You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
“Every child is an artist, the problem is staying an artist when you grow up. “Pablo Picasso
In this original, erudite, and generous work, Safan-Gerard has explicated across three major disciplines, the essence of Picasso's famous statement. She has brought together in a highly synthetic way, the creative underpinnings, both productive and destructive of painting, psychoanalysis, and music. The book is divided into two parts. In Part I, she lays the theoretical and clinical groundwork for Part II where she forthrightly discusses her artistic development in all its vicissitudes and triumphs. Additionally, she has graciously illustrated Part II with prolific examples of her beautiful paintings in all states such as destructive, lying fallow, and liberated. With this, she provides the reader with a visual narrative of her process, as well as relief from the repetitious sameness of the printed word. Given the limits of time and space, I have chosen because of my areas of interest to comment briefly across some but not all chapters. However, they all contain scholarly, original, and important ideas.
Beginning with the first chapter on chaos and control in the creative process, Safan-Gerard is fearless in discussing and highlighting the necessity of creative destruction and hate in creating a work of art. Working artists in any field remember the dread and horror of wiping down, crossing out, deleting, or shattering a work of art for the first time. It is a true act of ruthlessness. I applaud her for making this her opening discussion well populated with theoretical viewpoints from Sabina Spielrein, Marion Milner, Alberto Giacometti, and Melanie Klein among others. Of particular importance relative to the idea of the necessity of destruction in the creative act are the early and original ideas of Speilrein presented in her theoretical paper, “Destructiveness as the cause of coming into being” (p. 5). In this paper, early in the history of psychoanalysis, she originally disc