Introduction

In the name of the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis, I welcome you to this year's Symposium: “Psychoanalysis as Creative Process.”

Our last symposium, “Alienation and the Search for Identity,” which evoked a strong response far beyond the limits of professional psychiatry and psychoanalysis, resulted in the following insight: to help the patient of today who is deeply alienated from himself and from others, psychoanalysis has to outgrow alienated concepts of man as well as alienating techniques in therapy.

Psychoanalysis cannot be a creative process as long as it reduces man to an instinct-driven creature, disregarding man's inherent striving for self-realization—as long as it reduces the unconscious to a realm inhabited by libido aggression and destruction, disregarding its creative power evident in art, science and in human growth itself—as long as it reduces the dream to an expression of infantile wish fulfillment, disregarding it as a highly constructive source of creative insight—as long as it reduces the analytic relationship to a mere repetition of the neurotic past (as transference and counter-transference), disregarding the creative power of the new and unique encounter between patient and therapist—and as long as it reduces therapy to a mere “analytical” debunking procedure, disregarding the creative aspect in which a new, truer, larger self is born.

Karen Horney, whom we lost prematurely ten years ago, said in Neurosis and Human Growth: “Man's creative power can stem only from his desire for self-realization and the energies in its service. To the extent to which these energies are shifted from the simple and direct experiencing of life to having to prove—that he is something he is not—his creative abilities are bound to be impaired.” Conversely, man “may retrieve his productivity when in analysis his desire for self-realization is liberated.”