Christophe Paradas is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.

Reflections on art and artistic creativity played an important role in Freud’s elaboration of psychoanalytic theory. Such reflections resulted in some dubious or downright mistaken interpretations. Later, the psychoanalysis of art and psychoanalytic criticism were often guilty of instrumentalising the artistic process for their own doctrinal ends with some rather heavy-handed results.
Does psychoanalysis have anything to teach us about literary, cinematographic or dramatic creativity? What happens in the course of an aesthetic encounter, a learning experience which does not impose any lessons?
Following in the footsteps of Elie Faure and André Malraux as much as Freud’s, studying Bizet as well as Beethoven, Christophe Paradas gives us a psychoanalytic portrait of the creative artist. And explains why art can be so disturbing.

• Rather than a series of psychoanalytic interpretations with claims to veracity this is a thorough study of the mysteries of creativity.