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In this far-reaching study Dr Rose explores the parallels and differences between creative and psychopathological responses to traumatic events. The author is interested in the process of reintegrating into thought and perception feelings which were 'split off' or isolated through trauma. He emphasizes the mastery of reality achieved in psychoanalysis through the recovery of repressed memories and feelings, and sees the artistic process as mastering reality by a similar associative method.
In exploring his questions Rose presents two case studies of very severely traumatized patients, a murderer-rapist who suffered extreme violence as a child and a case of multiple personality whose mother was psychotic and cruelly abusive. The unconscious fantasy patterns which led the murderer to his act, and the precarious balancing of nine characters in the multiple personality, are described with a richness of detail which will interest many readers unfamiliar with the inner worlds of such patients.
These cases are then used as a ground against which the life and work of artists such as Dostoevsky and Picasso are figured by contrast. Rose's thesis is that the overstimulus in Dostoevsky's traumatic witnessing of a brutal horse-beating (and older traumata) was mastered creatively through his work as a novelist. For the murderer, on the other hand, there was no mastery of early trauma, only a repetition in action, a repetition motivated by a delusion that made a young girl throwing stones in the present seem to be a brutal figure from the past. The courts failed to understand the force of the compulsion bred from this delusion and the man was hanged.
A screen memory of Dostoevsky's is interpreted in the light of the many reworkings of the memory in his novels. Rose suggests that one of Raskolnikov's dreams in Crime and Punishment has its imaginative origin in the novelist's unconscious, in a sado-masochistic primal scene fantasy: a crowd cheers and joins in when a man beats h