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Dr. Boyer's paper demonstrates the genius of Freud—how one man, by taking a fresh point of view of the psychoses, was able to stimulate other investigators to further explore what had been a wasteland of psychiatry. This is the role of the pioneer in science: he opens new fields for the more ordinary worker to expand and delineate. This is the role of the genius who formulates data and ideas into a logical approximation of their true relationship.
Although Freud was wary of psychoanalysis as an effective treatment for the psychoses, he believed that psychoanalytical theory and technique provided tools for their better understanding. His early writings on these disorders evoked the early analysts whom Dr. Boyer cites to reinvestigate the formerly static view of these disorders.
Freud applied his concepts, formulated previously to explain neurotic behavior, to show that the psychoses as well as the neuroses are variations and distortions of everyday human psychology. His formulations of unconscious conflict, object relationships and the forces and mechanisms of primary process thinking all played a role in this new way of looking at the psychoses. This fresh viewpoint revealed that what previously was considered bizarre and irrational could now be understood, and it was the forerunner of the current psychoanalytic hypothesis of psychoses which explains the patient's thinking, feeling and behavior as a confluence of many disparate adult and infantile ego levels.
Freud himself often speculated on the mechanisms of creativity.
Although he never claimed that he solved this riddle, he thought that much of the creativity in those geniuses whom he studied consisted of the ability to have free and easy communication between the primary and secondary processes of the mind. In order to be useful in science, this “intuition” must be combined with a firm sense of reality.
Arthur Koestler characterizes creativity as the result of combining sets of phenomena that were never before a