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In this bold and original book, a well-known psychoanalyst explores the parallels and differences between creative and psychopathological responses to traumatic events. According to Dr. Gilbert J. Rose, the wear and tear of everyday life—including trauma and the threat of trauma—causes feelings to be bleached out of thought and perception. Both psychoanalysis and the creative imagination reintegrate what was defensively split off, thereby helping the individual to think and perceive with more feeling.
The author begins his discussion by comparing the childhood of a real-life murderer with that of Dostevsky. He shows that both were traumatized by a strikingly similar childhood memory of seeing a horse beaten, while this experience dominated the life of the murderer, the writer was able to use it as material for creative elaboration. Dr. Rose then compares the creation of imaginary characters in a case of multiple personality with the splitting and reintegration that take place in creative imagination, as in John Fowles’s novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Finally, he presents a vignette about a woman whose sense of time became altered following the sudden death of her daughter and demonstrates how this can be related to the altered sense of time in the music of Arnold Schoenberg and Charlie Parker.
With this material as background, Dr. Rose argues that, by different routes, both psychoanalysis and art reinvest feeling into thought and perception and thus broaden awareness. Psychoanalysis, through verbalization, recovers repressed memories and isolated feelings, art, through sensuous forms, undoes the denial of the emotional aspects of perception. Thus each contributes to the ongoing mastery of inner and outer reality. (245 pp.)
In order to begin to consider how psychoanalytic and artistic experience may overlap in some ways, it has been necessary first of all to set forth Freud’s attempt to project art beyond the reach of psychoanalysis. In this chapter we have tried to understand this “prohibition” by placing it within the framework of his primary identity as a scientist, his mixed feelings about art and artists, and the personal meanings of sibling rivalry and homoerotism that this may have had for him.
A double is one form of splitting-a conscious or unconscious displacement to the external world of various idealized or despised aspects of the self.
Dostoevsky’s oeuvre obviously transcends his own traumatic memories and has had a major impact on twentieth-century sensibility. It provides a text for the depth psychologist as well as the present-day utopian terrorist.
Under the impact of trauma, or of a traumatic intensity of conflict, the organism is in danger of being flooded with affects. In an attempt at containment and mastery, these affects may split off. Dostoevsky’s fictional character, Golyadkin, experienced a “vertical” split of consciousness to become Golyadkin plus his newly formed double; in Shaver’s real-life case, affects that had become too intense for consciousness underwent “horizontal” repression-that is, they were rendered unconscious.
If psychopathology and creativity appear to be related perhaps it is because they seem to share a somewhat easier access to the unconscious than that available to so-called normal and uncreative individuals.
The coexistence within an individual of defensive and creative purposes implies many things-among them, that an ego mechanism such as splitting may be used both to repress private unconscious conflicts and to foster abstraction of certain elements selected from a myriad reality in order to highlight them.
Language and thought both develop out of an affective and bodily matrix. As a result, feelings permeate thought and perception from the beginning. Live experience is thought-feeling-perception-not conceptual dichotomies of pure reason swayed by emotions.
As disturbing questions are raised by historians, metahistorians, existentialists, relativists, perspectivists, hermeneuticists, and de-constructionists, significant changes continue to take place in our understanding of the nature of truth and of the relation between reality and imagination, objectivity and subjectivity.
Art helps restore an awareness of the degree to which feeling and sensuousness always remain integral to thought and perception.
