Chaos and control in the creative process.

Abstract

This has been an attempt to understand the alternation of chaos and control in the creative process. As a painting acquires a life of its own, the artist loses control over it but then and only then can he or she establish an enriching dialogue with it. When losing control leads to too much anxiety, the artist will attempt to gain control over the work but this excessive control will lead to a tight structure that will seem lifeless. At some point the artist will have to destroy this structure and create a new chaos in order to start afresh and to seek something of value in it. Milner, Segal, Winnicott and the work of other psychoanalytic writers, as it is pertinent to these ideas, was examined.