ABSTRACT
In the mid-century, there had been a bifurcation in psychoanalytic thinking that might be represented by the difference between two notions of disruption and destructiveness. Melanie Klein and those under her influence saw the underlying scenario within mental life as constituted by the fantasies of aggression towards the loved maternal figure and the struggle to escape the remorse that this produced. In the same period a divergent position emerged. Winnicott, although he did not write directly about aesthetics or art, did write about the mental creativity that he assumed the arts exemplified. Marion Milner was in effect responding to Klein and her followers when she wrote: “Certainly for the analyst, in certain stages in analysing an artist, the importance of his work of art may be the lost object that the work recreates.
