Personality as Art: Artistic approaches in psychology

A rich and ground-breaking book, in that it brings together and begins to integrate an individual and creative approach to personality and psychology with the conventional scientific stance. Vignettes, photographs, music, poetry all contribute to the depiction of people, in their uniqueness and in their beauty, in their suffering and in their healing, in so-called 'deviance', in depression, in paranoia, in joy and in pain. Stimulating commentaries on Wilde and Dostoyevsky are followed by soundly based therapeutic advice, derived both from 'evidence' and from personal experience; and the identification of implications for education and for psychology itself: "science is only half an education", and a 'mixed method' approach is essential. A sense of fun and creative iconoclasm invades the text (though the reality of mental suffering is not bypassed). "If artists, rather than scientists, wrote diagnostic manuals… one might see instead 'disorders' like 'Pathological Middle-of-the-Road Personality Disorder' or 'Emotional Blandness', 'Insufficient Fantasy Life', 'Arts Aversion', 'Reality Obsession' or 'Aspiritual Personality'." All psychology students, and therefore their teachers, should read this book.