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In Emotional Illness and Creativity the author employs a unique literary technique to present and expand his thesis that emotional illness inhibits and may eventually destroy artistic creativity rather than enhance it. He writes: “I hope the old fallacious notion that psychoanalysis removes or inhibits the creative capacity of an artist will be put to rest once and for all, because one can see in the case histories related here how patients’ psychopathology actually ruined the products of their creative capacities.” On the one hand, the psychopathology of the artist may render him alienated and uncomfortable with the prevailing mythology of his cultural milieu, thus providing a motive to express this mythology or a new mythology in a creative form. But at the same time, it mars the creative process by the intrusion of preoccupations or destroys it as a result of a fragmented sense of self and impaired ego functioning.
Dr. Chessick offers careful developmental studies and continuously juxtaposes the history of the “quasi-psychotic” genius of Ezra Pound and that of “Barry,” a composite of his experiences with several psychoanalytic patients. While Pound was talented and successful, Barry represents a neurotic failure with a disordered personality and limited talents. The dynamic interplay of their psychopathology and attempts at creative production is discussed concurrently, allowing for a fascinating evolution of clinical material. In discussing the prehistories of these two individuals, the author demonstrates the effects of “internalizations” from which neither Pound not Barry could ever deviate in essence from youth to old age. In the case of each, the nurturing fathers were in obeisance to the maternal demand for them to achieve