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Creative States of Mind: Psychoanalysis and the Artist's Process, by Patricia Townsend, a British psychoanalytic psychotherapist and visual artist, will appeal to a cross-section of psychoanalysts and artists. The book consists of several components, centering on Townsend's interviews of 33 visual artists who were surveyed about their conscious experiences (states of mind) as they developed and completed their work. The accounts are based on the interviewees' respective memories of the multistages of their engagement. As a corollary, Townsend, a visual artist herself, has interspersed photographs of her own work alongside personal descriptions of her process, written in vivo, rather than from memory. This through-line allows the reader to join the author on her journey as an art maker, and to move back and forth between the abstract and the specific, the general and the personal.
The book has its genesis as a PhD dissertation undertaken at the Slade School of Fine Art. Townsend developed and administered structured interviews to 30 visual artists, mostly from the Slade community, probing each of them individually about their memories of their subjective experience during successive phases in making a new body of work (later she interviewed three others). Her sample was drawn from a group of visual artists (painters, photographers, sculptors, and video artists). Townsend coded
and analyzed the recorded statements using the Interpretive Phenomenological Experience Analysis, an instrument designed to measure subjective lived experiences of individual members of a group. Despite divergences and variability, the data yielded findings from which Townsend formed schematic categories of successive states of mind that artists pass through when making art. Her stated purpose was to follow the how of the artist's experience, rather than the why. In this vein, she analyzed her categories by applying ideas outlined by Winnicott, with occasional assists from Milner and Bollas.