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Since Freud's controversial venture into Leonardo's iconography (1910), a virtual flood of publications has appeared, attempting or purporting to account for the "creative process" or to explicate the content—seldom the form—of works of art of all ages and in all media.1
More recently, application of psychoanalytic ideas to historical events and to the lives of historical figures has led to the emergence of psychohistory, a new interdisciplinary synthesis that seeks to meld the depth perceptions and psychological insights of the psychoanalyst with the rigorous scholarship and long-range perspective of the historian.2 Now, in Peter Gay's Art and Act we have the logical development in this progression—a historian's excursus into the lives and work of three major creative figures whose art, he believes, serves as exemplars of historical processes. Creativity is viewed here as a phenomenon in history, illustrative of causative principles that, Gay proposes, work on all levels of historical explanation.
A new approach to the psychoanalytic psychology of creativity is certainly needed. From Freud's time to our own there have been two basic trends in such studies. The effort to "interpret" works of art or artists' biographies to expose unconscious motivations and/or meanings has been widespread but has rarely demonstrated anything in the personal history or preoccupations of artists that can truly account for a particular and unique mode of resolving conflict or communicating meaning. (Greenacre's work, "The Childhood of the Artist,"3 is a major exception here.)