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I will focus my observations on one point that seems to me to be the key of the paper: the primal scene and its possible relationship to the creative processes.
Dr. Segal shows very clearly that Jocelin moves in a very primitive stage and that his Oedipus complex is obviously a pregenital one which corresponds to the Kleinian description of an early Oedipus complex with oral characteristics. Consequently, the primal scene, described in various ways by the author, is very primitive and traumatic. We can infer the transcendency of this persecutory conception in the omnipotent
project of building up the spire, and also in the sterile couples.
Since the Wolf Man, the characteristics and varying contents of the primal scene have become familiar. One is the fantasy of being inside the womb, in order to contemplate the primal scene from there. This paper shows that Jocelin has a primal scene that makes him oscillate between an intrauterine regression (the cathedral's interior as the mother's interior) and a very persecutory postnatal situation corresponding to the paranoid-schizoid position of the Kleinian School.
Dr. Segal suggests that the creative processes could have arisen from the existence in the unconscious of a parental couple loving each other; and that the child, future adult creator, or artist identifies himself with a creative primal scene wherein the internal parents, instead of destroying babies, make happy babies or repair those who have been destroyed.
The existence in Jocelin's inner reality of a traumatic primal scene could explain his castration anxieties as resulting from his exposure to its violence. The infertility of both couples could also represent a parental couple with whom Jocelin lives a life that sterilizes him and his creative processes. In this case, Goody and her son's death represent the primal mortal scene displaced to a mortal childbirth in which the internal parents kill the creative. The dead baby could be a personification of Jocelin'