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The world is created anew by each human being.
There is, as we all know, a long history of psychoanalytic exploration of artists and their productions. Historically, analysts, when speaking about art, focused on the dynamics of repression, displacement, and overdetermination. What was repressed in the psyche found expression through art. Such an approach, of necessity, has a limited perspective, that is, the individual artist's mind and/or his or her specific work (Kuhns, 1983). The work of Donald Winnicott (1971) enabled analysts to approach art through a more complex study of an individual psyche and its developmental environment. Through such concepts as the mirroring function, the caretaking mother, the ever-present need to create the found world, and transitional space and transitional phenomena, which are the seedbed of art, religion, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, Winnicott provided analysts with a wider relational canvas to interpret art and the artist. With such models the psychoanalyst looks at art beyond, but obviously not excluding, the primarily intrapsychic functions of the individual. Heinz Kohut, building on the many theoreticians that went before him, further refined and expanded Winnicott's understanding of the mirror function of the mother-child relationship and enabled us to understand its pervasive presence throughout life via his expansive concept of the self-object. The self-object model is obviously not limited to early mother experiences but is operative throughout an individual's life, in various situations.
Using Kohut's insights as a primary paradigm, Hagman proposes in The Artist's Mind that “Successful art involves the artist's creation of an opportunity for self-object experience” (with all the joy of unity of the idealized and grandiose self-object as well as the dejection at its loss). He defines “self-object” by noting that
throughout life people seek out proximity to and engagement with idealized others. These relatio