Mari Ruti and Gail N. Newman, "The Creative Self: Beyond Individualism" (Columbia UP, 2025)

Feb 25, 2026

Gail N. Newman, Harold J. Henry Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Williams College, studies subjectivity and psychoanalytic readings of literature. She discusses resisting neoliberal self-optimization. Conversations range from Winnicott’s relational ideas and the creative uses of the false self to Milner’s valuing of solitude, mortality’s influence on thought, and quiet radicalism in teaching and care.

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ANECDOTE

How Gail Newman And Mari Ruti Became Collaborative Partners

Gail Newman met Mari Ruti at a Lacan panel where Mari's incisive question cut through jargon and led to dinner and a lasting friendship.
They collaborated late in Mari's life, lived and wrote together (including six weeks in Vienna) and coauthored the book from those exchanges.

INSIGHT

Neoliberalism Eats Creativity Through Performance Demand

Neoliberal self-optimization manifests as relentless performance, efficiency, and a controlling ego that squelches creativity.
Mari emphasized the loss of worldly transcendence; Gail added polarization and zero-sum thinking as complementary harms to relational life.

INSIGHT

Winnicott Shows Creativity Lives Between Selves

Winnicott's intermediate area models a nonbinary relationality where creativity arises between me and not-me, not from full self-revelation.
The transitional object must feel to the child as having a life of its own, enabling playful false selves that support true self emergence.

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In their book The Creative Self: Beyond Individualism (Columbia UP, 2025) Mari Ruti and Gail N. Newman offer our beleaguered souls a breather. Together they tackle the question of what makes life worth living, and before you recoil at the sound of that question, which intentionally has a little neoliberal ring to it, emphasis mine, let me say that this book studies and challenges the neoliberal way of, if you will, “being” and does so beautifully. Lamenting how perfecting, polishing and pushing ourselves beyond the beyond has become de rigeur—(with our overfull email boxes, demands for more, more, more that keep piling in, and how we are doing it all proudly on our own, no side to fall into) Newman and Ruti plumb the works of Marion Milner and Donal Winnicott, two analytic thinkers, both members of the British Psychoanalytical Society, contemporaries in fact, in search of an escape hatch.

It is important to note that Ruti was dying, knew she was dying, when she wrote this book, in which she fearlessly lays some blame for her demise at the feet of neoliberal modes of relating. At one point she describes the pressures of academia to attend to too much outside the realm of the classroom and scholarship, driving her to want to exclaim “Stop just stop.” Who has not had this experience where we are called upon to be on all the time, available, responsive, game?

Today I listened to a patient who was very ill with a cold moments before he trudged into work. Sure he has sick days but the new ethos is not to take them. We must not give in. His partner whose father died within the last six months is also back at work where she is expected to plow though her grief: “you must feel better by now right?’, her boss asks nervously. Not a one of us lives outside this realm. Ruti and Newman study the ways in which our loss of the ability to stop, feel emptiness, or seek isolation can foment a kind of psychic deformation that threatens to trounce our creativity.

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