You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
From its beginnings, psychoanalysis has had a tense and ambivalent relationship to the riddle of artistic creativity. On the one hand the striking and uniquely human ability to imagine and to create—both capacities that are sometimes facilitated and sometimes inhibited by personal history, memory, conflict, and trauma—attract and even demand the attention of anybody interested in the study of mind. But despite the volumes that have been written, we are still haunted by Freud's pessimism about our ability to come up with satisfying approaches to the problem. Opening his paper in this special section on “Psychoanalysis and Literary Creativity,” Dennis Haseley quotes Freud's comment that “before the problem of the creative artist analysis must, alas, lay down its arms” (1928, p. 177). It is a sentiment that Freud expressed virtually from the beginning to the end of his career.
The caution is warranted, of course. All understanding, perhaps psychological understanding in particular, is always incomplete, and the puzzle of how some people achieve and express creativity that transcends, surprises, and informs is especially complex. But our vision of creativity has also been shaped by Freud's way of thinking about the discipline he invented; recall (as Adele Tutter notes in her contribution to this section) that, early on, Freud was concerned that his psychoanalytic narratives were too creative. As he put it, “It still strikes me myself as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science” (Breuer and Freud 1895, p. 160). Freud lacked the epistemological tools that