Abstract

From approximately the 1950s until he died in 1981, Jacques Lacan's "return to Freud" was a reaction against the use of ego psychology in the practice of psychoanalysis. In Lacan's strong aversion to ego psychology, which he viewed as destructively encouraging the patient to adapt to societal norms, Lacan demonstrated an orientation that suggested to this author an underlying interest in the creative. ;In Lacan's psychoanalytic theory, the subject of the unconscious is differentiated from the ego, which is constituted in the course of development through social interactions with others, starting with the sight of one's own image in the mirror between the ages of 6 to 18 months. Starting with experience, the ego constitutes itself in terms of a series of imagos that add up to a fundamental misrecognition of its nature. While the ego labors under its illusions, the subject is defined in terms of absence of substance and manipulation by signifiers. ;The first task of the dissertation, the project of demonstrating an unstated creative agenda in Lacan's theory, generated a second task, which was to resolve a dilemma about the possibility of creativity for such a subject as Lacan theorizes. After examining the evidence for and against the possibility of a creative subject, the author found Lacan to be consistent in describing the subject of the unconscious in passive and empty terms, while attributing apparently creative powers to the linguistic signifier. The author deemed this finding unsatisfactory from a clinical standpoint, where any realization of the unconscious dimension by the analysand must be gained by means of subjectivity and any progress would seem to demand the expression, inevitably creative, of subjectivity. ;Freud was brought into the dissertation to provide the theoretical background against which Lacan improvised and against which Lacan's claims of a "return to Freud" could be checked. D. W. Winnicott was brought into the dissertation because of an explicit orientation toward creativity in his environmental psychoanalytic theory. The psychoanalytic synthesis Maud Mannoni developed from aspects of both Lacan's and Winnicott's theories provided further evidence of the author's conclusion