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.
The question whether in Balzac's fifteenth year we could have predicted that he would be capable of great artistic productivity, we answered in the negative. We pointed out some favourable prognostic signs: his good relationship with his sister Laure and his very early sense of responsibility towards her, his interest in books, his vitality, and the reversibility of his symptoms.
Our second question was: How is it possible that in adulthood Balzac's severe character neurosis did not hinder his creative ability, a question which arises in relation to many artists. In other words, the same conflicts which lead to character neurosis can be used by the artist in the field of his abilities in creation. To explain this, Freud (1907) speaks of the tolerance of the intelligence in the artist (Die Duldung der Intelligenz) towards the unconscious, and in his Leonardo study (1910), of a great proneness to repression in combination with great possibilities of sublimation. To indicate the fields of free functioning Beres (1959) speaks of dissociation, Kris (1952), (1955) of several degrees of neutralization, and of the reversibility of the process of neutralization, so that conflictual material can be used in conflict-free functioning, but on the other hand the creative process remains in a very unstable equilibrium which is easily disturbed.