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The author tries to show how Melanie Klein's work, especially her concept of the depressive position and the reparative drives derivative from it, illumines the conditions critical to success or failure in artistic activity and also helps us understand the æsthetic pleasure of the artist's public.
In the unconscious of all artists all creation is really re-creation of a once loved and whole but now lost and ruined object, a ruined internal world and self. It is the inability to work through depressive anxieties that leads to inhibition of artistic activity or to the production of an unsuccessful artistic product. Creating a work of art is the psychic equivalent of procreation. It is a genital bisexual activity. The ability to deal with the depressive position is the precondition of both genital and artistic activity.
The artist has an extremely high reality sense in at least two respects, one in relation to his own internal reality and the other in relation to the material of his art. He shares with the neurotic unresolved depression, but he differs in that he has greater capacity for tolerating anxiety and depression. All æsthetic pleasure experienced by the artist's public is due to an unconscious reliving of the creator's state of mind.