Projective features of contemplative artistic experience.

Abstract

Institute for Psychoanalysis, ChicagoN ORDER to help transcend the pains of life, man has built the spiritual I retreats of religion and art. These are the oldest and least perishable of the institutions with which ci;ilizations proudly ornament themselves. We find peace and comfort there from the cruelty of nature, the asperities of life, and from a world overpopulated with personifications of our unconscious guilts and fears. In viewing the outside world as a symbolic expression of inner reality, art and religion endow with form and content the need we have to identify ourselves with ideal aims. These identifications afford us our keenest sense of the significance of life. We call art and religion "eternal," and value them as the most enduring of man-made things because they abide through all change. I t is small wonder then that these venerable institutions are the last strongholds of magic which psychology is attempting to penetrate.Culture has always endowed the church and philosophy with authority for furnishing an official directive for our thinking about art. During the middle ages, culture transferred most of this authority from theology to its handmaiden, philosophy. Since then, philosophy has maintained the ancient chaos of esthetic theories among which the only agreement lies in their conception in terms of God, and of values that transcend human life. The philosopher is far more interested in art as an institution than in the purely secular pursuit that it is for modern man. H e does not conceive the powers of the human imagination as themselves creative enough to initiate the production and appreciation of art. Thus we are always told that creativeness and appreciation are evoked by some outside stimulus that is generally the Beauty of God a t some remove from the philosopher's metaphysical heaven. We are told by theories of esthetics that the experience of beauty is evoked in the artist as his special reaction to an outer stimulus; for example, to Mother Nature, the universe, or the milieu. This ancient philosophical concept is given wide popular currency by the artist who repeats it because his creative experience is a passive and ineffable one; and because this concept is less absurd than others, such as analogy with midwifery or play with which he usually explains a highly valued experience for which he cannot account, and one that he is unable to repeat a t will.Until as recently as the latter part of the nineteenth century, the tradi-* Presented a t the 1948 Annual Meeting.The present contribution is the seventh in a series on problems of the creative imagination.

Timelessness and Restitution in Relation to Creativity and the Aging Process*

“…The theories of many writers emphasize the importance of restitution from depression as an unconscious motive in creative activity (4, 12, 13). According to Greenacre (8, 9), Kris (14), and especially Lee (16, 18, 19) who has written extensively on creativity and the projective features of contemplative artistic experience, the creative artist is a more sensitive and perceptive person who is more subject to neurotic depressions than are other people. Much of his cyclic creativity is due to the fact that it is often initiated as a restitutive activity from a depressive reaction in order to regain love from the maternal conscience figure by creating an art work which is invested with love.…”

“…Through utilizing artistically the element of timelessness in the personalities of the creative person, it is possible to orient the self further in such a way that there can be healing replenishment of the loved image of the self by interacting with and incorporating at a deep level within the self those stimuli which have stood the test of time. Since the beauty in art work is so valued, therefore, the contemplative artistic experience adds value and a form of timelessness to the self‐image (16).…”

“…Such a lift from depressive feelings can occur not only for the person who is the creative artist, but also for the person who is the sensitive appreciator of art works, in that he may utilize the same mechanisms through identification and projection, and at times through introjection, which are utilized by the artist himself for increasing his own self‐esteem. As Lee points out (16), “our activity of appreciating at a given time either grasps immediately the design and its unconscious significance, or else mostly the meanings associated with the subject matter.”…”

An Experimental Study of Schizophrenic Interpretations of Nonrepresentational Painting1

“…SYCHODYNAMic Studies of nonrq>resentatjonal art suggest that the creations permit expression through symbolism of certain n^ds that cannot be faced directly Stated in classical psychoanal3rtic terms, art provides a channel through which the "id" may communicate with the "tgp" (9) and express fantasies ordinarily excluded from consciousness (4,10) Although often dreamlike m form (1,3), the aesthetic restructuring of reality by the normal artist follows certain objectively established and widely held criteria and transforms personal unconscious experiences into culturally acceptable symbols through which they may be commumcated to others (12,13) In this way the artist gives the observer the q^rtunity of abreacting his own emotional tensions while at the same time guaranteeing safety through the integrated form m which he expresses himself (9) In the case of the psychotic artist (2,12,13) reality has been so transformed in accordance with his private wishes that commimication with others is greatly limited The productions are more often the fragmentary reflections of a fragmented ego that has lost control and can be understood only m the light of the case history The artist has given up the attempt to accept reality or to share his expressions He succumbs to autistic needs, expressing them directly with no attonf^ at reorganization or social reality testing Nonrepresentational art, whether psychotic or normal, serves the purpose of shock absorption. This function is analc^ous to the preparaticm of the hypnotized patient to face material that has not yet broken through resistances to consciousness (16) In formal art therafŵ ith mentally ill patients Hulse (8) observed that by "painting through" symbolically expressed matenal the patient changes frcon nonobjective to more realistic forms A similar trend was reported by Naumburg (U) in her studies of schizophrenic art PROBLEM Since the schizc^hrenic patient is assumed to have suffered a breakdown of the usual ego defenses that ward off the direct impact of unconscious material, he has been regarded as more perceptive of tmconscious meanings in the behavior of others (6) Recent clinical sujqxnt for this hypothesis has been advanced by Rosen (14), who found his recovered patients especially successful at interpreting the significance of bizarre symbols used by other patients.…”