ABSTRACT
In his paper, Dr Jerome Oremland distinguishes between creativity and talent: creativity having to do with originality and talent being a highly developed skill. This distinction enables him to discriminate between truly creative acts and what he calls "compromised creativity", which involves the embellishment of someone else's product, or highly skilled derivative work. Oremland reminds us that P. Greenacre, E. H. Erikson, E. Kris and others have concluded that creative people possess a special kind of mental functioning that is not necessarily neurotic and/or narcissistic. Every creative person has periods of untethered creativity and other periods of difficulty that lead to compromised, derivative work. The confusion in psychoanalysis regarding the origins and psycho-dynamics of creativity stems from the fact that most psychoanalytic studies of creativity are of artistic content rather than of the artist's process.
