Creative Analysis

Art, creativity and clinical process

George Hagman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317577690
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

Creative Analysis: Art, Creativity and Clinical Process explores the dynamics of creativity in psychoanalytic treatment. It argues that the creative process of the analytic interaction is characterized by specific forms of feeling, thinking and most importantly, relating that result in the emergence of something new – therapeutic change. The artistic aspects of psychoanalysis and various features of creativity in analytic treatment are explored. Clinical examples are discussed at length.

George Hagman presents a new model of the psychology of creativity and art that helps us to better understand the clinical process. The book explores and develops several important implications of Hagman's main thesis: the psychodynamics of art, the creativity of the brain, aesthetic aspects of the treatment relationship, the creativity of the analyst and analysand.

Change in analysis is driven not just by the analyst's interventions but the patient's own motivation and capacity for self-transformation. This change is depicted here as a depth psychological process which explores the sources of the patient's resistance to self-actualization and identifies hidden potential, unrealized capacities and strengths. Creative Analysis: Art, Creativity and Clinical Process reformulates psychoanalytic therapy as a form of art that can help patients realize their potential which may have been blocked, inhibited, denied or derailed. The book will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, graduates and students, including the educated public interested in art.

Chapter I

What art is

In this chapter, I will define Art as the psychological processes involved in art creation and appreciation. This is not to say that the art object is not important, but the defining element is the psychological work that the artist engages in as he creates the artwork. Whenever this particular psychological process is engaged in, there is art.

Once we separate out the definition of art from the cultural institutions and products which we associated with art we will find that psychoanalysis, is a form of art, a process in which subjectivity is externalized, worked on and perfected. In this case creativity is at the heart of the analytic enterprise and process. So in this chapter we will look anew at art. I will propose a definition which is very specific, but also highly generalizable to areas of human life and action beyond the cultural activities and products which we have traditionally defined as art. As we will see in the next chapter, one of these art forms is psychoanalysis itself.

Classical psychoanalysts never considered what art is. Freud appeared to view art as a form of defensive behavior, which he saw as an effective opportunity for the mobilization of a range of different psychological mechanisms, such as displacement, condensation, and most importantly, sublimation. Despite the interest Freud showed in art throughout his writings, in the end he saw art as an ancillary phenomenon, not basic or essential to human psychological life. Of course at the time, the notion of a drive to create art would have been out of keeping with the sexual and aggressive instinct model. Art was an epiphenomenon, one of many strategies available to human beings to channel their disruptive instincts into safe channels.

This chapter argues that the creation of art and the valuing of art is a fundamental human need. In agreement with recent scholarship in evolutionary theory, neurobiology, and cultural studies (see the appendix for a review of this research), I believe that the drive to create and value art developed within human communities during the Prehistoric age and continued to be elaborated into modern times (Dissanayake, 2009, pp. 153–154). In addition, art had an adaptive function in early human communities and its importance is linked to basic elements in attachment and self-experience. Art helped communities be more cohesive and therefore more viable. Individuals developed an instinct for art because the function of art in human life increased the probability of survival, both for the individual and the society within which he lived and worked.

Before proceeding further let me make a point about my terminology. I am distinguishing the term “art” from the more general definition of the cultural institution as well as the general class of products referred to as art. I will be discussing art as a unique type of psychological process which results in artworks, and which is valued by all cultures and referred to under the general term Art. I also distinguish art from aesthetic experience, which is a more general term for the human tendency to organize experience into formal structures and patterns that are valued and appreciated. Aesthetic experiences such as beauty, ugliness and the sublime play an important role in many forms of art. However, though aesthetics is important to art (as it is important to human experience more generally, though normally less obviously) it does not define it.

In the next section I will review the psychoanalytic literature regarding the nature of art. I have selected representative writings, which best capture analysts’s thinking on what art “is”. Not surprisingly we will see how analysts have emphasized the psychological processes involved. My goal, however, will be to differentiate the unique or distinctive psychological nature of art which distinguishes it from other psychological phenomena. Following this review I will offer and elaborate on a comprehensive, integrative definition of art that will serve as the theoretical foundation of our exploration of creative psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalytic approaches to art

Since Freud’s first important papers on art and creativity (1908, 1910) psychoanalysts have worked to understand the nature of art, aesthetic experience and creativity.

In his paper “Creative writers and day-dreaming” (1908) Freud understood adult creativity as an extension and elaboration of the psychological activity of daydreaming. Since daydreaming often involves forbidden or otherwise disturbing wish fulfillments, the daydreamer usually keeps them to himself. However, the artist engages in creative work, which being the adult equivalent of childhood play, allows for the expression of Phantasy in a disguised fashion that both protects against anxiety but allows for the pleasurable release of tension. Freud wrote:

The Creative writer does the same as the child at play. He creates a world of Phantasy which he takes very seriously – that is, which he invests with large amounts of emotion – while separating it sharply from reality … The unreality of the writer’s imaginative world, however, has very important consequences for the technique of his art; for many things which, if they were real, could give enjoyment, can do so in the play of Phantasy, and many excitements which, in themselves, are actually distressing, can become sources of pleasure for the hearers and the spectators at the performance of a writer’s work.

(Freud, 1908, p. 143)

What makes art different from play or daydreaming is the way in which the artist makes use of the formal organization of the phantasies to soften their impact, and paradoxically to provide an opportunity for enjoyment in the place of anxiety and defense (see recent research by Kounios and Beeman, 2010, regarding the importance of positive affect in the readiness for insight and creative thinking). Freud wrote:

The writer softens the character of the egoistic daydreams that he offers us in the presentation of his phantasies. We give the name of an incentive bonus, or a fore-pleasure, to a yield of pleasure such as this, which is offered to us as to make possible the release of still greater pleasure arising from deeper psychological sources. In my opinion, all the aesthetic pleasure, which a creative writer affords us, has the character of a fore-pleasure of this kind, and our actual enjoyment of an imaginative work proceeds from a liberation of tensions in our minds. It may even be that not a little of this effect is due to the writer’s enabling us thenceforward to enjoy our own daydreams without self-reproach or shame.

(Freud, 1908, p. 152)

In other words Freud viewed art as a variation of the secondary process found in dreams. Unlike dreams, however, creative work involves maintaining awareness of the difference between the real and unreal, while at the same time creating an experience where the difference is partially and temporarily breached. This is the realm of art; the formal organization of the phantasies creates an aesthetic experience, in which the audience can indulge in a conscious and enjoyable experience of dream fulfillment. The piece of literature, the artwork, is simultaneously phantastic and real.

Unfortunately, Freud stops short in his discussion and does not consider the psychological nature of the “arts poetica” which he linked to the overcoming of repressions. The experience of aesthetic pleasure involves not only a release of tension but also the sustained enjoyment of a form of idealization, in which the object is over-valued and esteemed, even while it expresses a range of emotions and phantasies, from the most sublime to the most horrible. Freud never explains this process. Later, I will argue that the primary means by which the artist accomplishes this is through a special idealizing process. He expresses the Phantasy in a form that both expresses the Phantasy but also “makes it special”. In this way art creates experience that amalgamates Phantasy and idealization.

With ego psychology, the psychoanalytic emphasis began to shift to art as an activity of the ego (Kris 1952; Sachs 1942). Nonetheless, creativity continued to be linked to the dynamics of the primary process, albeit now altered by defense mechanisms. According to ego psychologists such as Freiberg and Kris, art involves a regression in the service of the ego (Kris 1952) in which primitive drive impulses in the form of fantasies are consciously channeled and organized according to the rules of social communication and culture. To them, art is primarily a product of the secondary process acting upon primary-process fantasies.

The work of the ego psychologists, most especially that of Kris, contributed an important facet to the psychoanalytic model of art – that is, that the creation of art involves a dynamic interaction between conscious and unconscious thought processes, between fantasy and reality. This is crucial, given that successful art must “work” according to conditions and terms that are radically different from those of the unconscious or of sleep. Art exists for the real world, and ego psychologists understood this.

At the same time, from the perspective of object relations theory, Melanie Klein (1929, 1930) viewed art as a function of the psychological dynamics of the depressive position. In a model later extended by Hanna Segal (1952, 1957), the Kleinians viewed the search for order and beauty as an attempt to reconstitute and preserve an internal good-object world, threatened with permanent disintegration as a result of the aggressive forces of the paranoid-schizoid position. What is important for us to note in this approach is the notion that creativity and art have a dynamic, integrative function in which the artist works to achieve an enhanced form of self-experience by means of creative activity.

On the other hand, D. W. Winnicott (1971), diverging from the Kleinian viewpoint, proposed a special relationship between the inner world of the artist and the object of his or her creation. For Winnicott, an artwork can be understood as a type of transitional object, which is experienced by the artist as a part of the self, an object invested with fantasy. Creativity arises from the fluid relationship between the fantasy life of the artist and the plastic nature of the potential artwork. Creativity occurs in the transitional or potential space between the artist’s inner fantasies and the world of objects. This is where the capacity to play is important.

Consistent with classical tradition, for Winnicott, unconscious processes (fantasizing, in this case) influence the artist’s relationship with the world, altering the formal structure of reality to express subjective processes. Unfortunately, despite the richness of Winnicott’s model, he does not differentiate between the creativity of the artist and the everyday creative engagement of an individual with his or her world. Given this limitation – although Winnicott offers us a stimulating view of human psychology – we remain disappointed by his failure to speak to the special quality found in the creation of art.

In 1980, Gilbert Rose published the first edition of his monograph The Power of Form (all quotes will be from the expanded 1992 edition), in which he offered a model of creativity as a distinct psychological process. Rose’s work is a transition from the ego psychological and object relations perspectives toward a self-psychological model of the creative process. This is due to the emphasis that Rose places on the role of narcissism in creativity. He wrote:

Unconscious remnants of the so-called omnipotent feelings of infancy can be seen to play an important role in the impulse to create. Whereas before, they were grandiose notions of the person the child thought him- or herself to be, they have become transformed into perfectionist goals to which the child aspires in order to earn self-respect. The artist endows his or her work with this ego ideal of perfection.

(p. 63)

Echoing the Kleinian model, Rose believed that the artist is seeking to recover the experience of early states of perfection in which the child feels at one with an idealized, all-powerful mother. This is not to say that creativity implies psychopathology or developmental deficit. Rather, Rose (1992) believed that:

Everyman has undergone separation from what was primordial, unitary pre-self, each of us is, so to speak, bereft of our original partner. Our imperfection, then, is our incompleteness, and seeking self-completion is the route (back) to perfection.

(p. 67) (emphasis mine)

Unlike Klein, Rose did not think that aggression played a central role in creativity. To him, the loss of perfection formed a part of individuation and the establishment of self-experience.

The artist, according to Rose, is someone who turns inward to experience the early state of fusion, and thus to “gain an increased apprehension of the nature of reality” (p. 69). This is not just a private fantasy, but also an exploration of primitive fusion states of maternal oneness and bisexuality through which the artist “reshapes reality in new forms” (p. 69). Rose stated: “The re-emergence from narcissistic fusion and the re-establishment of ego boundaries carry the possibility of altered, perhaps even innovative, arrangements of the building blocks of reality” (p. 70). He continued:

By making the work serve as a proxy, the artist can vicariously relive the primitive experiments of testing reality by repeated fusions and separations. The artwork is built up and melted down again and again, repeating second-hand the building up and melting down of psychic structure in the emergence from narcissism … In other words, the artist searches for self-completion in the work; he or she has a private dialogue with a projected part of self-mirroring, smiling, frowning, approaching, and withdrawing, until the final completion and release.

(p. 73)

Here Rose described how the artist engages in a dialectical process with the artwork, which is composed of the projected contents of the artist’s psyche. In this way, the artist engages in an act of self-creation through structure building, both internal and external. Rose seemed to be describing a dialogue in which the artist creates the object as he creates his self. However, it is not just the artist’s own self, but the universal human self-making process that is captured in the artwork.

The artwork summarizes and magnifies the process by which each of us continually tests and masters reality, relating inner and outer in repeated fusions and separations. The creative work that remains behind represents the cast of a mind “reborn” and objectified in the process of thought, feeling and action.

(pp. 77–78)

From the perspective of Self Psychology, Heinz Kohut argued for the special role of self-experience in the creative process. Kohut felt that the creative person possesses a more fluid self-structure, characterized by dynamically active, archaic modes of psychological organization. He believed that the artist’s relationship to the world was narcissistically driven and that the boundaries between self and object were less rigid:

In creative work narcissistic energies are employed which have been changed into a form to which I referred earlier as idealizing libido. The creative individual is less separated from his surroundings than the non-creative one; the “I-You” barrier is not as clearly defined. The creative individual is keenly aware of these aspects of his surroundings that are of significance to his work and he invests them with narcissistic-idealizing libido.

(1966, p. 112)

At the heart of artistic creativity, Kohut believed, the artist seeks an experience of perfection, or rather the experiencing of a lost, ideal self-state:

Creative artists may be attached to their work with the intensity of an addiction and they try to control and shape it with forces and for purposes, which belong to the narcissistically experienced world. They are attempting to re-create a perfection that formerly was directly an attribute of their own.

(1985, p. 115)

Kohut envisioned a form of psychological process that characterizes the in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 What art is
• 2 Psychoanalysis as creative art
• 3 Creative brain
• 4 Aesthetic interaction
• 5 Creative analysand
• 6 Creative analyst
• 7 Creative analysis
• 8 Postscript: Creative living
• Appendix
• References
• Index