The creative process and the narcissistic personality disorder

This paper describes the emergence of the creative process during the psychoanalysis of a patient suffering from a narcissistic personality disorder. Infantile history revealed an unending series of failures in the maternal holding environment to which the patient had reacted by withdrawal into fantasy, apathy, and hypochondriasis. The transference material made affective reconstructions of early life possible, and a creative communication was initiated. The newly liberated creative capacity permitted an important sublimatory release for the blocking which had hitherto threatened the patient' emotional health. As infantile fantasies were reexamined and their role as a reaction against threatening experience was understood, the creative arrest was slowly lifted. By creation of artifacts concerned with distorted scoptophiliac derivatives, the patient brought into consciousness material which reflected a broadening of his perceptual field.