Psychoanalysis and Creativity in Everyday Life: Ordinary Genius is an attempt to create a psychoanalytic space for the quest and questions of our everyday creativity. Official creativity is normally applauded to the point of obscuring all other types of creativity, with detrimental consequences for our psychic life. However, as Gemma Corradi Fiumara demonstrates, the creative force of ordinary subjects can be as vigorous as that of our acclaimed, official accomplishments. Corradi Fiumara focuses on the unsung creativity which emerges from relationships and the world at large. She explores how understanding the operation of creative impulses in an everyday setting can crucially inform psychoanalytic clinical work. There are three main themes: Donald Winnicott's Psychoanalytic Will Melanie Klein and the Other Side of Genius Genius: Ordinary and Extraordinary. Psychoanalysis and Creativity in Everyday Life advocates an inclusionary view of human genius, and demonstrates that creativity and genius can be manifested in everyday life with the ordinary as its focus of attention. It will be key reading for psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists, philosophers and scholars in social studies.

Psychoanalytic theory frequently explains psychopathology from the perspective of either inadequate early care or as the result of environmental factors. In this book the author suggests that poor mental health can be a result of our incapacity to respond to internal and external stimuli, and indicates that spontaneity is essential in the development of many aspects of the self.

It is not what happens to us, but how we react to events, that forms who we are. Spontaneity presents an original approach to issues of agency, spontaneity and creativity in psychoanalysis by exploring questions including:

• active internalisation
• paradox
• forgiveness
• responsibility
• empathy
• self de-creation.

This book will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, philosophers and psychologists. It will also prove to be engaging for those interested in psychoanalytic theory and theories of subjectivity.

This book creates an awareness shows ways in which to talk and think about the enormous problem of a "gravitational force" in the surrounding: an excessive fear of pain that might ultimately paralyse our maturation, growth, and creativity.

In this monumental work of complex and probing proportions, the renowned feminist and psychoanalyst Gemma Corradi Fiumara surveys the vast literature on metaphor. She suggests that metaphorical language communicates via the creation images, pictures and finds in it an irreducible aspect to interpersonal communication and our use of language itself. Combining an intimate knowledge of psychology and and philosophy to produce a masterful work in the function and role of metaphor in language and life, Fiumara contends that metaphors lead to the creation of ever new worlds of experience, to which one could not otherwise gain access. Inventing new ways of thinking about metaphor, Fiumara suggests, generates new ways in which human beings can examin their relationship to hemselves and the language which they inhabit.

Metaphor is much more than just a linguistic phenomena, argues Gemma Corradi Fuimara, it is in fact the key process by which we construct and develop our ability to understand the world and the other people we share it with.
Rationality as understood by philosophers has led to a disembodied view of ourselves in which interaction between life and language has been downplayed. By looking at the metaphoric process - in an interpersonal rather than a formal way - its importance in allowing us access to new worlds of experience is revealed. The metaphoric potential in all of us opens us up to the world and initiates our involvement in it.

Our philosophy is grounded in only half a language, in which the power of discourse is deployed and the strength of listening ignored. We are inhabitants of a culture that knows how to speak but not how to listen, so constantly mistakes warring monologues for genuine dialogue. In this book, the author seeks to redress that balance by examining the other side of language - listening. Synthesizing the insights of Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Gadamer, among many others, puts forward a powerful argument for the replacement of the "silent" silence of traditional Western thought with the rich openness of an authentic listening.

This book creates an awareness shows ways in which to talk and think about the enormous problem of a "gravitational force" in the surrounding: an excessive fear of pain that might ultimately paralyse our maturation, growth, and creativity.

Psychoanalysis and Creativity in Everyday Life: Ordinary Genius is an attempt to create a psychoanalytic space for the quest and questions of our everyday creativity. Official creativity is normally applauded to the point of obscuring all other types of creativity, with detrimental consequences for our psychic life. However, as Gemma Corradi Fiumara demonstrates, the creative force of ordinary subjects can be as vigorous as that of our acclaimed, official accomplishments. Corradi Fiumara focuses on the unsung creativity which emerges from relationships and the world at large. She explores how understanding the operation of creative impulses in an everyday setting can crucially inform psychoanalytic clinical work. There are three main themes: Donald Winnicott's Psychoanalytic Will Melanie Klein and the Other Side of Genius Genius: Ordinary and Extraordinary. Psychoanalysis and Creativity in Everyday Life advocates an inclusionary view of human genius, and demonstrates that creativity and genius can be manifested in everyday life with the ordinary as its focus of attention. It will be key reading for psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists, philosophers and scholars in social studies.

We are inhabitants of a culture that knows how to speak but not how to listen. Against a tradition that has endorsed the power of discourse, where warring monologues are mistaken for genuine dialogue, Gemma Corradi Fiumara examines and reveals the other side of language - listening.

Psychoanalytic theory frequently explains psychopathology from the perspective of either inadequate early care or as the result of environmental factors. In this book the author suggests that poor mental health can be a result of our incapacity to respond to internal and external stimuli, and indicates that spontaneity is essential in the development of many aspects of the self.

It is not what happens to us, but how we react to events, that forms who we are. Spontaneity presents an original approach to issues of agency, spontaneity and creativity in psychoanalysis by exploring questions including:

• active internalisation
• paradox
• forgiveness
• responsibility
• empathy
• self de-creation.

This book will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, philosophers and psychologists. It will also prove to be engaging for those interested in psychoanalytic theory and theories of subjectivity.