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IN The Beginning of this century, there was a well-liked comedy in which one of the characters is interrogated by a policeman. When he is asked what he is doing, he replies: “I am an artist.” “What kind of an artist are you?” asks the policeman, and the man says: “I am an umbrella maker,” whereupon the policeman wants to know: “Is that an art?” The man replies: “Can you make an umbrella?”
We join the skeptic policeman and submit the question: Has that man the right to call himself an artist? My answer would be that he can call himself an artist, but not a creative artist.
My presentation, stimulated by Karen Horney's1 study on creativity in her last book Neurosis and Human Growth, will have a clinical approach. It will concern itself with the interrelationship between artistic productivity and the individual's movement in the direction towards self-realization.
I am limiting myself to those cases where there is no doubt about genuine artistic creativity. I have in mind the artist who is able to create something from nothing: the painter with an empty canvas; the writer with a blank pad of paper; the sculptor with an unformed slab of marble or clay or with a raw piece of wood or metal; the musician with his blank music paper. I am thereby including all those artists who, in their creative work, call exclusively upon their inner resources. Artists who are re-creating, even if their performance may be formidable, cannot be included in this study because their approach towards their work requires a different prerequisite. A separate investigation would have to clarify the psychological problems of this latter category, it would have to be devoted above all to the study of all the many kinds of performing artists and to such artists who produce their work along lines which have been outlined for them by others.
The creative artists to whom my study is devoted come into treatment for all kinds of reasons such as marital difficulties or psychosomatic problems, but very seldom