Preface of 《The Psychology of Art》 (My Notes)

Preface of 《The Psychology of Art》 (My Notes)

1. The Psychology of Art which presented Vygotsky’s results of his work in the years 1915~1922 was published in 1926.

2. Vygotsky’s main analyses in this book were base on Krylov, on Hamlet, and on the composition of the short story.

3. Vygotsky’s purpose of this book was to reexamine the traditional psychology of art and to try to delineate a new field of investigation for objective psychology. And his goal was to offer a program, not a system.

4.
a) Vygotsky agreed with Lipps that aesthetics can be defined as a discipline of applied psychology.

b) Socialogical view of art with in Marxist (Plekhanov)

c) Vygotsky also shared Utitz 's view that art goes beyond the limits of aesthetics and even has features that are fundamentally different from aesthetics values, but that it begins with the aesthetic element and remains with it to the end.

d) Hennequin said a work of art as a combination of aesthetic symbols aimed at arousing emotion in people.

e) Müller Freienfels said that the psychologist of art resembles the biologist who can make a complete analysis of living matter and break it down into its component parts but is unable to recreate the living whole out of these parts or to discover the laws that govern this whole.

f) Spinoza

5. The central idea of the psychology of art, Vygotsky believed, was the recognition of the dominance of material over artistic form, or what amounts to the same thing, the acknowledgement in art of the social techniques of emotions.

6. The essence of the problem was: the theoretical and applied psychology of art should bring to light all the mechanisms that operate through art and should also provide the basis for all disciplines concerned with art.

7. Vygotsky thought that we should never be able to reconstruct authors’ psychology, and the psychology of his readers, but we can, by analyzing the art work, discover the psychological law on which it is based, the mechanism through which it acts; this we may call the psychology of a certain art work.