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The perceiving and the forming are the same. The self has gone into what it perceives and what it perceives is, in this sense, itself. So the object becomes the subject and the subject the object. [Coleridge on Creativity, quoted in Richards, 1935, p. 57].
Since Freud's early writings on the subject (Freud, 1908), art and artists have fascinated psychoanalysts. The analytic literature on art is large and varied, and each school of psychoanalytic thought has attempted to develop its own understanding of the artist and his audience (for example, Freud, 1908, 1910, 1925; Klein, 1929; Rank, 1932; Sachs, 1942; Kris, 1952; Stokes, 1963; Freiberg, 1965; Ehrenzweig, 1967; Winnicott, 1971; Noy, 1979; Segal, 1991; Rose, 1992). One crucial area of the psychology of art, which has continually challenged and eluded analytic theorists, is the psychodynamics of the creative process itself. In this regard, Freud complained that although his theory helped him understand the unconscious meanings of art, he despaired at unlocking the secrets of the creative act . In fact, subsequent analytic theories of creativity, while offering interesting observations, also failed to develop an adequate model of the psychological process, which makes artistic creativity unique (Noy, 1979). In this chapter I will show how self psychology offers just such a model of the creative process.
I have developed the ideas in this chapter from several sources: first, my own experience as an artist, a vocation I pursued for 10 years intensively and have continued to be involved with for the past 20 years; second, my knowledge of the experience of other artists, as patients and friends; third, a study of the writings of artists regarding their creativity; and forth, a review of the psychoanalytic literature on the creative process.