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Consideration is given to the biographies of St Francis of Assisi, Thomas Chatterton, Gogol, Henry M. Stanley, and Rilke, and the dynamics of the Family Romance which is a common feature. The artist's greater inborn sensory responsiveness and capacity to organize sensory impressions lends an intensity to his personal relationships and an ability for empathy which often leads him to a special relation with aspects of the inanimate world which he animates (the field of collective alternates. Psa. Study Child, 12). Precocious development with diminished boundaries between libidinal phases and premature confrontration with an intense oedipal phase may drive the artist to ease the conflictful nature of his object—relatedness by displacement into the field of collective alternates. Rivalry for cathexis between intensely felt bodily states and object experiences may lead to hypochondria and disturbance of emotional relations.
The marked ambivalence of the latter with the tendency to the splitting of images arises from an unusual degree of fusion of phase pressures and their mutual interaction and reinforcement. The prolongation of this state into latency may result in a feeling of difference from his group for which the family romance provides a rationalization and reinforcement.
In some cases the extreme frustration arising from this hypererotized state may lead to compulsive masturbation with phantasies of destructive inventiveness. The compulsive drive for perfection of the artist derives from this masked sadism as well as the need to harmonize it in the act of creativity. These two attitudes may find expression in the family romance.
The identification of the artist with God and Nature may arise in the phallic-oedipal phase through the force of his own body feelings, incomparably greater in the artist, which respond to and cause a kind of amalgamation of body imagery with outer forms in the world. Experiences of inspiration and revelation at an early age often com