Creative States of Mind: Psychoanalysis and the Artist's Process by Patricia Townsend

摘要

Creativity is a fraught topic for psychoanalytic writers and theorists: a recent book by Donald Moss is one example with its searching discussion of creativity and its 'fetishization' (Moss, 2018). Freud wrote extensively about individual artists and works of art but did not engage with the artistic process itself. Classical theory, following Freud's view of the aits as a neurotic configuration, tends to pathologize the process and, at times, to prioritize the Kleinian view of creative work as, largely, driven by the wish to repair. A key, underlying question posed by Townsend's book is: can psychoanalysis throw light on art without reducing it?