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Despite Freud's (1927) oft-quoted dictum that “before the problem of the creative artist analysis must, alas, lay down its arms,”1 his colleagues, disciples, and followers (including this one) have been unsparing in their efforts to apply his ideas or their derivatives to studies of the lives and works of artists in every medium and of the creative process itself. Sublimation, regression in the service of the ego, restoration of the lost object, and other formulas have come and gone, but the persistence of the mystery leaves ample room for new departures to flourish.
Perhaps the most ambitious (and certainly the most intricate and iconoclastic) of these recent contributions is Art in the Offertorium, by two Canadian psychoanalysts who have worked extensively in this field and whose impressive scholarship extends through art history, philosophy, sociology, and theology. Indeed, their nodal concept, the offertorium—which they define as a “relatively safely contained and neutral social space” (p. ix)—is derived from the offertory in the Catholic ritual of communion; it is the moment before “transfiguration” is thought to occur. The authors' comment that “in the offertorium, art becomes an energic point of contact in which the narcissistic condition is momentarily reconstituted: the triumphal side of narcissism is rejoined with what it has disavowed through projective identification with the aggressor: its abjection” (p. ix)