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This paper makes a comparison of the nuclear findings which are characteristic of the major impostor and the creative individual. The author draws together her findings in two other papers, one on the impostor and the other on the creative artist's childhood. The impostor suffers from an incompleted development of the ego involving defective ability to form object relationships and a special disturbance of the sense of identity. Ego defects derived from strong pregenital fixations cause a thin but dramatic enactment of the oedipal conflict which is constantly re-enacted in each imposture, the imposture itself being most often the assumption of the identity of an oedipal figure, with a real or illusory assumption of his power. The artist is at least two people, the personally oriented self and the artistic one. The artistic child may react to the external world in the direct personal way characteristic of the maturational forces of the ordinary child, and his libidinal attachments develop in the direction of normal object relationships. But with his greater perceptive response to both form and rhythm, the personal objects of his immediate human environment may be invested with a greater range of other outer (often inanimate) object perceptions, related to the personal objects by similarities in form or rhythm. This means that all object relationships may be felt and expressed with a vast increase in their symbolic representations. These characteristics constitute the access to primary process thinking, the retention of which into adult life is characteristic of the artist. This 'field of collective alternates' offers alternates for the specific objects of the human object relationships and is frequently invested to a greater extent with fantasy.
Both in the creative artist on the brink of a new surge of creativity and in the impostor, between periods of imposture, there is a sense of ego hunger and a need for completion—in the one of the artistic self; in the