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In my experience as an art teacher I found that creative sterility may be the result of ego rigidity impeding the free flow of mental imagery. The student cannot relax his all too deliberate control of the medium, nor can he tolerate any failure in realizing preconceived ideas; he is thus unable to absorb new stimuli arising from his work in progress. It follows that the art teacher's task is to make the student's personality more flexible and so to develop his latent creativity. What precisely these creative ego changes are, is difficult to say. The analyst is more concerned with resolving the id conflicts which stand in the foreground and call for all his skill; he will be inclined to let the sublimations that follow on the resolution of id conflict, look after themselves; he may consider creative development an educational rather than an analytical task. The art teacher who is in an better position to observe creative ego changes, lacks the conceptual tools to describe them for us. Yet the artist's never ceasing search for creative stimulation reveals itself every bit as dramatic and painful as is the psychoanalytical exploration of id conflict and ego defences.
It is our good fortune that Marion Milner, who finally became a psychoanalyst herself, continued her life-long search for creativeness without interruption by her psychoanalytical training. She felt that her creative search as an artist was something apart from her growing understanding of her id phantasies. For this reason perhaps she never bothered to reformulate more technically her creative experiences which