ABSTRACT
The work of Melanie Klein has thrown more light on the problem of the creative impulse and sublimation, and has provided a new stimulus to analytical writers on art. The 'depressive position,' as described by Melanie Klein, is reached by the infant when he recognizes his mother and other people, and among them his father, as real persons. In her paper 'Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States', Melanie Klein has shown how mourning in grown-up life is a reliving of the early depressive anxieties. Paula Heimann described this example of an acute impairment of an already established sublimation. Creating a work of art is a psychic equivalent of pro-creation. It is a genital bisexual activity necessitating a good identification with the father who gives, and the mother who receives and bears, the child. A severe chronic hypochondriac, she suffered from frequent depersonalization and endless phobias, among them food phobias leading at times to almost complete anorexia.
