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I want to thank Dr. Dexter for this very interesting report and the opportunity to discuss it. Dr. Dexter has written a vivid account of the ongoing analysis of a 20-year-old student composer. She conveys a portrait of this young woman—unconventional, intrepid, a loner—poignantly suffering the death of her mother at age 16 and that of a beloved grandmother at 20.
Because of my interest in creativity and creative people, I approached this case from the point of view of the psychology of the artist. Phyllis Greenacre's conception of the artist certainly seems pertinent to Ms. B (1957, 1958). Along with the constitutional factors of the artist's greater sensitivity to sensory stimulation and a greater sense of the gestalt, Greenacre emphasized the importance of the family romance in artists (1958). Basically, the artist needs to glorify his parents because of the tremendous amount of awe he experiences in childhood and the ecstatic experience of his bodily states. The child artist must often invent the parents who match such sublimity (Greenacre, 1958).
The material presented on Ms. B strongly suggests a powerful family romance having to do with her being a special child (perhaps a princess) who was adopted or perhaps illegally abducted by her parents. We are told that because of her darkness she is suspected of being a foreigner and recalls being questioned by U.S. immigration officials at the border, while on a trip to Brazil in childhood. Later, at age 18, she goes off and has sex with a strange man in Mexico.
The patient's major complaint about her parents was their utter lack of protectiveness. This may go well beyond their unwillingness