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Leonard Shengold begins his psychoanalytic foray into the mystery of artistic creativity with an apt quotation from Leon Edel (1985), one of the world's great biographers: “Novelists have omniscience; biographers never do” (p. 3). These words are especially true for psychobiographers, who must acknowledge candidly that if we cannot completely know ourselves, how can we know other human beings? Shengold might have also quoted one of Freud's (1928) own cautionary statements— “Before the problem of the creative artist analysis must, alas, lay down its arms” (p. 177)—a warning that prevented neither Freud nor other psychoanalysts, including Shengold, from attempting to solve the enigma of artistic creativity.
To his credit, Shengold reminds readers of Is There Life Without Mother? that applied psychoanalysis “has generally been the province of amateurs, in both the best and the worst sense” (p. 14). Apart from Freud, Shengold cites few other psychoanalytic theorists writing on creactivity: He breifly points to Ernst Kris, John Gedo, and Gilbert Rose