ABSTRACT
Elliott Jaques proposed that pre-mid-life creativity tends to be a ‘hot-from-the-fire’ creativity, being intense, spontaneous, and emerging, as it were, ‘ready-made’. But the artist who is in the post-mid-life phase tends towards what Jaques calls ‘sculpted creativity’. The very qualities that make the negotiations of the mid-life crisis possible are the ones that are essential to the creative process. Jacques argues that early adult idealism is built upon the use of unconscious denial and manic defences against two features of human life: the inevitability of eventual death and the existence of hate and destructive impulses in each person. Carl Gustav Jung has declared that the integration of the personality involves above all the preparation for death as a purposeful end. Thus the authors driven to the conclusion that, just like ageing, so creating demands the presence of the development of particular capacities, of which trust and the confrontation with the fact of death are the most important.
