Futility and Creativity

The Feeling of futility is perhaps one of the most painful and yet amorphous states of dis-ease that nudges people into analysis, particularly in their mid to late thirties. Of these people, my attention was caught by a small but sizeable group, the members of whom were all engaged professionally in creativity of an artistic kind, and many of them were prone to long periods of profound futility soon after they had created something. The feeling was quite different from the exhaustion, ordinariness and deflation that seems to follow naturally a period of writing, composing or whatever. The effects of futility were to freeze these people's creative capacities, to make them feel cut off from their innermost and cherished treasures and frighteningly alienated from their objects.

I had also observed that for relatively short and transitory periods the analytic space seemed filled with the bitter taste of futility, which was sometimes the prelude to the acknowledgement by both parties that the work of the previous days, weeks or months had been discarded or rather viciously destroyed. This led me to contemplate the tension between the pessismism expressed by Freud in his late work, ‘Analysis terminable and interminable’, in which he stresses the limitations of psychoanalysis, the difficulties of its procedure and the obstacles standing in its way (FREUD 4); and the optimism shared by Jung on the last page of Memories, Dreams, Reflections, in which he writes: ‘Life is—or has—meaning and meaninglessness. I cherish the hope that meaning will preponderate and win the battle’ (JUNG 13).

From being with my patients, and from my own pre-occupations, I became aware of two images, one an interrupted flow resulting in stagnation, the other a savage attack on linking, producing dismemberment. The imagery generated strong feelings in me that spun frenziedly in opposite directions, feelings of futility and of hope, of being minced up and of being put together, of closeness and remotenes