ABSTRACT
The possibility of creativity during a session arises when both therapist and patient can use what is available to them without too much editing in the listening. The author have chosen to extensively quote from R. M. Rilke's letters because he describes so well the difficulties involved in carrying out a life engaged in creative work. His letters convey the travels from the paranoid-schizoid position and the confusion with the object to the depressive position where there is true separation from it. As compared with W. Wordsworth, a poet of the depressive position, Rilke's writings exemplify the paranoid-schizoid position. Britton is not describing Rilke as in the mode of the paranoid-schizoid position, since, in order to be able to write as Rilke did, he had to be functioning in the mode of the depressive position. The poetry of Wordsworth, Rilke, Blake, Milton and others is examined from a psychoanalytic perspective by psychoanalyst Ronald Britton in Belief and Imagination: Explorations in Psychoanalysis.
