James Hamilton's engaging book offers us his own unique insight into the unconscious factors involved in the creative processes associated with painting, filmmaking, and photography by studying the lives and works of a number of artists, each one having a unique personal style. In separate chapters, he looks at the lives and works of Mark Rothko, Joseph Cornell, Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso, Clement Greenberg, Edward Weston, Ingmar Bergman, Francois Truffaut, Quentin Tarantino, and Florian von Donnersmarck from a psychoanalytic perspective with emphasis on unconscious motivation and the quest for mastery of intrapsychic conflict. The book is bound to encourage further questions and hypotheses about the nature of these complex phenomena.

James Hamilton's engaging book offers us his own unique insight into the unconscious factors involved in the creative processes associated with painting, filmmaking, and photography by studying the lives and works of a number of artists, each one having a unique personal style. In separate chapters, he looks at the lives and works of Mark Rothko, Joseph Cornell, Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso, Clement Greenberg, Edward Weston, Ingmar Bergman, François Truffaut, Quentin Tarantino, and Florian von Donnersmarck from a psychoanalytic perspective, with emphasis on unconscious motivation and the quest for mastery of intrapsychic conflict. The book is bound to encourage further questions and hypotheses about the nature of these complex phenomena.

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

Introduction / Stephen Bann -- Stokes and the architectural basis of the sculptural / Alex Potts -- "A deep and necessary commerce": Venice and the "architecture of colour-form" / Stephen Kite -- "The house of the mind": on Piero, perspective, and psychoanalysis / Peter Leech -- "We are exalted": Adrian Stokes's coming to terms with Michelangelo's massiveness / David Hulks -- Stokes's analysis / Richard Read -- Portrait of an analyst: Adrian Stokes and Melanie Klein / Lyndsey Stonebridge -- Healing art, healing Stokes / Janet Sayers -- "Showing openly the inside of action": place, ballet, psychoanalysis / Martin Golding -- The art historian as art critic: in praise of Adrian Stokes / David Carrier -- "Inferential muscle" and the work of criticism: Michael Baxandall on Adrian Stokes and art-critical language / Paul Tucker -- To bring the distant things near: distance in relation to the work of art in Stokes's thought / Etienne Jollet -- Stones of solace / Michael Ann Holly.

A pioneering overview of art and psychoanalysis that shows how each field can enrich and enlarge the other.

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.

In Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Masterworks of Art and Film, Harry Trosman demonstrates that a psychoanalytic point of view can vastly enrich one's understanding and appreciation of works of art. Drawing on current psychoanalytic views of the importance of fantasy, attachment and individuation theory, preoedipal factors in development, and object relations, Trosman addresses the impact of psychoanalysis on the understanding of the visual arts, painting, and film. Velázquez's Las Meninas, Giorgione's The Tempest, Rembrandt's self-portraits, and Seurat's La Grand Jatte are among the paintings Trosman analyzes. He also considers such films as Antonioni's L'avventura, Welles's Citizen Kane, Hitchcock's Vertigo, and Fellini's 8 1/2. The result is an insightful and innovative perspective, integrating classical and contemporary psychoanalytic thought with art and film criticism.