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Creativity is a fraught topic for psychoanalytic writers and theorists: a recent book by Donald Moss is one example with its searching discussion of creativity and its ‘fetishization’ (Moss, 2018). Freud wrote extensively about individual artists and works of art but did not engage with the artistic process itself. Classical theory, following Freud's view of the arts as a neurotic configuration, tends to pathologize the process and, at times, to prioritize the Kleinian view of creative work as, largely, driven by the wish to repair. A key, underlying question posed by Townsend's book is: can psychoanalysis throw light on art without reducing it?
It is an original contribution to questions such as this, filling a gap in theorizing about art and doing so with conscientious attention to detail and respect for the interviewees and their individual process and achievement. Townsend has the advantage of being both clinician and artist, and her use of her own work is both generous and illuminating. She offers us a compelling account of the artistic process, employing interviews with 33 artists, from the point of view of the Independent Tradition where an interest in creativity is a hallmark. The book is underpinned by the work of Milner, Bollas and Winnicott as well as that of thinkers relevant to but outside the psychoanalytic arena, such as Anton Ehrenzweig and Susanne Langer.
Chapter 1 puts forward and develops Townsend's notion of the ‘pre-sense’, that is the artist's initial experience of sensing the potential of something external, be it a feature of landscape, a fabric or a photograph. Chapters 2 and 3 look at the period of gestation when little appears to be happening at a time before the form of the work comes to light. The author draws on her own experience of a work's early stages as well as that of a photographer and other artists, usefully referencing Bollas' (1992) notion of the ‘receptive unconscious’. The focus shifts in Chapter 4