Why do painters paint? Obviously, there are numerous possible reasons. They paint to create images for others’ enjoyment, to solve visual problems, to convey ideas, and to contribute to a rich artistic tradition. This book argues that there is yet another, crucially important but often overlooked reason. Painters paint to feel. They paint because it enables them to experience special feelings, such as being absorbed in creative play and connected to something vitally significant. Painting may even transform the painter’s whole sense of being. Thus, painting is not only about producing art, communicating content, and so on, but also about setting up and inhabiting an experiential space wherein highly valued feelings are interactively enabled and supported. This book investigates how and why this happens by combining psychoanalytical theorization on creativity with philosophical thinking on affectivity. It focuses on creative experience itself, and illuminates the psychological mechanisms and dynamics that underlie the affects at stake. Painters’ own descriptions of how they feel at work are used throughout to give an accurate, true-to-life portrayal of the experience of painting. The strength of the book lies in its open-minded yet critical integration of contemporary psychoanalytic and philosophical thinking, and in its truthfulness to painters’ experiential descriptions of the painterly process. On the whole, it enriches our understanding of artistic creativity and sheds more light on how and why we come to feel the things we do. As such, the book will appeal to philosophers, psychoanalysts, and art researchers alike.

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.

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.

This book examines how contemporary psychoanalytic theory provides insight into understanding the psychological sources of modern art.

Poetry and Psychoanalysis: The Opening of the Field provides a guide to applying a poet’s imagination and precision of language to the healing endeavours of psychoanalysis while making a lucid journey through 2,000 years of transformative poetry from Virgil, Dante and Blake to the contemporary poet Claudia Rankine. Patients enter treatment with the hope of being recognized and the hope for transformation of a painful experience. David Shaddock shows how poetry can guide psychoanalysts towards meeting that hope. The book is based on the proposition that an accurate recognition of what is leads to the opening of what could be. The imaginative space that opens between poem and reader or therapist and patient can be a place of healing and transformation. Poetry and Psychoanalysis will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists interested in using literature and creativity as inspiration for both their clinical work and personal growth, as well as all who love poetry.

Art and Mourning explores the relationship between creativity and the work of self-mourning in the lives of 20th century artists and thinkers. The role of artistic and creative endeavours is well-known within psychoanalytic circles in helping to heal in the face of personal loss, trauma, and mourning. In this book, Esther Dreifuss-Kattan, a psychoanalyst, art therapist and artist - analyses the work of major modernist and contemporary artists and thinkers through a psychoanalytic lens. In coming to terms with their own mortality, figures like Albert Einstein, Louise Bourgeois, Paul Klee, Eva Hesse and others were able to access previously unknown reserves of creative energy in their late works, as well as a new healing experience of time outside of the continuous temporality of everyday life. Dreifuss-Kattan explores what we can learn about using the creative process to face and work through traumatic and painful experiences of loss. Art and Mourning will inspire psychoanalysts and psychotherapists to understand the power of artistic expression in transforming loss and traumas into perseverance, survival and gain. Art and Mourning offers a new perspective on trauma and will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, psychologists, clinical social workers and mental health workers, as well as artists and art historians.

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.