ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author considers some of the creative characteristics that two enterprises hold in common for both participants. In speaking of creativity, the author has in mind both individual originality and the ordinary inventiveness which the author sees as fundamental to being alive, and the specialized creativity the people associate with art. Having acknowledged innate sources of creativity, the author considers how this creative capacity develops under the influence of both internal and external conditions, including now the growing need to consider the object, and to communicate. Pleasure is an important component of creativity. If the creative impulse is not extraordinary, but fundamental, ubiquitous, and essential to being alive, then there is something that resembles the artist both in the patient and in the therapist, and traces of the artistic process in the interpersonal encounter of the therapeutic session. Both the dream, and the way the author conveyed the dream, were indicative of the style of the patient.
