In a testament to the deep friendship between its authors, the late Finnish-Canadian theoretician Mari Ruti and the American Germanist Gail Newman, The Creative Self: Beyond Individualism (Columbia University Press, 2025) lays out an antidote to the neoliberal demand for self-optimization in a world dominated by zero-sum competition and constant productivity. Each of the book’s two long chapters details different dimensions of the origins and implications of our current thinking. Ruti’s critique emphasizes the rise of instrumental reason and the performance principle it engendered. Newman goes back to the European Enlightenment as the source of the West’s hyper-individualism and its unwavering belief in abstract universality. At the core of the book are their respective alternatives to the neoliberal mentality. Ruti focuses on Marion Milner (1900-1998), who proposes letting go of the ego to promote creativity and celebrates moments of what Ruti calls “immanent transcendence” in everyday life. In her chapter, Newman examines Donald W. Winnicott’s call to embrace paradox without attempting to resolve it as the basis of creative living.

Gail Newman is the Harold J Henry Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts USA. Her research centers on questions of subjectivity in the context of narrative and language, especially as they relate to trauma and incomprehensibility. Her work is informed by the psychoanalytic theories of Freud, Lacan, Ferenczi, and Winnicott. Her most recent publications include The Creative Self: Beyond Individualism (Columbia University Press, 2025), published together with Mari Ruti, as well as articles in German Studies and psychoanalytic journals on the aesthetics of catastrophe in the work of Heinrich von Kleist, the narration of silence and history in two of Gerhard Roth’s novels, and the “confusion of tongues” in Ingeborg Bachmann’s short story “Simultan.” Her contribution to the volume Thoughts for the Times on Groups and Masses examines the relationship between Freud’s ”Massenpsycholgie” essay and the MAGA movement.

Jeanne Wolff Bernstein is a psychoanalyst, living and working in Vienna. She is a member, training analyst, and vice-president of the Board at the Wiener Arbeitskreis für Psychoanalyse, WAP. She is the head of the Advisory Board of the Sigmund Freud Privatstiftung where she had also been the Fulbright-Freud Visiting Lecturer of Psychoanalysis in 2008. Prior to moving to Vienna, Jeanne Wolff Bernstein was the past president and supervising and personal analyst at PINC (Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California). She is still on the faculty at PINC and at the NYU Postdoctoral Program and teaches at WAP. She has published numerous articles on the interfaces between psychoanalysis, the visual arts and film.

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