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In this issue we publish four outstanding contributions on psychoanalysis and creativity. Two of them were first presented at the Freud at the Millennium conference, from which papers were also published in the previous issue of this journal. I begin with a few words about the way the conference set the tone for this issue to reevaluate aspects of the application of psychoanalysis to creativity.
Freud at the Millennium was sponsored by the International Institute of Object Relations Therapy and five co-sponsors1, and was held at Georgetown University from October 16-18, 1998, to coincide with the opening of the landmark exhibit at the Library of Congress, Freud: “Conflict and Culture,” which featured the holdings of the Library's Sigmund Freud Archives supplemented by artifacts from the Sigmund Freud Museums of London and Vienna. The conference celebrated Freud's legacy and was designed to demonstrate the scope of his impact on psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and on society and culture. We hoped it would provide a vehicle for reexamination and updating of psychoanalysis 100 years into its history, and more specifically, would examine which of Freud's own contributions have stood the test of time, and which have benefited from extensive revision during the past century.
In the exhibit and in the conference, we began to see how the cultural attack in England and America of the last two decades that would consign Freud and psychoanalysis to the historical scrap heap, could also serve as a goad, forcing us to reevaluate the assets and liabilities of our tradition. If the “psychoanalysis is dead” movement succeeded, it would relegate Freud and analysis to the status of curious anachronisms and mere historical