Panel IV:
Achieving Individuality Through Creativity and Leadership: Biographical Studies of Selected Subjects

The panel I moderated and chaired began with an example of individual creativity - a short film on Alexander Calder, called "Calder's Circus." It served both as introduction and shared experience. The panelists, Ramon Riera, Barbara Feld, and Charles Strozier then presented their respective biographical studies of individual creators who labored in different domains: Salvador Dali, the Surrealist painter and sculptor, who lived into his 80's and died in 1989; Emily Bronte, the poet and novelist who died at age 30 in 1848; and Heinz Kohut, the psychoanalyst and contemporary of Dali, who died at age 68 in 1981.

I noted that questions about the creative individual abound and asked if we can posit commonalities or specific constellations that promote creativity in an individual's development. Are there special conditions pertaining to one's birth, special sensitivities or family relationships that are more likely to spur individual creativity? Psychoanalytic researchers have suggested that a number of factors may be widely shared among creative individuals such as the traumatic loss of parents or siblings, and experiences of physical or psychic pain. These were amply illustrated in the panel's biographical studies.

Riera on Dali

By means of psychoanalytic theory, paintings, and writings Riera focused (dare I say, riveted) our attention on the elusive, flamboyant artist, Salvador Dali, and his struggle for emotional survival through creativity. Riera helped us organize our experience of Dali and his art with respect to four intersubjective contexts: his childhood; Freud's theories, which were felt to be a legitimization of his polymorphous sexuality; his "treatment" with Pierre Roumeguere, which addressed the centrality of his brother's death and the idea that, to his parents, he was the dead brother come to life; and, lastly, the theme of personal annihilation of his emotions by his invalidating caregivers.

A critical event that occurred before Dali was born seems to have been the death of his older brother at 21 months. The fact that Dali was given the name of his dead brother, although culturally not uncommon, seems to have been a pivotal early trauma that reverberated in violent, destructive, decaying, sexually perverse, reality-bending images in his art. According to Riera, the emotional configuration of his parents' unresolved mourning, their depression, and diminished ability to enjoy their son was deeply, if unconsciously, felt by Dali. His family lived in a world of secrets and traumatic losses punctuated by his grandfather's suicide and his mother's precipitous death from cancer when Dali was 17 years old. Dali's experience of death is inextricably linked to sensations of aliveness in the midst of decay and putrefaction. Dali says of his odd experience of being alive, "From the moment that I became aware of things, I was absent from myself and I felt constantly obliged to verify if in reality I was actually in the world." In his paintings, the truest expression of Dali's inner experience of his world emerges, symbolically representing the sense of strangeness, terror, obsession with masturbation and potency, and fear of female sexuality.

Feld on Bronte

As Barbara Feld insightfully demonstrated, Emily Bronte's history is pervaded by the repetition and amplification of early, sustained losses and fantasies of reunion. At age 3, she lost her mother to ovarian cancer; at age 6 she lost her two older sisters to tuberculosis while they were all away at school, which appears to have been a harsh and depriving environment. Following these experiences, she could never leave Haworth, her home, for very long, without feeling unprotected and becoming ill. A safe and stable family environment was created by means of daily writing. This was a family activity, which all, including the father, enjoyed, alone, and in pairs, often at the dining room table. Creating together, as well as separately, was a deep expression of the strength of the affiliative sibling bond, which could, and did, in this case, transcend, for a time, the inexorable pull toward death. Unlike Charlotte who sought recognition and connection to the world, Emily gave up on the forbidding outside world, which continually wreaked havoc--threatening death and destruction to herself and her beloved family. This prickly, angry Emily co-existed with a ferociously determined young woman who lived fully and fluidly in her wide-ranging imagination, a world of freedom, ghosts, passions, death, and inevitable haunting.

Considering the context of the sexist culture of the time, the Bronte sisters had a few extraordinary developmental influences. Although he expected his daughters to perform parish duties, Reverend Patrick Bronte (Emily's father) took a great interest in his children's development and encouraged their precocity. A published poet, he had re-created himself at Cambridge, changing his name from "Branty" to the more expansive "Bronte" and exchanging his lowly station for a position in the Church. It seems likely that, as a result of his egalitarian treatment of his daughters, Emily, like Charlotte, viewed herself as a writer from the outset. The level of his support included providing them with access to all types of literature, including the writings of Byron and Georges Sand, as well the study of French and German with a pre-eminent teacher of literature in Belgium. Despite their overwhelming traumas, Emily and Charlotte felt confident in their abilities. I wondered if, in contrast to her sister Charlotte, as well as in contrast to Kohut and to Dali, Emily's disinterest in the affirmation of the outside world left her with fewer internal obstacles with regard to the process of creation.

Strozier on Kohut

Strozier's sketch of Heinz Kohut began with an account of his relationships with his parents. After having prepared for a career as a concert pianist, Felix, Kohut's father, enlisted in the Army when Heinz 16 months old. A decorated veteran who had been captured and placed in an Italian POW camp, Felix returned a changed man when Heinz was 5 years old. Apparently traumatized, he had become remote and devitalized. Nevertheless, Heinz treasured the times of closeness and vitality they shared. Unfortunately, Felix died when Heinz was only 14. Heinz Kohut's focus on the idealizing transference seems to have been informed by his search for the protection and comfort from a father, particularly in light of his mother's intrusiveness. After her husband's departure for the war, and her later divorce, Else, his young and beautiful mother, became increasingly dominating. Keeping Heinz home to be schooled till age 10, she continually violated Heinz's privacy, even to the extent of inspecting his pimples.

How can we understand Kohut's transformation from an extremely accomplished, productive analyst, a master at his discipline, into a scientifically creative analyst whose original thinking about narcissism and the self changed psychoanalytic treatment? Kohut retained his need to maintain idealizing transferences to those connected to the royal psychoanalytic family, even becoming president of the American Psychoanalytic Association. On a more personal note, as Strozier indicates, his recognition of his mother's overt paranoia and disintegration freed him further from her power. Having received a diagnosis of lymphoma in 1971, Kohut also felt the pressure of time. In fact, Strozier's chronicle of the evolution of Kohut's creative ideas about narcissism and the self, reveal Kohut to have been a somewhat reluctant leader of a movement. According to Strozier, Kohut never thought he was devising a new psychological theory de novo and out of context. He was convinced that he was revising psychoanalysis itself, that he was the voice of the future for the field and not just another dissident. In fact, Kohut was injured when, in response to the publication of The Analysis of the Self, Kurt Eissler and Anna Freud distanced themselves from him. Having carefully crafted his work to seem part of classical analytic thinking, Kohut was very uncomfortable to find that his innovative and groundbreaking ideas put him at odds with heirs of the patrilineal Freudian line.

The Chicago group, formed in 1969, served as a valuable forum for the discussion of Kohut's writings, and eventually coalesced into a movement. Kohut was well aware of the similarity to Freud's Wednesday Evening seminars, the forerunner of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Over time, Kohut assumed its leadership, devoting his energy to developing his theory of the self with increasingly less concern about the connection to classical theory and the centrality of the Oedipus complex.

In my summary I noted that these three gifted individuals were fragile and yet demanding about the fulfillment of their needs for privacy and emotional support. I pointed out the sustaining importance of the physical landscape for each of them, be it the moor, Cadeus, or Vienna, and that what these represented for each was evident in their work. I suggested that Kohut, Bronte, and Dali all transcended the domains in which they began their work after having spent at least 10 years mastering them before their creative breakthroughs.

I concluded by suggesting that concepts offered in the first panel were relevant. Fosshage's ideas about developmental direction and developmental motivation, Stolorow's description of Heidigger's concept of "mineness," and Lachmann's ideas about self transformation can all be applied to the lives of these creative individuals and their extraordinary developmental trajectories to self-transformation.

Dr. Hershberg is Director of Psychoanalytic Training at the Institute of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis in Washington, DC, faculty member of the Washington Center for Psychoanalysis and member of the IAPSP International Council