Creative Analysis: Art, Creativity, and Clinical Process. By George Hagman. New York/London:  Routledge, 2015.  129 pp.

Perhaps due to Freud's own conflicting feelings about whether psychoanalysis was more a science or a literary art form, psychoanalysts have long been debating whether a humanistic perspective adds or detracts from our practice.1 Psychoanalytically inclined neuroscientists, such as Eric Kandel,2 consider the conflict resolved when they show the scientific bases of art. Some analysts find ways of integrating artistic sensibilities into their perception of patients' cognitive processes,3 in part by evoking the transformative power of metaphor to integrate sensation, conception, and reflective functioning. Some psychoanalysts analyze artists.4

In his new book, Creative Analysis: Art, Creativity, and Clinical Process, George Hagman, both artist and analyst, treats psychoanalysis as an intersubjective art form aimed at creative living. In doing so, he moves past the science-versus-art binary in seeing psychoanalysis as an actual art, a view intimated by Winnicott's emphasis on playing and potential space.5 Winnicott, of course, was not alone in viewing analysis as a form of creativity. When Adam Phillips asserted that patients are the failed artists of their lives,6 surely he had in mind Otto Rank's dictum that true artistic