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The relationship between the personality of an artist and his creations has always been a challenging enigma to psychoanalysts. This problem has been studied in psychobiographies of the artist (19); in analyses of the artistic products, usually literary works (23), (28), and in attempts to correlate these two approaches. In this latter effort it was often assumed that the products of creation were directly correlated with the creator's experience, emotional states, and fantasy life. As psychoanalytic theory and experience have developed, it has been realized that the process of creativity is more complicated than that, and that the creative product of a talented person, or a genius, is more than the expression of a fantasy in a highly developed form. Kris expressed it thus (28): 'The artist has created a world and not indulged in a daydream'.1
Current efforts at understanding creativity have gone in two main directions: the first, to understand the nature of the process (3), (24), (29); the other, to look for determinants common in the lives of artists in general, in an effort to pick out those features which differentiate them from other people (15), (16), (27), (33). Others combine both approaches (10), (17). In this paper an attempt is made to examine the life and personality of Joseph Conrad, the nature of his works and their principle themes, and to demonstrate the observation made by Kris as well as the identity problems of Conrad expressed in the totality of his work.