Creative Characters - Hardcover

Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0415903696 ISBN 13: 9780415903691

Publisher: Routledge, 1991

Synopsis

The study of creativity is as old as western thought. In recent times any crisis of confidence is likely to involve anxiety about the loss of creativity--scientific, artistic, technological--and to set off a new search for creativity's definition.
In Creative Characters, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl reflects on the long search for an understanding of creativity and offers a novel approach. She notes that studies of creativity fall into types. Some look at the act of creation, others focus on the creators, while others stress the conscious or unconscious motivations of creative people. All these approaches share certain limitations. They lack an integrative perspective and they search for a common denominator--one definition of the creative process, a single creative type--which obscures the diversity of creative people and their work.
Young-Bruehl here offers an original analysis of creativity based on a theory of character. Creative people, she argues, create in the medium of their characters. They develop (usually unconsciously) an image of their characters or, in other terms, an ideal for the organization of their minds and lives, which they both aspire to and project into whatever they create. This character-ideal appears in their works, their social visions, their philosophies of nature, and also their understandings of creative processes, their own and others'. What creative people wish for themselves, for the psychic order in themselves, is what they wish for in their lives and works.
Young-Bruehl suggests that there are three broad character and creative types, each comprised of many variations. She displays these ways of getting one's psychic act together or getting a product together by turning to three ancient Greek theorists of creativity--Plato, Aristotle, and Zeno--and three modern theorists--Nietzsche, Freud, and Proust. She then proceeds by clustering biographical vignettes and portraits of ideas in which she can show--rather than try to define--the creativity as well as the character ideal she has in mind.
Of special interest to Young-Bruehl is what individuals say about their own creativity, especially when creativity is not explicitly their topic. Her approach is primarily psychoanalytic, but she also uses philosophical analysis, literary criticism, history of science, and biography.
Psychoanalysts and psychologists will find the book not only a new approach to creativity, but a new way of doing applied psychoanalysis: there have been many psychobiographies but no effort has been made to survey them and draw conclusions. Philosophers will discover a major contribution to the theory of character, one of the most neglected subfields of philosophy. Finally, in Creative Characters biography readers will see how the study of individual lives can lead to reflection on larger questions.

About this title

About the Author:

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl is Visiting Professor at Haverford College and the author of Mind and the Body Politic.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Author of biographies of Hannah Arendt (1982) and Anna Freud (1988) as well as the novel Virgil (1983), Young-Bruehl hits the ground running in this demanding approach to understanding creativity. Proceeding from issues raised during her biographical research work--the very different styles of her two celebrated subjects--she attempts to construct a typology that resists common assumptions about creativity, especially the idea of a single unifying factor, and argues instead for an intricate and diverse configuration of traits and motivations that illumines the development of creative minds. Young-Bruehl first refers to ancient Greek theories and the dualistic European philosophers, then begins a trellislike elaboration of her own pluralistic scheme featuring three broad character-types, or ways of being creative: the artisanal/sexual, the spiritual, and the political. She amplifies these concepts in a variety of ways, leaning heavily on psychodynamic insights (id-, superego-, and ego-dominated characters), referring to particular biographers' ways of presenting their subjects (one of the book's more accessible parts), and straining to relate and balance issues relevant to each part of the superstructure--issues of cultural significance, gender, and personal history among them. Many of her observations are apt, lucid, and well supported, e.g., on themes in Freud's writings about Leonardo da Vinci and Moses. She offers some memorable quotations for verification, such as Marguerite Yourcenar's comment on the purifying element involved in her own writing technique: ``One sheds one's clothing in order to be bronzed by the sun's rays.'' And she ably dramatizes the influence of late adolescence on her subjects' works. Unfortunately, Young-Bruehl's text has a fudgelike density, with the highly hyphenated prose frequently distracting from a clear presentation of ideas. She suggests that this work is ``a map for further inquiry'' but its conclusions are less than compelling, and most readers, even psychodynamically oriented ones, will find a number of serious roadblocks here. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0415903696
• ISBN 13: 9780415903691
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 275