The Creative Self: Beyond Individualism - Couverture souple

Ruti, Mari; Newman, Gail M.

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 023121894X ISBN 13 : 9780231218948

Editeur : Columbia University Press, 2025

Synopsis

"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.

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

Gail Newman (PhD, German Studies, Minnesota) is Harold J. Henry Professor of German, cross-listed with Comparative Literature, at Williams College. She is the author of Locating the Romantic Subject: Novalis with Winnicott (Wayne State, 1997). I chose her as a reader for her interests in psychoanalytic theory, literature and psychoanalysis, and
narrative theory.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Columbia University Press
• Date d'édition: 2025
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 023121894X
• ISBN 13: 9780231218948
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 312
• Coordonnées du fabricant: Columbia University Press; https://cup.columbia.edu/; ; OFFICE OF THE GENERAL COUNSEL 412 LOW MEMORIAL LIBRARY 535 W. 116THSTR; NEW YORK; NY; 10027; Etats-Unis
• Personne responsable: non disponible