Creativity and Anxiety: Making, Meaning, Experience: An Uncertain Relationship

Anxiety is perhaps the defining psychological malady of our age, whereas creativity is seen as an almost unassailable good, its importance heralded and promoted in a range of disciplines and domains. A number of diverse thinkers and researchers have tried to unpick the relationship between anxiety and creativity, and this short book explores and connects some of their ideas and findings. Drawing on psychoanalysis and neuroscience, existential psychology and mindfulness, literary studies and philosophy, this book places a range of different disciplines in dialogue. It explores how creativity and anxiety might impact one another, and argues for the importance of establishing a diverse and inclusive cultural space which everyone can draw from and contribute to.  

Gavin Goodwin is a lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University, UK. He is a co-director of Contempo (The Centre for Contemporary Poetry), a collaborative, cross-institutional research centre, and a published poet.