Jussi Saarinen is a psychologist and a researcher in philosophy with interests, and publications, in psychoanalytic aesthetics and the philosophy of emotion. His book conscientiously traverses philosophy, psychoanalysis and cognitive theory interspersed with interviews with artists, with the central aim of exploring and supporting his theme that ‘painters paint to feel’ (p. 1).

He argues that we create niches to ‘scaffold’ our minds and suggests what is lacking in philosophical approaches to the subject is a psychological understanding of what ‘drives our scaffolding interactions and how these interactions incorporate lengthy personal histories of feeling’ (p. 3). At this point Saarinen recruits psychoanalysis and, in a particularly illuminating way, the work of Winnicott. He contends that painting is ‘a reciprocal activity conditioned by early interactions with others’ (p. 4), a creative form deriving from the earliest exchanges between infant