Pychoanalysis and art, Freud and Leonardo.

Freud was the first to apply psychoanalysis to art, choosing for his subject the life and work of Leonardo da Vinci. Observing Leonardo's partly fused image of the Virgin and St. Anne, he inferred that the artist had depicted his two mothers, his biological mother and his stepmother. This very early analytic discourse on parent loss and adoption changed the course of the interpretation of art. Freud explored the psychology of art, the artist, and aesthetic appreciation. Confronting the age-old enigma of the Mona Lisa, he proposed a daring solution to the riddle of the sphinxlike smile of this icon of art. His paper prefigures concepts of narcissism, homosexuality, parenting, and sublimation. Lacking modern methodology and theory, Freud's pioneering insights overshadow his naive errors. In this fledgling inquiry, based on a childhood screen memory and limited knowledge of Leonardo's artistic and scientific contributions, Freud identified with this Renaissance genius in his own self-analytic and creative endeavor.     

The Hands of Egon Schiele

Through an exploration of Egon Schiele's life and enigmatic ?mannerisms?, which recall those of autistic children and schizophrenic patients, the author explores the impact his outstanding and disturbing paintings can have. The approach is biographical, revealing Schiele the artist as an already gifted though disturbed child. Some material refers to Schiele's way of expressing painful yet creative fantasies, in which different parts of his body (in particular his hands), projected into his paintings, form part of an intimate, creative, disturbed language. From childhood to his early death, Schiele used a coherent figurative language which was both realistic and oneiric; the author develops some ideas on art and psychoanalysis, particularly as to the creative process within a complex and disturbed personality. Working as he did between the psychotic and non-psychotic elements of his personality (Bion), Schiele is an appropriate artist for our time. His drama, his feelings of disintegration and ?dismemberment? are nourished by the creative, sane parts of his personality. The true psychotic artist is not entirely psychotic, for creation requires aesthetic taste and harmony.     

Owning It

What is the distinction, if any, between who we are as people and what we believe and how we practice as psychoanalysts? For me, art played a vital affirmation that there was a world full of larger ideas and feelings in contrast to the desiccated environment my parents had created. From grade school, through my training as an analyst to the present, art has not only elucidated who I am but expanded my sense of being a creative individual. From the procession of viewing art and engaging with it, to making and acquiring art pieces, the discovery was not only that I owned these pieces but that their impact challenged the ‘who’ I thought I was if I was willing to own up to it. The information that informs our personal beliefs and practice in psychoanalysis comes from such an openness to new experiences from many directions in our daily lives, and challenges who we believe we are. Art adds to analytic knowledge, not by giving us an interpretation for our lives, but by stimulating the genuinely creative process of self-reflection.     

Art in support of life: Caravaggio and the plague

In the struggle with COVID-19, art offered a way to face the solitude of the lockdown. The focus of this paper is primarily on Caravaggio’s painting The Seven Works of Mercy, with references to other paintings to amplify some aspects of the artist’s approach to life and his uniqueness in the artistic landscape of his time. Darkness was part of Caravaggio’s research for spiritual truth and by entering the stories of his life and exploring the tales told through imaginative expression in his paintings, it is possible to understand his process of exploration of ancestral darkness. The author uses her imagination to reflect on how art can help to contact the profound fears buried in the unconscious which are now being awakened by the pandemic. The contemplation of this painting facilitated the emergence of emotions related to the darkness of our time, with the discovery that empathy and mercy offer a way to come to terms with the pandemic. This approach demands a different understanding of reality with Caravaggio’s dark creative world becoming a companion that permits the exploration of what is not yet thinkable in daily life. Images accompany the author’s research that relies on her imagination and amplifications.     

The Divine,The Deviant and the Diabolical: A Journey Through An Artist's Paintings During Her Participation in a Creative Process Group: An Evolution of "Developmental Mourning"

Participation in writing and creative process offers a unique window to view the evolution of the mourning process. This study traces how a painter's work as shown to such a group reveals and interacts with her developmental progress as she goes through the mourning process in individual therapy with the author, who is also the leader of the writing and creative process group to which the artist belongs. Through these mutually beneficial exchanges, the patient is able to relinquish her constructed false self-identity for an authentic female identity, as seen in the evolution of her painting over her two-year participation in the writing and creative process group.     

Tensions in naturalistic,evolutionary explanations of aesthetic reception and production

Aesthetic universals may plausibly reflect biases in aesthetic reception that arose through evolutionary pressure. However, the role universals play in high-level aesthetic creativity is not well understood. After reviewing evolutionary aspects of aesthetics, some specific proposed aesthetic universals, and the nature of creativity in aesthetic domains, I examine a creative dynamic in which long-term pressure for novelty leads to inexorable tensions with canalized aesthetic biases. Examining the role of aesthetic universals in individuals’ creative processes, as well as more thorough trans-historical assessments of the development of universals, are proposed as methodological strategies for gaining traction on this issue. Such investigations have the potential to inform the role of the audience in shaping the evolution of artist styles, how universals play out in high versus low art, the possibility of identifying new aesthetic universals (perhaps particularly with conceptual art), and the relative value of novelty versus adaptive value in aesthetic creativity.     

Enthusiasm Versus Self-Possession: The Art of Psychological Science

In this article, I propose that psychology is an art, and that it can be so without forfeiting its identity as a developing science. In support of this proposal, I outline the ways in which art and science unnecessarily have become dichotomized, and I suggest a framework for integrating art and science. This integration is based on reframing the art versus science tension as a vehicle through which the basic human dynamic of "enthusiasm versus self-possession" is expressed. I apply this new framework to the field of psychology and outline ways in which research and practice in psychology can be unified to produce an integrated, dynamic, and creative field.     

Differential Effects of Divergent Thinking,Domain Knowledge,and Interest on Creative Performance in Art and Math

The purpose of this study was to investigate the main effects of divergent thinking, domain knowledge, and two types of interest (i.e., individual and situational interest) on creative performance in art and math, as well as moderating and mediating effects of the two types of interest. A series of hierarchical multiple regression analyses were conducted on data collected from 221 Korean 8th graders. Both divergent thinking and domain knowledge contributed to creative performance in art and math. However, the relative importance of these two factors was different in the two domains. In art, divergent thinking explained more of the variance in creative performance than domain knowledge did; in math, domain knowledge explained more of the variance than divergent thinking. Individual interest had no statistically significant main effect either in art or math. Situational interest had a statistically significant main effect on creative performance in math, but not in art. None of the hypothesized moderating and mediating effects of the two types of interest was statistically significant. The theoretical implications of the study are discussed, especially with respect to linking the relative importance of the variables in this study to the different domain structures of art and math.     

Can People Creative in Imagery Interpret Ambiguous Figures Faster than People Less Creative in Imagery?

The purpose of the research study was to investigate whether people creative in imagery are better than people non‐creative in imagery at interpreting ambiguous figures. Creativity, in the imagery paradigm, is said to involve two processes: combinational play and discovery. Discovery plays a major role in creativity as it is the process of discerning, judging or interpreting the value of a mental construction. Furthermore, creative people have been said to be insightful thus supporting the proposition advanced here that people creative in imagery are faster at interpreting and finding alternative interpretations for ambiguous figures than people less creative in imagery. This study reports both latencies and discoveries in perception and mental imagery as measured on a figure combination task. The data support the conclusion that people creative in imagery are more capable in reinterpreting ambiguous figures and that they are quicker in their discoveries than people less creative in imagery. The analysis to the questions of how the subjects arrived at their discoveries may also illustrate the Gestalt literature on insight as a rapid pattern recognition.     

Conceptual blending of high-level features and data-driven salience computation in melodic generation

Conceptual Blending (CB) theory describes the cognitive mechanisms underlying the way humans process the emergence of new conceptual spaces by blending two input spaces. CB theory has been primarily used as a method for interpreting creative artefacts, while recently it has been utilised in the context of computational creativity for algorithmic invention of new concepts. Examples in the domain of music include the employment of CB interpretatively as a tool to explain musical semantic structures based on lyrics of songs or on the relations between body gestures and music structures. Recent work on generative applications of CB has shown that proper low-level representation of the input spaces allows the generation of consistent and sometimes surprising blends. However, blending high-level features (as discussed in the interpretative studies) of music explicitly, is hardly feasible with mere low-level representation of objects. Additionally, selecting features that are more salient in the context of two input spaces and relevant background knowledge and should, thus, be preserved and integrated in new interesting blends has not yet been tackled in a cognitively pertinent manner. The paper at hand proposes a novel approach to generating new material that allows blending high-level features by combining low-level structures, based on statistically computed salience values for each high-level feature extracted from data. The proposed framework is applied to a basic but, at the same time, complicated field of music, namely melodic generation. The examples presented herein allow an insightful examination of what the proposed approach does, revealing new possibilities and prospects.     

Enhancing the Creative Process in Couple Therapy

ABSTRACT

This paper reviews the literature as it relates to psychotherapy and creativity. The focus is on the creative process and the role of the therapist as “artist” in the practice of couple therapy. The theory on which the paper is based in problem-centered with influences from the writing of Satir, humanistic psychology and psychodynamic psychotherapy. The paper attempts to offer suggestions as to how therapists might enhance their innate creative ability when working with couples.     

Multimodal reflection for creative facilitators: an approach to improving self-care

Creative and arts-based facilitators who work in the area of supporting others, such as youth workers, educators, counsellors and therapists, often do not prioritise their own well-being and self-care. This paper explores a study that focused on the utility of multimodal reflection for sustainable as well as satisfying practice for creative facilitators. Participants in the study were involved in a trial 10-week reflective programme called Stepping Outside the Circle. This programme was part of a larger research project that sought to understand the professional and reflective practices of creative facilitators, a term used within the study to encompass practitioners who use arts (both performative and visual) interventions to work within a variety of therapeutic and educational settings. During the programme, participants drew on their own personal knowledge of the disciplines in which they worked and reflected in and on this practice both professionally and personally. They also collaboratively supported each other through the process. We argue that engagement in multimodal reflection shared with others, particularly for creative facilitators, is integral for purposeful and effective self-care practice.     

Creativity in Medical Education: The Value of Having Medical Students Make Stuff

What is the value of having medical students engage in creative production as part of their learning? Creating something new requires medical students to take risks and even to fail--something they tend to be neither accustomed to nor comfortable with doing. “Making stuff” can help students prepare for such failures in a controlled environment that doesn’t threaten their professional identities. Furthermore, doing so can facilitate students becoming resilient and creative problem-solvers who strive to find new ways to address vexing questions. Though creating something new can be fun, this is not the main outcome of interest. Rather, the principle reason we recommend devoting precious curricular time to creative endeavors is because it helps medical students become better doctors.     

Types of Creativity and Visualization in Teams of Different Educational Specialization

This research is the first to examine different types of creativity dimensions in relation to different types of visualization on a team level, by comparing adolescences’ teams of different specialization (visual artist, scientists, and humanities) during a complex creative task in an ecologically valid educational setting First, the difference between all teams’ creative outputs (drawings) was compared in terms of their visual characteristics and represented content based on parameters derived from the content analysis of visual media. Second, the teams’ creative performance was compared using evaluations of experts from different professional domains. Based on the evidence from examination of teams’ creative products (final drawings) and their evaluations by professionals, this research suggests that object visualization is related to artistic creativity and spatial visualization is related to scientific creativity on the team-level. Furthermore, the findings provide a clear indication that assessing general creativity independently of the domain, as it has been done so far in most team creativity literature, might be somewhat limited.     

Knowledge Discovery as an Aid to Organizational Creativity

Computers can play an important role in the creative process. With the abundance of data and increasing speed of computers, creativity can now be stimulated and enhanced with knowledge mined from available data. The process is known as knowledge discovery or data mining. Knowledge discovery is the process of discovering interesting associations among data in the database. Users in the creativity process can feed on the discovered associations to generate creative solutions. The objective of this paper is to present knowledge discovery as an aid to creativity. The paper first presents the concept of knowledge discovery and then discusses the various techniques in knowledge discovery. Mednick's associative theory of creative thought serves as the theoretical foundation for this research.     

Otto Rank's art

Abstract

Otto Rank's work has had an indirect influence on much of existential‐humanistic psychology, yet his contribution has been unevenly acknowledged. Seeing Rank as a developing artist helps to put his creative contributions to psychoanalysis, post‐psychoanalytic critique, and existential‐humanistic psychotherapy, in perspective. After his separation from Freud, Rank's innovative thought blossomed; his later works have deep and lingering humanistic import. A look at convergences and divergences between Freud and Rank shows that Rank's art (of living, of theorizing, and of practicing therapy) is an uncannily familiar and inspiring model of humanistic practice in the world. The continuing relevance of Rank's ideas about art and artists is explored, and Rank is re‐introduced to humanistic psychologists who may recognize aspects of his work as consonant with their own.     

THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE SUBLIME IN NATURAL SCIENCE

The various aesthetic phenomena found repeatedly in the scientific enterprise stem from the role of God as artist. If the Creator is an artist, how and why natural scientists study the divine art work can be understood using theological aesthetics and the philosophy of art. The aesthetic phenomena considered here are as follows. First, science reveals beauty and the sublime in natural phenomena. Second, science discovers beauty and the sublime in the theories that are developed to explain natural phenomena. Third, the search for beauty often guides scientists in their work. Fourth, where beauty is perceived, feelings of the sublime often also follow upon further contemplation. This linkage of beauty in science with truth and the sublime runs counter to most aesthetic theory since Kant. Scholarship in theological aesthetics has recently argued that the modern and postmodern elevation of the sublime over beauty is merely a preference that reveals a bias against transcendence—against God. If doing and understanding science can show this sundering of the sublime from the beautiful to be in error, science also gives evidence of transcendence.     

Breakdown or Breakthrough? A History of European Research into Drugs and Creativity

ABSTRACT Language barriers have largely prevented American scholars from learning about European studies concerning drugs and creativity. An art historian reports on several Swiss, English, French and German studies conducted from the 1940s to the 1970s, offering new data in a research area that has been banned since drugs like mescalin, psilocybin, and LSD became illegal. Different views of the operations of these drugs, revealed by such terms as “hallucinogens,” “psychotogenics,” and “psychedelics,” appear to have colored researchers' aims to a large extent. The notions of drugs “dictating” or “liberating” the intoxicated artist are criticized by discussing the importance of set and setting. It is proposed that intentional drug use among artists expecting artistic breakthroughs while intoxicated, can be seen as a form of “gaucherie” or disinhibiting technique.