When the various artistic categories and styles acquire their essence in the psychological needs of the audience, then the source of all the means of artistic expression of these categories and styles will become clearer. Specific artistic expression is the second objectified existence of the audience's aesthetic and psychological needs.

This has been clearly seen by many artists throughout history.

Schiller once pointed out that the basic form of all art is determined by the needs of the recipient. Therefore, the form of tragedy is the best form to lead the audience to sympathy and emotion. This puts a specific issue of art form on the basis of the psychology of the audience.

Schiller

Horace of ancient Rome once said that art should have charm in addition to its internal structure. This separates the form of the work from the effect of the work. In Schiller's view, the structure should be determined by the need for "charm", not by adding some infectious pigment after the structure has been established.

The same is true for other elements of the play, all of which are directly related to the psychology of the audience.

For example, considering the aesthetic and psychological characteristics of the audience when appreciating unfamiliar things, playwrights generally need to adopt a compact and clear structure with a beginning and an end when writing scripts with ancient themes, because in this case, it is the premise for the audience to be interested in understanding it quickly; On the contrary, taking into account the aesthetic and psychological characteristics of the audience when appreciating familiar things, playwrights may wish to adopt the structure of scattered and miscellaneous and open exhibitions when writing plays with full realism. Because in this case, retelling everything that the audience is familiar with too clearly is the most likely to produce boredom, while the deliberate looseness and abbreviation can mobilize the audience's personal associations, fill the blank space in the play, and produce aesthetic pleasure.

For another example, in addition to Schiller's statement that the form of tragedy comes from the audience's psychological need to sympathize with others and move themselves, even each tragic expression directly corresponds to the audience's psychological basis. The German aesthete Ripes once revealed the law of "psychological blockage" in the expression of tragedy, which is very insightful. He said:

Disasters reinforce a sense of value, according to a universal law. I usually call it the law of "psychological blockage": a psychological change, a series of appearances, in its natural development, if it is contained, obstructed, and isolated, then the mental movement is blocked, that is, stagnant, and it increases its degree in the place where the containment, obstacle, and partition occurs.

In fact, as we all know, as early as ancient Greece, there were philosophers who pointed out that some tragic expressions correspond to the needs of the audience for "psychological purification" and "psychological abrupt transformation".

It can be seen that almost all artistic expressions can be found in aesthetic psychology. It is a great blindness to talk about various laws of art without aesthetic psychological reasons.

If the formulation of the laws of art has been the main mission of many art theories throughout history, then aesthetic psychology requires that such laws be regained empirically. It is already very dangerous to design beauty without regard to aesthetics, and it is of course even more dangerous to abstract this design into a law.

In the past 200 years, people have had many painful reflections on this issue, and the conclusion of the reflection is to return to the basics. Should we trust aesthetic psychology or the laws of art? Everyone gradually understood.

Alexandre Dumas

In the mid-70s of the 19th century, when Alexandre Dumas's "The Bastard" was re-staged at the Comédie Française, a critic carefully analysed every part of the play and concluded that the playwriting technique had reached the point of exquisiteness and sophistication. These rules summarized by him can be effective in any play. Zola also went to see the play, and in his famous essay "Naturalism and the Dramatic Stage" he quoted the critic as saying nothing, but simply stating that "the perception is rather cold. "If we are more convinced of Zola's perception, we can conclude that the sad thing about theories of technique detached from aesthetic sensibilities is that they may also be perfectly suited to a very unsightly play.

George bernard shaw

Zola believed in his own aesthetic sensibility in the theater, while the critic believed only in certain laws of technique, and let the laws clog up his aesthetic sensibilities to be numb and singular. George Bernard Shaw, a master of humor, mocked such people and said, "They are like those farmers who are used to smelling garlic, and once you give them food that doesn't smell of garlic, they insist that it doesn't taste at all, that it's not food at all." ”

Beginning in 1867, the Parisian daily newspaper Die Zeit published a weekly review by the same reporter with uninterrupted perseverance. Over time, this journalist became the most important authority in the French theater industry at that time, and he was Sasay. There are many young people who always think that Sasai writes so many drama reviews according to a few "general rules of drama", so they carefully search for and summarize in his drama reviews, and write scripts based on the results of the induction. Sassay often receives letters: "I have read tirelessly your supplement which sets out the general rules of drama, and if you read my manuscript with a pleasant face, you will see that I have sought to conform to the insightful rules which you have laid down. "Actually, what general rules of drama did Sasai make? He then published an article clarifying and telling people that the aesthete is not a theologian, but a chemist.

Theologians preach with a priori laws in their hands, and chemists immerse themselves in detailed analysis. In the field of art, "theologians" frame various artistic phenomena in terms of several general principles, while "chemists" concretely analyze specific aesthetic and psychological activities.

These examples show that many high-level artists, although they may not have entered the systematic study of audience psychology, have long recognized the importance of this issue.

Audience psychology is the study of the procedures and rules of the audience's mental activities in a state of acceptance. In creation, it reveals the "underlying principles" of various artistic means.

The proposition of the "latent principle" was put forward by Sasai.

The American scholar Brenda Matthews once described Sasay's views in this regard:

Royal Concertgebouw, London

Sasai declared that he had no intention of formulating any rules, promulgating any guidelines, or inventing any rules or proposing any rules. What he intends to do is to find out the "underlying principles" of theatrical creation, and to try unbiased to show the true basis of the drama. He found that the real basis for this lies in the fact that the word "acting" includes the opinion of the audience, and we cannot conceive of a play without an audience. Performances, sets, costumes, staging, lighting, all these things can be done without, but the audience is indispensable.

No matter what kind of work it is, it is created to be seen by many people who gather into an audience, and this is its essence, and this is a necessary condition for its existence.

The audience is a necessary, indispensable condition. The theatre art must adapt its means to this condition. For example, since it is almost impossible to attract the same audience in succession, and because the audience cannot sit for hours and keep them interested, the playwright must devise a plot that condenses his story, and only deals with the most interesting elements of it, and cuts out the insignificant details. And because of the diversity of the audience, the artist must deal with themes that are contagious by human nature, and avoid subjects that have limited appeal.

Therefore, the study of the psychology of the audience is also the study of the underlying principles of artistic creation.