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Any psychoanalyst who has read the biographies of Hannah Arendt and Anna Freud, written by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, will consider a new book by this author an event of note. She now devotes a substantial volume to the ever-present, and somewhat mysterious, problem of creativity.
Like all thorough students, she first reviews the history of her topic. Going back to the philosophers of the Golden Age of Greece, she scans the opinions of Plato and Aristotle, and compares them to the moderns. The clinically oriented psychoanalyst will probably gain little of practical value from the views of the ancients, necessary though this inspection is.
Young-Bruehl reviews almost every available theory about creativity before giving us her own compendium. In formulating her ideas she draws heavily on psychoanalytic theories and notably the Freudian corpus. She views creativity as issuing from the character structure of the individual. It is what she calls the “character ideal,” which bears some resemblance to the Freudian ego ideal, that determines the creative output of the person. Each individual amasses a set of principles that he finds congenial to his make-up, and by which he plans to live. These principles now constitute his character ideal.
Says Young-Bruehl (p. 215),
The characterology that I have been developing in this book is pluralist, but it does not rely on any one-to-one correlation between a dominating trait and a character-type. I assume that there are three character regions or complexes in which an array of elements intersect. Each person is a unique instance of her or his type; and each of the three types is a dynamic
Page 358configuration of the different elements in different proportions … I have been suggesting that each region or complex of character will reveal to an analytical approach these elements:” a predominating libidinal phase; a predominating psychic structure; characteristic patterns of behavior and mechanisms of defense; characteristic pathological syndrome