Creative Analysis

Creative Analysis: Art, Creativity and Clinical Process explores the dynamics of creativity in psychoanalytic treatment. It argues that the creative process of the analytic interaction is characterised by specific forms of feeling, thinking and, most importantly, relating that result in the emergence of something new – therapeutic change. The artistic aspects of psychoanalysis and various features of creativity in analytic treatment are explored. Clinical examples are discussed at length.

George Hagman presents a new model of the psychology of creativity and art that helps us better understand the clinical process. The book explores and develops several important implications of Hagman’s main thesis: the psychodynamics of art, the creativity of the brain, aesthetic aspects of the treatment relationship, and the creativity of the analyst and analysand.

Change in analysis is driven not just by the analyst’s interventions but by the patient’s own motivation and capacity for self-transformation. This change is depicted here as a depth psychological process which explores the sources of the patient’s resistance to self-actualisation and identifies hidden potential, unrealised capacities, and strengths. Creative Analysis: Art, Creativity and Clinical Process reformulates psychoanalytic therapy as a form of art that can help patients realise their potential which may have been blocked, inhibited, denied, or derailed.

The book will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, graduates and students, including the educated public interested in art.