The Phantasmatic in romantic subjective experience and aesthetics

Sammanfattning: The goal of this research is to asses the reach and characteristics of the Phantasmatic as a proposed concept, useful to understand fundamental aspects of the romantic subjective experience in artists, aesthetes and writers. This experiential level has been exemplified in artists that had been living or intermittently residing in Dresden during the first half of 19th century. Caspar David Friedrich was linked to Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert and the painter Georg Friedrich Kersting. Inquiries have been directed towards art works and written sources. The Phantasmatic embraces the interplay between mind, outer reality and perception and considers how absence, excisions and distances, as well as abstractions and fallacies occur. Four main conceptual coordinates define the reach of the Phantasmatic. Two of them are related to factual experiential contexts and the individual psychological dimension. The role of imagination and the creative process in the individual’s psyche will also be considered as interrelated to the artist’s perception of factual surroundings. An intertextual analysis links the art works and written sources of the period. The analysis has been directed towards romantic iconographic motives and literary pieces such as Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Faust and Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann’s tale Die Bergwerke zu Falun. The relation between the uncanny and the sublime experience is connected to issues of absence and the romantic obsession with metaphysical realms. The profound relationship between the personality’s inward turn, the enhanced role of imagination, as well as the creative process has also been proposed. This introspective turn implies a Phantasmatic experience as outcome, a reduction of sensory perception and the individual’s estrangements from his surroundings. The Phantasmatic can then define the subjective experience of romantic artistic creation. This investigation shows the main relevance of the relation between C. D. Friedrich and G. H. von Schubert. It has provided the possibility to discover a shared teleology and ‘Phantasmatic’ visions about the ‘spirit’s’ role in natural processes. It has also provided evidence of an, until now, unseen iconography in Friedrich’s oeuvre, which have been called ‘dream images’. This imagery gives evidence of reached states of absolute inwardness and a symbolic lecture of dreams as providing messages from a hidden divinity under phenomena’s sensible surface.