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Melanie Klein’s first paper on art, ‘Infantile anxiety situations reflected in a work of art and the creative impulse’ (1929), addresses itself to the sources of the creative impulse. In that paper Klein discusses first a libretto by Colette for a Ravel opera, L’Enfant et les Sortiléges. In that libretto a little boy in a fit of temper attacks various objects in his room and attempts to hurt a squirrel. The objects come alive and they, as well as little animals, grow to enormous proportions and attack the child. At some point in the mêlée a little squirrel gets hurt and falls to the ground. On an impulse of compassion the little boy picks up the squirrel. Immediately the scene changes. Objects and animals become friendly and the little boy calls ‘Maman’, and some of the objects and animals echo him. Klein uses this example to describe what she then considered a leading anxiety in little boys, related to their phantasy attacks on the mother’s body and the paternal penis within it, and shows how the persecutory anxiety to which it gives rise gets modified by reparation.
The second example is taken from a biography of a Swedish painter, Ruth Kjär. That young woman suffered from recurring depressions in which she felt invaded by an empty space inside her. One day a picture which she had on loan had been taken back by the painter and she could not stand the empty space on the wall. Her biographer says: ‘On the wall there was an empty space which in some inexplicable way seemed to coincide with the empty space within her…. The empty space grinned hideously down on her.’
The intolerability of the empty space, according to the biographer, compelled her to do a painting herself. And this was the beginning of a successful career as a painter.
One of her early pictures represented a wrinkled old woman in a state of disconsolate resignation. One of the last pictures was a portrait of her mother when young and beautiful. She has the effect of a ‘magnificent woman of primitive times