The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 20, 1951, No. 4: Gustav Bychowski. 'Metapsychology of Artistic Creation.'

Although the defensive character of the creative impulse is often clinically detectable, it is probable that it more often arises from less pathological sources, among which narcissistic omnipotence is preponderant. The artist wishes to create imperishable objects and to perpetuate the past in defiance of the inevitability of change and oblivion. His desire to perpetuate the past includes the desire to relieve the painful; in this respect the artist's ego resembles that of the ego in traumatic neurosis. He tends to relive his childhood by projecting both his repressed id impulses and unconscious super-ego components on to objects of his own creation. His stock of projectible objects is greatly increased by his ability to split off parts of his ego, which are maintained in incomplete repression, ready to re-emerge when called upon by the creative ego. This faculty of the creative ego, when compared with the ego of the pre-psychotic and of 'ordinary' people, presupposes (a) an unusual strength of ego and capacity for binding energy released from the unconscious, and (b) an unusual mobility of counter-cathexis and psychic barriers (including the ego-boundaries), which is responsible for the creative ego's easy access to the unconscious and for its ability to perceive external reality in terms of symbolic meaning and to express intra-psychic experiences in terms of material reality.

During the creative process libido becomes deflected in three directions; (1) towards the objects created by the artist, which absorb a major part of his narcissistic and object libido; (2) towards parts of reality which become invested with narcissistic libido; and (3) libido becomes diverted from its original instinctual aims to provide the energy for creation. This last is the process Freud called sublimation. Sublimation in the artist differs from that in other civilized persons in its scope and intensity. It may well be that in certain instances there is a re-sexualization of