You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Various psycho-analytic theories of play are considered as set forth by Freud, Waelder, Hendrick, Alexander, and others, for further understanding of the creative process, defined as the production of a new and original element, whether in the field of science or art. 'Playfulness', functional enjoyment, experiment with maturational pressures, mitigation and mastery of anxiety may be common to both play and the creative process. Repetitive functioning in a safeguarded situation to achieve a clearer definition of an ill-defined emotional experience, attempted resolution of past problems (repetition compulsion), and the imaginative integration of experience according to secondary process for problem solving, all feature in childhood play at different development periods. 'Each artistic product is the delivery into an externalized and communicable form of an economically organized piece of the artist's total interaction with the world around him. In doing this the creative artist expresses more than he is aware that he knows … There is something in this which is not identical with but seems related to the directional pressures of childhood.'
The inevitable imprint of the specifically conscious and personal problems of the artist may be great or slight, but the enduring creative product is generally not so explicitly restricted to the personal. The original aspects of creativity are likely to be derived from fantasy or play which is less rather than more bound by the repetition compulsion. It cannot be said that the creative production appears regularly as the result of integration of the individual's personality or that lasting alleviation of instabilities is achieved through satisfying creative work. The author suggests that the energy utilized in creative activity is often not well neutralized, but is quite often associated with sexual and aggressive feeling amounting almost to frenzy. The capacity for intense cathexis is found side by side with extreme mobil