You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Psychoanalysis has been fascinated with questions surrounding creativity. In his papers on creativity and on specific artists, Freud set in motion a discourse that has been taken up by many writers ever since. Traditionally, psychoanalytic theories tried to include exceptional capacities and persons within the same conceptual frameworks established to explain routine (i.e., normal and deviant) behaviors—unconscious and (pre)conscious processes; the pleasure and reality principles; primary and secondary processes; defenses such as repression, sublimation, and dissociation. If these concepts and processes are able to distinguish one pathology from another (e.g., neurosis from psychosis, hysterias from obsessive disorders), then why not apply them to explain what distinguishes the creative artist from the rest of us?
Consequently there is a considerable psychoanalytic literature on the relation of creativity to psychodynamic concepts that asks questions such as the following. Is the artist able to dip into deeper (i.e., unconscious) levels of the psyche, utilize more primary processes dominated by the pleasure principle, but still not lose a sense of reality to which he or she returns, with artistic product in hand? Do we respond to those creative products because they provide us a safe connection to an underground (i.e., unconscious, primary process) part of ourselves? Still another focus in the psychoanalytic literature has been to question the connection between the artist's psychopathology and his or her ability to produce creative works: How interdependent are creativity and personality structure? If one “cures” the pathology, will creative capacity disappear or be liberated? Does the artist's fluid motility between fantasy and reality make him or her more (or less) prone to mental illness?
In recent years psychoanalytic theories have increasingly emphasized the functions of other persons—intrapsychically, interpersonally, or intersubjectively—in the development of