Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

February 27, 1973. ON THE PSYCHOANALYSIS OF THE CREATIVE PROCESS WITH SPECIAL EMPHASIS ON THE ARTIST'S PUBLIC. Donald M. Kaplan, Ph.D.

Psychoanalytic study of the creative process must include consideration of the artist's adaptational plight. In the creative process, the adaptational gain involves the ultimate success of a work of art with the public, even if only to one real or imaginary person. In creativity there is communication of some incremental value to an audience. This extraordinary communicative power of art is the reason for psychoanalytic interest in the enrichment of ego functions in the artist, as well as in what motivates the audience to collaborate in the communicative purpose of the artist.

Kaplan feels that the audience, like the artist, has special sensibilities that allow a reciprocity of shared illusion. Unlike magic, a work of art does not yield its powers to produce illusion when its mechanisms are exposed to consciousness; it can bear exacting scrutiny. As technique led to the created object, it is the interest in technique that Kaplan feels typifies the artist's audience, distinguishing it from mere spectators and leading it to a vicarious experience of having created the work or wishing to do so. The author referred to Winnicott's transitional object and transitional phenomena. Artistically gifted children, unlike others, continue to elaborate transitional phenomena into actual creative products as the culture available to them in ordinary life is not sufficient; they must continue to elaborate culture, eventually the work of art, and shape in an audience attitudes analogous to those that prevailed in the parent toward the original transitional object. In the artist's audience there is often some early incipient creative gift, too feeble to produce an art object but sufficient to produce a response to an art object. Kaplan illustrated some of the vicissitudes of reciprocity in the complex relationship between the artist and his p