ABSTRACT
Social prejudice, lack of educational opportunity, family tensions, and biological determinism, all may inhibit the realization of talent. Psychoanalysis, from the start, has sought understanding of the creative impulse, situating it within the sublimatory diversion of instinctual energy or alternative contexts. From Freud's early pathographies of Leonardo, Michelangelo, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and others to contemporary neuroaesthetic studies of the dynamic interplay of subjectivity with the neurobiology of representation, symbolization, and perception, psychoanalysis has pursued creativity's source. Clearly, thinking psychoanalytically about imagination sheds light on our understanding of creative process. Organized chronologically, the interviews sometimes reflect the kind of associative thinking that takes place in the analytic consulting room. Analytic home to Kris, Greenacre, Hans Loewald, and others for whom creativity and artistic process in their relation to child development, fantasy, and the psychoanalytic situation was a primary focus, New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (NYPSI) has long stimulated thinking in this arena.
