More than meets the eye: Morandi's art and analytic listening

This study of Giorgio Morandi, the great twentieth-century Italian painter, departs from the model of Freud's essay on Leonardo, in which he creates a psychodynamic hypothesis by linking the art with facts and conjecture about the artist's life. Because personal information about Morandi is remarkably scarce, we can make few connections between his art and his individual psychology. But Morandi's works can inform psychoanalysis and enhance analytic listening when we reflect on the paintings themselves, our responses to them, and the responses of art critics. This approach to his art evokes core principles of clinical theory, demonstrates the overlap between the creative process in art and analysis, and exemplifies the value of interdisciplinary study for analytic education.     

Creativity,Loss, and Character. Balakirev: The Man Who Had at One Time All of Music in His Hands,But…

For many centuries, the professional literature has discussed the complicated relationship between creativity and psychopathology. Creative people reproduce their feelings using their creative skills, and it is only natural that one's mental state may influence art. This article describes a special type of creativity that is associated with early loss and bereavement. In this form, creative work plays an important role in coping with loss, especially traumatic loss, in early development. Those who are bereaved, especially when young, may use creative work as a transitional object linking them to a deceased loved one, usually a parent or sibling. This article also describes the life, creativity, character, and illness of one of the most famous Russian musicians of the late 19th century: Miliy Balakirev. Balakirev's use of musical creativity as a method of coping with the loss and the consequent effects on his psychological state during his lifetime is apparent in his letters, friend's memories, and biographies.     

Art produced by a patient with Parkinson's disease

Artists with neurological diseases sometimes produce remarkably appealing art. Here we present the art of a patient with Parkinson's disease, who demonstrated remarkable creativity and productivity well into the course of his disease. Despite his manifest motor impairments, he produced paintings and drawings with fluid sinuous movements. He also became preoccupied with his art in an unprecedented way, raising the possibility that his disease and medications were contributing to his creative drive.     

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.     

“More Life,Not Less”: Using Narrative Therapy With Older Adults With Bipolar Disorder

Counselors who work with older adults with bipolar disorder are in a unique position to help them navigate their challenges. Older adults with bipolar disorder have lived decades with mental illness and also face the regular aging process. Narrative therapy provides counselors with a framework to deal with these issues.     

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.     

Creativity, “Twinning,” and Self-Destruction in the Life and Work of Tennessee Williams

Applying an eclectic psychoanalytic framework, this paper provides a thematic link between the core experiences of Williams' early life and his creative work. Both preoedipal and Oedipal themes are elucidated. The central issue that dominated Williams' mental life was his struggle between a sense of suffocation and confinement, on the one hand, and having artistic and sexual freedom, on the other. The experience of suffocation extended to his dread of becoming mad. This dread derived from his intense twinning or twinship merger with his schizophrenic sister who was confined in an asylum. The study focuses attention on a number of Williams' one-act and full-length plays, written during each of the decades of his public career, as representative of his overall dramatic opus. These works are indicative of his special relationship with his sister as well as of his obsession about self-indulgence and fear of confinement. The later plays suggest that he was subject to identity confusion.     

Music,Nature and Ineffability

In the final chapter of his Ineffability and Religious Experience, Guy Bennett-Hunter proposes that the ineffable may be ‘bodied forth’ through works of art and ritual, and hence engage with our lives. By way of supporting this proposal, this paper discusses some relationships between experiences of music and of natural environments. It is argued that several aspects of musical experience encourage a sense of convergence or intimacy between human practice and nature. Indeed, these aspects suggest a codependence between culture and nature. The paper continues by proposing that a sense of this co-dependence fosters the further sense of cultural and environmental experience as an integrated whole whose ‘ground’ must be entirely mysterious and ineffable. It is concluded that, if this is right, then music and other cultural practices indeed bring the ineffable into engagement with human life.     

Richard Wagner: Grandiosity,Entitlement, and its Metastases

Richard Wagner was a genius. About this there is little doubt among musicians and musicologists. It is also a judgment with which Wagner, himself, would have readily concurred. There was also little doubt among those who knew him that he was a scoundrel. As a genius, he felt entitled. The two-dimensionality of his character stands in sharp contrast to the complex, three-dimensional characters that populate his operas. However, his evil characters are all Jews, and his anti-Semitism reigned supreme in his life and art. His creativity died with him, but his grandiosity, entitlement, and anti-Semitism metastasized to his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and found a welcome home with Adolf Hitler. In this article, I describe Wagner’s early life, his near-death experience shortly after he was born, his recollections of his cold mother, his unclear paternity, and his self-aggrandizing autobiography in which he depicted himself as having had the childhood and parents that he felt would have befit the extraordinarily creative person he considered himself to be. Nevertheless, his impact on the musical world was revolutionary.     

Severe Mental Illness: A Bridge between Neurochemistry and the Collective Unconscious

This article builds a relationship between neurochemistry and Jung's a priori construct of the collective unconscious through an exploration of the psychotic delusions present in severe mental illness and the psychopharmacological drugs used to treat them. Jung's postulations of a collective unconscious were rooted in his clinical work with severely mentally ill patients, and he was aware, early on, that severe mental illness offered an example of the interplay between human biology and our psychological lives. Current post-Jungian discourse has moved away from addressing severe mental illness as a means of understanding the continued relevance of Jungian theory amidst advances in the fields of neuroscience. Narrative analysis of qualitative data on severe mental illness adds psychic dimension to medical research and offers evidence that the rise and fall of delusional content, replete with archetypal patterns of expression, are related to the presence or absence of psychopharmacological drugs used for the treatment of bipolar disorder.     

Asperger’s and musical creativity: The case of Erik Satie

The link between psychopathology and creativity was investigated in the study of one individual: the French composer Erik Satie. The current literature puts much emphasis on the connection between creativity and the psychoses – such as schizophrenia and the affective disorders – but there is relatively little concerning other psychological disorders. Nevertheless, there has been a recent upswing in the study of autism and associated disorders (such as Asperger’s syndrome), and their association with creativity. The literature reviewed here included a number of biographies, books about the autism spectrum disorders, and articles detailing the psychopathology-creativity link. The aim was not to diagnose Satie with a psychological disorder, but to illustrate that he, who was highly creative, innovative and influential in the development of 20th century music, displayed many of the personality traits typical of Asperger’s syndrome. These include perfectionism, perseverance, hatred of conventions, and heightened sensitivity; these combined enabled Satie to devise his own original musical idiom. This case study alone does not – and was not intended to – answer the overall question regarding the existence of a psychopathology-creativity link; but it does support the idea in the context of current literature.     

“A Matter of Life and Death”: Kawabata on the Value of Art after the Atomic Bombings

This article explores the possible interpretations—and the implications of those interpretations—of a comment about the importance of art made by Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1972), later the first Japanese Nobel laureate for literature: that “looking at old works of art is a matter of life and death.” (In 1949, Kawabata visited Hiroshima in his capacity as president of the Japan literary society P.E.N. to inspect the damage caused by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima that helped end World War II. On his way back to his home in Kamakura, he stopped in Kyoto. He came under severe criticism for “sightseeing” at such a time. This comment was his response.) The introduction explains why we should take him seriously as a commentator on art. The body of the article examines why our looking at art might be more, not less, important after the post‐War situation, the kinds of art Kawabata might have meant, why some possibilities are more likely than others, and how they differ in what they offer us and the value of art under conditions of trauma and mass trauma.     

Kant's Expressive Theory of Music

Several prominent philosophers of art have worried about whether Kant has a coherent theory of music on account of two perceived tensions in his view. First, there appears to be a conflict between his formalist and expressive commitments. Second (and even worse), Kant defends seemingly contradictory claims about music being beautiful and merely agreeable, that is, not beautiful. Against these critics, I show that Kant has a consistent view of music that reconciles these tensions. I argue that, for Kant, music can be experienced as either agreeable or beautiful depending on the attitude we take toward it. Although it is tempting to think he argues that we experience music as agreeable when we attend to its expressive qualities and as beautiful when we attend to its formal properties, I demonstrate that he actually claims that we are able to judge music as beautiful only if we are sensitive to the expression of emotion through musical form. With this revised understanding of Kant's theory of music in place, I conclude by sketching a Kantian solution to a central problem in the philosophy of music: given that music is not sentient, how can it express emotion?     

Violations of Expectations in Creativity and Perversion

Expectations and violations of expectations provide an entry into creativity and into perversions of aggression in the form of violence. Both creative works and perversions are co-created by a violator of expectations and one whose expectations are violated. The life of Kip Kinkel, a fifteen-year-old mass murderer illustrates the reciprocal violation of expectations between Kip and his parents leading to his increasingly perverse ways of asserting his presence in a world that was slipping from his grasp. Whereas the histories of some violent persons are replete with violations of expectations of living in a safe, predictable, affectively responsive world, a number of creative people (Stravinsky, Chagall, Wagner) began life as violators of the expectation of their families. They were stillborn or became so sick that they were not expected to survive, but they did. In their paintings and operas the theme of being violators of expectations then became dominant.     

Portrait of a creatively gifted child facing cancer

Creativity can be demonstrated in various ways. The following case study describes how one creatively gifted boy applied creative skills from one dimension of his life to a totally new one. When cancer halted his musical career, he chose to channel his abilities into a new challenge: controlling pain and writing. The results demonstrated a heroism that opens new avenues to our consideration of what constitutes creativity in human lives.     

The Ontology of Musical Works and the Role of Intuitions: An Experimental Study

Philosophers of music often appeal to intuition to defend ontological theories of musical works. This practice is worrisome as it is rather unclear just how widely shared are the intuitions that philosophers appeal to. In this paper, I will first offer a brief overview of the debate over the ontology of musical works. I will argue that this debate is driven by a conflict between two seemingly plausible intuitions—the repeatability intuition and the creatability intuition—both of which may be defended on the grounds that they are reflective of our actual musical practices. The problem facing philosophers within this debate is that there is no clear way to determine which of the two conflicting intuitions is more reflective of our musical practices. Finally, I offer discussion of an experimental study that was designed to test participants' intuitions regarding the repeatability of musical works. The evidence presented there suggests that the participants broadly accept the repeatability of musical works, but in a much narrower way than philosophers would likely accept.     

Rethinking the Body and Space in Alfred Schutz’s Phenomenology of Music

What is initially striking about Alfred Schutz’s phenomenological account of the musical experience, which encompasses both the performance and reception of music, is his apparent dismissal of the corporeal and spatial aspects of that experience. The paper argues that this is largely a product of his wider understanding of temporality wherein the mind and time are privileged over the body and space, respectively. While acknowledging that Schutz’s explicit or stated view is that the body and space are relatively insignificant to his account, the paper reveals how they actually feature significantly in the latter, but in ways that remain largely implicit. First, the analysis demonstrates that the mental and temporal aspects of Schutz’s phenomenology of the musical experience cannot be considered independently of their interrelations with the equally important, albeit under-examined, corporeal, and spatial aspects. Concepts from Nietzsche’s early aesthetics are recruited to fulfil this task. Second, the analysis challenges Schutz’s dismissal of space in his theory of music perception. Lastly, it reveals the crucial, yet implicit, role of the body and space in his key examination of the intersubjective phenomenon he terms “making music together”. By presenting the above arguments, the paper aims to draw out the implicit dimensions of Schutz’s phenomenology of music and thereby enrich his influential account.     

Exploring the frontier from the inside out: John Sloan's nude studies

The American realist artist John Sloan (1871-1951), a leading member of The Eight and the Ashcan School, is best known for his paintings and etchings of New York City life at the turn of the twentieth century--pictures that have endured as major documents in art history. Given the social nature of his early images, contemporaries were perplexed when Sloan became almost exclusively preoccupied with what was perhaps the most unpopular genre in American art--the female nude. Yet despite disapproval from his peers and lack of public interest, he continued to focus on nude studies for over twenty years, and created a series of unusual and disturbing images that so far have defied explanation. Formal analyses exist, but little has been written about the content of these pictures. My study bypasses the question of aesthetic quality that has troubled other art historians, and instead attempts to correlate these works with Sloan's personal life and his early career. When interpreted in the light of his history and his own words, these images reveal Sloan's intimate connection to his depicted female figures--a bond that emerges despite his attempt to maintain an objective distance from his subjects. My analysis is based on the work of D. W. Winnicott, who theorized that cultural production embodies our earliest, most profound relationship to our parents. As I will argue, the late nudes represent an intense period of mature, retrospective self-exploration. While this psychoanalytic investigation is certainly speculative, it is intended to open some possible new ways of understanding Sloan's representations of women.