Abstract
Famously, Freud asserted that the goal of psychoanalysis is to allow patients to love and work unimpeded by the effects of neurotic suffering and its consequent restrictions. A life of common unhappiness was, to him, a desirable outcome. And that may indeed be the case for many; however, analysts have more recently had higher expectations. Some have promoted the notion of increased capacity for creativity and creative living as the desirable analytic objective. From this perspective, effective treatment is associated with a fundamental change in the patient’s relationship with both inner and outer worlds, involving the emergence of new and surprising meanings and experiences. Among those promoting creative analysis is Hector Juan Fiorini. In his new book, The Creating Psyche: Theory and Practice of Tertiary Processes, Fiorini, a psychoanalyst and professor of psychology at Buenos Aires University, elaborates Winnicott’s ideas of potential space and the “area of cultural development” (1971) and examines the emergence of the conditions for creativity in the clash between the “unformed and empty” primary processes and the “structured, symbolizing” secondary processes. Fiorini posits tertiary processes, neither formal nor formless, in which new organizations, new experiences, can emerge. I will consider here the implications of this idea for artistic creativity and, most important, for the creative potential of analytic treatment. In pursuing this end, I will not do justice to the rich complexity of Fiorini’s book. Although his writing style is often overwrought, perhaps overly poetical for a psychoanalytic text, it is worth the trouble to read him carefully and appreciate the aesthetic attitude at the heart of his philosophy of living and creating. At the very least, his rich store of quotes and references is well worth the struggle of engaging and making sense of the book. Perhaps reading Fiorini is an example of his thesis, a provocation, a taste of chaos, and hopefully the emergence of new ideas and approaches to analysis, art, and life. But first, by way of background, I will briefly touch on the notion of creativity and creative analysis in Winnicott’s writings.
Winnicott (1971) revealed the creativity that potentially is part of all human experience. In particular he showed how inner fantasy and outer “reality” enter into relation within a psychological zone he called potential space, which is transitional between subjective and objective realities. He demonstrated how the real mother, receiving and responding to the spontaneous gestures and projections of her child, allows the child to experience a mix-up between her real being and the child’s dreams and longings. Over time, if the mother remains confidently suspended and resonant, the child comes to take for granted the relaxed flow of influence between self and world. There is a mutual ongoing enrichment of the child’s experience of self and self-in-relationship. In the space between, the mind intermingles with the world, and something new crystallizes. The unexpected becomes as natural as a dream and as real as stone. Creative living is taken for granted, like breathing, sustaining life.
The artist enters into relationship with a reality of his or her own creation. The art work is subjectivity made objective, psychological experience made real. The subjective object that Winnicott described becomes subject to the artist’s skillful ability to change it. The object is made into a more precise, more articulate, more affecting expression of the artist’s aesthetic imaginings. It is worked, reworked, destroyed, rebuilt, refined, yes even perfected, until he or she feels that it is “just right.” This process may even occur at the artist’s expense—the artist at work cares for nothing but the artwork, and he or she will sacrifice what is necessary to “get it right.” Because of this, art is not inherently therapeutic. It may feel good, the artist may feel satisfied and experience heightened self-esteem, but nothing is changed within the artist’s self-experience. He may be just as neurotic and miserable in the end as he was when he started. But—the art work was done right and it is good. That is all that matters.
By contrast, psychoanalysis evokes an objectification of the self, a subjective object, the transference. In this way a potential space is created for the analyst and analysand to work on the self, making self-experience itself the object of creative effort. What in another context might have been the work of art becomes the analysand’s self, the object of shared creative analytic work. The analyst offers his capacity to play in this potential space, to interpenetrate and engage the analysand, offering his creative capacities to help reconfigure, elaborate, and refine the analysand’s self. Most important, this process stimulates the analysand’s openness to the unpredictability of potential experiencing, allowing “not-me elements” to enter into and become part of self-structure. Old restrictions and self-protections are let go, dismantled, and a new, flexible interchange between self and world is enabled.
What are the processes within the potential space that lead to creation? Winnicott believed that aggression, the urge to destroy the object, creates the conditions for the experience of the object’s survival and “discovery/creation.” In The Creating Psyche Fiorini takes a more complex view, suggesting that the creative subject seeks not to destroy the object or the self but to disrupt the forms and assumptions that imprison them both and thereby squelch the creative drive. He argues that the mind is driven by the need to escape the threat of imprisonment within a world of accepted forms. He postulates a “force in the creating psyche that works against the threat of capture”; he believes that this “force acts like a drive, leading to the dismantling of established forms in order to move the psyche into new spaces, spaces of the unknown” (p. 26). The resulting struggle between the parts of the psyche that cling to the familiar, structured, and safe and those parts that seek disruption, disorganization, and chaos is characterized by both insistence and resistance, as well as by the distress and fascination of freedom. The creating psyche is one that ventures into the abyss of chaos, that contains all possible forms, assembling and disassembling, appearing and disappearing, a state in which Fiorini believes “the impossible” and “the possible” coexist in dialectic tension. Another aspect of these tertiary processes is “narcissism in transit,” meaning that the creating subject identifies with the creative process itself and is “willing to dynamite all identifications” (p. 42). There is a horror at being captured by identity. The subject seeks the “space of being possible” and may seek to exist (or not exist) at the boundaries where things come together (p. 45). However, many people undergoing this experience of chaos and disruption will experience vertigo, the fear of collapsing into the abyss of nothingness: hence the ever present tendency to retreat from creative opportunities and cling to the known and familiar, the given.
Many anxieties tempt the subject to escape, to panic, to despair, or to control by traveling familiar roads to prevent the process from unfolding its potential for radical novelty. Psychopathology may take over and sidetrack the process, acting as old attractors that may arrest the process and offer it old clothes and false paths (p. 166).
Normally the belief in “absolutisms” (what Fiorini views as givens, established forms and identifications) allows people to experience their world as safe, secure, and predictable. However, according to Fiorini these assumptions are just the kind of traps that confine the creative subject. On the other hand, the traumatic shattering of protective absolutisms can cripple the potential for creative living. In Trauma and Human Existence, Stolorow (2007) writes: Emotional trauma shatters absolutisms, a catastrophic loss of innocence that permanently alters one’s sense of being-in-the-world. Massive deconstruction of the absolutisms of everyday life exposes the inescapable contingency of existence on a universe that is random and unpredictable and in which no safety or continuity of being can be assured. . . . an anquished sense of estrangement and solitude takes hold [p. 16].
The traumatized psyche (as opposed to the creating psyche) is plunged into the abyss, the void within which meaning is destroyed but then transformed, not into something useful and new, but into a crippling awareness of vulnerability that necessitates emergency measures to find and/or construct safety. Trauma may at times be an opportunity for creative living, but more often than not, at least for a time, flexibility, openness, and playfulness are foreclosed and replaced by panic or rigid self-protectiveness. It is not so much what actually happened, but the resulting process. The traumatized subject shuns creative responses, clamping down on experience, fortifying the self, which may become reified and locked into a mask of fear.
For Fiorini, creative living means the constant refusal to settle for established forms and given identities. It may even mean resisting the normal tendency to seek stability and assurance in a cohesive sense of self or social role. Creative living eschews identifications and cultivates flexible and responsive self-experience. It does not mean living in a state of chaos or nothingness, but it does mean being able not only to tolerate the experience of chaos, but to work with it, to explore chaos, to transform objects and self into new forms, to give order and then destroy it again and again. For Fiorini old distinctions, time-honored by psychoanalysts, between conscious and unconscious, feeling and words, analyst and patient, past, present, and future, are allowed to be collapsed, disassembled, and then reassembled in new forms to suit the special nature of each analytic relationship and process.
In clinical practice chaos becomes visibly manifest in crises . . . with unexpected changes which paralyze and disorient. An opportunity to gestate new answers may potentially emerge, a risk of greater damage and loss is experienced above all else. It will have to be endured [Fiorini, pp. 165–166].
The challenge for the analyst is to avoid interfering in the process, which might foreclose the opportunity for a creative response. “Preserving contact with the self-organizing possibilities of unstable chaotic systems” (p. 165), the analyst attends to the present moment, the patient’s experience in the midst of crisis. This sustained innocence, combined with alertness, helps the analyst not get in the way, but it also prepares him or her to observe new directions and support the emergence of the patient’s creative response. Ultimately, if the patient is not to remain in a state of panic and chaos (a noncreative place), a selection process must be engaged in whereby the chaos is given meaning, and new, clearer, differentiable forms crystallize out of the fragments. This is the heart of creativity to Fiorini: the crisis of chaos, accompanied with disruption and deidentification, creates an opportunity for a creative response in which new psychological forms and meanings are developed, soon to be destroyed and reconfigured in an ongoing, evolving living system. This also is the essence of creative analysis, as meaning is co-constructed, disrupted, and restored in a process that frees the patient from a self-protective prison of beliefs and behaviors, eventually opening the psyche to the possibilities of creative living.
There are many forms of psychotherapy that are legitimate and helpful to people. Most of them are of a supportive nature; others are remedial and/or rehabilitative. They offer an opportunity for improvement in self-feeling and in the quality of the patient’s social, family, and work life. They are not primarily creative, and are not intended to be. If they increase the creative potential of the patient, that is an indirect benefit, not fundamental to the treatment itself. By contrast, creativity is at the heart of the psychoanalytic process; it is perhaps its defining quality. I don’t mean this in terms of any particular content or treatment procedure; rather, it is the way psychoanalysis creates the conditions for the opening up of psychological life and the restoration of people’s inherent capacities for creative living. How does anything truly new emerge out of the clinical process? What happens in analytic treatment that helps patients transcend the repetitive and self-defeating strictures of their unique psychopathology? What are the conditions from which potentials and possibilities emerge out of pain, frustration, and fear?
Fiorini’s notion of the creating psyche suggests that within any person, even the most stuck and miserable, lies the potential to risk something new, an urge, even drive, to confront chaos and wrest meaning from nothingness. He believes that under the proper conditions, with the active assistance and support of the right person (the analyst), crisis can be endured and, most important, worked with. Psychoanalysis, with its powerful blend of passionate engagement, empathy, abstinence, and thoughtful reflection, creates the conditions for transformation, a sustained experience of disruption, crisis, and reorganization that does not necessitate an emergency response of shutting down, foreclosing, and walling oneself off from life. Nor does analysis offer an easy way out, or a predetermined method or philosophy that reassures and provides a particular meaning as an end in itself. Fiorini’s notion of the creating psyche encourages the analyst to recognize the uniqueness of each analytic process and to be exquisitely sensitive to his or her impact on the patient and, most important, the way the analyst can facilitate or block the creative processes set in motion by the psychoanalytic situation.