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Volume 9, Number 2
July-December 2005

Creativity, Vandalism and Restoration in the Intrapsychic Dimension
Simona Argentieri

SUMMARY

In this paper the Author explores the intrapsychic relationship between the artist's creativity and destructiveness from the perspective of three apparently well defined and distinct personages - the artist, the vandal and the restorer: the creator, the destroyer and the repairer of a work of art.

However, as usual, the psychoanalytic approach re-shuffles the cards, showing the continuity of the link between the act of creating and the parallel act of destroying the previous achievement. The Author remarks that this same conflictuality accompanies another form of creativity - the creativity of the self - no less relevant even though devoid of artistic talent. It is a form of creativity that belongs to every human being during the process of development: for every "psychological birth" is accompanied by powerful anxieties, catastrophic anxieties when confronting change, and deperates resistance to abandoning previous states of undifferentiation, fusion and non-integration.