Discussion

I am in entire agreement with Dr. Wenkart's central position that personality is not substance but creative act, that “all creative activity consists of relation,” that “generic and hereditary potentials are only material for creative activity,” and that “all psychotherapies … are geared to develop and restore this creative activity.” Her quotation from Fromm that “destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life” brought to my mind Rilke's wonderful eighth Letter to a young Poet which concerns both sickness and creativity alike:

“Dangerous and bad are only those sorrows that one carries among people in order to drown them; like sicknesses that are superficially and foolishly handled, they simply withdraw and after a little pause break out again the more fearfully; and accumulate within one and are life, are unlived, spurned, lost life, of which one may die.1

“Self-realization,” says Dr. Wenkart, “becomes real in the sharing of experiences.” Self-realization and sharing are indeed corollaries, but which is the goal and which the by-product? Does sharing experiences mean sharing in a common reality, or does it mean that each only secondarily imparts to the other something of that subjectivity which is his primary touchstone of reality? This raises the problem of the relation to creativity of such terms as “self-realization,” “self-expression,” and “experience.” I am very glad that Dr. Wenkart has recognized the integral relation between creativity and relatedness for, to my mind, the Bergsonian notion of creativity as the expression in the outer world of an intuition that is already present in the inner self meets with insuperable difficulties. The creative man does not express his self; rathers, he creates new form and new reality through a response to what is not his self. The greatness of a work of art lies neither in its subjective intensity nor its objective universality but in the potential form and meaning which again and again become actual in the meeting between