"Side Effects" by Adam Phillips

This article, "On Not Making it Up: The Varieties of Creative Experience" from Side Effects may not have been entirely as earth-shattering as some other pieces of literature, particularly philosophical or psychological, I have filtered in the past, but quite so raised many interests and concerns in my mind as not only a painter but a being. Phillips compares the theory analyses, creative experience varieties, and notions of the self all believed by the minds of such intellectuals as Sartre, William James, and of course Freud.

Conclusively, the philosophers/psychologists analyzed in this text all seem to break creative (or maybe non-creative) individuals down into two groups - those involved with self-promotion and those involved with self-surrender. Self-promoters make creative work based on their own self - their knowledge of their own self (be this the most true assessment of oneself or the "making-up" of one's history is also in question) - they are the Prometheans, the modellers, the auto-biographers, the ones who believe their own life is worth telling. They strive to "create" something that (they believe) is not already in existence. That is their "creative experience." And then there are the midwives, the carvers: those who strive to discover what already exists; they experience the world as a stone block with which to carve into, to extract and simply represent their "creative experience." They are separated from their own stories, they are not afraid of the horrors of the past, they are objective in their art-making (to what degree, I am skeptical) and "midwife" an object from its (mundane?) position in the world into a "creative" endeavor, project, art-piece, whathaveyou.

Freud believes that to be creative one must balance the lives of these two selves. In my view, to be only Promethean is to be self-centered and blind, to be only a carver is to be without subjectivity, without oneself in an artwork. I believe, in conjunction with this reading, that many minimalist artists may be the second, the midwife - take Donald Judd for example (in his art-making alone, I do not know about his personal life.)

Is one more credible than the other? Does the balance that Freud suggests result in the optimal state of creativity to exhibit as an artist, as a self-aware individual?