Psychoanalysis and creative living.

Abstract

Psychoanalysis is ambivalent about creativity and its own creative potential. On the one hand, psychoanalysis offers enormous resources for elucidating obstacles to creativity, that way of living, making and relating to self and others that is fresh, vital, unpredictable and open to feedback and evolution. On the other hand, when we analysts know too much beforehand about what a work of art really means or the fundamental and singular motives of creativity, then psychoanalysis unconsciously partakes of a perverse scenario in which the work of art serves as merely a means to the author's ends and is psychologically colonized. When psychoanalysis is The Discipline That Knows, then art has nothing new to teach psychoanalysts and our field is impoverished. "Psychoanalysis and Creative Living" attempts to elucidate how psychoanalysis could work through this tension between its creative and perverse possibilities and foster creative living.