Eric Maisel

Eric Maisel (born 1947) is an American psychotherapist, teacher, coach, author and atheist. His most popular books include Fearless Creating (1995), The Van Gogh’s Blues (2002), Coaching the Artist Within (2005), and The Atheist’s Way (2009).

Eric Maisel, Ph.D., is the author of more than 40 books and is widely regarded as Americas foremost creativity coach. He trains creativity coaches nationally and internationally and provides core trainings for the Creativity Coaching Association.

Eric Maisel was born in the Bronx, and grew up in Brooklyn. Dr. Maisel is a columnist for Professional Artist magazine and a featured contributor to Psychology Today. His books include “Rethinking Depression,” “Mastering Creative Anxiety,” "Creative Recovery," "A Writer’s San Francisco,” "A Writer’s Paris" and many others. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his family.

In the early 1990s, while working with creative and performing artists as a psychotherapist, Dr. Maisel developed the coaching specialty of creativity coaching. Creativity coaching focuses on helping creative and performing artists meet their emotional and practical challenges, including overcoming creative blockage and performance anxiety, dealing effectively with the art marketplace, and handling criticism and rejection. Many of the creativity coaches trained by Dr. Maisel have gone on to become certified creativity coaches under the auspices of the Creativity Coaching Association.

In his 2005 book Coaching the Artist Within Dr. Maisel presents anecdotal case studies of his creativity coaching work with creative and performing artists and presents lessons of importance to artists, among them “creating in the middle of things,” “upholding dreams and testing reality,” “committing to goal-oriented process,” and “maintaining a creative life.”

In his 2012 book Rethinking Depression: How to Shed Mental Health Labels and Create Personal Meaning Dr. Maisel rejects the idea that a case has been made for the existence of the “mental disorder of depression,” given the weakness of the construct “mental disorder,” the insufficiency of diagnosing on the basis of symptom pictures alone, and the reasonableness of supposing that what we are seeing is profound sadness instead; and presents an “updated existential program” for dealing with that profound sadness.

A lifelong atheist, Dr. Maisel described in his 2009 book The Atheist’s Way: Living Well Without Gods how individuals can negotiate the paradigm shift from seeking meaning (in religion, spiritual pursuits, or anywhere else) to making meaning. He argues that by making use of ideas like “meaning investments” and “meaning opportunities” people can effectively handle their meaning crises and meet their meaning challenges. The book presents one picture of how a person can make personal meaning despite the absence of beneficent gods and despite the indifference of the universe to human concerns.