PSYCHOANALYTIC EXPLORATIONS IN ART

London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1953. First Edition. . Hardcover. Very Good/About Very Good. Ernest Kris began his celebrated multi-disciplinary career in the 1920s in Austria where he received a doctorate from the University of Vienna in art history. He then began work with Sigmund Freud as an editor of Imago Magazine while training as a psychoanalyst, later emigrated to England and then to the U.S. to escape the Nazis. One of his first published papers argued that the difference between an artist and a psychotic is that the artist can return from his imagination to reality while a psychotic cannot. In this book, Kris deals with the contributions of psychoanalysis to the study of art and to the psychology of the artist and his audience. There is also a large section on the art of the insane and chapters on the nature of comedy, the meaning of poetry and the problems of literary criticism. First Edition, First Printing. About 5 3/4 x 8 5/8 inches, 358 pages including bibliography and index with 80 illustrations in section following text. Orange cloth-covered boards with black lettering on spine. Pale green dustjacket with black lettering and illustration of Giovanni Battista Porta's, "The Man and the Ram" on the front panel; the back panel shows publisher's ads for "books that matter." Boards show very slightly bumped corners and shelf wear at spine ends, o/w boards are free of significant flaws such as tearing or chipping. Text shows several tiny stains on fore edge and a single pinhead-size stain on bottom edge, o/w clean, complete and unmarked, no tears, no creases. The dustjacket shows some slight soiling and wear at spine ends and corners, no significant tearing or creasing, not price-clipped. A collectable copy of an early and notable work on art and psychology.