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, François 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.

James W. Hamilton is a board-certified psychiatrist living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He has extensive publications in the professional literature on various clinical and theoretical issues. He is also the author of Life and Art: The Creative Synthesis in Literature, published by Karnac in 2009.