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DISCUSSION: Dr. Joseph Colterra agreed with Dr. Weissman's choice of an approach through ego psychology; in pre-ego psychology the role of creativity was seen as cathartic. With the advent of ego psychology creative experience came to be understood as a process that has as much to do with the creation of tension as it does with tension discharge. Like Greenacre, Dr. Coltrera has noted that the creative individual feels a sense of difference and an apartness in the latency period. He believes that the creative ego is able through its unique apparatus of consciousness to distribute pattern modalities of attention cathexis of a radical cognitive organization, probably related to the desynthesizing function.
Dr. Leon Altman felt that adding the dissociative function to the ego functions when discussing creativity might burden the ego. He agrees that it is not enough to use sublimation in relation to the drives to explain creativity. He has seen creative people who could function when there was severe disorganization and breakdown of sublimation in the rest of the personality. He asked how the detachment from objects occurs, what is meant by a creative person, how is creativity defined?
Dr. Emanuel Klein felt that desynthesizing and resynthesizing is an interesting way for the creative person to formulate the capacity to see familiar experiences in a new light. Dr. Bernard Meyer wondered whether facts learned in dealing with people who manifest pathology can be applied to creative people. Dr. Jay Stanton challenged the idea that neutralization of energy is necessary to creativity.