A Shift of Focus

During the course of psychotherapy individuals often produce symbols of creativity, yet fail to recognize or value what they have produced. Figures in dreams and fantasy which mirror the patient's implicit awareness of his or her own creative capacity are often in danger of being put out of play by the subject's misunderstanding, scorn, or neglect. Symbols of psychic generativity are frequently drawn into or masked by chronic pathology.

In the clinical account below, the symbols of creativity produced by a patient, Clara, were obvious to the therapist but confusing to her. She tended to disown them or reduce them to signs of pathology. Only through severe therapeutic struggle was she able to gradually build the imaginative courage to discern and stand behind her generative acts and the symbolic objects which reflected them.

When Clara was six years old her mother died; Clara felt guilty for her death. Clara's mother had held back her own creative urges in deference to her husband's artistic work. Clara herself had not been able to get started in life. She was severely blocked in social and vocational functioning and plagued by suicidal urges from very early on.

During a phase in which Clara was working on her feelings about her mother's death, and especially her identification with her dead mother, she dreamed that John Donne was going to die. Two figures were in the room with him – one seemed to be her mother. Clara blindly felt that she herself was John Donne, following her mother's fate – the death of both personal and creative selfhood. She wished to fight against this fate but felt helpless. The dream threw her deeper into despair. She used it to reinforce the status quo, tightening the noose.

I questioned her about John Donne, and she revealed that she admired his poetry. However, the idea that he felt he would die did not seem to click with her at this time. She insisted that his appearance simply meant the