Self-Creating in Therapy

The Notion of Psychoanalysis as creative process clearly is a reaction to some earlier conceptions: psychoanalysis viewed merely as a process brought about by a special technique, the adequacy of which is guaranteed through correct training; psychoanalysis running according to definable laws which make the outcome entirely predictable, at least in principle. The concept of creativity reflects the continuous process of revision of our view of man, a process that seems to belong to the very nature of the psychoanalytic encounter with illness. In the introduction to the Symposium on “Alienation and the Search for Identity” Dr. Weiss1 outlines different interpretations of man's loss of authentic creativity, his self-alienation: those associated with names like Freud, Binswanger, Jung, Fromm, Erikson and Horney. Something creative has happened here; out of the seed sown through Freud a multidimensional growth has come into being. The way has been opened for meeting new challenges such as, for example, the psychotherapy of schizophrenics, of persons with tuberculosis, of the hypertensive, or even of politicians. These new worlds of experience have also generated new symbol-formations, while creative words, on the other hand, have been at the origin of the worlds to be opened up for experience. In this situation we frequently realize we have underestimated the implicit insights in, for instance, Freud's formulations, which so many times reflect a rather mechanistic view of man. I am thinking here, inter alia, about Freud's writings on the death instinct;2 these seem to contain a sharp awareness of the radicality of man's alienation—a view that differs from Freud's formulations of alienation as an unavoidable result of civilization and its discontents.3 How much in common there is between Freud's concept of the death instinct and Luther's view of man as a slave of sin has been recently demonstrated by a Finnish theologian, Aarne Siirala, in his book The Voice of Illness.4 I