The Creative Self

Beyond Individualism

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Pub Date 14 Jan 2025 | Archive Date 23 Apr 2025

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Description

“Be the best you can be!” Practically from the moment we are born, we are taught to optimize our lives—to devote ourselves to increasing our productivity and efficiency, which, we are told, will make us happier and more successful. The imperative of constant self-improvement, however, drains us dry even as it promises to build us up.

The Creative Self delves into the hegemony of neoliberal self-optimization and turns to psychoanalysis in search of an alternative. In paired chapters, Mari Ruti and Gail M. Newman examine the works of the psychoanalysts Marion Milner and Donald W. Winnicott. They provide deeply personal accounts of how these thinkers resonate with day-to-day life, exploring modes of selfhood that subtly but profoundly resist the lure and escape the trap of competitive individualism. Milner urges us to relinquish the ego in the face of loss and lack, and Winnicott asks us to accept the paradoxes of the self instead of demanding their resolution. Together, their insights help us flourish where neoliberal self-improvement would stifle us. Combining the intellectual, the personal, and the political from two perspectives that converge and diverge in striking ways, this book offers an antidote to transactional individualism and envisions forms of creative living beyond its confines.

“Be the best you can be!” Practically from the moment we are born, we are taught to optimize our lives—to devote ourselves to increasing our productivity and efficiency, which, we are told, will make...


Advance Praise

"Like 'anarchic Aphrodite' in Auden’s eulogy for Freud, the authors weep for those whose performance without purpose consigns them to loneliness, and they find in the work of Milner and Winnicott a liberationist and thereby curative psychoanalysis. Sophisticated, erudite and deeply personal – at once a dialogue and a meditation – this book enacts its subject: the human conditions for and profound joy within creative life."

--M. Gerard Fromm, author of Traveling through Time: How Trauma Plays Itself out in Families, Organizations and Society

"Like 'anarchic Aphrodite' in Auden’s eulogy for Freud, the authors weep for those whose performance without purpose consigns them to loneliness, and they find in the work of Milner and Winnicott a...


Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9780231218948
PRICE US$30.00 (USD)
PAGES 288

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