Creative States of Mind: Psychoanalysis and the Artist’s Process

147 Pages·2019·1.287 MB·English

by  Patricia Townsend

CREATIVE STATES OF MIND
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.
Patricia Townsend is an artist, working with video, photography and installation,
and a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. Her artworks have been exhibited widely
and her writing on psychoanalysis and the artist’s process has appeared in a variety
of publications. She recently completed a PhD at the Slade School of Fine Art,
University College London.
‘This is a highly original and extremely rich study of the artistic process as one
of creative processing, or working through. Valuably based on interviews with other
artists as well as on Townsend’s self-reflection on her own artwork, this book
compellingly argues that artistic forms grow out of our inner worlds but are not
simply a representation of these. This study is the most resonant and detailed
psychoanalytic account of creative processes that I have read since the work
of Marion Milner. Like Milner’s contributions to our understanding of art, it
should be an essential read for artists as well as for those who study them, or seek
to understand artworks.’
Catherine Grant, Professor of Digital Media and
Screen Studies, Birkbeck, University of London.
‘Psychoanalysis has struggled to understand the process of artistic creativity from
the inside, but Patricia Townsend’s outstanding book draws on interviews with
professional artists as well as her own experience to investigate the process, from
the artist’s first awareness of a creative work through to its emergence into the
world. Taking cues from Donald Winnicott, Marion Milner and Christopher
Bollas in particular she builds a convincing and subtle account of the unfolding
creative act, which will engage anyone interested in how it is that we relate
creatively to our worlds.’
Ken Robinson, Psychoanalyst, Visiting Professor of
Psychoanalysis, Northumbria University.
CREATIVE STATES
OF MIND
Psychoanalysis and
the Artist’s Process
Patricia Townsend
First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 Patricia Townsend
The right of Patricia Townsend to be identified as the author has
been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Townsend, Patricia, 1947– author.
Title: Creative states of mind/Patricia Townsend.
Other titles: The artist’s creative process
Description: New York : Routledge, 2019. | Edited version of the
author’s thesis (doctoral—University College, 2018) under the
title: The artist’s creative process : a Winnicottian view. | Includes
bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018046812 (print) | LCCN 2018047402 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780429052736 (Master eBook) | ISBN 9780367146146
(hardback) | ISBN 9780367146160 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Art—Psychology. | Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.)
Classification: LCC N71 (ebook) | LCC N71 .T69 2019 (print) | DDC
700.1/9—dc23
LC record available at https://lccnloc.gov/2018046812
ISBN: 978-0-367-14614-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-14616-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-05273-6 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
CONTENTS
List of illustrations vii
Foreword by K en Wright viii
Acknowledgements x
Introduction 1
1 The pre-sense 6
2 Preparation, research and gestation 17
3 Illumination and the idea 27
4 Working with the medium 37
5 The artist’s state of mind 49
6 Play and playing 59
7 Creativity, aggression and destructiveness 68
8 Spaces and frames 81
9 The artist’s internal frame 90
1 0 Out into the world 99
vi Contents
11 Recurring themes 112
Postscript 122
Appendix: Archiving of interviews 125
Bibliography 127
Index 133
ILLUSTRATIONS
3 .1 The Quick and the Dead . SD video, 2009 30
5.1 The Transience of Wonder . Work in progress 1 56
6 .1 B ay Mountain . HD video animation, work in progress 62
6 .2 Bay Mountain . Sand, HD video animation. Slade Research
Centre, 2009 63
8.1 U nder the Skin . HD video animation. Brantwood, Coniston,
2013 85
10.1 The Transience of Wonder . Work in progress 2 103
10.2 The Transience of Wonder . Work in progress 3 104
10.3 The Transience of Wonder . 30 photographic prints mounted
under perspex. Slade School of Fine Art, 2017 105
11.1 Solarised photographic print of tree for D ouble Bind 113
11.2 Double Bind . 4K video animation, 2018 114
11.3 On the Shores . SD video, 2009 117
11.4 E cclesia Mater . 12 inscribed steel panels, photographs.
Globe Gallery, Hay-on-Wye, 2000 118
11.5 W itches’ Dance . 8 photographic prints on silk. Dock
Museum, Barrow-in-Furness, 2007 119
FOREWORD
Freud’s attitude to artistic creation was complex and contradictory, for while he
loved the arts and held them in high regard, he treated them as quasi-neurotic
phenomena when he viewed them through his psychoanalytic lens. This patho-
logical bias cast a shadow over psychoanalytic writing for years to come, and
the idea that art is a devious expression of repressed impulses has influenced the
way that art is viewed to the present day. It has led to a complicated relationship
between psychoanalysis and art, for while psychoanalysis can fascinate by seem-
ing to reveal the ‘secrets’ of art, it is frequently criticised for reducing it to its
basic elements and thus devaluing it.
There is little doubt that this pathological, reductive skew has curtailed
more open exploration of artistic creativity from a psychoanalytic perspective.
Although many analysts have questioned Freud’s original approach, attempts to
create alternative theories have been few. It is true that the Kleinian school, in
the work of Hanna Segal, has developed a more comprehensive theory of artistic
creation, but as in Freud’s original model, this is tied to a theoretical shibboleth,
the need of the artist to make reparation for primitive destructive impulses.
Creativity and imagination have long been of interest to Independent psycho-
analysts of the British Society but, although their ideas are often suggestive, no
coherent theory of artistic creation has emerged from their writing. Winnicott’s
work is a case in point, for while it establishes a radically new conceptual space
for thinking about art, its novel dimensions are never completely worked out.
The closed conceptual system was contrary to Winnicott’s way of thinking and,
in contrast to Freud, he never tried to set out his ideas in the form of a finished
theory.
Winnicott’s writing on creativity exemplifies this, for while he insisted, against
Melanie Klein, on the crucial role of the mother’s responsiveness in infant devel-
opment and explored the origins of creativity in this adaptive relationship, he
Foreword ix
never developed a theory of art in its own right. He traced a line from the infant’s
primary creativity (creating the breast that the mother provides) through transitional
phenomena and childhood play to adult creativity, including the arts, but was
more concerned with creative living as a universal potential than with its specific
development in the creative arts.
For the psychoanalytic observer interested in art, this gap in theory is a tan-
talising challenge: can psychoanalysis throw light on art without reducing and
devaluing it? The author of this book, Patricia Townsend, is both artist and
psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and this unique position informs her approach.
As artist, she explores the phenomenology of artistic creation, using her own
experience and that of the many professional artists whom she interviewed to
take us into the creative experience. She shows us what it is like to be the artist
and allows us to glimpse the creative process from its first stirrings as ‘hunch’, or
‘pre-sense’, to its gradual emergence as material form. She allows us to share in
the difficulties of entering a creative state of mind and the satisfactions, tempered
with disillusionment, of creating a work. Out of this raw material, she extracts
recurrent themes and, as psychoanalytic observer, she explores these in the light
of contemporary psychoanalytic ideas. Her approach leans heavily, but not exclu-
sively, on Donald Winnicott, Marion Milner and Christopher Bollas, but she
also draws on non-analytic sources, in particular the work of Anton Ehrenzweig
and Susanne Langer.
This book fills an important gap in psychoanalytic theorising about art and
offers a coherent account of the artistic process from an independent perspective.
I predict it will become an important source book for writers on art, and it lays
the foundation for a more relational view of art and the function it has in the lives
of both artist and viewer.
Ken Wright
July 2018