You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Anyone who has felt regret about the fracturing of the psychoanalytic movement in the early part of the 20th century will I believe be heartened by this article. Writing for a
psychoanalytic audience, Dr Rubin has as his overarching aim to foster the vitality and generativity of psychoanalysis. To do this he first offers a critique addressing three shadow tendencies in psychoanalysis and then puts forward some important concepts, especially from analytical psychology, as correctives to enable psychoanalysis to encounter creativity more appropriately.
The schools of psychoanalysis have little by little begun to be able to free themselves of the feuds inherited from wounded relationships among the founders, especially the relationship between Freud and Jung. In this evolution it sometimes appears that psychoanalysts are reinventing the wheel, discovering Jung's discoveries either with no knowledge because they have shunned Jung's scholarship and the Jungian-tradition literature, or worse, with knowledge but without acknowledgement that Jung's pioneering work had preceded them. Dr Rubin's article is a healing influence in this hitherto problematic feature of psychoanalytic writing, because he honours and articulates important concepts of analytical psychology, wants to incorporate them openly into psychoanalysis, and explicitly gives Jung credit for being their discoverer. The article even takes a citation from Jung as its epigraph, ‘… that the art of life is the most distinguished and rarest of all the arts’.
In the first half of the article Dr Rubin addresses the ambivalence psychoanalysis has toward creativity itself. He believes that psychoanalysis has the capability to relieve obstacles to creativity. But before he elaborates upon how this can happen, he confronts three shadow tendencies that have manifested psychoanalytic ambivalence toward creativity and that have vitiated psychoanalytic practice, impoverishing the endeavour and by implication the lives of some