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This article is an attempt to throw some light onto the role of destruction in the creative process. This notion is mentioned frequently in the psychoanalytic literature, not only in relation to the work of the artist but in relation to the analytic process and to development in general.
My interest in writing this paper stems from wanting to put forward what I have learned from an attempt to document with slides my own paintings in progress. I have been doing this for the last two years with the idea that I might use these slides to illustrate the creative process in a more meaningful way than by showing the finished work itself or slides of it. I have been surprised to find that on occasion I have been unable to determine the sequence of these slides when I get them back from the processing lab. Luckily the lab numbers them which solves the problem of reconstructing how I went about doing what I did. I have also been struck by the visual evidence of the destructiveness I seem to engage in each time the painting seems to be acquiring too much structure. If one looks at the progression of the slides one can see that the attempts to develop some formal qualities over, say, a sequence of four slides are now followed by a purposeful, deliberate collapse of such structure in the next slide. Out of his new chaos something begins to emerge in the next few slides until things seem to be under control again. But the structure is again destroyed as evidenced in the next chaotic slide. These sequences of chaos and control out of which something is finally born is characteristic of all the paintings I have documented in this way. I believe that this phenomenon is not idiosyncratic of my work but of the work of many artists and certainly other artistic activities including that of the analyst at work.