In approaching contemporary art it is useless to try to determine to what extent it conforms or not to a previously conceived notion of art acquired from past centuries. It is more advisable instead to understand what idea, perhaps even an original one, this art imposes on us. In other words, when faced with a new experience, we should draw from it the original “problematic,” that is, formulate appropriate ideas to explain it. If we limit ourselves to the first years of the twentieth century, we can observe both in its content and style one particular characteristic: the importance of play. Artists have sought in related activities, such as dance or music, an image analogous to their own. They have sometimes looked for it in activities like those that interested Vermeer: The Weigher of Pearls or Lady with a Spinet (in Buckingham Palace), or in this inscription of the artist in one of his paintings relating to music: Musica laetitiae comes, medicina dolorum, which we are tempted to take as a motto and to apply to the activity of the painter himself. The same impression is given by some of the paintings of Watteau, the Musician or the Indifferent, in which we feel that the painter wanted to say something about himself. Through this catalogue of images of music or dance the artist seems to have acquired with particular pleasure an awareness of the possibility of his own art. These somewhat remote images are the ancestors of a family of buffoons, harlequins and clowns, which multiply to an extraordinary extent at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Is our title as paradoxical and unrealistic as it sounds? More than a little argument and persuasion would no doubt be necessary to convince anyone that a world wracked by economic conflict and distress, by the aftermath of war and by war itself was on the verge of any kind of Golden Age. But it is not Utopia that is in the making, nor, whatever it is, will it be born suddenly. What we are aware of in the significant changes of direction in human affairs is not the infant's first wail but the first shocking deed of what is already a youth, who strides to the center of the stage and will not thereafter be silenced. The Renaissance is a classic example. We do not know the ultimate origins of that change which is already mature in Sir Francis Bacon's Novum Organum. In hindsight it reads like something already far advanced and in fact like a protocol of conspiracy by scientists to make over the world in a new image, a world in which the pursuit of knowledge will be justified by its being a pursuit of power. To achieve this “I have submitted my mind to things,” says Bacon.

Competitive games form a distinct category of games. They are in contrast first of all to the sensory-motoric games of small children, who play with a foot, utter inarticulate sounds or throw things on the floor for the simple pleasure of acting upon the surrounding world, games of make-believe or acting out a fictitious situation, and emotional games, the best known of which are those whose object is to make you dizzy or lose balance, and sexual games.

Philosophers who have studied games to determine their nature have evidently established two hypotheses: on the one hand, that all games can be studied collectively, as though the essence of the game were common to all, and on the other hand, that the answer to the problem lies in the subject, or who plays, and not in the game itself considered as an object. The question then is to determine the psychological, biological or social reasons that induce men or animals to play, the inclinations that are involved, but not the external structures to which games must conform in order to please or to be adopted.

Mime expresses a condition suffered by all men: the physical condition. Since here is the seat of all consciousness and the implicit support of the mind's most delicate constructions, mime is the original and universal language. Learning to talk is mimicry at the beginning, and the small child repeats the words before he has understood their meaning. The adult never stops resorting to it; sympathy, love are born and avowed in a mimetic exchange; and relaxation results from the freedom of movement which most games entail. Mime is also a means of social communication; it gives birth to pity, which is awakened by physical sympathy. Pity in turn is the most binding sentiment of all : Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and anthropology consider it fundamental to the condition of society.

The day Niepce successfully achieved a “view-point” for the first time, it was possible for man to believe that a century-old dream was being fulfilled: the dream of obtaining a reproduction of reality that would be absolutely faithful and could be preserved. The people of the time, surprised to see that in a daguerreotype, the first widely diffused form of photography, they could “count the tiles on a roof,” somewhat naively believed that they had succeeded in catching hold of reality. Confronted with this new picture, which was of a still unknown kind and must understandably have been illusive at first glance, they were carried away by a childish enthusiasm and hence did not realize that what they had before their eyes was only a simulacrum.

For many people in the United States the designation of the first part of the twentieth century as the Age of Analysis does not seem strange or even overstated. They know immediately that the phrase refers to psychoanalysis and not spectrum analysis or content analysis or market analysis. Psychoanalysis as a therapy, as a way of looking at the world, undeniably caught on in this country and in this hemisphere to a far greater extent than it has anywhere else in the world. Yet today many signs indicate that its influence has leveled off and perhaps even declined, while in Europe and Japan the boom may be just getting under way. This current disparity between the Old World and the New provides fresh impetus for speculation about the forces that implemented the acceptance of psychoanalysis in this country and for illustration of how this acceptance became in part a silly infatuation. Some of these factors should be outlined both from the point of view of phychoanalysis as a cultural phenomenon and from the point of view of psychoanalysis as potentially the most inclusive general psychological theory. To spell out some of the conditions that did and do obtain in the United States in regard to psychoanalysis may supply a baseline from which to study the similarities and differences in the growth, in other countries, of psychoanalysis as an institution and as a system of thought, as well as a part of medicine along with its barely legitimate offspring, dynamic psychiatry. This vast task can be undertaken here only in the broadest possible terms. Hence historical, sociological, and psychological generalizations will be offered without the necessary noting of ever-present exceptions and disagreements.

I

Unilateralism is a big word. Like Moliere's comment on prose, it is something we have been using all of our lives without knowing its exact nature. Perhaps this is because unilateralism is a notion which we have measured in terms of degree rather than kind. The rub seems to be in the word “degree.” Thus, to understand the significance of “unilateral initiatives,” and perhaps to appreciate the complexities in working out an intelligent strategy for winning international peace, it might be worthwhile to explain the varied aspects that attach to a concept of unilateralism.

Until a few decades ago the study of the peoples and civilizations of the Orient did not appear to require any apology, since it was considered one of the most uncontroversial and innocuous branches of the science. The orientalist was, and still is in some of the less up-to-date sectors of European communis opinio, a scholar who chooses as the object of his research one of the most remote fields of knowledge, far removed in space or time, or both, barred from access by incomprehensible languages and writings, whose religions, philosophies and literatures are quite apart from the main stream of classical and Western tradition. This was the conception of orientalism among the Bouvards or Pecuchets of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In reality, the interest in oriental civilizations itself constitutes a brilliant chapter in contemporary European culture and civilization, developing from this modest level of estimation to a more important historical concern. This is illustrated in certain respects, if not yet in its entirety, by works that are at the same time a history of ideas and a balance sheet of the results achieved. Orientalism has been respectively an aspect of Enlightenment and of Romanticism, of Positivism and of European historicism, and to sketch its complete history would be tantamount to going through the entire evolution of Western culture. It was precisely in this latter field that it had projected itself outside of itself, toward something other than itself, and by this very act (this should appear obvious and should not be the object of polemics or raised eyebrows) establishing its own view of civilization and history, politics and religion, society and poetry.