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As psychoanalytic knowledge has expanded, certain interests that once seemed commonplace to any would-be psychoanalyst have gone by the board. How would we otherwise continue to embrace it all? Still, mere expedience doesn't gladden what has to be a sad state of affairs. The notion that most psychoanalytic knowledge has dated poorly anyway, so good riddance, is consolation only to the Philistine, whose idea of intellectual progress is synonymous with eliminating non-essentials and tidying up the bare remains (a kind of epistemic hausfrau neurosis). The fact is that languishing in the annals of psychoanalysis are many subjects whose interest revives once they are restored to the light of day.
What occasions these reflections is the prospect of commending Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's marvellous book Creative Characters. For the psychoanalyst still responsive to historical, biographical and other cultural applications of psychoanalytic knowledge, this remarkable study of creativity is a preserve busy with all sorts of endangered psychoanalytic problems. For example, psychoanalytic characterology, which Professor Young-Bruehl makes extensive use of, is hardly obsolete after all but was merely there to be rehabilitated.
This is not to say that, Creative Characters is a study of creativity by means of exclusively psychoanalytic concepts. Though psychoanalysis is a continuous theme throughout, much of the book evolves out of Young-Bruehl's extraordinary knowledge of cultural history, with a heavy emphasis on moral philosophy and biography. However, for the psychoanalyst in particular, one of the rewards of the book is the opportunity to see how a completely technical version of psychoanalysis, without reduction or other compromises, can be made to work with various domains of cultural history.
Furthermore, Young-Bruehl has made an intelligent peace with Freud, whose career serves as an example of a type of creativity. Thus there are no distractions from opportunistic and