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Daniel Dervin has written a major, truly convincing—genuinely creative—study of a variety of “creative types,” largely drawn from the realm of literature (his official specialty), but also from science, with a few cases thrown in from philosophy and the visual arts. The book is a brilliant contribution to applied analysis, indeed, a showpiece demonstration of it at its most insightful: an argument which uses psychoanalytic ideas to make explicit what is subjectively implicit—let's say unconscious—in an ostensibly objective subject matter. In other words, applied analysis is an exercise in critical consciousness, in which a socially given terrain is discovered to be the deviously literal representation of far from transparent emotional forces. If clinical psychoanalysis can be characterized as, in part, an archaeological enterprise, as Freud thought, then applied psychoanalysis can be characterized as essentially geological: it is not so much a matter of digging up what is buried, as of examining a certain social text—and every life is one—in order to understand how it came to be formed by forces beyond its control, indeed, greater than it.
The socially presentable surface is left intact and unchanged or, to put this another way, its history is assumed to be finished (this holds true in principle, that is, even when more information about it is found)—its only future is that which its reading brings to it—but the forces that helped give it its appearance and form are studied, as a kind of lesson in life. Applied psychoanalysis involves careful observation of the details of surface, a certain understanding of the “laws” of the depth it “bespeaks,” and a demonstration of their connection. For better or worse, it is physiognomic in import—hopefully an “informed” physiognomy. That is, it relies not simply on the external features of the social face the way traditional physiognomy relied on those of the physical face, but also on recognition of the skull behind the face—on