Routledge A Psychoanalytic Approach to Visual Artists

James Hamilton's engaging book offers us his own unique insight into the unconscious factors involved in the creative processes associated with painting, filmmaking, and photography by studying the lives and works of a number of artists, each one having a unique personal style. In separate chapters, he looks at the lives and works of Mark Rothko, Joseph Cornell, Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso, Clement Greenberg, Edward Weston, Ingmar Bergman, Francois Truffaut, Quentin Tarantino, and Florian von Donnersmarck from a psychoanalytic perspective with emphasis on unconscious motivation and the quest for mastery of intrapsychic conflict. The book is bound to encourage further questions and hypotheses about the nature of these complex phenomena. Review " A Psychoanalytic Approach to Visual Artists is very much in the biographical and psychoanalytic tradition. James W. Hamiltion is a psychiatrist who practices in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a city that may be identified as a center for the psychoanalytic understanding of art. In a previous book, Hamilton (2009) applied psychoanalytic ideas to writers. This subsequent volume concerns itself with visual artists, including painters, critics, and filmmakers. Hamilton concentrates on 20th-century powerhouses in painting (Rothko, Cornell, Mondrian, Picasso), film (Bergman, Donnersmarck, Tarantino, Truffaut), photography (weston), and criticism (greenberg). In each chapter he presents the data--details of the artist's life, plots of a film, and so forth--and draws connections with various psychoanalytic constructs. The book elicits questions about the ways we approach creativity. Left unspoken is whether psychoanalytic thinking can help us investigate the fundamental question of aesthetics, to with, what is beauty? That would be a different book, but it is a theme that this book will elicit in the minds of many readers."-- (02/27/2013) About the Author James W Hamilton