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Townsend sets out to explore the patient's creativity in the analytic process, comparing it with the artist's when engaged in making a work. She has an interesting proposal: that the patient uses the analyst creatively in a similar
way to how the artist uses her medium. In the process of creating, as in the psychoanalytic process, there is an interplay between oneness and separateness in which aggression and destructiveness are essential. I'm reminded of a saying attributed to Frank Auerbach that in order to create a great painting you have to destroy a good one.
Descriptions by selected artists of how they approach their work are given, showing how artists imbue the medium, be it paint, stone or any other medium the artist may choose, with fantasy. I would say there is a process of active imagination in which the medium participates in a ‘dialogue’. Townsend points to the artist's projection of her inner world onto the medium which she then works to mould into a mirroring role. Here Townsend draws on Winnicott's concepts of mirroring (a parallel between the artist's relation to her medium and the baby to her mother) and of use of the object. She quotes Marion Milner's young patient as using her ‘as a pliable medium that he could mould however he wanted except that she also had qualities of her own to be taken account of’. This is very like the artist's medium: it has qualities which need to taken account of when being used. The size of the canvas or paper, the qualities of the paint, if a painting; the type of stone if a sculpture, and so forth.
The analyst allows herself to be moulded by the patient until she understands what is being communicated unconsciously, then this can be explored with the patient. As the medium, then, she is flexible to a certain point until she asserts her difference, when something new and unexpected can happen. (Here I am departing from Townsend's psychoanalytic frame in which the unconscious communication would be interpreted to the p