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Biography is a genre that requires a certain humility,” Elisabeth Young-Bruehl remarks disarmingly in the Preface to her new book, Creative Characters, “but, I have observed, those who do it well are not naturals at humility. They discipline themselves. And then they have a fling” (p. ix). By her own admission, Young-Bruehl, the author of two respected biographies on Hannah Arendt and Anna Freud, has her fling in Creative Characters, and the result is a book that is both rewarding and frustrating to readers.
Young-Bruehl's stated intention in Creative Characters is to speculate on the nature of creativity and construct a typology or characterology of creative characters. Admitting that a book on characterology may strike some readers as quaint in light of the theoretical controversies arising from deconstruction, poststructuralism, and postmodernism, she nevertheless argues that the time is right for a new approach to creativity that respects the diversity of creative types and avoids the tendency toward reductivism implicit in earlier characterological studies.
She begins her study by contrasting three ancient Greek theorists of creativity—Plato, Aristotle, and Zeno the Stoic—with three modern theorists: Nietzsche, Freud, and Proust. Each viewed creativity differently. Plato assumed that creativity is divinely inspired, Aristotle believed that creativity is an evolutionary force arising from reason, and Zeno maintained that creativity derives from the soul's union with the cosmos. Neither Plato, Aristotle, nor Zeno theorized that creativity is allied to self-analysis. Observing that Immanuel Kant was the first to link creativity and self-analysis, Young-Bruehl discusses how self-analysis is central to the views of creativity propounded by her exemplary modern theorists. Nietzsche began as a positivist psychologist and arch-Platonist, only to repudiate his early work and construct a Platonic self-artificing image of creativity which he described as