Artistic process, dream process, and psychoanalytic process: Fairbairnian links

Abstract

The common factor between art, dream, and psychoanalysis is, therefore, the possibility and the need for the creation of conditions favourable for the emergence, acceptance, and elaboration of a creative vortex. The creation of an internal creative state, endowed with a specific "surplus-value" propitiates the transmutation of the subject's innermost intimacy into a valuable object of art. One can view art as the result of a long, painful, and complex intentional psychic work, comparable to a process of "impregnation, gestation, and childbirth". Every artistic object necessarily has an aesthetic and a dramatic dimension—these are the dimensions that the public is looking for, these are the dimensions that the author has to reveal at a superlative level. The artistic labour or artistic process uses specific expressive techniques, to transform internal representations pregnant with artistic potential, resulting from particular cycles of disturbance/turbulence/psychic re-equilibrium of the author into external artistic objects.