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Consideration of the investigation of a creative individual in terms of the products of his creativity leads to many areas of investigation, not the least of which is the process itself. Picasso asks (15) “How can one penetrate my dreams, my instincts, my desires, my thoughts, which have themselves taken a long time to elaborate themselves and bring themselves to the light, above all seize in them what I brought out, perhaps, against my will?” Is it vàlid to make inferences regarding the psychological structure of the artist from his work? This is the subject matter of psychopathography, an unfortunate term which connotes psychopathology, which may or may not be present in the productions.
I should like to offer an alternative, that of the creativity of the artistic individual being integral to his life. Art, then, for the artist, as a function of his existence must include the healthy parts of his personality as well as the possibly psychopathological. This view is perhaps more strongly expressed by Trilling (14) when he states that even though the artist be neurotic, the content of his art need not be, that “(if the inner life is neurotic) it does not then follow as the inevitable next step that his ability to express these fantasies and to impress us with them is neurotic, for that ability is what we mean by his genius…. the reference to the artist's neurosis tells us something about the material on which the artist exercises his powers, and even something about his reasons for bringing his powers into play ….” In speaking of the poet, for which may be substituted the artist, he adds, “For, granting that the poet is uniquely neurotic, what is surely not neurotic, what indeed suggests nothing but health, is his power of using his neuroticism. He