The Origins and Psychodynamics of Creativity: A Psychoanalytic Perspective: Jerome D. Oremland. Madison:  International Universities Press, Inc., 1997.

Jerome Oremland, in this thoughtful and well-written book, focuses on themes or paradigms present in the creative process that he observed in his psychoanalytic work with artists Rather than theorize from an experience-distant perspective, Oremland utilizes his personal experience with art, his contact with artist friends, and his communication with four respondents whom he identifies as “creative,” to explore the accessibility and universality of art

In his introduction Oremland begins with Freud's reading of Hamlet, citing the ubiquitous central paradigm of Oedipal conflict. A second paradigm is the evocative power of an artistic masterpiece to portray “human universals and developmental fundamentals” (xiv). Oremland posits a third paradigm taken from Freud's study of Hamlet: that artistic work bears a biographic relationship to the artist's life. A fourth paradigm is the creative relational process of artistic work to the dream. He elaborates upon these four paradigms of unconscious Oedipal conflict, human universality, biographic context, and creative relational dream processes.

Oremland's first chapter deals with meaning in art and psychoanalysis. He explores the multilayered and multidetermined structures and symbolic representations, for example, Freud's concept of hysterical blindness as a physical compromise formation that expresses the wish to see something forbidden and the punishment or subversion of such wishes. This is not only a psychopathological conflict but a paradigm that transcends normative individual and socio-historical development. Oremland writes that “of all the humanities, psychoanalysis provides the most encompassing approach …” (6) to the study of the subjective in art. He applies the psychoanalytic approach to the study of paintings, for example, Judith, by Francesco Maffei, and da Vinci's St John, St. Anne and Two Others, and the Mona Lisa. By condensing meaning and evoking symbolic representations in Judith (in which a woman holds both