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Creative activity is profoundly rooted in a fundamental ambiguity ot human experience: the fact that we can experience ourselves as both embodied and disembodied at the same time. The basic tension between two worlds or dimensions of experience has been recognized by psychoanalytic thinkers in such concepts as “body ego” and “observing ego” (Freud, 1923; Greenson, 1967), “somatic ego feeling” and “psychic ego feeling” (Federn, 1952), “body self” and “mind self” (Kohut, 1971), and “body ego” and “transcendental ego” (Elkin, 1972). We move within and between these two poles, now immersed in thought, now in body experience. In extreme states of dissociation the observing function becomes split off from immediate experiencing (Federn, 1952; Arlow, 1966). More generally the flow of interest flexibly shifts in emphasis as cathexes fluctuate in characteristic ways. In optimal instances the ego's double experience of itself reflects a natural division or differentiated unity. At such moments one may take oneself for granted or experience oneself as “whole” in harmonious well being. Creative activity frequently appears to be motivated by the intention to reconcile these two primary poles of human experience. It may be prompted by the wish to reduce the tension between them or represent an expressive overflow of their felt harmony.
Milner (1969, 1973) and Ehrenzweig (1971), in particular, point out various ways the ego symbolizes its shifting states of tension and harmony as it moves through different worlds of experience. The ego, for example, may represent its own self-experience and, more broadly, its sense of psychic creativity by means of androgynous god images (Ehrenzweig, 1971, Parts IV & V). It may, too, express its