Paleolithic Art

Ralph Frenken, *1965, graduate psychologist and educational scientist, doctorate (Dr. phil.) 1998, licensed as a child- and adolescent-psychotherapist in private practice. Scientific author with publications on childhood history, mysticism, close swaddling of babies, psychology of art and paleolithic images. Book on children‘s drawings in print. 2020–2022 University assistant at the University of Innsbruck.

Preface Due to several factors, the approach demonstrated by Ralph Frenken seems to me to be a very promising and important step forward in the study of rock art. Even the founding fathers of psychology, for example, W. Wundt and S. Freud, paid some attention to ancient art, but the “psychological” approach to the study of this phenomenon did not find understanding, support and development among archaeologists. Isolated works in this direction appeared in the first half of the 20th century (G.-H. Luquet), but they did not lead to any significant results in the scientific community. Not entirely successful attempts in this direction by archaeologists, which were undertaken in the second half of the 20th century, marked primarily by the work of D. Lewis-Williams in South Africa and J. Sher in Russia, on the one hand, were provoked by a dead end, to which the study of rock art led in a way that was too strict from the point of view of philosophy and research methodology, due to the dominance of the archaeological concept of art heritage. And, as a result, the work of these two researchers marked a desire to seek new approaches to the study of rock art. Since then, no serious research has been carried out in this direction. In this sense, Frenken’s approach, on the one hand, seems very fresh, since it gives new perspectives in understanding rock art, and, on the other, from a methodological point of view, it is based on the centuries-old psychodynamic tradition of human studies. What makes Frenken’s work particularly valuable is that, unlike others, he does not turn to psychology from an archaeological worldview and style of thinking. Freneken is a practicing psychotherapist for children and youths, and his approach to the study of rock art has completely different connotations, a different focus and a different motivation for research than anything that has been attempted before him in the last hundred years. A lexey Solodeynikov (Classical philologist, acheologist, psychologist)