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The creative process and the narcissistic personality disorder
International Journal of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy
|January 1, 1980
Summary
Psychoanalysis helped a patient with narcissistic personality disorder unlock their creative process. Understanding early life experiences and fantasies resolved creative blocks, improving emotional health.
Area of Science:
- Psychology
- Psychoanalysis
- Psychiatry
Background:
- Focuses on psychoanalysis of a patient with narcissistic personality disorder.
- Explores the emergence of the creative process in a clinical setting.
- Highlights the impact of early life experiences and maternal holding environment failures.
Observation:
- Patient exhibited withdrawal, apathy, and hypochondriasis due to early life failures.
- Transference facilitated affective reconstructions and initiated creative communication.
- Newly liberated creative capacity led to sublimatory release.
Findings:
- Creative arrest was lifted through reexamination of infantile fantasies.
- Understanding fantasies as reactions to threatening experiences was key.
- Creation of artifacts related to scoptophiliac derivatives broadened perceptual field.
Implications:
- Demonstrates psychoanalysis as a pathway to resolving creative blocks.
- Suggests a link between early developmental failures and creative inhibition.
- Highlights the therapeutic potential of creative expression in narcissistic personality disorder.