The Captive Muse: On Creativity and Its Inhibition By Susan Kolodny, D.M.H. Madison, CT:  Psychosocial Press, 2000.  154 pp.

Reviewing a book that examines the creative process beckons one to enter experientially the very territory the book explores. Facing down the blank page and attempting to bring shape and substance there to one's thoughts, feelings, and reactions to what the author has written evokes a lively encounter with one of the principal themes of this book: how we write is who we are, and every creative encounter is an encounter with ourselves.

Author Susan Kolodny focuses her discussion of creativity and its inhibitions by posing three questions: Why is creative work so difficult? What promotes or inhibits the process, both from within and from without? Finally, what makes creative activity possible at all? In proposing answers to these questions, the author draws on her experience as a published poet, her years of practice as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist working with creative patients, and interviews with artists and writers who shared the texture and trajectory of their inner journeys through both fertile and fallow times.

With clinicians, would-be and accomplished creators, and curious onlookers in mind, Dr. Kolodny provides a detailed topological map of the creative process, as well as its potential impediments. She highlights the difficult and very personal territory one must negotiate in order to produce, and the psychic vistas that reward those persistent enough to push ahead, even when the going slows or stalls. The book begins by addressing inner obstacles to creative expression, in the form of resistances to the content of the work and, by extension, of our own minds. Kolodny describes how resistance to the creative process may mobilize in response to forbidden pleasurable mental contents or discontents, those disappointments and impossible longings one is wary to confront. One may also fear being re-traumatized if one attempts to use previously painful experiences as fuel for