Was reading Storr's Dynamics of Creation, where he analyzes creativity (as viewed through biographies of 'great' artistic figures) in psychological/psychoanalytic terms. It's one of his earlier books, and a little clunkier than the later ones – Storr has made a career out of intelligent but popularly-oriented explorations of various experiences in psychological terms; one of the pleasantest things about the books is his willingness to be speculative and essayistic rather than dogmatic, which is rather rare in the world of psychology.
Anyway, he coasts over various artistic personalities, viewed through a diagnostic lens – schizoids, manic-depressives, etc., mostly interpreted in terms of Kleinian theory (I told you it was an older book – does anyone spend much time on Melanie Klein these days?). Naturally, I thought of myself throughout – and clearly my symptomatic problems are most associated with depressives (unfortunately not manic-depressives, which is probably why I don't get much work done). The Kleinian diagnosis was of course a bit insulting, including the identification of sexual fantasies, which was rather annoyingly plausible – I hate all the Freudian stuff about development, stages, and sexuality, especially because it claims that gay men are so 'arrested'. (And I also tend to dismiss most Lacanian theory, although some of my colleagues use it a lot – it seems to me merely a mass of pretentious and paradoxical obfuscation made to cover up the problems embedded in Freud's ideas.)
But it's interesting to think about aspects of a 'depressive' condition, and how it might dictate some of the problems I'm always trying to solve for myself. I know that psychological self-diagnosis is always pretty doubtful, but I can't help hoping that some analytical thinking would help lead me out of – the hall of mirrors....
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