ABSTRACT
This chapter explores an idea that when creativity has been stifled for a long time it may first start again in a distorted form like a blade of grass in a desert at first growing sideways, and in analysis this needs not to be disparaged. It considers this in conjunction with the independent tradition of being the analyst whom the patient needs rather than always interpreting with a focus on the negative transference. The chapter illustrates with vignettes from child, adolescent, and adult patients all de-identified or composited, describes how female patients made a creative use of creativity and how creativity is sometimes co created as a female analyst with a male patient. Creativity bubbles out of children in their play and imagination, beginning, D. W. Winnicott suggested, in mutual gaze at the breast, with a mother allowing her baby the sense of creating the milk, and to trust their capacity to create.
