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Dr. Slochower, Colleagues, Friends:
I would like to start this symposium by speaking of a core process from which I envision we will be radiating out to study various specific instances and applications during the presentations of the next few days. Within this elemental core I will combine two main words which comprise the topic of this symposium: psychoanalysis and creativity. This will therefore include or fuse the nuclear thinking of psychoanalysis, through which we understand human functioning and behavior, and a core or model or basic theory of the source and wellsprings of the process of creativity, thus aiming at an understanding of the creative process as an example of applied psychoanalysis. Since I will limit myself to definitional and model concepts, my contribution will be parsimonious. I hope, however, that it will contain the “necessary and sufficient” explanations to make clear the case I wish to present.
Psychoanalysis started with an understanding of the symptom. A microanalysis of the genesis of symptom formation led to, or was accompanied by, a discovery of the existence of unconscious mental life. Simultaneously, from another path, Freud also began to study and understand the dream (10). Strangely—at least at first it was strange; later it became the common knowledge of mankind—the dream, which, incidentally, is a very creative product open to and shared by all, led to the same mental substrate, the unconscious.
Freud came repeatedly and from many different directions to this same source of psychological origins, for example, from