The Thinking-I and the Being-I in Psychology of the Arts

Transcription

1 1999, Vol. 12, NO. 3, Copyright 1999 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. The Thinking-I and the Being-I in Psychology of the Arts Gerald C. Cupchik University of Toronto ABSTRAC? The thinking-i and being-] are complementary facets of aesthetic creativity and reception. The thinking-1 encompasses perception, cognition, and reflection, whereas the being-i includes representation, unconscious dynamic processes, and transcendence. An intellectual appreciation ofart requires attention to sensory processes that embody style as well as an attempt to develop a coherent understanding of the subject matter of the work, visual or literary, and to relate it to various contexts including the world of the artist or author. In relation to the self; an artistic or literaly work can explicitly represent signijkant personal meaning and implicitly embody unconscious meanings. An understanding of these explicit and implicit meaningsprovides a basis for transcendence or personal growth. There are two complementary facets to aesthetic creativity and reception: thinking about the work and relating the work to the self. From the viewpoint of creativity, thinking involves the application of techniques and ideas that (a) organize the subject matter and style of art, literary works, and so on, and (b) make them accessible to a community of recipients. When artists transform traditional rules or codes that govern the creative process, they challenge recipients who may not appreciate the origins of these changes. In terms of aesthetic appreciation, thinking about a work involves an effort to discern its structure, interpret its meaning, and understand the context within which it was created. The burden of originality is, therefore, shared by the artist, who generates a novel system of organization, and the recipient, who must have sufficient patience to decode it. Formalist schools, such as New Criticism in literature (Brooks, 1947), maintain that works can be analyzed in objective terms like objects of scientific inquiry and that expert knowledge of these formal codes can be transmitted to recipients. The being-i, or the self, attaches emotional and personal meaning to the subject matter of the work and to the stylistic frame that surrounds it. Thus, sentimental art is accompanied by idealization and simplification of form (Winston, 1992), whereas expressionist art uses jamng colors and harsh outline to echo an ironic message. The ways that personal meanings are transformed and embodied in creative works has been a concern of the psychodynamic perspective (Ehrenzweig, 1967; Kris, 1952). These themes and their stylistic expression may spontaneously resonate with the emotions and personal experiences of recipients, sometimes engaging them and at othertimes repelling them. The interpretive role ofthe self in literary criticism is emphasized by proponents of the reader response viewpoint, who underscore the authorial role of individuals and communities in an effort after meaning (Fish, 1980; Holland, 1975) and, in the visual arts, by proponents of a social constructivist view of art appreciation (see Bryson, 1983). At least three stages of processing are encompassed by the thinking-i: perception, cognition, and reflection. Perception engages sensory experiences involved with and evoked by the work either in the act of creation or reception, whereas cognition focuses on properties of the subject matter and style in an "effort after meaning" (Bartlett, 1932/1995), and reflection considers the work in various contexts, either within the work itself This article is based on my presidential address to Division 10 of the American Psychological Association, Psychology and the Arts, August Manuscript received January 29, 1998; revision received March 3, 1998; accepted May 31, Correspondence and requests for reprints should be sent to Gerald C. Cupchik, University of Toronto at Scarborough, Scarborough, Ontario, Canada MI C 1 A4. cupchik@lake.scar.utoronto.ca.

2 G. C. Cupchik and relevant previous works, or in relation to the creator and the era. The being-i also becomes involved in at least thee ways that bridge the gap between recipient and work of art, literature, and so on: representation, projection, and transcendence. A work of art, literature, drama, and so on, may be experienced as explicitly representing personal meanings, values, and experiences or those of others. It can also implicitly embody unconscious meanings, as when we project hopes and fears onto characters and events. The creative act can be transcendent for an artist or author to the extent that previously unarticulated meanings and feelings gain expression. In the case of the recipient, reflecting on acts of representation or projection provides an important vehicle for encountering the self and, therefore, for transcendence and personal growth. Rudolf Arnheim's (1969) book, Visual Thinking, established a broad framework within which to consider a cognitive approach to visual aesthetics: My contention is that the cognitive operations called thinking are not the privilege of mental processes above and beyond perception but the essential ingredients of perception itself. I am refening to such operations as active exploration, selection, grasping of essentials, simplification, abstraction, analysis and synthesis, completion, correction, comparison, problem solving, as well as combining, separating, putting in context.... By "cognitive" I mean all mental operations involved in the receiving, storing and processing of information: sensory perception, memory, thinking, learning. (p. 13) Perception In the linear or sequential approach characteristic of the British empiricist tradition (see Boring, 1950), the sensory elements of perception lay a foundation for subsequent cognitive analysis and higher order reflection. Psychologists who adopt this bottom-up approach have variously characterized elementary physical-sensory cues (the stuff of perception) in terms of edges (Hubel & Weisel, 1962), color, brightness, line ends, tilt, curvature (Treisman, 1985), elongated blobs (Julesz, 1981), and convex shapes or "geons" (Biederman, 1987). The brain is deemed as hardwired to detect these elementary properties out of which local features of meaningful symbols are formed. The goal of everyday perception is to find potentially useful objects that help people fulfill goals (Berlyne, 1971) and, accordingly, these elementary properties are "discarded" on route to object identification (Lockhart, Craik, & Jacoby, 1976). Aesthetic activity, on the other hand, is intrinsically motivated (Berlyne, 197 l), valuing the process and artifact in and of itself. The physical-sensory qualities of perception can be structured so as to create visual effects (style) as well as symbolic representations of objects and events (subject matter). For this reason, Moles ( ) described aesthetic perception as hierarchically organized, encompassing both style (syntactic information) and subject matter (semantic information). These two levels of organization have been consistently found in multidimensional scaling studies involving pairwise similarity judgments of paintings. The fundamental dimension is hard-edged versus soft-edged (comparable to the linear vs. painterly art styles described by Wolfflin, ) with degree of representation or fig- ure-ground separation as the second dimension (Avital & Cupchik, 1998; Berlyne & Ogilvie, 1974; Cupchik, 1974; 07Hare, 1976). The gestalt tradition has offered a different way of conceptualizing perceptual processes. Rather than thinking like British empiricists in terms of sensation preceding cognition, a global versus local distinction is proposed. Thus, holistic processing lays a foundation for subsequent local analysis of specific pieces of information (see Arnheim, 1986). This distinction became acceptable to mainstream cognitivists through Neisser's (1966) notions of preattentive and focal attentive processing. By combining the two traditions, we arrive at the idea that physical-sensory qualities can be globally processed. In fact, viewers can discern structural properties, such as the relative complexity of a visual pattern or painting, within 50 msec, which permits just a single glance and requires holistic perception (Cupchik & Berlyne, 1979). According to a gestalt analysis, "expression is an inherent characteristic of perceptual patterns" (Arnheim, 1969, p. 433) experienced as "a configuration of forces [and]... dynamics" (p. 434). Thus, perceptual processes can provide structured information about visual effects (style) or spontaneously evoke emotion. This emotional quality can then feed forward to the locally processed subject matter and lend it a mood

3 Thinking and Being within the same psychological moment (Cupchik & Winston, 1996). The everyday habit of identifying objects leads to a cognitive bias that makes it difficult for novice viewers to discern the subtle visual codes associated with style. The disposition of untrained viewers to favor familiar subject matter over stylistic subtleties was revealed in a study in which viewers performed a seriation task (Cupchik & Gebotys, 1988). They were presented with slides of paintings or sculptures in groups of three (mostly by the same artist within each set). The artworks were chosen so that they lay along a continuum from representational to nonrepresentational. Participants were instructed to indicate the order of increasing meaningfulness from the viewpoint of an artist. Untrained viewers demonstrated a cognitive bias by finding the representational works more meaningful, and they also preferred representational artworks. Experienced artists perceived the intended order of increasing abstraction and preferred less representational artworks. In essence, aesthetic perception requires that the cognitive bias of everyday life be overcome. The Russian formalists, such as Shklovsky ( ) stressed the importance of "deautomatizing" perception: breaking the cognitive bias and experiencing a renewed awareness of sensory elements. Elsewhere I suggested that artists are naturally able to overcome the cognitive bias and attend to the process of perception itself (Cupchik, 1992). This enables them to learn the syntaxes underlying tonal, color, and textural variations in natural scenes. Through rehearsal with the manipulation of a medium, they recreate the observed visual effects, matching the emerging artistic product with the original percept (Gombrich, 1960). They can also project an image (Gombrich, 1960) onto or perceive an image in the emerging artwork, just as we perceive images in cloud formations, and ensure that it remains coherent as the work unfolds (Cupchik, 1992). The ability to engage in matching enables artists to apply the accepted techniques of any school, be it representation or abstraction oriented. The ability to project coherent images is the means whereby individual experience is expressed. Rule- and image-guided modes of artistic creativity show a surprising parallel to basic systems of neural self-regulation (Tucker & Williamson, 1984) and imply a continuity from biological to individual and cultural levels of organization (Cupchik, 1992). Cognition If the cognitive bias of everyday life generalizes to aesthetic processing, then subject matter should have precedence over the discerning of style. When people regularly discard physical-sensory qualities on route to object identification, it takes training to reinvest attention and appreciate the visual effects that underlie style. Not surprisingly, the aesthetic preferences of untrained viewers reflect the effects of cognitive bias (Winston & Cupchik, 1992). The aesthetic preferences and attitudes of untrained and trained viewers (minimum of six art courses) were examined for representational and abstract artworks. Results showed that untrained viewers preferred representational works that elicited warm feelings, whereas the trained viewers preferred abstract paintings that challenged them. The hedonic preferences and values of untrained viewers instantiate Berlyne's (1 97 1) inverted U-shaped curve and the idea that viewers prefer moderate states of arousal. Thus, the evocation of warm feelings and pleasant associations is a valued by-product of the cognitive bias from everyday to aesthetic cognition. The implication that subject matter would interfere with the perceptual discrimination of style was demonstrated in a study (Cupchik, Winston, & Herz, 1992) in which participants made "same" or "different" judgments of subject matter or style between pairs of paintings. Results showed that it was easier to perform different than same judgments, presumably because the latter require more exhaustive featural examinations. As expected, it was easier to make accurate comparative judgments of subject matter than style. The crucial finding was that participants were less accurate at discerning same style (impressionism or fauvism) when the subject matter was different (portrait vs, still life) and confounded the judgment process. This experiment (Cupchik et al., 1992) also showed that cognitive processes, such as comparative judgments of stylistic similarity, can be influenced by emotion. Viewing the pairs of paintings from a "personal, subjective, and emotional" set helped participants perceive similar style more accurately than did a "detached, objective, and analytical" set. In another study (Cupchik & Saltzman, 1999), participants viewed rock videos from subjective or objective sets and then performed a recognition memory task involving clips from these and other videos. A subjective emotional set made it easier for participants to recognize the rock

4 G. C. Cupchik music video clips as "old" (previously seen) or "new" (not previously seen). The basis for this effect can be derived by combining ideas from mainstream cognitive psychology and gestalt theory. Cognitive psychologists maintain that factors that enhance structure make it easier to discern similarity (see Farell, 1985). Adopting a gestalt perspective, the philosopher Polanyi (1967) speculated that "tacit knowledge" results from integrating individual stimulus "features" into groups with ''joint meaning." These groups (e.g., facial expressions) have an expressive quality that is independent of the individual features. For gestaltists, emotion lies in the expressive qualities of the stimulus. Thus, it can be argued that an emotionally involved attitude should facilitate the coherent perception of expressive qualities underlying style both in paintings and music videos. The principles of matching and coherence that were introduced in relation to perceptual processing apply just as well at the cognitive level. This was illustrated in literary reception studies where New Criticism stressed that a "correct" analysis of literary works can be objectively achieved. Matching occurs when readers analyze the formal structure of literary works in accordance with the frames or codes supplied to them by experts. Reader Response theory, on the other hand, affirms the value of individual interpretation. This position is founded on the openness (Eco, ) and indeterminacy (Iser, 1978) of literary works whose meaning can never be hlly resolved. According to the gestalt-phenomenological viewpoint (Iser, 1978), readers fill in gaps and seek appropriate contexts within the work to explain unexpected events. Coherence is the criterion with which readers assess their understanding of the text (Iser, 1978). Although matching is founded on objective external criteria, coherence has a more subjective feel to it. Some of the dynamics involved in the effort after coherence were revealed in a series of studies conducted on the reading process. In one experiment that examined rereading, participants were presented with short story excerpts from the work of James Joyce (Cupchik, Leonard, Axelrad, & Kalin, 1998). Challenging and difficult passages were, in general, read more slowly. On first reading, participants reported missing more detail and having thought more about other parts of the stories, and, as might be expected, they comprehended them better after the second reading. Thus, the slower initial reading speed reflected an effort to develop coherent mental representations (Graesscr, Singer, & Trabasso, 1994) of the stories. This was consistent with the finding of an earlier study (Cupchik & Laszlo, 1994) that showed that participants slowed the pace of reading if they judged the text to be rich in meaning about life. Reflection Reflection is a process that involves standing back and thinking about the results of lower order operations, either perceptual or cognitive. Although New Criticism treats a literary work as self-sufficient and closed, Reader Response theory believes that it is indeterminate and open to individual interpretation. From the objective perspective ofnew Criticism, an individual's ideas about literary works should accommodate the interpretations of experts. A relativist perspective, such as that of Reader Response theory, believes that knowledge about a work can extend beyond it to include the author or the social context within which the work was created. Reflecting the conflict between New Criticism and Reader Response theory, we can ask whether greater insight is achieved by receiving expert opinion regarding the structure and meaning of a work or by generating one's own interpretation. The study on rereading processes (Cupchik, Leonard, et al., 1998) showed that receiving an expert interpretation between first and second readings made participants more aware of the author's choice of words. The results of two studies involving sculptures showed that receiving information from the artists about the meaning of the pieces made them seem more personally meaningful, socially relevant, expressive, and powerful (Cupchik, Shereck, & Spiegel, 1994) and produced a deeper sense of understanding (Cupchik & Shereck, in press) on a second viewing. Onthe other hand, Bruner's (1 961) "discovery learning" approach favors actively generated knowledge over that which is passively received. The results oftwo recent studies showed that generating interpretations about the broader meaning of sculptures made them appear more complex and challenging (Cupchik, Spiegel, & Shereck, 1996) and more original (Cupchik & Shereck, 1998). In our study of rereading (Cupchik, Leonard, et al., 1998), generating interpretations facilitated the experience of images for emotionally loaded texts, while fostering an awareness of the author's - -

5 Thinking and Being choice of words and of richness of meaning in descriptively dense texts. It bears noting that, in both the literature (Cupchik, Leonard, et al., 1998) and sculpture (Cupchik et al., 1994) studies, experienced readers and viewers responded adversely to expert opinions. This would appear to be a reaction against having the works framed in a constraining manner. May (1958) proposed an existential transformation of Descartes's famous dictum "I think, therefore I am" to "I am, therefore I think, I act" (p. 44). An artistic version of this would be "I am, therefore I think, act, and express [in art, literature, etc.]." In this sense, art or literary works and reception episodes can relate to the self in at least three domains. First, in a very conscious and explicit manner, they can serve as representations in that the subject matter is informative either about the self or another person. Second, creative works provide a vehicle for the unconscious embodiment or projection of meaning by the artist or author or the recipient. Third, the act of reflecting on either of the first two domains, representation or projection, can heighten self-awareness and provide a framework for transcendence and personal growth. Representation In its simplest form, representation involves one thing standing for or denoting another (see Goodman, 1968). Thus, the subject matter of a painting of a bowl of fruit, for example, can represent a particular instance of bowls of fruit. Representation achieves a higher level of meaning when it goes beyond individual objects to include social situations and meanings. It is here that the process of identification enters the fray from the perspective of recipients. A viewer or reader may experience the art or literary work as representing something personally meaningful, which usually implies that it depicts subject matter reminiscent of themes or events fiom the recipient's life. This perceived relation bonds a person to the work and provides a basis for aesthetic preference that will be strengthened if the resolution of the plot (in literature or drama) is to the person's liking. In a recent study on reactions to sculptures (Cupchik & Shereck, 1998), visitors to a public art gallery were invited to view four emotionally charged scenes, each involving two or three figures (roughly 2 ft high in painted plaster). For example, one scene involved two figures, an old man with a scar indicating surgery and an angel dressed in black standing behind him. Participants rated the works twice on a series of scales and either received or generated interpretations between ratings. Emotional responses predominated during the initial encounter, whereas intellectual elaboration was moresignificant in the second one. A qualitative analysis revealed that many participants resonated to the themes depicted in the work that evoked personal memories. In addition, generating personal interpretations reduced the tendency for emotional impact and perceived originality to diminish over time, thereby showing the effects of enhanced bonding. It is easier for readers to find personal meaning in literary texts when they are given sufficient aesthetic distance as sympathetic spectators rather than explicitly instructed to identify with characters and imagine how they are feeling. In a study using short story excerpts by James Joyce (Cupchik, Oatley, & Vorderer, 1998), readers were instructed either to identify with the main characters or adopt the more detached stance of sympathetic spectators. Participants who were instructed to feel sympathy for the protagonist experienced more primary emotions and positive emotional memories in response to emotionally loaded passages. A related finding was obtained in another study using passages from Canadian short stories (Vorderer, Cupchik, & Oatley, 1997). When participants were instructed to focus on themselves in relation to what was happening in the story and to be aware of their own reactions and personal responses, they found experience-loaded texts to be more personally meaningful and wanted to continue reading them. Not surprisingly, they also had less knowledge of the main characters in action-oriented passages that factually described unfolding events. These findings clearly show that, when participants perceive works of art and literature as personally relevant (i.e., as representing their own lives), they digress into themselves and do not see the work in formal objective terms. Another study (Cupchik, Levin, & Ritterfeld, 1997) showed how interior settings, specifically living and dining rooms, can be seen as representing the lives of others. The paradigm involved presenting viewers

6 G. C. Cupchik with slides of rooms that were either fancy, modem, or familiar (see Ritterfeld & Cupchik, 1996). Participants either imagined the person who in fact lived there ("other" set) or imagined that they themselves lived in the room ("self' set). Participants later indicated whether or not details shown in slides (e-g., a vase on a table) were from the rooms they had seen. As in the initial study, participants were more accurate at recognizing details from the modem rooms that were geometric in layout. Of greatest importance, they were most accurate at recognizing these details under the "other" set than under the "self' set. Thus, it was easiest to recognize details when rooms were seen as representing the aesthetic values of others. Participants could not arbitrarily bond with the individual features of the rooms under the "self' set. Projection When meaning is embodied in or projected onto a work or art of literature, the opportunity arises for a special interplay of subject matter and style. One can speak about a trade-off between attention to subject matter or style. Thus, when subject matter becomes the focus of one's attention, style becomes an indirect route for the unconscious expression of emotion. Alternatively, when the execution of style is the central focus, the choice of subject matter provides a means for inadvertently revealing what is of paramount importance to the self. This trade-off is especially revealing about personal meaning in the artist's life but can also be informative about the private lives of recipients. Machotka (1 979) described aprojective function of art whereby viewers become attached to objects or themes in artworks that relate meaningfully to their needs. This projective function reflects two processes from a psychodynamic viewpoint, one relating to temporary wish fulfillment and the other to ego defense. Aesthetic preferences for aggressive or sexual subject matter may reflect a temporary symbolic replenishment of deficits. Alternatively, art can serve an ego defensive function, as when a preference for calm or highly controlled artistic style buttresses the viewer's need for inhibition or self-control. Similarly, Scheff (1979) argued that a properly constructed drama enables spectators to come into contact with repressed emotions and experience catharsis but with sufficient distance that they are not overwhelmed. However, when "underdistancing" occurs and the material is all too familiar, negative emotions are evoked and the work will be avoided. According to the analysis proposed here, one means for avoiding upsetting themes is to intellectualize and concentrate on seemingly neutral stylistic matters. A recent study on reactions to perfume advertisements (Cupchik, Leonard, & Irvine-Kopetski, 1998) illustrated how subject matter can encourage projection. In this experiment, viewers were presented with simple and complex perfume advertisements. Simple ads were ones in which the image and copy reinforced each other and were sentimentalized, whereas complex ads involved an ironic relation between the image and copy. Participants who wrote a brief narrative outline about what might be going on in the scenes depicted in the simple romantic ads rated themselves as feeling more powerful and masculine or feminine if they were to use the perfume products, and a content analysis of their outlines revealed a romantic leitmotif. Thus, participants were able to project onto the advertisements a desire to feel more powerful in fulfilling their gender roles. A defensive response would be expected when the theme of a work elicits negative emotions even without the recipient's explicit awareness. Under these circumstances, one might expect the viewer or reader to turn away from the offending theme and focus on some kind of neutral distraction, such as an intellectualized commentary on style. This kind of selective attention enables the viewer to adopt an acceptable aesthetic viewpoint, while avoiding the threatening subject matter. These dynamics were observed in an experiment (Cupchik & Wroblewski-Raya, 1998) examining responses to artworks by Hopper, Munch, and Degas depicting individuals who are alone in the scene. When participants were instructed to identify with the figure and imagine how he or she felt, they reported the paintings to be more personally meaningful and also preferred the narrative implied by the subject matter. Lonely participants (measured by the Revised UCLA Loneliness scale, Peplau & Cutrona, 1980) also judged the paintings to be personally meaningful and pleasing but preferred the style over the subject matter, indicating a defensive intellectualizing response. Clearly, when the work strikes too close to home, a defensive response ensues. The process of defensive avoidance is not restricted to recipients but can be applied equally to those who cre-

7 Thinking and Beiag ate paintings, novels, plays, and so on. It is an interesting paradox that, although artists focus on stylistic problems they encounter during the creative process, powerful emotional content can unconsciously leak into the work. Thus, selective attention to the manifest stylistic facet of an artwork enables latent emotional content to symbolically take center stage unbeknownst to the artist. Artists and writers can be so fixed in their aesthetic view of the work that they resist any acknowledgment that personal material has been embodied in it. This reveals the transformative power of the artistic endeavor, much as dream work enables repressed material to make its way into sleep-time consciousness! Transcendence Iser (1978) maintained that the act of constituting meaning by selecting appropriate interpretive contexts heightens a reader's self-awareness. This is similar to an argument made by Pomerantz and Kubovy (1 98 1) regarding awareness and stimulus processing. If changes are not occurring on the printed page but are generated internally, observers are forced in the metaperceptual mode. In this fashion they are made aware of the workings of their perceptual processes, of which they are usually unaware; processes that are normally transparent. (p. 425) The further statement by Pomerantz and Kubovy to the effect "we believe that this is the essence of the Gestalt phenomenological method" (p. 425) reveals a surprising convergence between mainstream perception and literary reception theory. A very interesting parallel emerges if we reach back to the very first section on perception and the thinking-i. Just as artists attend to the process of perception itself and the underlying sensory parameters that shape the perception of objects, readers can attend to the context of their own lives against which the meanings of literary scenes are thrown into sharp personal relief (see Bleich, 1978). Transcendence for the recipient encompasses not just an appreciation of personal themes, but an awareness that cultural biases about what constitutes good art and personal dispositions toward intellectualization can get in the way. As heightened self-awareness, it provides a basis for greater understanding of the self and one's being-in-the-world and acting-in-the-world. One concern remains, however. Can transcendence reduce artistic creativity? If the artist becomes explicitly aware of personal emotional themes embodied in a work and of the ways that style fosters the expression of those meanings, then is creativity cut short? One possible answer to this dilemma comes from the very notion of indeterminacy applied to text interpretation. The life of the artist or author is itself open-ended in that emotionally loaded themes from different stages of experience remain unresolved. The act of creation becomes a vehicle for the concrete embodiment and transformation of those themes, not to speak of the catharsis of built-up emotion that is attached to them. In the case of the artist or author, transcendence implies an openness to those emotions that gain expression through culturally meaningful avenues. Excessive psychological analysis of subject matter and style would distract from the expressive and meaning-creating process. Conclusions The thinking-i (or eye and ear) focuses on the stimulus, and the three stages, perception, cognition, and reflection, seem to follow in linear sequence. Perception uncovers the structure of physical-sensory qualities that provide the foundation for discerning style in the visual arts. Cognition uses these qualities to identify the subject matter of the work, including both physical objects and social meanings. On reflection, viewers and readers can consider style and subject matter from different perspectives, relating them to other works or to the context in which they were created or experienced. The three domains associated with the being-i (representation, unconscious dynamic processes, and transcendence) do not unfold in a linear manner. Rather, representation and unconscious dynamic processes are complementary. Viewers or readers can consciously observe that the subject matter in an art or literary work represents their own lives or those of other people. However, when unconscious processes predominate, they have spontaneous emotional reactions to the life experiences of figures and characters depicted in visual and literary works. This may lead them to identify with powerful figures, thereby feeling temporarily more powerful, or to display an unexpected and intellectualized interest in neutral matters of style, thus betraying the negative emotions that were evoked by the subject matter of the work. Transcendence occurs

8 G. C. Cupchik when recipients focus on the meaning of representations or become aware of their projective and defensive reactions to evocative works. From a therapeutic viewpoint, it can be argued that art and literature are important because they provide an avenue for the free expression of unconscious emotions. However, if artists look too carefully at the symbolic meaning of their artworks, there is a tendency for the creative process to freeze up. It is best that they reflect on the products of their creative efforts to ensure continuing originality. This discussion of the thinking4 and the being4 implies at least four basic processes. First, aesthetics requires deautomatization of the cognitive bias. In other words, viewers, in particular, must learn to overcome the everyday pragmatic tendency to object identification so as to invest attention in sensory processes and learn about the structure of artistic style. Second, aesthetics encompasses the complementary processes of matching and coherence. Matching provides a means for determining whether externalized criteria for effecting style or attaining a correct interpretation have been properly applied. Coherence is a more subjective criterion that reflects the extent to which a unifying structure of creation or appreciation has been achieved. Third, art and literary works provide a vehicle for embodying meaning in the choice of subject matter and style. This may involve the conscious and planned choice of particular subject matter and style, or the unconscious and spontaneous expression of meaning within the framework of an interplay between subject matter and style. Attention to style permits the inadvertent expression of meaning in the symbolic choice of subject matter, whereas concern for subject matter provides for the indirect expression of emotion through the very act of executing the artwork. Fourth, it is important to take into consideration the trade-off between global (and pretattentive) attention to overall structure and local (and focal) attention to specific visual or literary effects. These several processes unify the two faces of aesthetic creation and reception: the thinking-i and the being-i. References Amheim, R. (1969). Visual thinking. Berkeley: University of California Press. Amheim, R. (1969). Art and visualperception. Berkeley: University of California Press. Amheim, R. (1986). The trouble with wholes and parts. New Ideas in Psychology, 4, Avital, T., & Cupchik, G. C. (1998). Perceiving hierarchical structures in nonrepresentational paintings. Empirical Studies of the Arts, Id, Bartlett, F. C. (1995). Remembering: A study in experimental andsocia1 psychology. New York: Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1932) Berlyne. D. E. (197 1 ). Aesthetics nnd p~~chobiolo~. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Berlyne, D. E., & Ogilvie, J. (1974). Dimensions of perception of paintings. In D. E. Berlyne (Ed.), Studies in the new experimental aesthetics (pp ). Washington, DC: Hemisphere. Biedeman, I. (1987). Recognition-by-components: A theory of human image understanding. Psychological Review Bleich, D. (1978). Subjective crilicism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Boring, E. G. (1950). A history of experimental psychology. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Brooks, C. (1947). The wellwrought urn. New York: Harcourf Brace. Bruner, J. S. (1961). The act of discovery. Harvard Educational Review, 31, Bryson, N. (1983). The logic of the gaze. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Cupchik, G. C. (1974). The relationship of dimensions of the perception of paintings to stylistic dimensions derived from art history. In D. E. Berlyne (Ed.), Studies in the new experimental aesthetics (pp ). Washington, DC: Hemisphere. Cupchik, G. C. (1992). From perception to production: A multilevel analysis of the aesthetic process. In G. C. 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