Psychoanalytic Theories of Creativity: Clinical Applications1

Psychoanalysts have long been fascinated by creative individuals. The papers on this panel explored the ongoing engagement by psychoanalysts with the phenomenon of creativity. This engagement has enriched psychoanalytic theory while the experience of working with creative individuals has deepened our clinical understanding of issues that are ubiquitous in clinical practice.

Laurie Wilson's paper, The contribution of Ernst Kris's theory of creativity to clinical work, focused on his concept of ‘regression in the service of the ego’: how his concept evolved with his own development as a psychoanalyst, how it has been used by psychoanalysts who found it both clinically useful and theoretically foundational, and how the concept has been taken in a new direction by analysts who found the concept problematic and have developed better ways of understanding ‘primary and secondary process’ both in their studies of creativity and clinical work.

Kris, an art historian, had been looking at art and thinking about artists for at least a decade by the time he formulated the term ‘regression in the service of the ego’ in his paper, Psychology of caricature (Kris, 1952[1934]). Considering the creativity of caricaturists and artists he wrote:

We have now to elucidate in greater detail the relations of wit and caricature to dreams: in dreams, the ego abandons its supremacy and the primary process obtains control, whereas in wit and in caricature this process remains in the service of the ego. This formulation alone suffices to show that the problem involved is a more general one; the contrast between an ego overwhelmed by regression and a ‘regression in the service of the ego.

Though not initially noted, Kris's view that creative individuals are more flexible with regard to ego functioning and that they use earlier (more primitive) modes of functioning to gain access to preconscious thoughts for creative activity began the move away from a strict equation of regr