Creativity and Perversion: Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel on the Fine Line Between Creation and Denial

Psychoanalysis has long explored the origins of creativity — the mysterious process by which inner life becomes outer form. From Freud’s early writings on art and sublimation to Winnicott’s concept of transitional phenomena, creativity is often seen as a means of reconciling internal conflict through symbolic expression. But in Creativity and Perversion (1984), the French psychoanalyst Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel offers a strikingly different, even unsettling view: that creativity can serve either the pursuit of truth — or the denial of it.

This duality leads her to examine the fine and often ambiguous boundary between authentic creativity and perverse creation, where artistic or intellectual production becomes a vehicle of omnipotence, illusion, and reality-denial.

The Function of the Ego Ideal
Chasseguet-Smirgel situates both creativity and perversion in relation to the ego ideal — the internalized image of perfection and fulfillment that motivates the subject’s development. In healthy psychological growth, the ego ideal provides a guiding light, inspiring the individual to evolve and confront psychic reality. Creativity, in this sense, becomes a form of symbolic repair, allowing for the integration of loss, limitation, and desire.

However, in perverse structures, the ego ideal mutates into an idealized image of omnipotence, where the creative act is no longer symbolic but concrete and phantasmatic. Rather than mediating between fantasy and reality, creativity is used to bypass the painful work of mourning and differentiation. It becomes a tool not of transformation, but of denial.

Perverse Creativity: Creation as Control
Chasseguet-Smirgel describes the perverse creator as someone who builds alternative realities, not to express psychic truth but to replace it. In this mode, the creative act is infused with a narcissistic refusal of limits — limits imposed by the body, by sexuality, by otherness, by death.

Whether in the domain of art, science, or ideology, such perverse creativity seeks to reconstruct the world according to the demands of a grandiose self-image. It is anti-symbolic at its core — rooted in a fantasy of omnipotent mastery rather than a genuine engagement with unconscious conflict.

In this sense, perversion is not defined by its content (e.g., sexual themes) but by its function: does the creative act reveal unconscious truth, or does it evade it? Is it an encounter with reality, or an escape from it?

Creativity and the Work of Mourning
A central theme in Chasseguet-Smirgel’s thinking is the role of mourning in genuine creativity. True creative work involves a confrontation with loss — the loss of omnipotence, the lost object, the limits of the self. It is precisely by working through these losses that new meaning can emerge.

Perversion, by contrast, refuses mourning. It seeks to preserve a narcissistic illusion of wholeness at all costs, and creative acts become attempts to rebuild a broken inner world without acknowledging its fragmentation. The result is often dazzling, seductive, even brilliant — but empty of psychic truth.

This insight leads her to draw connections between perversion and totalitarian ideologies, in which collective fantasies replace shared reality, and creativity is used to erase complexity in favor of omnipotent simplicity. Ideological systems, in her view, can be a form of cultural perversion, where illusion becomes law.

Clinical Implications
For the psychoanalyst, the distinction between creativity and perversion is not always immediately apparent. Patients with perverse defenses may appear imaginative, original, even deeply engaged with symbolic material — but their creativity may function as a defensive enclosure, protecting them from affect, guilt, and the recognition of dependence.

Understanding the structure and aim of the creative act becomes crucial. Does it open the patient to emotional truth, or seal them off from it? Does it enable mourning and transformation, or maintain omnipotent fantasies?

Conclusion
Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel challenges us to rethink our assumptions about creativity. In her view, not all creative acts are healing — some are attempts to rewrite reality in the service of illusion. The creative impulse, then, is ambivalent: it can be a path toward self-integration, or a mask for psychic fragmentation.

The analyst’s task is to discern not only what is created, but why — to ask whether creation serves the self’s growth or defends against it.

“The difference between true creativity and perverse creation lies in the acceptance or refusal of psychic reality. One symbolises loss; the other denies it.”
— Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Creativity and Perversion (1984)
Reference
Chasseguet-Smirgel, J. (1984). Creativity and Perversion. London: Free Association Books.