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In my presentation today, I will look at a theme that runs through both creative writing and the analytic process: the need for a steady frame of some kind in order for creative work to come forth. What does this frame consist of? How do we understand it? How can we establish it, or restore it if it is weak or lost? How do frame and process relate to one another? I will look first at a literary depiction of this relation, then at the relation that emerges in Freud's first two published papers on the creative process, “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming” (1908)—the paper that was the springboard for this conference—and “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's Gradiva” (1907)—a longer paper published a year earlier. Finally, I will look at the clinical process and the way we understand the frame within it and present some clinical material where the issue of the frame is particularly important.
Describing the challenges that women encounter as writers of fiction in A Room of One's Own (1929), Virginia Woolf presents first an image of the setting that is necessary for the woman writer to work creatively and then, a few pages later, an image of the creative thought that emerges. The first image—that of the necessary setting—is more familiar to us as it has given its name to Woolf's book; this is the image of the “room of one's own.” In order to write, Woolf tells us, the woman author needs a private, protected space for her thoughts to develop. This space, significantly, is both concrete and metaphorical. The woman must have money and a protected realm free of impingements in order to do her work. In addition, she requires a felt place within the world of ideas, within tradition and a contemporary culture of expectation, where she can locate her own work.