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 [chapter from Will and Won’t: Autonomy and Creativity Blocks, John G. Young, M.D. Adventures in Creativity Publications]

AUTONOMY AND THE CREATIVE PERSONALITY

To become original creators, artists present themselves and their unique points of view. They go beyond the skill level, developing themselves as much, if not more than, their techniques. They go beyond refining approaches learned from others for they originate something new. To create at this level they need more than techniques and talent, they must have courage and imagination. When artists have the courage to express themselves, their understanding of the world, rather than repeat the formulas of the past, they become the originators.

THE QUESTION OF AUTONOMY

Developing a separate sense of self is important to the innovative artist. It is important in the development of any life that is a work of art. This process begins at an early age as the child emerges from its relationship with its mother to become a separate person. If this process is facilitated by the mother, the child separates in a conflict-free way and develops a healthy autonomy which can be expressed in many different ways.

The creative personality is but one possible course of human development. Otto Rank described the creative artist as one of three possible outcomes of personality development.(l)He theorized that man struggles between two fears in the course of his life: the life fear and the death fear. The former refers to man’s fear of separation from the security of the womb, from the protection of the familiar. The latter refers to his fear of losing himself if he attempts merge again with the mother, to return to the familiar, but lose the opportunity to find himself. The cost of security is the loss of individuality. Rank felt that the measure of man’s development is the extent to which he resolves his conflicts about these two fears. (Contemporary analysts like Margaret Mahler place the psychological birth at the separation-individuation phase between eighteen and thirty-six months rather than at physical birth like Rank)(2)

“Will,” according to Rank, is the integrated power of the personality. It is first expressed as a counter-will against the parents in an attempt to achieve self-hood. Some children handle this by suppressing their counter-will and adjust themselves to the model put forth by the parents. He termed the first group the “adaptive” personalities. They identify wholly with their parents and the parent’s surrogates, the society and culture in which they live. They become the “average” man. But, they pay for their the freedom from the guilt of aggressing against the parents by losing their creative drive and their unique self-expression.

Others who struggle with separating from the parents, who can not resolve their guilt about breaking away to find themselves, become conflicted. This second group, the neurotic ones, move further down the developmental path, but are filled with anxiety because their individual expression is not supported by their parents. Their separateness precludes the union of the adaptive type, but their guilt interferes with the development of the creative expression of their individuality. They have a sense of where they want to go, but they can not quite get there.

Rank’s last group, the creative artists, express their vitality, not their intra-psychic conflicts. These healthy self-expressive persons are unconflicted about themselves and their creativity. Their counter-will expressed as children is accepted by their parents who show pleasure in their children’s developing autonomy. Thus, the children develop a healthy guilt-free sense of self. Then they can allow their creativity to blossom.

When basic needs are met by their parents, they develop what Abraham Maslow, the psychologist, calls “meta-needs,” that is, the need to develop themselves and to actualize their potentials.(3) Because they do not continually have to fight anxiety and guilt, they can use their talents to the fullest.

Growth in any area requires a foundation of safety. When children feel safe, they can venture into the unknown, like the children who want to learn to walk when they have mastered crawling. In fact, when the safe way becomes too familiar, it becomes boring,–and children seek new adventures–if they are confident and have had the encouragement of their parents in the past.

Creative artists, it should be noted, experience conflict, but not neurotic repressive conflict. Any person truly alive will experience the struggle between what is and what might be and/or what ought to be. The tensions sometimes lead to symptoms that might be confused with neurotic symptoms. Even the well-analyzed patient who has mastered most of his/her neurotic conflicts must deal with “ordinary unhappiness.”

But creative artists, through their heightened sensitivity to the concerns of humankind, confront more than ordinary unhappiness. Existential questions deriving from man’s finitude, separateness, uncertainty about ultimate meaning, and need to act, will always be concerns of creative individuals, but their lives have a wholeness of purpose not blocked by intrapsychic conflicts. They experience a heightened sensitivity to universal issues of fate, tragedy, destiny, the longing for ideals, the search for truth, beauty, and meaning. Since they have greater ego strength, they can tolerate great tensions in the struggle with these issues long enough to work with them, because they are not deadened or enervated by the need to repress parts of themselves or their awareness of the state of the world.

COMPENSATORY MOTIVATIONS

What is the role of psychological illness and psychological health in creative self-expression? Freud thinks psychopathology is the driving force behind the creative urge in the form of sublimation. (4) Kubie feels it interfers with the creative process. (5) Barron think creators are both more vulnerable because of heightened sensitivity, but are also emotionally stronger (6) so they can “regress in the service of the ego.”(Kris,7) Dabrovsky sees the conflict and turmoil asprogress, a state of “positive disintegration” (8) in which the individual breaks away from older points of view to find more adequate ones. Rothenberg views the creative process as the obverse of dreaming, he finds it a highly rational progressive process.(9) Arieti also finds creative activity a higher function of man calling it a tertiary process which combines paleological with rational thought processes.(10)

Let’s take the first suggestion. Some theorists claim creativity is motivated by other more primary drives, that their creativity is not autonomous and free from intrapsychic conflicts. They think some persons create compensating for other intrapsychic problems. These theorists seem to think all art is a result of unresolved conflict, as though they were all in Rank’s second stage, rather than the third. Freud thought that the creative artist was driven by wishes for fame, fortune, and the love of women.(11) Ian Flemming, for instance, using this model, could have wanted to be the sophisticated James Bond 007. Freud felt these writers could not pursue their goals directly, so they fantasied victory in their imagination, like the wish fulfillment of a dream.

Other analysts such as Neiderland and Pollack think the drive to creative expression comes from loss.Neiderland feels that many artists strive to compensate for a loss of a body part by creating something outside themselves.(12) Pollack focuses on the relationship losses that many artist’s life stories demonstrate. (13) Both think artists create compensatorily, that is, they produce to handle other problems. Adler felt that artists worked from an attempt to compensate for feelings of inferiority.(14) By creating they expressed power they did not feel. Rather than resolve their neurosis directly, they did it through wish-fulfilling fantasy as expressed in their artistic production. Their creativity was defensive.

When one’s emotional life does not satisfy or have meaning, one can create his own world. Anthony Storr, for example, says Albert Einstein was schizoid, that he could not live in the world as it was, so he created a new world of relativity.(15) Edward de Bono claims artists in general are not very creative thinkers.(16) Instead they create a world of their own, then convert others to their point of view. But, outside this unique vision, they are quite inflexible.

Some create because they have to. Not to produce causes them anxiety. If creating helps a person avoid facing a difficult emotional situation such as the loss of a loved one, not to create would force the person to feel the loss. Some are nonconformist for the sake of being nonconformist. They do it not because it offers anything in itself, but because it helps them define themselves as separate from their parents or their representatives. They define themselves as not this or not that. Still they get little satisfaction in their accomplishments because they are not expressing themselves.

CREATION DESPITE EMOTIONAL ILLNESS

Some create despite emotional illness. Van Gogh created masterpieces in art despite a disabling psychosis that acted up every three months when he had constant auditory hallucinations. He defensively kept his vision on the external world to avoid his disturbing inner life. Thus he painted the reality around him, rather than use his imagination which too closely connected with the psychotic process going on within him. Once he acted in a concrete way towards his auditory hallucinations. After an argument with his roommate Gaugain he cut off his ear. It may have been an auditory translation of the biblical command: “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out,” and by implication “If thine ear offend thee, cut it off.” He was, after all, quite religiously oriented at one time. He may have been trying to remove the source of his continual auditory hallucinations in concrete way. But during the periods of recovery from his psychosis, he did feverous work. In the 70 days before he committed suicide, he painted 100 works. Van Gogh worked despite his illness, not because of it.

Ernst Kris says the outcome of psychosis on artistic production can have four consequences: one, no effect at all; two, cessation of the work; three, blockage with subsequent change after the psychotic process is over; four, distortion of the work itself. (17) Sometimes art is the result of psychological issues and at other times it is despite those conflicts, and sometimes it is neither.

Defenses may protect individuals from experiencing anxiety or grief or psychosis. They may motivate them to new accomplishments. But, they exact a price. The pleasure one gets in reaching the goal is short-lived. The accomplishment is more symbolic than real. To prove that one is different in a nonconformist way, stays the death fear of merging with the mother, but at the cost of losing oneself. To be not-something is to be nothing. Thus compensatory creators lack sustaining pleasure in their work.

PSYCHOLOGICAL DEFENSES MOST OFTEN BLOCK CREATIVITY

               Kubie, on the other hand, points out that most neuroses and psychoses interfere with creativity.(18) If one focuses on being adaptable and flexible in one’s responses to all different kinds of situation, psychological rigidity is hardly creative, even though the artistic product is unique. Neurotic and psychotic defenses tend to be stereotyped according to the intrapsychic conflicts which block the flexible responding that truly creative people display.

I once wrote a poem about such individuals. You have to read between the lines to see how blocked they really are:

Fettered

He first came to me disheveled and distraught;

he wanted to be well so I soon forgot

 “I want

the advantage he sought by remaining the same,

the excuse he brought for still being lame.

 “to stop hurting

The memories were gone of dangers addressed

with childhood armor then soon repressed.

 “but I’m afraid

He was stuck in the past by the choices of a child

when reality merged with fantasies wild.

“of change.

He feared going forward, why, he couldn’t express.

No one could guess what he couldn’t confess.

 “How can I

His neurosis persisted, very scared it seems of ghosts

from the past that roamed in his dreams.

“be different

Though he suffered, I’m sure he chose to endure

rather than face in their place the dragons of yore.

 yet still

Then soon I could see, rather than leaving his fetter,

what he wanted from me, was making it better.

“be the same.”(19)

META-MOTIVATED CREATIVITY

Writers such as Abraham Maslow (20), Carl Jung (21)., and others, believe creative people are motivated by healthy needs which come into being when more basic needs are met. They are not afraid of change because they welcome growth. Meta-motivations (meta: beyond) are drives which surface when the more primitive needs are no longer pressing. Curiosity, the wish to solve real problems, the search for understanding, the longing for truth, beauty and justice, the desire for the esteem of peers, theurge for mastery and independence, the wish to fulfill oneself–these are healthy drives of healthy individuals.

Healthy creative persons have pleasure in all stages of the creative process. (This, however, does not imply that there are no difficult times when one wrestles with a challenging problem. Cf. Mental and Emotional Blocks, ch. 9.) Because the pleasure is intrinsic though, rather than secondary to meeting more basic needs, the emotional response is fuller. Meta-motivated individuals are challenged by the unfamiliar. They pursue it with zest and energy, unlike the neurotic types who are compelled to create to harness anxiety. Meta-motivated individuals choose to create; they are able not to create if they want. They create without neurotic anxiety. Unlike the conflicted, compensatory types who get brief pleasure when they complete the task, the healthy, meta-motivated individuals find all stages of the process an interesting challenge. They are intrigued by the unfamiliar. They find it stimulating.

They have a different attitude toward failure from those who over-identify with their work. They know that trying and not succeeding does not mean they are a failure, but that the method they were using did not work. Instead they recognize that they have learned something, and they try another way. Their creativity is an expression of their attitude toward life. They resolve their life fear in a healthy way.

Because these individuals have had basic needs met, their creativity is a meta-need. It is not compromised by the necessity of having more basic needs fulfilled through the creative process. They have no need to sublimate like the compensatory creatives. Their creativity has intrinsic rewards, rather than the goal of fulfilling some other basic requirement toward life.

SUMMARY

• Originators must have more than talent–they must have courage, imagination and a separate, autonomous sense of self.
• Healthy self-assertion, when supported by parents, leads to autonomous creativity.
• Neurotic conflicts sometimes stimulate the urge to create, but compensatory creativity is rarely fulfilling. Most psychopathology interferes with creative productivity.
• When basic needs are met, meta-needs for creative expression come into being.

REFERENCES

1. Rank, 0. Art and artist–creative urge and personality development New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975.
2. Mahler, M., Pine, F. & Bergman, A. The psychological birth of the human infant. New York: Basic Books, 1975.
3. Maslow, A. The farther reaches of human nature, New York: Penguin Books, 1978.
4. Freud, S. Three essays on the theory of sexuality. (vol. VII) J. Straskey (Trans. & Ed.). London: Hogarth Press, 1905.
5. Kubie, L. Neurotic distortion of the creative process. New York: Noonday Press, 1961.
6. Barron, F. Creativity-and Psychological health. New York: Van Nostrand, 1963.
7. Kris, E. Psychoanalytic explorations in art. New York: International Univ6rsities Press, 1952.
8. Dabrowski, K. Positive disintegration. Boston: Little, Brown, 1964.
9. Rothenberg, A. The emerging goddess. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.
10. Arieti, S. Creativity and its cultivation: relation to psychopathology and mental health. In S. Arieti (Ed.), American handbook of psychiatry. New York:              Basic Books, 1974.
11. Freud, S. Three essays on the theory of sexuality.
12. Neiderland, W. Psychoanalysis of a creative personality. Presentation to the Denver Psychoanalytic Society, February 24, 1979.
13. Pollack Presentation the Creativity and Madness Conference, American Institute of Medical Education, 1984.
14. Adler, A. Problems of neurosis. London: Routledge, 1959.
15. Storr, A. Dynamics of creation. New York: Antheneum, 1962.
16. deBono, E. Lateral thinking. New York: Harper & Row, 1970.
17. Kris, E. _Psychoanalytic explorations in art.
18. Kubie, L. Neurotic distortion of the creative process.
19. Young, J. A psychiatrist’s notebook. Denver: Center for Creativity Publications, 1982.
20. Maslow, A. Toward a psychology of being. New York: Van Nostrand, 1968
21. Jung, C. Psychological factors determining human behavior. In Collected works of C.G. Jung (Vol. 8). New York: Bollinger, 1960.