A dialectical view of creativity

This paper draws into alignment two time-honored psychoanalytic concepts which are addressed in diametrically different ways to the question of human origins. These are the family romance and the primal scene. Traditionally these terms have not been seen as related to each other, and while properly understood as opposites they may also be seen as complementary. Creativity offers the ideal area for certain connections to be examined. As a revision of origins by means of casting oneself as an orphan and adding another set of lofty , Olympian -style parents, the family romance also revises for the individual the critical sexual act which brought him into existence, the primal scene. It is this act of our animal heritage, from which the child is the excluded party, that also disturbingly reveals the parents in their necessarily lowly actions . Thus Freud's three-part formula can be invoked and implemented: the painful reality from which the artist turns is preeminently a primal scene; the fantasy ( daydream ) of choice to which he turns is the family romance . By working through certain accompanying, often cultural illusions, the artist finds his way back to reality, which often amounts to a corrected apprehension of the Primal Scene , archetypally the Sphinx 's riddle, the answer to which is adult sexuality and an important step toward ego-identity. Between the subjective pole of the family romance and the objective pole of the primal scene the artist's work develops. Properly specified, the two concepts serve as important organizers and regulators of creativity. In order to place creativity within a cultural context, I have examined two areas beyond the perimeters of art. Both in the psychotic condition of Schreber and in the tribal condition of the Dogon , the family romance and the primal scene exist in overlapping or undifferentiated states. I have hypothesized that in no small part the evolution of culture depends on mankind's understanding himself by learning to distinguish between supernatural and natural explanations of origins. The individual also faces the task of sorting out subjective and fanciful notions of his origin from objective and perceptual accounts. In this process he may wander afield and end up concocting his own personal mythology. The artist concentrates the subjective and objective aspects of origins around the poles of the family romance and the primal scene . In this he is not unique. But he draws on mythic and cultural traditions in such imaginative ways as to represent his fantasies indirectly and in such symbolic modes as can be most widely shared.