Self-Analysis and Creativity: Views from inside and Outside

Je est un autre.

It is not accidental that psychoanalysis, the long-delayed fulfillment of the Socratic injunction to know oneself, was born in a self-analysis. It is no surprise that self-analysis preceded clinical analysis, for even if the self is a foreign country, it is unremittingly closer than are the more distant other people's minds. Despite the highly valued powers of empathy and projective identification, the way one can know oneself and the way one can know another are not the same. No one ever fully knows what it is like to be someone else, certainly not in the way one can know oneself. Yet the capacity to know oneself increases the depths to which one can come to know another. It is self-analysis that makes clinical analysis possible.

While the tasks an analyst performs for an analysand are called analyzing, they are hardly the same as the introspective work someone carries out in being an analysand. That deeply personal inner work is also called analyzing, with the word here used in the more keenly narrow sense reflected in the statement that the only person in an analysis whom an analyst can analyze is himself. Using the same word, analyzing, to describe the professional efforts one person performs for another and the introspective processes one performs and experiences for oneself is