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Over the years, I have been struck by the paradox that most of my patients who are creative artists: actors, dancers, painters, musicians, and screenwriters, displayed infantile, narcissistic traits, especially flagrant egocentricism and grandiosity, and yet they could be exceptionally mature and productive in their work. What came to mind was the popular stereotype of the “enfant terrible” or the “prima donna.” Although the public seems to accept this infantile sector of the artist's personality as, perhaps, the necessary price of creative achievement, implicitly assuming a linkage between creativity and grandiosity, most of the psychoanalytic literature, with the notable exception of Kohut's and Rank's writings, has suggested that grandiosity interferes with artistic creativity. From this perspective, grandiosity results in delusional expectations for instant, magical productivity that can undermine the secondary process functioning required for creative work. As a manic defense, grandiosity or omnipotence is said to deny the existence of the separate reality (the separation of self and other) that the artist requires in order to adequately perceive subject matter and to manipulate the chosen medium effectively (Segal, 1957, 1981).
For creativity to occur, psychoanalytic theorists claim that infantile grandiosity must dissolve, either: (1) through sublimation, and the neutralization of sexual and aggressive drives (Freud, 1905); (2) through mourning, guilt, and reparation in working through the depressive position (Klein, 1975; Segal, 1957); (3) through the neutralization of narcissistic libido (Kohut, 1971); or (4) through transitional process operations and the acquisition of internal objects (Winnicott, 1951).