Interest in the products of the unconscious is one of the central and defining attitudes of psychodynamic, and especially Jungian, psychotherapy.
Psychotherapy clients seeking help with blocked creativity are invited to speak of and explore their dreams, fantasies, and slips of the tongue.
Somatic symptoms are looked at in terms of how they meaningfully reflect anxieties and emotional inhibitions.
When the client is an artist or performer, in fact, it is often very clear how their emotional state negatively impinges on their work.
Singers lose their voices, artists and writers become "blocked", and dancers develop mysterious, hard to treat physical ailments which limit their movement.
Therapy, however, has TWO vectors: the direction of repair and healing and the direction of growth.
The presumption is made that when emotional struggles are resolved the blocks and somatic symptoms will be resolved and that is very often true.
As a result, psychodynamic therapists and their "blocked"clients will often prioritize emotional healing as a necessary part of the fully experienced life that is the source of creative freedom.
The romantic image of the "tormented artist" Artistic clients sometimes hesitate to seek therapy for their emotional suffering because they are afraid that they will lose their creativity if they heal emotionally.
Classical psychoanalysis calls creativity "sublimation" and suggests that it arises out of frustrated sexual or aggressive desires.
Controlling or damping down this frustration when it is excessive uses up resources which are then not available for genuine creative work.
There is always a sufficient natural store of sexual and assertive power in a human life to fuel creativity.

• Cognitive theory and brain science, in fact suggest that unhappiness, anxiety and depression, shut down and limit all kinds of mental activity, narrowing the focus and limiting the range of potential ideas and behaviors.
  

Art therapy is a special category of psychotherapy which looks pointedly at the expressive value of personal artistic creation.
Work with families, community groups, children, and the mentally handicapped shows clearly that "talent", skill or training is not a prerequisite for therapeutic work with art.
Ordinary individuals who seek art therapy in order to explore their personal or emotional problems often seek it because they already have some understanding or intuition that suggests that there may be some value in the work for them.
Often this "intuition" is the work of their unconscious, signaling a fruitful avenue towards resolution and growth.
Attention to artistic impulses is not limited to art therapy ...
but attention to an individual's creative productions or aspirations is not standard procedure in all forms of psychotherapy.

• Attention to a client's "talent" is not usually proposed as a central or necessary question in many initial patient interviews except perhaps if it is touched upon under the category "Hobbies or interests".
  
• Artistic expression is too often relegated to the general category of "stress reliever".
  
• There may be so much pain, chaos and uncertainty present in the client that their personal expression through art may be given a seat at the far back of the bus.
  
• The therapist's feeling that "I don't really know anything about music, painting, poetry etc.
  " may subtly tempt him or her to escape to an area of expertise where they feel more sure that they can help their client.
  Many people who do not declare themselves as "artistic" feel somewhat inferior and unknowledgeable when faced with another person's creative talent.
  Psychotherapists are human and not exempt from this response.
  

Why work with feelings around talent? Relationship to one's talent, the history of its growth and how it was supported or discouraged by important persons and events, past and present is often the paradigm of how all expressions of self-hood have been experienced.
If a therapist is not attuned to a client's investment in their talent or potential talent, as expressive of something self-defining, he or she risks failing their client, however unintentionally, in the same ways, that the rest of the world may have.
Feelings around talent are "emergent expressions of self" and as such point the way in the direction of personal growth.
Talent, manifesting as tendency and interest precedes training, competence, and technique.
All indications which point in the direction of what is innate to the self are valuable.
Even for a client who never puts brush to canvas or pen to paper the question of what it means to wish one could, to long for it or to be envious of those who do it, all reveal central longings, anxieties and tendencies.
Jungian and other psychodynamic approaches to therapy help clients address questions surrounding their art or talent.
They make space in the consulting room for questions of entitlement, of agency, of self-esteem, of values and deep questions of life's meaning and purpose.
When one engages with clients on the subject of their talents and artistic productions, one quickly encounters the dominant life themes that are being worked out.
Clearly some of these subjects ride on the therapeutic vector of repair and others on the side of development, and both sides are necessary in the therapeutic process.
After all the future that is envisioned after the painful struggle to heal has to be something that is worth striving towards.
Reference: C.
T.
Rotenberg (2006).
Self and Talent: Treatment Considerations, Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 26:442-461