ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates the creative use of activity to deal with developmental challenges, but also how dependent that creativity can be on a primary relationship in the person's life. For the young photographer, his creative ability to stop time mitigated his serious potential for catastrophic reaction to the loss of his mother and the dangerous possibility that he might turn permanently away from the reality of such a depleted world. Marion Milner captures the oppressiveness and the reassurances of conscious logic and preconceived ideas when it comes to creativity. Milner discovers, in first-hand ways that come through with the authenticity and freshness of a person speaking to herself, some of the parallels between the painter and the analytic patient. The patient felt that her teachers had never listened to her and recalled how her peers had teased her as "spacey". The chapter reveals that part of her difficulty might be thought of as a disturbance in the capacity for reverie.
