Creativity: a new paradigm for Freudian psychoanalysis

Abstract

In psychoanalysis, that tradition is, first and foremost, Sigmund Freud's metapsychology and clinical contributions. One of Freud's fundamental endeavours was to try to free psychoanalysis and psychoanalytical theory of the threat that the accusation of suggestion could have represented for its epistemological and therapeutic significance. For Freud, the fundamental touchstone of psychoanalysis lies in the role it gives to the sexual dimension in the individual's unconscious mental life — it is one of the shibboleths which he defined as contributing to the very identity of psychoanalytical theory. Donald W. Winnicott was perfectly correct when he argued that unrestrained and overwhelming drive-related excitation is a threat to creativity, to playing, and to transitional processes. He made a highly significant comment on this when he emphasised that, having gone through the experience of the object surviving his/her destructive anger, the infant becomes capable of a whole new set of subjective processes.