You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
MELTZER:
You have asked me to amplify what I said in our conversations that followed your paper Painting and the Inner World (similar to Part I of this book), read to the Imago Group.
As a practising psycho-analyst I shall draw from clinical and theoretical knowledge the implications of Melanie Klein's discoveries, with the aim of adding to what has already been written by Dr. Segal and yourself. On that foundation I shall try to extend understanding of the relationship between the artist and his viewer: hence, more widely, my concern, in this dialogue with you, will be the social value of art from the psycho-analytic angle. But first I shall want to comment on art as therapy for the artist, especially in regard to one of the themes of your paper.
Freud, and other writers following his lead, considered artistic creativity to be a part of mental functioning very closely related to dream formation. They have explained the manner in which artistic creativity, like the dream, is taken up with a working over in the unconscious of the residues of daily experiences, particularly those of the repressed unconscious. The Kleinian approach to art has tended to emphasize a more systematic self-therapeutic process of working over and working through the basic infantile conflicts that go on in the depths in relation to internal objects. The most constructive part of this process attempts to build a firmer passage from the paranoid-schizoid to the depressive position by way of internal object relations, consolidating, stabilizing the internal world.
STOKES:
Before you go on, I think you must supply an account of what is meant by the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive positions.