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Psychoanalysis has tended to view the creative act as a derivative of affective and instinctual drive phenomena, and consequently has patronized it as a form of psychopathology or at very best an alternate to that psychopathology. Silvano Arieti, in this interesting and very readable work, shifts our understanding to more contemporary psychoanalytic concerns with cognition and its impact on mental life and functioning.
Following an initial critical review of the major theoretical approaches to creativity and a clear and interesting summary of important issues in cognition that bear on the problem, Arieti advances his own theory of creativity that has its roots in classical observations on primary and secondary process cognition. He proposes that we view creativity as a complex cognitive process process he calls “tertiary process,” which he views as a special synthesis and integration of primary and secondary process cognition. While he points out certain similarities between the creative person and the schizophrenic, he carefully distinguishes between the two, believing that although both seem to have special access to primary process material, schizophrenics cannot coordinate primary process with secondary process for creative purposes.
Arieti's documentation of his thesis is extensive, scholarly, and immensely readable. He ranges through topics of poetry, wit, painting, music, religion, science, and philosophy with clarity and conviction, often demonstrating a breadth of interest and comprehension uncommon in psychoanalysis.
Arieti finds definite relationships between creativity and society and culture, and attempts to define characteristics of a society that is creativogenic, i.e., which tends to foster creativity. It is in this section of the book, and in the following section in which he offers prescriptions for promoting individual creativity, that I believe the author tends to oversimplify his otherwise rich and complex approach. Prescriptive approaches to creat