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This book is intended to correct what the author believes to be a glaring omission on the part of classical psychoanalysis: a consideration of the problem of aesthetic form, as opposed to content. Accordingly, Stephen Newton advances a theory of artistic creativity centering on the spiritual dimension of painting and based on Anton Ehrenzweig's adaptation of Kleinian psychology. Along the way, he provides illuminating discussions of contemporary artists such as Roger Hilton, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, and Georg Baselitz, and of icon painters, Fra Angelico, Leonardo, Nicholas Poussin, and Cézanne, among others.
Writing in the 1960s, Ehrenzweig proposed that the unconscious primary process is not chaotic but, rather, a layered structure. The deepest level, the “manic-oceanic,” is negotiable only through unconscious form. This is achieved when the creative process is able to incorporate unconscious psychic structure into the formal structure of painting. This deep, unconscious, manic-oceanic level of creative activity is the basis for the spiritual dimension of art—regarding which, Newton claims, both psychoanalysis and postmodern art are “in denial.”