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Editor's Note: The three papers printed here were first delivered at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute on February 27, 2021, at a conference dedicated to Christopher Bullock. The conference was moderated by Murray Schwartz, and introduced with the following statement:
Taking Freud's seminal paper, “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming” , as a starting point, this conference will offer reflections on psychoanalytic understandings of creative processes as they have evolved over time and as they relate to our inner and outer worlds today. Freud recognized a wishful continuity of childhood play, phantasy, daydreaming and creation in literary fiction. “Thus past present and future are strung together, as it were, on the thread of the wish that runs through them,” he wrote. And he puzzled over the writer's power to absorb our imaginations, but he also thought play was “a correction of unsatisfying reality.” “The opposite of play is not what is serious,” he wrote, “but what is real.” Since Freud, many other psychoanalytic writers have added their reflections on the nature and functions of creativity (e.g. Paula Heimann, Marion Milner, Adrian Stokes, Anton Ehrenzweig, D. W. Winnicott, Christopher Bollas, Gilbert Rose), questioning the compensatory function of art. How can we understand creative processes today? How are fantasy and creative imagination related to one another, to therapeutic processes, and to our shared outer worlds? As artists and clinicians confront “the world we live in,” how are the potential spaces of creativity promoted or inhibited by our social and political conditions?