Title:  Art and Madness Author;  José Guimón Series: Contemporary European Cultural Studies Imprint: The Davies Group, Publishers soft cover 272 pp. USD 26.00 ISBN 978-1888570861 April  2006 Art and Madness offers a critical review of current theories on the relationship between artistic creativity and the psychiatric disturbances that can favor this creativity, the psychodynamic mechanisms proposed by psychoanalysts to explain creativity, and the psychosociological factors that play a role in creativity. Using a series of vignettes throughout that incorporate brief biographical outlines and psycho-pathological portraits of artists like De Kooning, Virginia Woolff, Frida Kahlo, Oscar Wilde, Verlaine, Rimbaud and others, the author serves up a rich offering of conditions ranging from psychotic states, to physical defects, to sadomasochism, to exhibitionism, includes a discussion on the limits between obscenity, pornography and progressive political action, and offers some conclusions concerning many of the aspects in which the psycho- biographies presented can reinforce consideration of the respective importance of the processes of homeostasis that regulate psychic equilibrium in artists. The book is divided into three parts. Part I reviews the mechanisms involved in artistic creativity and the psychiatric disturbances that can favor this creativity. In Part II the author summarizes the psychodynamic mechanisms proposed by psychoanalysts to explain creativity. Part III looks at psychosociological factors that play a role in creativity through an examination of different modernist and postmodern movements in the arts. Brief biographical outlines are included throughout the text, some quite extensive, of selected modern artists, writers and painters from various countries. The author has contributed psychopathological portraits about some aspects of their lives and works that serve to illustrate some of the proposed neuropsychological mechanisms reviewed in Parts I and II. Abbreviated Table of Contents Preface Part I   Disinhibition and Creativity Chapter 1. Is there a hereditary disposition to creativity? Chapter 2. The disinhibition of cortical control Chapter 3. Psychological characteristics Chapter 4. Creativity and drugs Chapter 5. Anxiety and depersonalisation Chapter 6. Psychotic experiences Chapter 7. Affective disorders Part II Psychodynamic Mechanisms Chapter 8. The emergence of the unconscious Chapter 9. Perversion and artistic creativity Chapter 10. The uncanny Chapter 11. Narcissistic traumas Chapter 12. Alterations of the image of the body Chapter 13. Grief Part III Psychosociological Factors Assisting Creativity Chapter 14. Non-conformism, dandyism and decadentism Chapter 15. Avant-garde Chapter 16. Postmodernism Chapter 17. Obscenity and pornography Chapter 18. Art As Therapy Conclusion: Creativity and homeostasis Notes Bibliography Index Author José Guimón, M.D., PhD, is Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychiatry, University of Bilbao, Adjunct Clinical Professor at New York University, and a member of the International Psychoanalytical Association. He is the author of more than one hundred and fifty research articles in various international journals, and the source of more than thirty books for which he served as author or, in some cases, editor.