On Freud's Creative Writers and Day-dreaming


Book Description

This volume contains Freud's essay 'Creative Writers and Daydreaming' which explores the origins of daydreaming, and its relation to the play of children and the creative process. Each contributor offers an insightful commentary on the essay.







The Restless Compendium


Book Description

This book is open access under a CC BY license. This interdisciplinary book contains 22 essays and interventions on rest and restlessness, silence and noise, relaxation and work. It draws together approaches from artists, literary scholars, psychologists, activists, historians, geographers and sociologists who challenge assumptions about how rest operates across mind, bodies, and practices. Rest’s presence or absence affects everyone. Nevertheless, defining rest is problematic: both its meaning and what it feels like are affected by many socio-political, economic and cultural factors. The authors open up unexplored corners and experimental pathways into this complex topic, with contributions ranging from investigations of daydreaming and mindwandering, through histories of therapeutic relaxation and laziness, and creative-critical pieces on lullabies and the Sabbath, to experimental methods to measure aircraft noise and track somatic vigilance in urban space. The essays are grouped by scale of enquiry, into mind, body and practice, allowing readers to draw new connections across apparently distinct phenomena. The book will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines in the social sciences, life sciences, arts and humanities.




The Uncanny


Book Description

An extraordinary collection of thematically linked essays, including THE UNCANNY, SCREEN MEMORIES and FAMILY ROMANCES. Leonardo da Vinci fascinated Freud primarily because he was keen to know why his personality was so incomprehensible to his contemporaries. In this probing biographical essay he deconstructs both da Vinci's character and the nature of his genius. As ever, many of his exploratory avenues lead to the subject's sexuality - why did da Vinci depict the naked human body the way hedid? What of his tendency to surround himself with handsome young boys that he took on as his pupils? Intriguing, thought-provoking and often contentious, this volume contains some of Freud's best writing.




Writings on Art and Literature


Book Description

Despite Freud's enormous influence on twentieth-century interpretations of the humanities, there has never before been in English a complete collection of his writings on art and literature. These fourteen essays cover the entire range of his work on these subjects, in chronological order beginning with his first published analysis of a work of literature, the 1907 "Delusion and Dreams in Jensen's Gradiva" and concluding with the 1940 posthumous publication of "Medusa's Head." Many of the essays included in this collection have been crucial in contemporary literary and art criticism and theory. Among the subjects Freud engages are Shakespeare's Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, and Macbeth, Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit, Michelangelo's Moses, E. T. A. Hoffman's "The Sand Man," Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, fairy tales, the effect of and the meaning of beauty, mythology, and the games of aestheticization. All texts are drawn from The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey. The volume includes the notes prepared for that edition by the editor. In addition to the writings on Jensen's Gradiva and Medusa, the essays are: "Psychopathic Characters on the Stage," "The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words," "The Occurrence in Dreams of Material from Fairy Tales," "The Theme of the Three Caskets," "The Moses of Michelangelo," "Some Character Types Met with in Psycho-analytic Work," "On Transience," "A Mythological Parallel to a Visual Obsession," "A Childhood Recollection from Dichtung und Wahrheit," "The Uncanny," "Dostoevsky and Parricide," and "The Goethe Prize."




Collected Papers


Book Description




On Creativity and the Unconscious


Book Description

On Creativity and the Unconscious brings together Freud's important essays on the many expressions of creativity—including art, literature, love, dreams, and spirituality. This diverse collection includes "The 'Uncanny,'" "The Moses of Michelangelo," "The Psychology of Love," "The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming," "On War and Death," and "Dreams and Telepathy."




How to Be a Creative Thinker


Book Description

How to Be a Creative Thinker is a map to your creative mind, the places your creative potential resides, and the allies and enemies along the way. It’s a practical guide to the science and the psychology of creativity and the conditions required for cultivating it. We think creativity is for those lucky enough to be born with it – something you either have or you don’t. But this is untrue. Creativity is more than God-given talent, and it’s more than artistic flair. It’s the ability to come up with a new idea in any area or setting. And most importantly, it can be learned by anyone. In How to Be a Creative Thinker, professional creative and strategic designer Roya Azadi teaches you techniques to encourage creative thinking and shows how you can unlock your creative potential. She reveals that technology is inhibiting our ability to daydream and explains why this headspace is so important if you want to ‘catch a live one’. You’ll learn to not fear failure by understanding that it’s actually fertile ground for creativity. Throughout the book there are interviews, quotes, explainers and activities to inspire creative thought along the way. By the end of the book, you’ll be bubbling with creative force to take out into the world and make real change. The Survive the Modern World series tackles big subjects in a fun and digestible way. The tone is frank and chatty, but the content is comprehensive. Upskill and expand your knowledge with these accessible pocket guides. 'The hardest part of being creative lies in simply deciding to do so. And, after you've done that, Roya's astonishingly useful book is a great place to begin.' Seth Godin, author of The Practice.




The Psychology of Creative Writing


Book Description

The Psychology of Creative Writing takes a scholarly, psychological look at multiple aspects of creative writing, including the creative writer as a person, the text itself, the creative process, the writer's development, the link between creative writing and mental illness, the personality traits of comedy and screen writers, and how to teach creative writing. This book will appeal to psychologists interested in creativity, writers who want to understand more about the magic behind their talents, and educated laypeople who enjoy reading, writing, or both. From scholars to bloggers to artists, The Psychology of Creative Writing has something for everyone.




Cat's Cradle


Book Description

“A free-wheeling vehicle . . . an unforgettable ride!”—The New York Times Cat’s Cradle is Kurt Vonnegut’s satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planet’s ultimate fate, it features a midget as the protagonist, a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer, and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny. A book that left an indelible mark on an entire generation of readers, Cat’s Cradle is one of the twentieth century’s most important works—and Vonnegut at his very best. “[Vonnegut is] an unimitative and inimitable social satirist.”—Harper’s Magazine “Our finest black-humorist . . . We laugh in self-defense.”—Atlantic Monthly