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Despite the rave reviews on its back cover, and positively sycophantic foreword, I found this a self-important and disappointing book. The author takes ‘Poiesis… the creative act, the death and rebirth of the soul’ as a focus. His aim in the book is ‘to question the meaning of suffering’ and to explore ‘how, in the face of human fragmentation, art making can find its therapeutic power’. These are huge questions. In his attempt to answer them, the author hauls us through philosophy, anthropology, mythology and many other disciplines. There is a richness of material here indisputably, but I was left with the uneasy feeling that breadth is no substitute for depth and that rhetoric was masquerading as profundity.
Each of the nine papers that make up the book was in fact written for nine different occasions and different audiences, which gives an uneven and fragmented feel to the book. We meet Freud, Shamanism, Descartes, Apollo, Nietzsche, Jung, Winnicott, Klein - I could go on and on - in a fairground ride of ideas that left me with an impression of riches, but dizzy. The style of writing is a mixture of philosophical discussion, self-assertion and rhetoric, with little or no reference to clinical material; the sole exception to this is an example from the author's own therapy to which I will come later. This makes for a very ungrounded text in which the reader is expected to go along with his almost religious fervour despite the paucity of evidence to support his views.
He holds some strong views. Take, for example, ‘The task of therapy is not to eliminate suffering but to give voice to it’ (p. 15), or ‘Art provides the container in which pain can be borne, without this container the psyche cannot hold its suffering’ (p. 57), or, similarly, ‘Art has an inherent capacity to heal the psyche…’ (p. 2) - well, maybe it has, maybe it hasn't, let's have some examples to consider, to grapple with.
His statements are generalizations; is he talking about all patients, psychotic an