Discussion

May's paper raises many questions. To try to discuss all of them would take more time than is allotted me in this paper. I am most interested in the question: How does the creative encounter bear upon the psychoanalytic process and the doctor-patient relationship? A truly fruitful psychotherapeutic relationship would qualify as an encounter in the sense described by Dr. May. The artist feels himself with his paints and his techniques, the musician

with his sounds, and the analyst with his patient. Therapy is the outcome of some new process emerging from the meeting between analyst and patient. The patient has an investment in preventing it, and the analyst an interest in fostering it. Here we have the optimal condition for encounter, that is, to engage in conflict. The patient wants to create more of what he has always been, the analyst wants him to become that which he has never been. In its most fructifying sense, analysis is such an engagement. The creative outcome can be expressed in terms of a deepening and clearing of awareness and, therefore, of being, on the part of both participants.

The artist's grasp of the tree becomes the tree which then flows out onto the canvas. What is the parallel with the analytic process? Is it to grasp our patient's meaning and then to convey our grasp of it to him? Our patient brings his meanings to us and we struggle to grasp them, for by so doing, we create new meanings. Our patient must presently struggle with these new meanings, just as we struggled but a moment before in order to create meaning for ourselves. The patient and the therapist are experiencing the process of creating, for there now are outcomes which never existed befor