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Susan Kolodny, a California poet and psychotherapist, has written a well-intentioned, informative, engaging and yet peculiarly unsatisfying book on creativity and its inhibitions. Well-versed in psychoanalytic theory, Kolodny devotes most of her attention to the phenomenon of “writers block”. She views it as arising from multiple conscious and unconscious sources. Prominent among these are anxieties pertaining to the content of the potential topic. Such “resistance to content” (p. 6) tends to develop where what is about to get “mentalized” is at odds with the creator's sense of self and /or is associated with an un-metabolized traumatic situation.
Inhibitions of creativity arise from other sources as well. Thus the unconscious meanings of creative activity itself can be so threatening as to block the ego functions pertinent in this regard. This is especially so when developing one's artistic potential comes to represent a fatal outdoing of parents and siblings.
“The sense of danger many feel when we do, or want to do, creative work, often derives from our own fantasies about excluding others, competing with and outdoing them … (however) … the unconscious belief that creative work is dangerous, comes not only from our own fantasies and wishes. Sometimes it comes, at least in part, from actual experiences with the environment, and what we do with these in our imagination.” (p. 21)
Conscious concerns surrounding immersion in a creative endeavor, which almost invariably detaches one from the social surround, can become threatening and might block creativity. Kolodny states
“Writing is a glorious opportunity to leave others out and to live alone in my poem. But the excitement of this had to outweigh the anxiety and to become acceptable to me before I could allow myself to have it. I had to feel that excluding others for hours from my attention or awareness would not necessarily reveal to them my essential disloyalty in preferring my own company to theirs, my thoughts to the