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This small, but densely packed book is a valuable contribution to the literature. Jerome Oremland has for years pondered and written on creativity; this book is in part a restatement of earlier views. But he extends them with stimulating discussion and new hypotheses. The book is enhanced by 19 photographs as well as the responses of four creative artists.
What is Oremland about? He focuses first on Freud's contributions to creativity. Then begins a dialogue in which he quotes early psychoanalytic responders to Freud. At the same time he initiates his own responses to those previous works. As the book unfolds, he continues this three-way dialogue: Freud, extensions of Freud, and Oremland's ideas. His areas of focus are indicated by chapter titles that deal with meaning in art, dream interpretation and art appreciation, creativity and talent, creativity and relatedness, creativity and sexuality.
Although Freud is much cited, Oremland is not locked into Freudian concepts. Indeed he often infers and teases out from Freud's work intimations of issues developed by post-Freudian analysts. As Oremland warns, the going in the early chapters is sometimes difficult as the work is compressed, but it is a journey worth taking.
I found myself stimulated by many of the ideas. “Stimulated” does not mean I saw things as Oremland did; it means I understood his ideas but would sometimes come up with different ones. I think that Oremland would be pleased with this response.
In two early chapters Oremland considers similarities between dreams and art objects. In particular, he suggests that each has a number of fixed meanings. The dream observer learns those meanings alternatively or simultaneously. He indicates that as the analyst listens, he hears possibilities of a number of dream interpretations. Though the process of listening and questioning, the number of possibilities decreases until one arrives at the essential meaning of the dream.
There are other understandings of dreams, however