Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 1.djvu/163

 REPORTS 155

or whatever else it can find for pictures. Impressions mostly take visual form.

Then the writer discussed the relation of visual imagery, thinking, and word-forming. This led to an account of the mechanism of imagery in the thinker of pronounced visual type.

The two extreme types of intellectuals who are continually ex- pressing their antagonism for the other's way of thinking easily fall into a sensory image-forming and concrete motor type. The intuitive thinker was selected as the former and the scientist as the latter. Both, the one working in pure intimations of immediate experience, the other in material which can be measured, meet in every person in varying proportions.

When a forgotten visual memory laden with repressed impulse is hindered from transformation into intellectualization, or into motor activity, it is forced to artificial projection. Examples of this result were given: also examples of the unprojected and more passive forms which do not attain the representative situation, but are a direct and fixed looking at some object; and examples of the pro- jection of visual imagery into different forms of art.

Art, sex and religion were three subjects that were assigned their share in the projection of visual imagery. Their common bond and distinctions were discussed upon the definition of religion as essentially a longing for an intimate bond between a superior per- sonality and one's self

Art, although originating in a partial impulse and a direct urge is also in its process of production a form of sublimation, a deviation from the sex instinct, because it is love energy directed toward a non-human, instead of a human object love.

Similarly visual imagery, not only as a component of artistic production, but of any achievement, condenses many meanings in relation to libido. It is a sign that the libido is blocked somewhere and hence is a signal for transformation of energy. It is also an agent of sublimation, for it effects a diversion of libido from tabooed outlets.