The Creative Self: Beyond Individualism

"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.

About the Author :
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.

Review :
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" 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 Pure Excess: Capitalism and the Commodity 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 At the Risk of Thinking: An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva 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 Traveling through Time: How Trauma Plays Itself out in Families, Organizations and Society