You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This vigorous, provocative, often formidable work, completed just before the author's death, represents the fruits of thirty-five years' thought and writing about the theory of creativity. In an enlightening foreword Susan Deri's son admits with candour to highly mixed feelings about his mother: ‘It was not easy being her son.
Often she would say or do things that would pull me in several directions at once.’ He sees this conflicting temperament, of which there are traces in the book, as a reflection of a highly varied background: an early training in psychology and psychoanalysis in Hungary, heavily grounded in biology, under her earliest mentor, Szondi, and also Hermann and Balint; a philosophical framework taken from Ernst Cassirer and Suzanne Langer; certain dynamic principles of Gestalt psychology; and above all the concepts of Winnicott, to whom she devotes a complete chapter. Due tribute is paid also to Melanie Klein as being ‘the first to see in the capacity for symbolisation the absolute prerequisite for ego development, intellectual curiosity and creativity.’
As a result of these varied influences the author evolved a distinctive biopsychological view of creativity as ‘a continuous life-shaping activity’, an innate force or drive akin to the organising Gestalt principles of visual perception, which may ultimately shape a satisfying life-space for the individual where flexibility prevails and Eros outweighs Thanatos. If assisted in true Winnicottian fashion by good maternal care, it leads to the formation of a healthy ego, based on a trusting libidinous attitude, capable of linking parts together into increasingly complex and coherent patterns, of sustaining hope and accepting the inevitable fact of time, as well as the recognition that some goals are reachable and others not. It is a picture of sustained directedness leading to order through the mysterious process of perception, a Platonic or Kantian vision.
However, internal symbol formation is a Gestalt-f