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A reblog from "The Joe's Journal Blog".

"The ideas of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung have also influenced many genre theorists. Like Taine, both psychiatrists believed that art is a reflection of underlying structures of meaning, that it satisfies certain subconscious needs in both the artists and his audience. For Freud, art was a form of daydreaming and wish fulfillment, vicariously resolving urgent impluses and desires that can't be satisifed in reality. Pornographic films are perhaps the most obvious example of how anxieties can be assuaged in this indirect manner, and in fact Freud believed that most neuroses were sexually based. He thought that art was a by-product of neurosis, though essentially a socially beneficial one. Like neurosis, art is characterized by a repetition compulsion, the need to go over the same stories and rituals in order to reenact and temporarly resolve certain psychic conflicts, which are rooted in childhood traumas."
-Schulsteiss