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THE SUBJECT of creativity is fraught with paradox. On the one hand, most educated persons give to the artist and his productions as high a value as is accorded to any outstanding person in our culture. On the other, the influence of psychoanalysis has been such that creative activity is regarded as a rather poor substitute for more direct instinctual satisfactions, and the artist as a neurotic whose "real actions are blocked." In an interesting paper called "Freud and the Poet's Eye" 15 Norman Holland points out Freud's own ambivalence towards writers and artists. Freud wrote:
Creative writers are valuable allies and their evidence is to be prized highly, for they are apt to know a whole host of things between heaven and earth of which our philosophy has not yet let us dream. 10
Yet, although Freud admired and envied the insight of the artist, which often arrived by intuition at the same conclusions which he, Freud, could only attain by laborious work, he says in various passages that art and literature are like a child's game, a glorified daydream, a mild narcotic, an illusion offering an escape from reality into fantasy. In the Introductory Lectures, Freud refers to the artist as one
who is urged on by instinctual needs which are too clamorous; he longs to attain to honour, power, riches, fame and the love of women; but he lacks the means of achieving these gratifications. So, like any other with an unsatisfied longing, he turns away from reality and transfers all his interest, and all his libido too, on to the creation of his wishes in the life of phantasy, from which the way might readily lead to neurosis. 11