Dreams and Dramas

This work charts pathways in psychoanalytic thinking about art and the artist, revising views held in applied psychoanalysis and adding new dimensions to clinical thinking about the artist and the artistic process. Roland investigates identity issues and inner struggles involved in the developing artistic career. In the second section he focuses on the use of imagery by artists in the creative formation of poetic metaphors and paradoxes, and the metaphorical portrayal of the artist’s inner world. In a challenge to a pervasive assumption in psychoanalysis Roland argues that aesthetic form develops primarily to convey the artwork’s autonomous meanings rather than to give disguised expression to the artist’s inner world. In a third section Roland explores these themes in the context of the dramatic work of Pirandello and Pinter.