For a long time, Western notions of the genius – influenced by Plato and Aristotle – linked one’s extraordinary creativity to an extreme mental state. The madness in Plato’s poetry was attributed to the gods taking over his personality and speaking through him, while the melancholy of the genius, from Aristotle onwards (including Plato and Socrates among the melancholics), was attributed to an excess of bodily humour, black bile.
Indeed, in the European Middle Ages and early modern period, melancholy – exemplified in Albrecht Dürer’s well-known portrait of a man sunk in melancholic thought as the quintessential representation of the artist – became the defining attribute of the creative person.
Beginning with Freud’s 1910 study of Leonardo da Vinci, the admixture of mania and depression as a defining attribute of a genius was expanded by psychoanalysts. Rather than viewing it as a fixed psychopathological structure in the creative writer’s or artist’s psyche, they now focused their attention on major emotional conflicts as the source of his or her creativity. These conflicts, which have their source in the artist’s childhood and early youth, are expressed by the creative person in his or her work, poetry, music or art, while, at the same time, creativity and the creative product buffer him or her from the trauma inherent in the emotional conflict.
This function of creativity, which acts as a haven from the storms of emotional life and the swirling of subterranean passions, is not limited to artists but may well extend to all highly creative individuals.
As Albert Einstein observes, “Man seeks to form for himself, in whatever manner is suitable for him, a simplified and lucid image of the world [Bild der Welt], and so to overcome the world of experience by striving to replace it to some extent by this image. That is what the painter does, and the poet, the speculative philosopher, the natural scientist, each in his own way. Into this [simplified and lucid] image of the world and its formation, he places the center of gravity of his emotional life, in order to attain the peace and serenity that he cannot find within the narrow confines of swirling personal experience.”
In the West, the therapeutic function of creativity has been highlighted by many. The German poet Heinrich Heine writes:
It is a sentiment echoed by the Austrian poet, Rainer Maria Rilke: “My work is really nothing but a self-treatment”, and by the novelist Graham Greene: “Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation”.
But, the self-healing process is not always successful and artists are sometimes prone to exaggerating the benefit of their creativity. Art, even in the presence of considerable talent, cannot always stabilise a disintegrating personality. Artistic creativity, as the Canadian psychoanalyst Patrick Mahony observes, though potentially effective in various degrees in regulating symptoms or even providing a narcissistically comforting insight, cannot produce a deep and permanent structural change in the psyche.
On the other hand, it is true that for certain artists, not to write, paint, sculpt or make music may lead to drastic psychic disintegration. Thus, although the American poet Sylvia Plath referred to “poetry as therapy” and the English writer Virginia Woolf relied on her “art to keep [her] head sane”, both women committed suicide. (Parenthetically, let me note that ancient textbooks of Sanskrit poetics, too, recognise what they call ‘escape from ills’ as one of the secondary reasons why a poet writes poetry.)
...Indian foundational texts on high-level artistic creativity take a very different tack from that of the Western tradition.
From the classical text on the performing arts, Bharata’s Natya Shastra (ca. 200 BC), through its authoritative interpretation in the commentary by Abhinavagupta (975–1025 AD), who included literature and fine arts in his theory of aesthetics, to the modern works of the renowned art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877–1947), there has been a unitary view of the creative artist.
He is not a flawed being, prone to madness or melancholia.
Not for the Indian artist the sensual excesses that Europeans have almost come to expect of their creative artists. The ancient texts, the Shilpa Shastras, describe the Indian artist thus: “The painter must be a good man, no sluggard, nor given to anger; holy, learned, self-controlled, devout and charitable,” and especially not an adulterer.
In an artist, striving for individuality, receiving nutrients for self-esteem from “effectance” and appreciation of the audience were suspicious. To be truly creative, it was necessary for individual personality traits and complexes to be transcended. As Coomaraswamy observes, “The Indian artist, though a person, is not a personality.”
They were believed to be transitory and accidental, veiling the fount of creativity, pratibha, creative imagination, the faculty capable of creating novel combinations of ideas and images. Pratibha is an inborn faculty due to impressions of past births that are so strong in the artist that it responds to the slightest stimuli, which are normally ignored by others.
Excerpted from On Creativity, Edited by Sudhir Kakar & Günter Blamberger, Penguin Viking.
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Indeed, in the European Middle Ages and early modern period, melancholy – exemplified in Albrecht Dürer’s well-known portrait of a man sunk in melancholic thought as the quintessential representation of the artist – became the defining attribute of the creative person.
Beginning with Freud’s 1910 study of Leonardo da Vinci, the admixture of mania and depression as a defining attribute of a genius was expanded by psychoanalysts. Rather than viewing it as a fixed psychopathological structure in the creative writer’s or artist’s psyche, they now focused their attention on major emotional conflicts as the source of his or her creativity. These conflicts, which have their source in the artist’s childhood and early youth, are expressed by the creative person in his or her work, poetry, music or art, while, at the same time, creativity and the creative product buffer him or her from the trauma inherent in the emotional conflict.
This function of creativity, which acts as a haven from the storms of emotional life and the swirling of subterranean passions, is not limited to artists but may well extend to all highly creative individuals.
As Albert Einstein observes, “Man seeks to form for himself, in whatever manner is suitable for him, a simplified and lucid image of the world [Bild der Welt], and so to overcome the world of experience by striving to replace it to some extent by this image. That is what the painter does, and the poet, the speculative philosopher, the natural scientist, each in his own way. Into this [simplified and lucid] image of the world and its formation, he places the center of gravity of his emotional life, in order to attain the peace and serenity that he cannot find within the narrow confines of swirling personal experience.”
In the West, the therapeutic function of creativity has been highlighted by many. The German poet Heinrich Heine writes:
Disease may well have been the ground
In full for that creative urge,
Creation was my body’s purge,
Creating I’ve grown sane and sound.
It is a sentiment echoed by the Austrian poet, Rainer Maria Rilke: “My work is really nothing but a self-treatment”, and by the novelist Graham Greene: “Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation”.
But, the self-healing process is not always successful and artists are sometimes prone to exaggerating the benefit of their creativity. Art, even in the presence of considerable talent, cannot always stabilise a disintegrating personality. Artistic creativity, as the Canadian psychoanalyst Patrick Mahony observes, though potentially effective in various degrees in regulating symptoms or even providing a narcissistically comforting insight, cannot produce a deep and permanent structural change in the psyche.
On the other hand, it is true that for certain artists, not to write, paint, sculpt or make music may lead to drastic psychic disintegration. Thus, although the American poet Sylvia Plath referred to “poetry as therapy” and the English writer Virginia Woolf relied on her “art to keep [her] head sane”, both women committed suicide. (Parenthetically, let me note that ancient textbooks of Sanskrit poetics, too, recognise what they call ‘escape from ills’ as one of the secondary reasons why a poet writes poetry.)
...Indian foundational texts on high-level artistic creativity take a very different tack from that of the Western tradition.
From the classical text on the performing arts, Bharata’s Natya Shastra (ca. 200 BC), through its authoritative interpretation in the commentary by Abhinavagupta (975–1025 AD), who included literature and fine arts in his theory of aesthetics, to the modern works of the renowned art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877–1947), there has been a unitary view of the creative artist.
He is not a flawed being, prone to madness or melancholia.
Not for the Indian artist the sensual excesses that Europeans have almost come to expect of their creative artists. The ancient texts, the Shilpa Shastras, describe the Indian artist thus: “The painter must be a good man, no sluggard, nor given to anger; holy, learned, self-controlled, devout and charitable,” and especially not an adulterer.
In an artist, striving for individuality, receiving nutrients for self-esteem from “effectance” and appreciation of the audience were suspicious. To be truly creative, it was necessary for individual personality traits and complexes to be transcended. As Coomaraswamy observes, “The Indian artist, though a person, is not a personality.”
They were believed to be transitory and accidental, veiling the fount of creativity, pratibha, creative imagination, the faculty capable of creating novel combinations of ideas and images. Pratibha is an inborn faculty due to impressions of past births that are so strong in the artist that it responds to the slightest stimuli, which are normally ignored by others.
Excerpted from On Creativity, Edited by Sudhir Kakar & Günter Blamberger, Penguin Viking.