Jackson Pollock is known as an artist who developed the style of action painting by using automatism
based on Freud’s psychoanalysis. Pollock has suffered from alcoholism and schizophrenia during his life
time. After his sudden death in a traffic accident, many critics reexamined Pollock’s work through a
psychoanalytical lens. Critics found many similarities between Pollock’s work and children’s scribble. Based
on this, they concluded that the artists’ works were born through regressions. This paper aims to identify
similarities and differences between Pollock’s dripping artwork and scribbles. First, the paper traces the birth
of the dripping technique by relating it to Pollock’s life. Then, it examined the theories of Freud and Jung,
which greatly influenced Pollock’s artwork. This paper then, introduces the inferiority complex theory of
Adler in order to introduce a possible new interpretation and compare Pollock’s dripping work with
scribbles in terms of formative art. This paper also shows that Pollock’s automatism was downgraded in his
dripping artwork, while the screen structure was closely related to traditional European academism based
on cubism. After all, Pollock’s artwork was externalized through unconscious impulse, which was similar to
scribbling; on the other hand, his formative style on the screen is quite distinctive from that of scribbling.