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BENJAMIN, ELLIOT (2013). The Creative Artist: Mental Disturbance and Mental Health . Raleigh, NC: Lulu Publishing Services. 452 pp. ISBN 978-1-48340-3557, Paperback, $24.50. Reviewed by Ruth Richards.
This unique book, The Creative Artist, Mental Disturbance and Mental Health, by Elliot Benjamin, Ph.D., should perhaps be classi^ed as autoethnography and is a very readable gift of personal sharing and artistic promise. Here one ^nds theory, personal contemplation over a few decades, sections of a novel, and vivid in the moment notes from his creative and adventurous son, also leading the creative artistic life in a society that doesn't always encourage it. Both are clearly persons of exceptional creative talent and complexity-and of persistence and strength. As Dr. Benjamin (with Ph.D.'s in both math and psychology, who taught math for over 20 years at the college level) said years before, in a letter to his yet unborn son, he wished him the ''joys of being 'yourself, i.e., to know what it means to life an authentic life where you are true to your own dreams and ambitions'' (p. 61).
As Dr. Benjamin, this creative artist/mathematician/musician/philosopher/ psychologist/author, also found, this authenticity can be vital to one's connection with others (in his own life and his son's), and can lead to exceptional moments whether with family, friends, or one's life partner. Surely there is health here. Yet making it a mainstay of one's life, in our consensual reality and our current culture, may not always be that easy. Out of this conviction came Dr. Benjamin's own skill learning and educational, psychoeducational, and supportive program, the Natural Dimension; we see alternative trajectories along a humanistic and transpersonal path. Among other things, his overarching model became a viable aftercare path for some patients leaving more traditional mental health programs.
Yet finding and sharing our self and path is hard enough for anyone whose felt creative task is to reveal an inner world that even minimally challenges the status quo; there are many forces arrayed against such a change in the larger world, as this reviewer, for one, has expressed. Dr. Benjamin expresses this powerfully in terms of his ''reality argument,'' where we are called to do the practical, the lucrative, and very much the expected. He, himself, could teach mathematics-dealing...