Creativity and the Boundaries of the Self: Separation and Engulfment Anxiety in Keats and Poe

Abstract

Creativity is considered as a vicissitude of the cohesiveness or fragmentation of the self. The emergence of a self, separate from the mothering figure, requires the mother's empathic fuelling and the child's capacity to contain his gradual disillusionment with her. The process is never fully completed, allowing a potential for anxiety over threatened disintegration, along a continuum from separation anxiety (loss of the object), in a relatively cohesive self, to engulfment anxiety (loss of the self) in the less cohesive. The creative artist is uniquely sensitive to these anxieties, through his own difficulties in separating from the infantile union with the mother, or in mourning an object that dies during his childhood. The artist draws on his unconscious experience to speak to the unconscious of the audience. For the audience, it is having one's own deepest longings and deepest anxieties spoken to and spoken for that constitutes the power of creative art.

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