Preface

Although by no means the exclusive preserve of psychoanalysis, the theme of this issue of American Imago is indubitably central to it. The question at hand is whether, as Edmund Wilson (1941) maintained in his classic exposition of the myth of Philoctetes as a paradigm of creativity, the “wound” of neurosis is inseparable from the “bow” of artistic power, or whether, as Lionel Trilling (1947) rejoined, “there is in fact no causal connection” between art and neurosis (169), and “whatever elements of neurosis” the artist may have “in common with his fellow mortals, the one part of him that is healthy, by any conceivable definition of health, is that which gives him the power to conceive, to plan, to work, and to bring his work to a conclusion” (175).

The four essays here assembled are all landmark contributions to the understanding of their respective subjects. The absence of fanfare in George Mandelbaum's title, “On Ben Jonson's Comedies,” perhaps belies the dazzling quality of his reconstruction of the lasting reverberations in Jonson's plays of the death of his father before Jonson's birth and his mother's subsequent remarriage to a bricklayer almost certainly before her son had reached the age of three. Donald Capps's “Erik H. Erikson, Norman Rockwell, and the Therapeutic Functions of a Questionable Painting” takes off from the little-known fact that Rockwell was Erikson's patient at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, during the 1950s to offer a beautiful and searching exploration, centered on the painting The Art Critic, of the roots of Rockwell's creativity in his relationships with women—above all, his mother but also his first two wives—as well as in his second wife's relationship to their three sons. Janet Hadda's “Ginsberg in Hospital,” which has the distinction of garnering a story in the Los Angeles Times (Timberg 2007), draws on unpublished records to argue that Ginsberg's 1949 stay at the Psychiatric Institute of Columbia Presbyterian