ABSTRACT
The author, who is both an artist and a psychotherapist, was motivated to write this book by her reflections on the states of mind she experiences as she creates new artworks. The book sets out to trace the full trajectory of the artist’s process by examining the author’s own art practice, together with interviews with 33 professional visual artists. The Introduction outlines the findings of this research and the topics covered in each chapter. As the interviews and the author’s own diaries can only provide evidence of processes of which the artists are aware, the book draws on psychoanalytic theory to link the artists’ accounts with possible unconscious processes. The Introduction notes that, and explains why, the book focuses on writing by psychoanalysts from the British Independent tradition, including Donald Winnicott, Marion Milner and Christopher Bollas. The author builds on her own research and on this psychoanalytic literature to introduce new concepts and extensions of theory.
