Both « creativity » and « inventiveness » are linked to newness, originality; however, one difference remains which is linked to the motivation and the pattern(s) that allows them to arise. The psychotic patient and the autistic patient may have an access to one or another, but not as a result of achieved sublimation. Sublimation – as a « specific aim » – is a quest for « a happy capacity of satisfaction of drive » or « a satisfaction of a drive in the change of its object, without repression », as J. Lacan expresses it in Ethics of Psychoanalysis – concerns pathologies in which the Other is considered as an object. In the expression « satisfaction of the drive » the whole sex drive theory is concerned. This will invite us to examine the moment when some autistic patients may be involved in the field of inventiveness but without any access to sublimation. The discussion will be open as far as the autistic patient’s capacity for representation is concerned.

Adolescence, 2009, T. 27, n°1, pp. 167-175.