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The expressive power of art, among its other features, has stimulated psychoanalysts to apply our conceptual understanding to the task and challenge of researching art's mysteries. In this area, psychoanalytic scholars since Freud have created an enormous body of literature having two broad aims: (1) to use artistic products of all varieties to illustrate the complexities of psychoanalytic discoveries, and (2) to sound the depths of artistic mysteries by using psychoanalytic science to study aesthetics. The psychoanalytic literature on art, fascinating though it may be, is also an entangled web of complicated and all-too-contradictory inferences and questionable assertions. Those trying to master the vast psychological literature on creativity might find along with H. Gardner that “… the list of individuals who have studied the creative process is distressingly long in comparison with the handful who have actually illuminated it” (p. xi).
In Portraits of the Artist, we are guided by an author of unusual sophistication and scholarly erudition in both psychoanalysis and aesthetics to a higher degree of understanding. In this labyrinthine area of thought, no single book can do more than bring order to some areas of investigation, while raising previously unasked questions in other areas for consideration. This book succeeds admirably in its stated task, that of applying psychoanalytic psychology to the frontiers of culture so as to elucidate the self-experience of the artist and the relationship of his personal self to his expressive activity and its products, works of art. Gedo succeeds in the aims of his subtitle, enlightening us psychoanalytically about “creativity and its vicissitudes” (p. xiii).
Let us take, for example, one of myriad ideas discussed by Gedo. Since the days of Freud (e.g., in “The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming”), many psychoanalysts have failed to make the important distinction between neurotic fantasy and artistic production, which occurs at