Defensive style and esthtic distortion.

The present study aims to explore some of the affective factors that impel human beings to transform. There are, of course, perceptual and cognitive factors that seemingly not only channel the direction in which transformation might take place but also provide the original motives for transforming, however, this study explores only factors which might broadly be labeled affective. Certain estheticians and psychoanalytical theorists have proposed that works of visual art satisfy both by their form, and by their subject matter. These two satisfactions moreover are related. Of the theorists who stress that satisfaction from viewing esthetic objects is at least of this twofold nature, psychoanalysts are the more likely to emphasize the importance of subject matter, and moreover, to see "form" as being at the service of the more primary satisfactions deriving from content. When the subject matter might in real life arouse the censorship of the superego, one of the functions of transformation is to make the subject acceptable.