Dreams and Drama: Psychoanalytic Criticism, Creativity and the Artist

In this bold new study, artist and psychoanalyst Alan Roland charts new pathways in psychoanalytic thinking about art and creativity. Grounded in clinical observations and the author’s personal experiences as a visual artist and dramatist, Dreams and Drama revises long-held views in applied psychoanalysis and adds important new dimensions to clinical psychoanalytic thinking. Considering the use of imagery and symbolic expression in dreams and art, Roland argues against the pervasive assumption in applied psychoanalysis which posits art as the artist’s daydream dressed in aesthetic clothes. Roland works against this reductive notion to show how both artistic and psychoanalytic endeavors are enriched when one considers the integration of primary and imaginative secondary processes of imagery and symbolization.