This ground-breaking book provides a unique insight into artistic creativity that lays the foundation for a new theory. Through a review of documents such as essays, published interviews, lecture notes, and more, the book uses case studies of six contemporary artists to provide a detailed phenomenological study of artistic creativity. The book offers a narrative account of six contemporary artists and their ways of approaching art-making. Through comprehensive accounts based on the individual artist's descriptions, the book reveals an existential dimension of art-making that explores the inspirational moment, the state of mind during creativity, how creativity can originate in a spontaneous stream of consciousness and how emotions play a major role in the creative process. The book sets out a unique understanding of artistic creativity as an alternative to the prevailing cognitive conceptions within psychology. Offering novel insights into how art is created and can influence the human psyche, the book will primarily appeal to academics, scholars, and post-graduate students within the area of creativity research, psychological aesthetics, and the psychology of art, as well as those with an interest in art and artistic work.

This ground-breaking book provides a unique insight into artistic creativity that lays the foundation for a new theory. Through a review of documents such as essays, published interviews, lecture notes, and more, the book uses case studies of six contemporary artists to provide a detailed phenomenological study of artistic creativity. The book offers a narrative account of six contemporary artists and their ways of approaching art-making. Through comprehensive accounts based on the individual artist’s descriptions, the book reveals an existential dimension of art-making that explores the inspirational moment, the state of mind during creativity, how creativity can originate in a spontaneous stream of consciousness, and how emotions play a major role in the creative process. The book sets out a unique understanding of artistic creativity as an alternative to the prevailing cognitive conceptions within psychology. Offering novel insights into how art is created and can influence the human psyche, the book will primarily appeal to academics, scholars, and post-graduate students within the area of creativity research, psychological aesthetics, and the psychology of art, as well as those with an interest in art and artistic work.

This book offers the first comprehensive examination of the psychodynamic theories of artistic creativity and the arts. Neither oversimplifying the complexity of these theories, nor bogging down in pedantic discourse, it honors the depth and richness of the work of Freud, Adler, Kris, Reich, Jung, and several lesser-known theorists, while making their theories readily accessible to the educated reader. After discussing the role of theory, the work offers each concept as a readily usable template for describing and understanding a work of art, whether painting, sculpture, music, dance, film, poetry, or prose. With these theories at hand, anyone interested in the arts will possess a far richer vocabulary for describing the artistic experience and a deeper understanding of the artist's creativity.

Why do we enjoy art? What inspires us to create artistic works? How can brain science help us understand our taste in art? The Psychology of Art provides an eclectic introduction to the myriad ways in which psychology can help us understand and appreciate creative activities. Exploring how we perceive everything from colour to motion, the book examines art-making as a form of human behaviour that stretches back throughout history as a constant source of inspiration, conflict and conversation. It also considers how factors such as fakery, reproduction technology and sexism influence our judgements about art. By asking what psychological science has to do with artistic appreciation, The Psychology of Art introduces the reader to new ways of thinking about how we create and consume art.

The Psychology of Creative Writing takes a scholarly, psychological look at multiple aspects of creative writing, including the creative writer as a person, the text itself, the creative process, the writer's development, the link between creative writing and mental illness, the personality traits of comedy and screen writers, and how to teach creative writing. This book will appeal to psychologists interested in creativity, writers who want to understand more about the magic behind their talents, and educated laypeople who enjoy reading, writing, or both. From scholars to bloggers to artists, The Psychology of Creative Writing has something for everyone.

What is it like to be an artist? Drawing on interviews with professional artists, this book takes the reader inside the creative process. The author, an artist and a psychotherapist, uses psychoanalytic theory to shed light on fundamental questions such as the origin of new ideas and the artist’s state of mind while working. Based on interviews with 33 professional artists, who reflect on their experiences of creating new works of art, as well as her own artistic practice, Patricia Townsend traces the trajectory of the creative process from the artist’s first inkling or ‘pre-sense’, through to the completion of a work, and its release to the public. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, particularly the work of Donald Winnicott, Marion Milner and Christopher Bollas, the book presents the artist’s process as a series of interconnected and overlapping stages, in which there is a movement between the artist’s inner world, the outer world of shared ‘reality’, and the spaces in-between. Creative States of Mind: Psychoanalysis and the Artist’s Process fills an important gap in the psychoanalytic theory of art by offering an account of the full trajectory of the artist’s process based on the evidence of artists themselves. It will be useful to artists who want to understand more about their own processes, to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists in their clinical work, and to anyone who studies the creative process.

The ideas presented in this book have been incubating for over 25 years. I was in the first grade, I believe, when the ideas that eventually developed into this social psychology of creativity first began to germinate. The occasion was art class, a weekly Friday afternoon event during which we were given small reproductions of the great masterworks and asked to copy them on notepaper using the standard set of eight Crayola® crayons. I had left kindergarten the year before with encour agement from the teacher about developing my potential for artistic creativity. During these Friday afternoon exercises, however, I developed nothing but frus tration. Somehow, Da Vinci's "Adoration of the Magi" looked wrong after I'd fin ished with it. I wondered where that promised creativity had gone. I began to believe then that the restrictions placed on my artistic endeavors contributed to my loss of interest and spontaneity in art. When, as a social psy chologist, I began to study intrinsic motivation, it seemed to me that this moti vation to do something for its own sake was the ingredient that had been missing in those strictly regimented art classes. It seemed that intrinsic motivation, as defined by social psychologists, might be essential to creativity. My research pro gram since then has given considerable support to that notion. As a result, the social psychology of creativity presented in this book gives prominence to social variables that affect motivational orientation.