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(1989). Journal of American Academy of Psychoanalysis, 17:253-269

Psychoanalysis, Hemispheric Specialization, and Creativity

Klaus D. Hoppe, M.D., Ph.D.

After discussing modern psychoanalytic theories concerning creativity, the author introduces the working hypothesis of creativity as a transcallosal symbollexia (the transferential process of verbalizing presentational symbols) and as hemispheric bisociation (the synthesis of two different cerebral planes). This hypothetical concept is based on clinical observations of commissurotomy (“split-brain”) patients and an experimental study in which commissurotomy patients and normal control subjects were shown a three-minute videotaped film symbolically depicting the death of a baby and of a boy conveyed by the combination of music and visual images without spoken words. The surgical disconnection of transcallosal interhemispheric exchange and, therefore, of communication between the two hemispheres leaves commissurotomy patients with an outstanding lack of creativity that could be demonstrated on a lexical, sentential, global, affective, and EEG-spectra level. In contrast with

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