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If the soul within is more real than the outer world, as you, philosopher, pretend, why then is it the outer world that is offered to me as the model of reality?
—Fernando Pessoa, Poèmes Païens: d'Alberto Caeiro et de
Ricardo Reis.
For many years I have endeavored to capture a glimpse of the mysterious origins of creative expression, through exploring the impact that certain creative works have on me, as well as by studying the creative process and its inhibitions in my analysands. In whatever form of expression—writing, painting, sculpture, music, the performing arts, scientific and intellectual creativity, or innovation in the world of politics, business, and industrial invention—there is an enigmatic dimension to creative activity that evades our comprehension.
Freud (1908) himself searched constantly for the secrets of creativity. In his essay "Creative Writers and Day Dreaming," he asks: "From what sources does that strange being [the creative writer] draw his material?" He replies that a creative writer behaves like a child at play in that he creates a world of his own. He states that the child "creates a world of phantasy which he takes very seriously [and] invests with large amounts of emotion." Freud goes on to say, "as people grow up they cease to play [and furthermore the adult] knows that he is expected not to go on playing or phantasying any longer." Later in the same essay he proclaims, "we may lay it down that a happy person never phantasies, only an unsatisfied one." This somewhat critical attitude to fantasy life in adulthood appears throughout Freud's writings, as though fantasies, and even the enjoyment of contemplating creative works, were preoccupations about which he felt guilty.
The analytic world had to wait for Winnicott to convey a more optimistic view of fantasy, play, and creativity. Winnicott's (1951) designation of