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Psychoanalysis was born after the death of a father, Freud's father, which led Freud to make an auto-analysis and later write the ‘Interpretation of Dreams’. This book is an important example of creativity and one of the masterpieces of psychoanalysis. This text focuses on the relationship between creativity and the child's relationship with the father. It is well known that the murder of the father is the primordial crime and is the primary source of the feeling of guilt. In psychoanalytical theory, the boy desires to murder his father and to replace him in order to be with his mother. He gives up this desire as he fears his father's power to castrate him. This is a conscious act and the original desire is maintained in the unconscious.
Joyce McDougall writes that for both sexes, the good functioning of the mind and creativity are equivalent to having a penis in the unconscious. Girls, on the other hand, not only face with the fear of castration, but they also lose a whole object, the mother. Hence, their creative processes are partly dependent on their ‘crippled’ relationship with their mother. Examples are given from literary works such as Sophocles's King Oedipus and Antigone; Shakespeare's Hamlet; Dostoievsky's Karamazov Brothers, Birkan Keskin's poems as well as the work of Orhan Pamuk, whose speech at the Nobel Award ceremony was dedicated to his father. In addition to these, Bernardo Bertolucci's films, his comments on his psychoanalytical process, and his relationship with his father are discussed as well as vignettes from clinical cases.