PSYCHIC REALITY AND CREATIVITY

摘要

The Chairman opened the meeting by asking the general question of whether psychoanalysis provides a good paradigm for understanding creative processes. He then briefly introduced the four panellists and invited Ana Maria Andrade de Azevedo to read her presentation. With reference to a quotation from Herbert Read, Andrade de Azevedo, the first panellist, wondered whether we should consider Freud's proposition to make conscious what is unconscious as the goal not only of psychoanalysis, but also of art. She saw the proximity between art and psychoanalysis in terms of form, that is, 'psychoanalysis regarded as a performance in which knowledge is let loose'. In this sense, she considered psychoanalysis, as we move into the twenty-first century, as belonging to modernity, as a twentieth-century art of multiple languages; a method that 'seeks to make available for psychic representation what had hitherto been only anxiety, pain, nameless terror'. Its object, according to Andrade de Azevedo, 'has to do with the conquering and enlarging of areas of sensitivity, in short, to the area of subjectivity that constitutes the nucleus of what is called psychic reality'; this, she added, is always a creative act, as psychic reality is unknowable, unreachable and unthinkable unless through a process of representation which, by approximation and transformation, can attain some form of symbolic expression.