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The creative writer, inhibited in his productivity, is the youngest member of the large family of neurotics who seek analytic help. So recent is his advent that analysts have not even formed a uniform opinion on the causes of “writer's block,” a term which, as far as I know, was introduced into analytic literature and explained genetically by myself, in a long series of studies conducted over nearly twenty years, and recently summarized in my book, The Writer and Psychoanalysis.2
As usual, when confronted with something new and untested, like writer's block, analysts' first reaction was to take the simplest way out of a dilemma: application of the already known and tested. The result has been schematized use of phallic and anal interpretations. Since both phase —phallic and anal— can be proved in every human being, the analytic “material” produced by writers in analysis seemed to confirm the gratuitous assumption: “There is nothing new in this.”
Unfortunately, colleagues proceeding in this fashion have been victims of a fallacy. All artistically creative people are not only orally masochistically regressed, unconsciously using the more superficial layers as inner defense against those which are more deeply repressed, but they also reveal, within the framework of oral regression, a series of mechanisms which are characteristic for them, and for them exclusively. There is also the fact that for the majority of colleagues the term, “oral regression,” means “I want to get,” whereas I believe that this formulation confuses historic-genetic development with clinical facts, the latter indicating that the contents of oral regression are “I want to be refused.” This topic has been elaborated on at length in my book, The Basic Neurosis.
In my opinion, creative writing represents a successful episode (or series of episodes) in the lifelong “battle of the conscience.” This attempt at sublimation, achieved in this “self-curative alibi sickness,” is, however, differentiated from any