ABSTRACT
This case illustrates how the grandiose self in the artist can infect and invade the capacity to create and paralyze the entire creative process.
A middle-aged psychologist came to treatment because he had a great desire to become a writer. Writing meant everything to him. But whenever he was around other writers, especially successful ones, he would go into an emotional paralysis. His envy of other writers caused him enormous anguish, grief, suffering, and psychological torment. At an interpersonal level, he could never find the “right” women because none of them were “good enough” to meet and match his strong internal superego demands. While bridging his feelings of externalized envy into the transference relationship with the analyst, he not only denied his envy but totally denigrated the analyst and her own writings.
