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The following paragraph succinctly summarizes the primary emphasis of Dr. Kubie's book:
Preconscious processes are assailed from both sides. From one side they are nagged and prodded into rigid and distorted symbols, by unconscious drives which are oriented away from reality and which consist of rigid compromise formations, lacking in fluid inventiveness. From the other side they are driven by literal conscious purpose, checked and corrected by conscious retrospective critique. The uniqueness of creativity, i.e., its capacity to find and put together something new, depends on the extent to which preconscious functions can operate freely between these two ubiquitous, concurrent and oppressive prison wardens. (p. 45)
The writer indicates his conviction that most “earlier” writings on creativity and neurosis have confused the functions of the Unconscious and Preconscious. Thus many misleading cliches proliferate: since creative processes are clearly influenced by processes more obscure and rapid than the conscious; and because of the revelatory discoveries in the early days of psychoanalysis of the importance of the Unconscious in the neurotic process, understandable but erring deductions, positing identity or close relationship between the two processes, assumed significance (cf. Thomas Mann). In diagrams, the author illustrates his hypotheses as to the complex interrelationships among the three systems of Cs., Pcs. and Ucs. These diagrams, which we are wisely cautioned not to take literally, extend from the area of purposes, yearnings and wishes in the Conscious to the hallucinatory, delusional and symptomatic compulsive aspects of the Ucs. The concurrent play of Pcs. processes contributes the flexible and creative components to the creative process as Kubie defines it: (a) an analogic rearrangement of old data into new combinations, and (b) “continuous selective influence on … free associations … and indeed of every moment of life” (p. 39). The book abounds with appos