Discussion of Imagery and the Self in Artistic Creativity and Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism

In his richly conceived paper, Dr. Roland has touched upon many issues at the forefront of the psychoanalytic analysis of creativity. We have come exceedingly far from the criticism that Suzanne Langer and other philosophers of art once directed at psychoanalytic theory; namely, that in emphasizing the hidden content of a work of art psychoanalysis completely neglected the central problem which is “the perfection of form.”2

Noy quotes Langer's admonition in his recent paper, “Form Creation in Art: An Ego-Psychological Approach to Creativity” —a paper whose many themes are echoed in Roland—and Rothenberg's work.5 Noy points out that it was not until the advent of ego psychology that we have been able to confront the true study of the creative process in its many aspects. Only then did interest shift from unconscious contents impelling the artist to the “mechanisms which process these contents—”5a Noy and others have dealt with many of these mechanisms, such as the structure of the creative personality, the process of creativity, neurosis and psychopathology, and, most important, the creation of form.

When Roland analyzes artistic imagery, when he discusses the way in which personal metaphor enters into poetic metaphor, when he presents in detail the actual creation of a poem, he is dealing with the issue of form and its perfection—certainly the most compelling problem for every artist. And it is the process of form creation that takes us into the heart of ego psychology.

In the example of the poet searching for the most perfect form in which to convey his latent meanings, almost every function of the ego