long round about path of making real alterations in the external world.
Two Principles of Mental Functioning
Pg 42 On Metapsychology – The Theory of Psychoanalysis: “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, “Ego and the Id” and Other Works (Penguin Freud Library)
“A general tendency of our mental apparatus, which can be traced back to the economic principle of saving expenditure (of energy) seems to find expression in the tenacity with which we hold onto the sources of pleasure at our disposal, and in the difficulty with which we renounce them. With the introduction of the reality principle one species of thought- activity was split off; it was kept free from reality testing and remained subordinated to the pleasure principle alone. This activity is phantasying, which begins already in children’s play, and later, continued as day-dreaming, abandons dependence on real objects.”
