ABSTRACT
Arising from the fact that his method of analysing neurotics (‘free-association’) imposed its own demand that patients’ dreams should be analysed, Sigmund Freud was forced to take a professional interest in the creative processes. To begin with, his interest arose from the dream images: he had to devise a method of interpreting these according to some standard procedure. 1 This involved an understanding of the different ‘mechanisms’ by which the raw materials of everyday life are converted into a more or less coherent pattern (the manifest dream content). The creative process, especially in painting, sculpture and the other visual arts, in literature, as well as in jokes, was discovered by him to be closely related to creativity in dreams. 2 Due to his highly-developed tendency to consider every question in a universal context, he had very quickly come to consider creativity as a general problem. 3 He was interested in how this function might be related to the unconscious processes which he claimed to find underlying neurotic symptoms.
