© Columbia University Press
The Artist and the Emotional World: Creativity and Personality
Paper, 288 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-07853-5
$30.00
/ £17.50
October, 1996
Cloth, 288 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-07852-8
$83.50
/ £49.00
The Artist and the Emotional World is unique as an effort to discern the role of personality in helping or hindering creative production. From over four decades of psychoanalytical practice, Gedo draws on his work with his psychotherapy patients and more than twenty analysands involved in a variety of creative endeavors as well as the biographies of a number of well-known artists, including Mozart, Gauguin, Conrad, Trollope, van Gogh, Goya, Picasso, Gorky, Proust, and many others.
In this unique blending of clinical experience with in-depth biographical study, Gedo examines both the necessary traits that prepare a person for a creative career as well as the emotional vicissitudes of such a career-the psychological issues talented persons must struggle with in order to be creative. He then goes further to discuss crucial developmental experiences that may result in a creative personality-childhood experiences, the strong, possibly negative, effect of a possession of talent on personality, and the influence of opportunities provided by a creator's environment. Gedo also details attributes required of the successful artist, the possible need to separate creativity from psychosis, and the evolution of psychoanalytic views on creativity.