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Freud's early drive–defense model of creativity, associated with conflict and sublimation, evolves and expands with the ascendancy of ego, object relations, and self psychologies. Psychoanalysis now emphasizes ego strengths as well as preoedipal object relations (Winnicott's transitional object; Bollas's transformational object). Freud's applied analyses were limited to pictorial content—he painstakingly deciphered classic works of art while ignoring revolutionary developments in vanguard art (with a certain hostile bewilderment). Modernist art, which minimizes content for the pursuit of pure form, has become increasingly amenable to psychoanalytic conceptualization. Artists possess the special ability to symbolize simultaneously our two modes of apprehending reality, essentially corresponding to primary-process and secondary-process modes of feeling, thinking, and perceiving. Our dual orientation is embodied in the tensions and balances of pictorial form itself, which distills and freezes our fluid psychological experience. Art safely promotes a heightened self-awareness, fosters the reconciliation of primitive
Gilbert J. Rose is in private practice in psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and is a former faculty member of Yale University Medical School and the Western New England Psychoanalytic Institute. He is a member of the Muriel Gardiner Program in Psychoanalysis and the Humanities at Yale.
and mature self and object representations, and offers a renewed sense of wholeness. Post-Freudian psychoanalysis enables us to link peak aesthetic experiences to the creativity of everyday life—namely the perpetual need to integrate inner and outer worlds, and the eternal pursuit of a fuller human experience.