Psychoanalysis and the Act of Artistic Creation


Book Description

This book explores the phenomenon of creativity and creation from a psychoanalytic point of view, focusing on understanding the psychoemotional dynamics underlying artistic creative activities, such as theatre, literature, and painting. Throughout, Delgado considers these works of art through a Bionian, Kleinian, and Freudian lens. He uses three major psychoanalytic models of the creative process, two of them classic: the first, Freudian, based on the theory of conflict between impulse and defense, the result of the effort to manage an excessive drive activity, and in which the concept of sublimation is central; the second, Kleinian, based on the attachment theory, in which creative effort corresponds to an attempt to repair the damage done to the object or to the self; and the third, more recent, affiliated with the more expanded attachment relationship theory, based on W. Bion’s theory of thinking, and emphasizing the continent’s capacity for psyche and the oscillation between schizo-paranoid and depressive positions. With illustrations throughout, this book will be vital reading for anyone interested in the intersection of creativity, the Arts, and psychoanalysis.




Scansion in Psychoanalysis and Art


Book Description

Scansion in Psychoanalysis and Art examines a strain of artists spanning more than a century, beginning at the dawn of photography and culminating in the discussion of contemporary artists, to illustrate various psychoanalytic concepts by examining artists working in a multitude of media. Drawing on the theories of Sigmund Freud, who applied psychoanalytic methods to art and literature to decipher the meaning and intention of the creator, as well as Jacques Lacan’s dissemination of scansion as a powerful disruption of narrative, the book explores examples of the long and rich relationship between psychoanalysis and the fine arts. Whilst guiding readers through the different artists and their artforms – from painting and music to poetry, collage, photography, film, performance art, technology and body modification – Sinclair interrogates scansion as a generative process often inherent of the act of creation itself. This is an intriguing book for psychoanalysts, psychologists and creative arts therapists who wish to explore the generative potential of scansion and the relationship between psychoanalysis and the arts, as well as for artists and art historians interested in a psychoanalytic view of these processes.




Art, Creativity, and Psychoanalysis


Book Description

Art, Creativity, and Psychoanalysis: Perspectives from Analyst-Artists collects personal reflections by therapists who are also professional artists. It explores the relationship between art and analysis through accounts by practitioners who identify themselves as dual-profession artists and analysts. The book illustrates the numerous areas where analysis and art share common characteristics using first-hand, in-depth accounts. These vivid reports from the frontier of art and psychoanalysis shed light on the day-to-day struggle to succeed at both of these demanding professions. From the beginning of psychoanalysis, many have made comparisons between analysis and art. Recently there has been increasing interest in the relationship between artistic and psychotherapeutic practices. Most important, both professions are viewed as highly creative with spontaneity, improvisation and aesthetic experience seeming to be common to each. However, differences have also been recognized, especially regarding the differing goals of each profession: art leading to the creation of an art work, and psychoanalysis resulting in the increased welfare and happiness of the patient. These issues are addressed head-on in Art, Creativity, and Psychoanalysis: Perspectives from Analyst-Artists. The chapters consist of personal essays by analyst/artists who are currently working in both professions; each has been trained in and is currently practicing psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic psychotherapy. The goal of the book is to provide the audience with a new understanding of psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic processes from the perspective of art and artistic creativity. Drawing on artistic material from painting, poetry, photography, music and literature, the book casts light on what the creative processes in art can add to the psychoanalytic endeavor, and vice versa. Art, Creativity, and Psychoanalysis: Perspectives from Analyst-Artists will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, theorists of art, academic artists, and anyone interested in the psychology of art.




Creative Analysis


Book Description

Creative Analysis: Art, Creativity and Clinical Process explores the dynamics of creativity in psychoanalytic treatment. It argues that the creative process of the analytic interaction is characterized by specific forms of feeling, thinking and most importantly, relating that result in the emergence of something new – therapeutic change. The artistic aspects of psychoanalysis and various features of creativity in analytic treatment are explored. Clinical examples are discussed at length. George Hagman presents a new model of the psychology of creativity and art that helps us to better understand the clinical process. The book explores and develops several important implications of Hagman’s main thesis: the psychodynamics of art, the creativity of the brain, aesthetic aspects of the treatment relationship, the creativity of the analyst and analysand. Change in analysis is driven not just by the analyst’s interventions but the patient’s own motivation and capacity for self-transformation. This change is depicted here as a depth psychological process which explores the sources of the patient’s resistance to self-actualization and identifies hidden potential, unrealized capacities and strengths. Creative Analysis: Art, Creativity and Clinical Process reformulates psychoanalytic therapy as a form of art that can help patients realize their potential which may have been blocked, inhibited, denied or derailed. The book will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, graduates and students, including the educated public interested in art.




Creative States of Mind


Book Description

What is it like to be an artist? Drawing on interviews with professional artists, this book takes the reader inside the creative process. The author, an artist and a psychotherapist, uses psychoanalytic theory to shed light on fundamental questions such as the origin of new ideas and the artist’s state of mind while working. Based on interviews with 33 professional artists, who reflect on their experiences of creating new works of art, as well as her own artistic practice, Patricia Townsend traces the trajectory of the creative process from the artist’s first inkling or ‘pre-sense’, through to the completion of a work, and its release to the public. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, particularly the work of Donald Winnicott, Marion Milner and Christopher Bollas, the book presents the artist’s process as a series of interconnected and overlapping stages, in which there is a movement between the artist’s inner world, the outer world of shared ‘reality’, and the spaces in-between. Creative States of Mind: Psychoanalysis and the Artist’s Process fills an important gap in the psychoanalytic theory of art by offering an account of the full trajectory of the artist’s process based on the evidence of artists themselves. It will be useful to artists who want to understand more about their own processes, to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists in their clinical work, and to anyone who studies the creative process.




Scansion in Psychoanalysis and Art


Book Description

Scansion in Psychoanalysis and Art examines a strain of artists spanning more than a century, beginning at the dawn of photography and culminating in the discussion of contemporary artists, to illustrate various psychoanalytic concepts by examining artists working in a multitude of media. Drawing on the theories of Sigmund Freud, who applied psychoanalytic methods to art and literature to decipher the meaning and intention of the creator, as well as Jacques Lacan’s dissemination of scansion as a powerful disruption of narrative, the book explores examples of the long and rich relationship between psychoanalysis and the fine arts. Whilst guiding readers through the different artists and their artforms – from painting and music to poetry, collage, photography, film, performance art, technology and body modification – Sinclair interrogates scansion as a generative process often inherent of the act of creation itself. This is an intriguing book for psychoanalysts, psychologists and creative arts therapists who wish to explore the generative potential of scansion and the relationship between psychoanalysis and the arts, as well as for artists and art historians interested in a psychoanalytic view of these processes.




Women and Creativity


Book Description

This book addresses aspects of how creativity is viewed in psychoanalytic theory and worked with in the consulting room, with particular reference to human generativity and the life cycle, within the arts in the broadest sense and its workings in society and culture in the widest sense.




The Artist's Mind


Book Description

For the past century psychoanalysts have attempted to understand the psychology of art, artists and aesthetic experience. This book examines how contemporary psychoanalytic theory provides insight into understanding the psychological sources of creativity, Modern Art and modern artists. The Artist’s Mind revisits the lives of eight modern artists including Henri Matisse, Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, from a psychoanalytical viewpoint. It looks at how opportunities for a new approach to art at the turn of the twentieth century offered artists a chance to explore different forms of creativity and artistic ambition. Key areas of discussion include: developmental sources of the aesthetic sense psychological functions of creativity and art psychology of beauty, ugliness and the Sublime. co-evolution of the modern self, modernism and art. cultural context of creativity, artistic identify and aesthetic experience. Through the examination of great artists’ lives and psychological dynamics, the author articulates a new psychoanalytic aesthetic model that has both clinical and historical significance. As such this book is essential reading for all those with an interest in the origins and fate of Modern Art.




Dreams and Drama


Book Description

Explores the major inner struggles involved in becoming an artist.




Art in Psychoanalysis


Book Description

A revolution is brewing in psychoanalysis: after a century of struggle to define psychoanalysis as a science, the concept of psychoanalysis as an art is finding expression in an unconventional 'return to Freud' that reformulates the relationship between art and psychoanalysis and in this process, discovers and explores uncharted routes through art to re-think problems in contemporary clinical work. This book explores recent contributions to the status of psychoanalytic thought in relation to art and creativity and the implications of these investigations for todays analytic practice. The title, 'Art in Psychoanalysis', reflects its double perspective: art and its contributions to theory and clinical practice on the one hand, and the response from psychoanalysis and its "interpretation" of art. These essays expose the "aesthetic value of analytic work when it is able to 'create' something new in the relation with the patient". The authors surprise the reader with an immense array of fresh and stimulating hypotheses which reflect the originality of their own creative process that has overturned ideas including the 'application of psychoanalysis' to art and the entity of the object of art.