Summary
Contents
‘It is surely worth reading, not only by the author's fellow psychiatrists, but also by psychologists in general’ — Contemporary Psychology. ’I found this book a joy to read. Each chapter sets out the orthodoxy in question, then proceeds to explain lucidly the author's difficulties with this orthodoxy and to suggest an alternative way of looking at the issues’ — Self and Society Psychotherapy's influence seems all pervasive today. But to what end? Is helping people really therapy's main mission? This provocative book explores the alternatives to psychotherapeutic orthodoxies on such vital issues as sexuality; the self; the unconscious; creativity; and the dilemma of evil. Erensto Spinelli challenges psychotherapy, asking if it has retreated from its early promise of being a pivotal agent in our attempts to discover what it means to be human, in exchange for its current role as a pacifier of personal and social unease.
Creation and Being: A Challenge to Psychoanalytic Theories of Artistic Creativity
Creation and Being: A Challenge to Psychoanalytic Theories of Artistic Creativity
Why do human beings attempt to create works of art? What is the nature of the value placed upon the works by their audience? What do the individual artistic creator and audience member experience through works of art that is so compelling and meaningful to them? What kind of person does it take to become an artistic creator of merit and genius? And how is it that works of art are not universally recognized as being such or, similarly, may undergo reassessment or be discovered for the first time by later generations or by other cultures alien to that in which the creative artist ...
