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The Chairman opened the meeting by asking the general question of whether psychoanalysis provides a good paradigm for understanding creative processes. He then briefly introduced the four panellists and invited Ana Maria Andrade de Azevedo to read her presentation.
With reference to a quotation from Herbert Read, Andrade de Azevedo, the first panellist, wondered whether we should consider Freud's proposition to make conscious what is unconscious as the goal not only of psychoanalysis, but also of art. She saw the proximity between art and psychoanalysis in terms of form, that is, ‘psychoanalysis regarded as a performance in which knowledge is let loose’. In this sense, she considered psychoanalysis, as we move into the twenty-first century, as belonging to modernity, as a twentieth-century art of multiple languages; a method that ‘seeks to make available for psychic representation what had hitherto been only anxiety, pain, nameless terror’. Its object, according to Andrade de Azevedo, ‘has to do with the conquering and enlarging of areas of sensitivity, in short, to the area of subjectivity that constitutes the nucleus of what is called psychic reality’; this, she added, is always a creative act, as psychic reality is unknowable, unreachable and unthinkable unless through a process of representation which, by approximation and transformation, can attain some form of symbolic expression.
She then questioned Hanna Segal's definition of the creative impulse as restoration of lost or damaged internal objects, and suggested that a work of art (‘creation, not recreation’) will always be original and unique. With the help of two clinical vignettes, Andrade de Azevedo finally discussed theoretical and clinical creativity in the analyst, proposing that creativity can at times be feared ‘since it can be perceived as unruly, unpredictable and untidy whereas a more technical, objective and academic view would afford clarity and organisation’.
In the following presentation on ‘Mult