There will be time, there will be time,
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create
T.S.Eliot. The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Introduction
We still have much to learn about the forces of life and death that can both empower and destroy us – love and sexuality on the one hand, and out hate and murderousness on the other. Within our psyches these powerful instinctual forces meet up with a powerful, controlling moral force, clearly apparent, for example, in the Judaeo-Christian moral tradition, and more and more primitive in nature the earlier we go back in our own ontogenetic development. How do we learn to cope with these opposing forces without a dangerous loss of control on one hand, or a restrictive compliance on the other?
An integrated and creative thrust can develop in one direction when our developing capacity to think meets up with these opposed instinctual and moral forces. Many writers have emphasised the fundamental importance of play here in facilitating the opening up of transformation avenues for the unintegrated forces of rage, terror and infantile sexuality lying within us. Somewhere between the risk of living dangerously, and ‘the danger of living safely’ (Nietzsche), lies ‘the dangerous safety of play’ (Peter Blake). If we are unable to find generative avenues for transformation of these forces, a disintegrative, chaotic and/or life-threatening thrust can develop in the opposite or regressive direction, as with some psychoses or serious forms of psycho-somatic disease.
Winnicott (1974) has described the role of transitional processes in the evolution of child’s play, the importance of that play in the unfolding development of a child’s imagination, and how all this in turn opens avenues for the gradual emergence of individual creativity, not only through artistic, scientific and religious avenues of expression, but also in the enjoyment of life generally. Such creative avenues seem to involve the adaptive use of a creative imagination in exploring and enhancing the appreciation of reality, rather than having this circumscribed, in misleadingly precise terms, through repression and denial (Rose, 1992).
How can a developing individual be helped to achieve these ends?
As psychoanalysts we usually recognise at least four areas of importance here:
(1) There is the quality of early maternal holding and the maternal capacity for reverie and empathy, providing a safe and generative containment for the new-born infant. Of considerable interest here are anthropological studies suggesting that assumption of the erect posture in the evolving human species has reduced the size of the pelvis and resulted in all human babies being born prematurely. Battegay has pointed out how this provides a need for a ‘social uterus’ in the early months of life outside the womb, a quality of holding ideally provided by the arms of a mother, herself supported by father and other family members.
(2) Secondly we emphasise the soundness of an early shared parental holding, with father’s increasing significance in helping mother provide space and time for the gradual disillusionment of the child’s early infantile omnipotence (Searles, 1965).
(3) Thirdly, there is a shared parental capacity for allowing healthy and containing triangulations that can facilitate the actualising and working-through of oedipal and sibling rivalry anxieties.
(4) Fourthly, the eventual importance of this same shared parental capacity in providing a sound structure in and against which the adolescent can re-work a hormonally-intensified revival of infantile conflicts, and go on to achieve an increasing separation of a consolidating and increasingly integrated sense of individual identity. If we are to assert our own selves in a productive way we require the emergence of a such a sound sense of self, together with a capacity to engage any other person effectively. This will include being able to avoid the over-precise use of words in intellectualising ways. In referring to his own use of words, the Tasmanian author, Richard Flanagan said recently. “I mean, I make a bonfire of the bastards, if they illuminate a moment of truth”.
My own clinical experience leads me to feel increasingly that a major benefit growing out of an effective piece of individual or group analytic therapy is an increased capacity for living creatively, i.e. when the pervasive ambivalent forces common to us all have been helped to emerge in more generative, rather than in more destructive or neurotically inhibited directions.
Creativity
Some analysts, e.g. Elliot Jaques, use the term creativity as more or less synonymous with an enjoyably productive living. However Phyllis Greenacre (1959) makes a point of distinguishing between productivity and creativity, separating these out into two extremes, with a transitional range spread out between them. At one pole she puts the copied product. At the other pole she describes the created product as something which is new, original and inventive. Barron (1969) provides a definition of creativity similar to that of Greenacre, i.e. ‘The ability to bring something new into existence’.
Individuals capable of real creativity vary from those of us who may be in reasonably sound psychological health right through to those of us who may be very disturbed. For those of us with more marked psychopathology there will need to have been at least some significant beneficial influences in our early developmental histories. Some extremely creative individuals have suffered considerable early deprivation and trauma, and may manifest psychotic, perverse or psychopathic traits. However even severe symptomatology will often wane temporarily during periods of creativity, as if some symbolic transformation of destructive forces is occurring. This tends to support Joyce McDougall’s view (1995) that the part of the personality allowing all of us to create, and impelling us to keep on creating, is the healthy part. The majority of creative people, as she reminds us, are astonishingly productive.
Creativity and procreativity
Creativity and procreativity both clearly draw upon the powerful forces of desire and destruction lying within all of us. Has the ambivalent struggle involved in genuine creativity something in common with the human struggle involved in conceiving, delivering and raising children?
One is reminded here of the fundamental importance of Feder’s concept of pre-conceptive ambivalence (1982), i.e. an ambivalence towards pregnancy present in both members of a potential parental couple. He emphasises a universal repression here, seeing the universality of the infanticidal component as being matched by the universality of its denial. Rozsika Parker even suggests that ambivalence provides a woman with a sense of her independent identity :- ‘Julia Kristeva observed that motherhood makes passions circulate… I would say that it is ambivalence that makes passions circulate, as well as firming boundaries, forcing reflection, provoking both separation and unification, and thus providing a spur to individuation for mother and child.’ One is also reminded here of Winnicott’s view (1974) that the reliability of the mother-infant relationship needs to be motivated by mother’s love-hate, and not by reaction-formations.
‘The ability to bring something new into existence.’ These words inevitably bring the image of a baby into mind. Is there more than metaphor involved here? Reference is often made to somebody’s ‘fertile mind’, or to an inhibition of this creativity as ‘creative sterility’. Many successfully creative people use procreative metaphors in saying something about their experience. To quote Richard Flanagan again, ‘I feel, once I have finished a book, that I have given birth to a still-born baby’. As one teacher in a creative field remarked – ‘I feel like a mid-wife to my clients’ creative births’. Some male artists have been even able to own their awareness of how much they envy a woman’s capacity to conceive and give birth to a child. Meyer (1972) has written of the familiar experience of many artists who, upon completion of their work, feel empty and depressed, like women who suffer post-partum emptiness and melancholia.
Just as a single cell can evolve into a baby, a single cell can also develop in the opposite direction, and gradually grow into the monstrous shape of a life-threatening somatic illness such as cancer. Joyce McDougall has recently stated that little has been written about how serious somatic illness can occur towards the end of, or shortly after, a lengthy analysis, citing 5 of her own analysands over a 35-year period.
Cancer’s a funny thing…
Childless women get it,
And men when they retire
It’s as if there had to be some outlet
For their foiled creative fire
W . H. Auden. Miss Gee
The nature of the creative process
The act of creativity characteristically involves two phases :
(1) the emergence of an original or inspirational idea
(2) the hard work required to bring a created product into existence.
The original idea needs to be contained and nurtured – one can easily lose it again. As Freud said to Paula Heimann – ‘Write it down, write it down, write it down!’. Even then the enlivening effect of the original conception can be lost, leaving only a residue of written words. Perhaps one could say here that the original idea has aborted.
A deeply ambivalent struggle seems to be part of the hard work required to bring any created product into existence, i.e. to facilitate a progressive transformation of the powerful forces involved in the process. Sometimes this fails to be achieved – the original idea is aborted, or the created product destroyed, as when a painter or sculptor proceeds to smash the finished work.
In Grinberg’s view (1972), the emergence of a creative idea involves :
(1) A phase of temporary ‘disintegration’, i.e. a regressive desynthesis of relatively integrated ego functioning, uncovering the psychotic potential that lies within all of us.
(2) An innate capacity or ‘creative potentiality’ within the ego, i.e. an already existing capacity to provide time and space for any emerging psychotic processes to be contained, handled, and allowed to evolve in a creative direction, without the individual losing a connection with reality. According to Grinberg, a creative personality, free from the obstinate urge to cling to logical and orderly structures, feelings and concepts, will have the capacity to ‘forget’ what is already known and endure the frustration and anxiety of being transiently in what can seem like ‘void’, disorder and chaos. The creative potentiality is able to facilitate playful, imaginative transformations and new symbolizations that will allow the emergence of a created product. A meeting of contraries, for example, will result in a generative interaction, rather than the annihilation or repression of one by the other.
It is of interest that Gabriella Rifkind (1995), who is both artist and group analyst, describes how, as an artist, she sets a frame or boundary around her work to act as a container for the not-knowing, and the potential chaos, that precede the creation of something new. Similarly, in an analytic group, she sees a boundary created that provides sufficient safety for members to explore the familiar and cohesive before moving into a position of greater tension, unfamiliarity and potential chaos, necessary for the birth of new, creative ideas, and any resumption of growth.
Grinberg suggests that the diverse phases of the creative process should be regarded not only as ‘regression in the service of the ego’, as formulated by Kris (1952) but also as ‘primary process progression towards the ego’, the benefits of which will reach both the individual ego and the external objects, due to the transcendence of the created product, and its impact upon the external world, an impact that remains unaltered throughout time.
So primary and secondary processes are able to come together in allowing the conception of an inspirational idea and the struggling emergence of a created object. A procreative analogy in all this was recognised by Marion Milner (1989), who said that our primary and secondary processes need each other ‘like man and woman need each other.’ She added in Winnicott’s case, ‘…this was a marriage with very little impediment’.
According to Milner, some writers on art consider that the state of mind Freud described as the ‘oceanic feeling’ (a repetition of the infant’s feelings in its mother’s arms) is an essential part of the creative process. But Milner points out it is not the oceanic feeling in itself that is the important thing here but rather the oceanic feeling in cyclic oscillation with a surface mind characterised by the secondary process. She adds that this cyclic oscillation is not just passively experienced but it actively used, with the intent to make something i.e. to produce something new.
However there is much more involved here than a revival of an ‘oceanic feeling’. In McDougall’s words – ‘Perhaps we can envisage the internal universe of the creative person as something like a volcano’. McDougall proceeds to remind us of Melanie Klein’s emphasis upon the dimension of violent emotion in the primal substratum of the human psyche, and Klein’s point (1957) that creativity derives from the tumultuous relationship between infant and mother :- ‘The desire to rediscover the mother of the early days, whom one has lost actually or in one’s feelings, is also the greatest importance in creative art… Similarly the sculptor who puts life into his object of art, whether or not it represents a person, is unconsciously restoring and recreating the early loved people, whom he has in fantasy destroyed’ (McDougall, 1995).
Michaelangelo was the second of four sons born to a somewhat upper class couple. When his mother became ill soon after his birth, he was handed over to a stone-cutter and his wife, and they continued to look after him for the first decade of his life, even though his mother gave birth to two further sons kept at home. Apparently his mother continued to visit Michaelangelo from time to time. In this way he may well have had continually revived for him the experience of being separated from her and his family of origin. She died when he was 6.
Michaelangelo’s adult life was characterised by long periods of depression (the intervallo periods), and short periods of relief during which he would attack his creative sculpturing with a use of the chisel that it would evoke comments from observers.
Meyer (1972) has made several observations concerning the influence of death and grief upon individual creativity. Joseph Conrad, after working desultorily for four and a half years on his first novel Almayer’s Folly, was suddenly galvanised into finishing it in eight weeks, after the death of a devoted uncle, his only surviving relative. ‘Conrad seems to have reacted to his loss as if it could be cancelled out by an act of creation’.
The death of Samuel Johnson’s aged mother ‘acted as a spur to a creative outburst’, and the famous Rasselas was written in the nights of a single week. Meyer has demonstrated convincingly the autobiographical nature of this work, supporting the thesis that the work itself was an act of penance for Johnson’s feeling that he had abandoned his mother. Charlotte Bronte experienced a burst of creative writing in the finishing of a belated piece of work following upon the death of her sister, Ann. Bela Bartok, dying of leukaemia, was electrified into a temporary reawakening by a commission to write a piece for the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
On the other hand, a powerful reaction to early maternal deprivation may be blocked from expression and this may inhibit the creative or procreative processes.
In a recent book Joyce McDougall describes how many of her psychosomatic patients have an incomplete sense of bodily differentiation from the mother in the area of their psychosomatic pathology, together with, as yet, no developed words in which to express their emotional pain.
An example can be given of a patient who was consulted for unexplained infertility. Initial exploratory sessions revealed no evidence of any psychogenic factors. However the interesting fact emerged when her mother had died some years previously, she had been unable to cry, A short time later the patient was found to be suffering from raised blood pressure. Before initiating any medical investigation her sensitive and supportive woman doctor had asked - " Has anything significant happened in your life recently? patient began to speak of the loss of her mother, burst into tears, and wept at length for the first time, She could not find words for the feelings she was experiencing. However her raised blood pressure began to subside without any treatment being required.
The patient later disclosed that in the first weeks of her life her mother had developed a serious physical illness requiring hospitalization. The baby was taken from the mother, and placed with a friend for two months before her mother recovered and was able to take her back.
Thus a separation had occurred at a time in early infancy when psyche and some are not clearly separated out from each other and when disturbing feelings tend to be split off into bodily expression. In subsequent sessions it became possible to take up with the patient the possibility that the sudden separation occasioned by mother's death had revived in the depth of her inner being something of an originally powerful response to the first separation in early infancy, a response for which there would have been no words, or satisfactory avenues of expression, only a turmoil of primitively ambivalent feelings, revived and expressed through her body later in the form of the raised blood pressure. when she had been able to weep at length in the empathic, holding presence of her woman doctor, she had perhaps at last been able to find an avenue for expressing something of bar reaction to the original loss, as well as the more recent one, enabling her raised blood pressure to return to a normal level ?
The patient was intrigued by these possibilities, but also found it hard to think about them. As this was worked through in subsequent sessions she gradually began to emphasize the reasons why she did not want to have a baby at her stage of life, as well as feeling an increasing sadness about this, because of a persisting wish to have one. Now increasingly able to hold such ambivalent feelings dearly in consciousness, she proceeded to conceive naturally for the first time in her life. She eventually had a normal labour, was deeply gratified to hold a baby girl in her arms, and her breast milk flowed freely. She felt no need to continue her consultations.
The interesting speculation follows that a deep inner turmoil of unconscious ambivalent feelings, held at an early preverbal level, had not only provided an unconscious block to this woman's procreativity, but also held a predisposition for future life-threatening illness. The opening up of an avenue of expression for derivatives of these deep feelings rendered it possible for this patient to gain increased conscious access to her range of ambivalent feelings about having a baby, with the resulting conception that can so often occur in patients with previously unexplained infertility.
Creativity and perversion
Chasseguet-Smirgel (1985) has written a book in which she contrasts the essential differences between creativity and perversion. She is using the term perversion here as something with wider implications than what, at first sight, ‘…is merely a picturesque deviation of sexual behaviour.’ She sees perversion ‘—as a dimension of the human psyche in general, a temptation in the mind common to us all’, a ‘perverse core’ latent within each one of us, and capable of being activated under certain circumstances.
Chasseguet-Smirgel shows how perversion is based upon idealisation of instinct and how a perverse psychic structure often co-exists with idealisation of the aesthetically beautiful. As she sees it, the pervert achieves an alimentary canal-like churning-up of reality into a conglomerate or stool, e.g. the disintegration of barriers between male and female, and between the generations, as in paedophilia. The pervert is said to identify his own faecal stick with father’s envied potent penis and believe that his faecal stick is his mother’s preferred object. Perversion is thus seen primarily in violent terms as an attempted destruction of the creativity of the parental couple, with the use of anal self-sufficiency to attack or deny post-oedipal mutuality. As a delinquent teenager remarked recently after trying to murder his parents with a club – ‘Shit happens!’
According to Juliet Mitchell (1987), Chasseguet-Smirgel is saying :- ‘The pervert…is the solipsistic 2-year-old triumphant, creating from his faeces babies that no-one else can make. He looks neither before to the reciprocity of a feed at the breast nor after at the exchange of gifts at the heart of oedipality. Gender and generation differences are obliterated in favour of timeless anal omnipotence.’ However Juliet Mitchell sees this view of creativity as unnecessarily reductionistic. She says that a creative person like Oscar Wilde can look with detachment, i.e. without idealisation, at his own self-idealisation. She adds : “Heterosexual procreation may be one model from which we can construct an image of creation but it is not the only one.”
Joyce McDougall has written that a certain degree of creativity is involved even in the genesis of a perversion. As she points out, the sexual deviant may devote a mental care and effort in bringing his sexual scene to fruition that is comparable to the artist’s effortful pursuit of his vision and its actualisation. But she sees the creative work here as differing from genuine creativity (involving sublimation, and an awareness of the genital parental couple and the oedipal taboos) in that there is a lack of imaginative freedom and a reliance upon idealisation of instinct. A sexual deviation is rigidly structured. Moreover its inventor feels that to alter the pattern would be not only to risk castration but also to risk his or her sense of identity, i.e. the risk of facing a psychotic disintegration of some degree.
McDougall has also written :‘Although there are finer creations of the human spirit than perversion and psychosis, in the long run it is better to be mad than dead.’ In this she is saying that the alternative may be serious, even fatal psychosomatic disease, and that the emergence of perverse or psychotic episodes during the analytic treatment of patients with life-threatening illnesses can be a sign of progress, and presage movement towards more creative transformations of the inner destructive forces.
In her latest book, The Many Faces of Eros (1995), McDougall says observation and reflection have led her to conclude that violence is an essential element in all creative production. Apart from the force and intensity of the creative urge in itself, innovative individuals are necessarily violent to the extent that they exercise their power to impose their thought, image, dream, or nightmare on the external world.
In a recent presentation dealing with the work of Francis Bacon, Ken Heyward quotes the painter as saying :-
‘This violence of my life, the violence which I’ve lived amongst, I think it’s different to the violence in painting. When talking about the violence of paint, it’s nothing to do with the violence of war. It’s to do with an attempt to remake the violence of reality itself. And the violence of reality is not only the simple violence meant when you say a rose or something is violence, but it’s the violence also of the suggestions within the image itself which can only be conveyed through paint.’
Creativity and sexuality
McDougall spells out four fundamental factors that she sees as part of the background for any creative thought or act, and as a frequent source of creative inspiration – and its inhibition :- The medium of expression, the relationship with the public, the underlying importance of pregenital sexual drives and an integration of the bisexual wishes of infancy.
According to McDougall the medium presents itself as both an ally and an enemy. The musician will speak of both loving and hating a chosen instrument, of wanting to caress it, and wanting to attack it in an effort to master it : ‘The medium of creative expression has to be “tamed” so that the creator can impose his or her will upon it; it must translate the creator’s inner vision, sometimes evoking a transcendent feeling of union with it. At the same time, the creator must regard the medium with objectivity and feel convinced that it has the power to transmit to the outer world the message or vision or concept.’
McDougall points out that the first ‘public’ for the creator is the inner one, i.e. the inner world of significant ‘objects’ from the past, who may be experienced as hostile or supportive. Once some form of truce has been formed, then the creator is able to release the work for external publication. The relation between the creative personality and the anonymous public is a love affair that bristles with hazards and anguish for many an individual. The analysts first area of exploration concerns the nature of what is projected upon this external public – welcoming, appreciative, desirous of receiving the creative offer – or persecutory, critical, rejecting?
McDougall proceeds:- ‘The libidinal foundation of all creative expression is invariable infiltrated with pregenital drives as well as archaic aspects of sexuality, in which eroticism and aggression, love and hate, are indistinguishable from one another.’ Of the oral, anal and phallic drives, then anal component is pre-eminent. ‘The initial “creation” that the infant offers to the first caretaker is the faecal object, with all the erotic and aggressive meaning invariably associated with anal activity and faecal fantasy’. But there is always an element of uncertainty, because of the two ways in which faecal production is experienced, i.e. as a gift of great value to the other, or as a weapon used to attack and dominate the other. The spontaneous expression of these impulses and fantasies is subject to rigid control, and this impels a sublimated solution.
McDougall also points out that the infant normally identifies with both parents and desires to possess the magic powers of each of them, usually symbolised by their sexual organs. ‘To the extent that the masculine and feminine parts of every individual are well integrated and accepted, we all have the potential to be creative – to sublimate, so to speak, the impossible wish to be both sexes and to create children with both parents’ – i.e. to produce parthenogenetic infants in the form of creative productions.
Perhaps the horrific conglomerates found in Bacon’s paintings might be seen in part, at least, as created stool-infants i.e. as condensing Chasseguet-Smirgel’s gastro-intestinally churned-up stools with McDougall’s parthenogenetic infants.
Some influences favouring development of a creative potential
In his 1908 paper ‘Creative writers and day-dreaming’ Freud found a parallel between the child at play and the adult creative writer – i.e. each is creative an imaginative world of his own. Winnicott (1974) has shown us how ‘the intermediate area of experiencing’ or ‘transitional space’ i.e. the indeterminate area between inner and outer worlds. ‘…widens out into that of play, of artistic creativity and appreciation, and of religious feeling and of dreaming…”
In 1989 Lynne Murray reviewed research on infant development in the first year of life. She informed us that many researchers have noted a growing motivation in the infant for a different form of experiencing around the age of 3-5 months. Learning is already under way at this stage, involving, for example, the infant’s affective attunement to the mother, and innate capacity for amodal perception (Rayner, 1992). Mother-infant communication now ceases to be an exclusively two-part relation and instead becomes a three-part one. As the infant’s visual acuity improves, reach and grab movements start to become effective, and the infant’s interest is far more readily engaged by a nearby person or thing. The infant will now spontaneously start grabbing at the hair, nose, tongue etc. of the mother or any other interested person. Such episodes, and others initiated by the mother or mother substitute attracting the infant’s attention, gradually develop into what Trevarthen calls ‘games of the person’ in which both parent and infant take on assertive, teasing roles which may become set into play routines.
Example
Over 40 years ago I was sitting beside my wife, holding out 5-moth-old first born baby, when the little girl happened to grab a lock of my hair, and pull it sharply. My sudden sharp ‘Ow!’ caused her to freeze in instant fear, her pupils dilated, her hand still gripping my hair. I wasn’t sure what to do, but continued holding her as before, our eyes remaining locked in contact. Gradually her eyes lost their frightened expression. Time continued to pass. A new expression began to emerge in here eyes, and eventually I again felt a pull, this time a very faint one. I gave a quietly histrionic ‘Ow!’ in response. After a considerable pause, there came a sudden peal of delighted laughter from the little girl. Another pull – another ‘Ow!’, and more laughter. A moment of terror – a holding situation – and the birth of a game – something rendered possible by earlier safe holding experienced by the little girl in the arms of her mother.
This experience was in line with the events Murray describes in what Blomfield (1987) has designated as a transitional period between a destructive (ruthless) foetal parasitism and the emergence of a potentially creative baby. It seems to follow then that playful experiences in the space between infant and mother (or any other care-taking figure) can provide early opportunities for the infant to discover exciting avenues for resolving terrifying fantasies of annihilating and/or being annihilated. The importance of such a discovery is suggested by the quality of relief and joy in the laughter of an infant in the midst of the play.
There is an accumulation of evidence that much human creativity arises from the transformation of very deep, powerful early forces of feeling – chaotic mixtures or rage, envy, vengefulness, even terrors of psychotic quality, resulting from experiences of significant infantile deprivation and trauma. For the arousal of these forces to result in creative achievement, rather than just psychopathology and its symptomatic consequences, we must surely need to have the beneficial influence of at least some opportunities for containment, triangulation and play, as described above, that have survived the traumatic circumstances. As McDougall has pointed out, we require a surviving healthy part of the ego to bring about creative transformations of the pathological forces developing within us.
Some thoughts about the ‘Controversial Discussions’
It seems clear that Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein were originally a potentially generative couple, i.e. that in some ways they were ideally suited to provide an integration of findings about early childhood development, Freud with his illuminating findings about the Oedipus Complex, and the stages of psychosexual development, and Klein with her exploration of the obscure pregenital levels of early infantile mental life. Further it seems that both Freud and Klein were genuinely experiencing an need for something the other could provide, despite all the differences and disputes subsequently developing between the Freudian (‘Viennese’) and Kleinian (London) schools.
Melanie Klein had married and began raising children in Budapest in her mid-30’s, when, as Money-Kyrle puts it (1975): ‘She had come upon a book by Freud and felt that she recognised in it something she had always vaguely been looking for’. This book was The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). Klein proceeded to go into analysis with Ferenczi, and started preparing for her life’s work. In the early years of her work, at least, Klein always felt that her developing theories were in harmony with Freud’s idea, i.e. the implication of a generative interaction.
In his paper ‘Female sexuality’ (1931), Freud, in referring to the early pre-oedipal phase in girls, writes :- ‘Everything in the sphere of this first attachment to the mother seemed to me so difficult to grasp in analysis’. After suggesting that this may have been because his female analysands were able to cling to a father transference towards him as a refuge from their earlier, deeper difficulties, Freud proceeds :- ‘It does appear that women analysts – as for instance, Jeanne Lampl de Groot and Helen Deutsch – have been able to perceive these facts more easily and clearly because they were helped in dealing with those under their treatment by the transference to a suitable mother-substitute’. We can see here how the new ideas beginning to emerge in Freud’s mind were resonating with Klein’s work. He speaks of his developing realisation, for example, of how the little girl’s very early dependence upon the mother can lead to ‘…the surprising, yet regular fear of being killed (? Devoured) by the mother’. Freud suggests that the frustrations implicit in child-rearing evoke hostility and fear in the child, adding that ‘-the mechanism of projection is favoured by the early age of the child’s psychical organisation’.
So here, initially at least, we have Klein turning to the man, and Freud turning to the woman – a generative moment? A time to murder and create?
Riccardo Steiner and Pearl King have given us absorbing accounts of the extraordinary complexity of factors that grew to involve these two pioneers and the schools gathering around them, factors lying behind the extreme hostility that emerged between the Viennese School, with its steadily developing Freudian traditions, and the Kleinian School, centred in London. We are also very grateful to Marcus Whelan and John McLean for providing us with a further series of absorbing tape-recorded seminars on these Discussions.
The growing complexity of these violent factors involved theoretical differences, socio-cultural and language differences between the European centres and London, the gathering clouds of likely war between Germany and Britain, relatively uncontained group forces, and even the intrusion of family triangulations e.g. between Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, and between Klein, Glover and Melanie’s daughter Melitta, and, eventually, even war-time horrors, such as bombs falling on London during the Controversial Discussions ! We can only pause and feel respect for how difficult it must have been to understand and work productively with all this.
However the British Psychoanalytical Society was able to survive it all, and even gain in strength and respect in the process. Clifford Yorke sees this as ‘-the transformation of the Society into an organisation that could accommodate the irreconcilable and still carry on business as a functioning unit’. Praising the contributions of several speakers to the Controversial Discussions (1943-44), Roy Schafer goes on to say : ‘. . . the tradition was being established then and there in the Institute of maintaining individuality within group solidarity, whatever the doctrinal differences within the group at large’ (my italics).
When one considers all this, it does seem that there were at least two of the facilitatory factors discussed earlier operating here :-
Firstly there was a quality of containment provided by the British Institute, especially by certain women analysts, such as Ella Freeman Sharpe, Sylvia Payne, Marjorie Brierley and Susan Isaacs, but also by Ernest Jones and others. This allowed contrary positions (involving much force of feeling) to co-exist throughout this difficult period, with some lucid expositions of these same positions by analysts such as Ella Freeman Sharpe.
Secondly, almost from the start, there was an increasingly mature triangulation of groups, i.e. the Freud Group, the Klein Group and the Middle Group, later to become the Independent Group.
Such containment and triangulation must surely have contributed to a contextual capacity that enabled creative transformations to emerge out of all the acrimony, perhaps facilitating, for example, the conceptions and ultimately creative productions of people like Bion, Winnicott, Milner, Klauber, Tustin and others.
After exploring and writing at length about these matters, Pearl King and Riccardo finally got together to produce their volume on the Controversial Discussions. In this final act of the story, were they symbolising the generative power of The Couple? Perhaps this applies to Marcus and John also.
Some thoughts about psychoanalysis and creativity
What can we hope our patients will achieve as a result of years spent on the analytic couch?
I am moved whenever I think of what Winnicott wrote about Marion Milner’s work with a schizophrenic woman patient in his foreword to her book The Hands of the Living God (1969) :- ‘I have been fortunate in that I have been one of those who have known both Marion Milner and the patient over a period of decades, and I have watched both of them with amazement as they let time pass by while a process tending towards wholeness or health was taking its own time to be realised’.
What is required for us to be able to help our analysands in such as creative direction, as contrasted with analytic engagements that become stuck, as in forms of chronic resistance or, even worse, in a client’s dutiful compliance with the ideas of the analyst? Well, as indicated by Winnicott, there has to be, first and foremost, a sound and reliable containment, and a sufficient passage of time. What does reliability mean here? Apart from the need to be good-enough in the Winnicottian sense, it is first and foremost the capacity to survive, come what may in the way of disturbing responses, feelings and behaviour in the treated person come what may in the way of responses, feelings and mistakes on the part of the analyst. It is not possible to overstate the central importance of this requirement, which is one that can be sorely tested each day in our work. The analyst must be able to survive every development and still be there for the patient or client, no matter how attacked, no matter how demandingly loved, no matter how difficult the analyst may find it is to think, at least for a while, and perhaps not until after the session.
In these and other ways the analyst needs to provide a space that can allow the actualising of the powerful ambivalence that always exists, rather than have this remain inhibited, or have it emerge in destructive ways. A difficulty here, for all of us, is the question of how to understand and manage our own angry or critical feelings towards some analysands, particularly those with intellectualising and manic defence ways of warding off persecutory anxiety. There is firstly the ever-present task of discovering whether this difficulty arises as our own inner problem, or is the result of some subtle avenue of communication from the patient, or some combination of both. There are many occasions on which, to my embarrassment, a critical or judgmental tone has been recognisable in my comment or interpretation. One has to accept this when it happens. A punitive or moralistic response to an analysand is always unhelpful, of course. If such occurs, the analyst must be able to reflect about it and try to understand it in the total context of the analytic engagement. This is not an occasion for anguished apology, but it is an occasion for accepting the analysand’s complaint as having a factual basis i.e. as grist for the mill for a continuing reflective analysis. Anger in the analyst is not necessarily a problem at all, as long as we can own its existence and retain our curiosity as to what is going on. The absence of anger in the analyst must always be a problem.
All this, of course, is clearly reminiscent of what is necessary if initially the mother, and then the parents together, are to be good-enough providers for the needs of a developing infant and child. Scharff describes how the infant’s sense of basic trust depends on the ‘unfailing reliability and accessibility of attachment figures’. Winnicott points out that early playing in the space between mother and infant is something that can only take place in a relationship found to be reliable.
The emergence of genuine aliveness and spontaneity, and a sense that life is worth living, has to be distinguished from a manic defensiveness, which superficially might appear similar, but which is really brittle, and unconsciously aimed at controlling the self and the other. One of the interesting possibilities, whenever there is sound containment, good listening and plenty of time for interaction, is the emergence of a spontaneous moment of generative humour in analysis, paralleling the spontaneous emergence of play in the infant-parent situation. The spontaneity here is the important thing, and I think it can have a mutative influence upon the course of analysis. But a deliberate use of humour, whether by analysand or analyst, is often counter-productive, being more likely to have an unconscious sadistic motive, or a defensive controlling function, as in manic defence ‘humour’. All these things may be lost and regained many times in the course of an analysis, of course, before they can gradually become more integrated and consolidated in a lasting resumption of personal growth.
Finally one of the ever-present dangers for all of us here is that of being drawn into becoming a disciple of some idealised figure in the theoretical field, and proceeding to use his or her language in an authoritarian or dogmatic manner. We have to retain out capacity to reflect upon matters in our won spontaneous language, and that of our analysands. If our analysands, assisted by the setting we provide and by our receptive listening and guidance, can discover something for themselves, gain access to their own creative fire, and struggle to express this in their own imagery and language, it will mean much more to their unfolding growth and development than most of what we interpret from our theoretical standpoints.
DIAGRAM: PRIMARY FORCES OF LOVE AND HATE
