ABSTRACT
Grace Pailthorpe is the first artist and psychoanalyst to have written about how free creative work emerges from the artist’s unconscious. She worked as a physician and was an active contributor to medical practice in hospitals and prisons before she wrote about creativity and her experiences while painting. With Mednikoff, her artist/partner of many years, she applied psychoanalytic notions to understand the unconscious meaning of the imagery in her own paintings. Pailthorpe wrote papers on the birth trauma, illustrated with her own paintings. Her writings have a close relationship with Melanie Klein’s theories. Psychoanalyst Martin Nass interviewed well-known American composers about their sources of inspiration and concluded that some composers don’t seem to be “auditory people” because they don’t seem to draw from other musician’s work, but from visual experiences, dreams, bodily feelings, thinking feelings, etc.
