ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the engagement with psychic conflicts via artistic activity and the structural similarities between the therapeutic and artistic approach to such problems. Ever since its origins in the work of Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis has repeatedly won decisive insights from the observation of the artistic approach to human conflicts. The chapter looks at several examples of the ways in which psychic crises and conflicts can be coped with by means of artistic creativity. The relationship to what psychoanalysts call “internal objects” can be portrayed more graphically by artists than by scientists. In R. M. Rilke’s poem, the intra-psychic shaping and structuring is condensed in the phrase “when a happy thing falls”. The reference is to language, communication, and love, but at the same time fulfilment and disappointment, presence and absence, the realization of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “die and become”.
