Awards

• Winner of Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2025

Overview

Full Product Details

9780231218931

Table of Contents

Reviews

In an era dominated by productivity pressures and self-improvement mandates, The Creative Self provides a necessary antidote. This book is essential for anyone seeking an intellectually rigorous yet deeply humanistic perspective on meaningful living in contemporary society. * Choice * 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 <i>Traveling through Time: How Trauma Plays Itself out in Families, Organizations and Society</i> Physical, emotional, and social exhaustion suffocates creative living. This brilliant, timely book offers antidotes to neoliberal culture’s soul-crushing demands that we constantly self-optimize, produce, self-improve—always with a smile. Ruti and Newman’s careful readings of Milner and Winnicott lead us toward living lives of wider perception, joyful play, and worldly transcendence. -- Alice Jardine, author of <i>At the Risk of Thinking: An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva</i> A joint book from Gail Newman and Mari Ruti arrives like a gift from heaven. The Creative Self articulates a vision that draws on undeveloped threads in psychoanalysis to provide the keys for finding creativity without giving into the capitalist demand for self-optimization. -- Todd McGowan, author of <i>Pure Excess: Capitalism and the Commodity</i>

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 <i>Traveling through Time: How Trauma Plays Itself out in Families, Organizations and Society</i>

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 <i>Traveling through Time: How Trauma Plays Itself out in Families, Organizations and Society</i> Physical, emotional, and social exhaustion suffocates creative living. This brilliant, timely book offers antidotes to neoliberal culture’s soul-crushing demands that we constantly self-optimize, produce, self-improve—always with a smile. Ruti and Newman’s careful readings of Milner and Winnicott lead us toward living lives of wider perception, joyful play, and worldly transcendence. -- Alice Jardine, author of <i>At the Risk of Thinking: An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva</i> A joint book from Gail Newman and Mari Ruti arrives like a gift from heaven. The Creative Self articulates a vision that draws on undeveloped threads in psychoanalysis to provide the keys for finding creativity without giving into the capitalist demand for self-optimization. -- Todd McGowan, author of <i>Pure Excess: Capitalism and the Commodity</i>

Author Information

Mari Ruti (1964–2023) was Distinguished Professor of Critical Theory and of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Toronto. A leading interdisciplinary theorist, she wrote many books, including The Call of Character: Living a Life Worth Living (Columbia, 2013) and Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings: The Emotional Costs of Everyday Life (Columbia, 2018). Gail M. Newman is the Harold J. Henry Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Williams College. She has published extensively on German Romanticism, modern Austrian literature, and links between literature and psychoanalysis.

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