'In the Style Of': From Creative Inhibition to Creative Imagination

Institute of Psychoanalysis and Severnside Institute for Psychotherapy presents:

‘In the style of…’ From creative inhibition to creative imagination. Presented by Dr.Christine English.

This paper is about a photographer who struggled for decades to find his own style, and to overcome various creative inhibitions in his work, and in his life. I shall argue that the patient’s compulsive attempts to sanitise or prettify his work, mirrored an urgent need to idealise his experiences and relationships, which meant denying so much about his emotional life. Denial of aggression and forestalling of mourning were central to the patient’s inhibitions. I hope to show how in the course of a ten-year analysis, these obstacles to creativity were to a large extent worked through, resulting in the patient having far greater creative freedom.

Christine English is a child/adolescent and adult psychoanalyst in private practice in South Oxfordshire. She is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society, Archivist of the Melanie Klein Trust, and Honorary Associate Professor of the Psychoanalysis Unit, UCL. She is the author of Melanie Klein's Narrative of an Adult Analysis, published in 2023.

Chaired by: Kate Wright - Psychoanalyst