Art Psychotherapy, Vol. 1, pp. 109-112. Perg:amon Press. 1973. Printed in the USA

REFLECTIONS ON CREATION, THERAPY AND CO~~UN~CATlON*

ROSEMARY

ACCORDING to the Oxford Dictionary, to create means to “bring into being, to cause to exist, to form, to produce.” Thus creativity involves a num- ber of qualities such as productivity, inventiveness, originality. However, it is most important to remem- ber that creativity is none of these or any of these alone. For the most important quality needed in any product of the creative process is that it be imbued with value and excellence, and that it ex- press man’s need and search for meaning. Conse- quently, all creative acts form an integral part of the process of personal growth, development and the estabii~ment of one’s personal identity, which is, of course, a life-long activity. It is this sort of conception of art, the artist and the creative process which Stephen Spender (1952) seems to describe when he suggests that to a poet “what really mat- ters is integrity of purpose and the ability to main- tain the purpose without losing oneself.”

The creative process itself depends on a person’s capacity to be active as well as passive, to give as well as to receive. Herbert Read (1929) when he discusses Picasso, attributes his greatness to his “inexhaustible power of transformation, receiving all and giving all in endless and engrossing inter- change.” Jung was the seriousness with which he viewed man’s need to create. Already in 1929 in his paper, “Psycho~o~c~ factors in human behavior”, Jung (1960) classified creativity as one of the five main groups of instinctive forces - the other four being hunger, sexuality, activity and reflection.

The importance of the need to create is often very evident to me not only in my personal intro- spections, but also in my experience of persons who come to me for analysis. Though many arrive with the expressed wish to be relieved of their symp-

GORDON

toms, many, if not all, are driven by a need to get in touch with their own creative centre and to find expression for their need to make, to make forms, to pour into a form their own experiences, feelings, fantasies, wishes, fears and hopes; and to extend their awareness of themselves and of the world in which they live through the forms that have emerged out of them.

The creative process is the process par excellence in which contradictory but mutually reciprocal qual- ities are mobilised: activity and passivity, receptivity and productivity, consciousness and unconscious- ness, The interaction and interdependence of these contradictory processes emerges clearly if we consid- er the stages of the creative process as these have been identified by most artists and researchers. Nearly all of them seem to agree that there are four of them. First of all is the stage of preparation, which is the time when a person immerses himself in a problem and feels himself drawn into a period of baffled but conscious struggle. To enter this stage and keep his faith by it a person needs to be humble but persistent; and he cannot shun know- ledge and information.

The second stage, the stage of incubation, has . been well named by Whitehead (1952) the philoso- pher, as a state of muddled suspense. At this point a person literally or metaphorically ‘sleeps on his problem.’ He lets go of it, he withdraws from it. He finds himself baffled and confused. He can find no resolution and, as it were, admits his ignorance, his defeat.

Then, if he is lucky, the third stage may ‘happen’ to him. There is a sudden flash of light, an inspira- tion, a happy idea occurs to him. This third stage, the stage of illumination, tends to be unexpected, sudden, and often marked by a feeling of certitude.

*Requests for reprints should be sent to Rosemary Gordon, 26 Montagu Square, London, WA., England.

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110 ROSEMARY GORDON

It happens in a state of mind which Harold Rugg (1963) has described as the state of “creative emptiness” and is thus often accompanied by a feeling of hav- ing been passive, a mere bystander in what has occurred. Max Ernst, the painter, for instance, has described this when he wrote: “I had only to repro- duce obediently what made itself visible within me.” And even so rational and logical a person as the mathematician, Gauss (1949), wrote as follows: “Finally, two days ago I succeeded, not on account of my painful efforts, but by the grace of God. Like a sudden flash of lightning the riddle happened to be solved.”

This exuberant and often ecstatic phase is then followed by the fourth stage, the stage of verifica- tion. This is the period of critical testing, when the ideas received in the period of inspiration need to be tested, organised and given relevant form and expression.

These four stages thus make it clear that a cre- ative process depends both on the capacity of a person to use his conscious ego functions, for these predominate in the first stage, when knowledge and skill are needed and when the problem poses itself and challenges to battle, and in the fourth stage when the ‘illumination’ requires critical evaluation. But in the second and the third stage surrender of ego functions is required; for these stages rely on what Ehrenzweig (1967) has named the capacity for dedifferentiation or unconscious scanning; they rely on the-capacity to surrender, to bear doubt, anxi- ety, and a not-knowing and a not-controlling and on the capacity to experience ‘sacred awe’. Consequent- ly the process of creation seems to demand that a person be available to freely moving osciflations between control and surrender and between periods of conscious work and periods of passive accep- tance.

Of course the relative importance and the relative duration of each one of these four stages will vary greatly from person to person, from one discipline or art-form to the other, and indeed from one creative act to anather creative act. And clearly the process can be a continuous, possibly spiralling one, so that the stage of verification may shade over into the stage of preparation of a following creative work.

I believe &hat there has been an interacting and reciprocal relationship in the development of the studies of art and creativity on the one hand, and the theoretical and clinical discoveries of analysts on

the other. The pioneers like Freud and Jung first drew attention to some of the unconscious roots of creative work and activity and indeed they broke open some of the symbolic codes embedded in creative work and activity. Yet, as understanding of creativity increased, psychoanalytic thought and per- haps its ethos itself was affected and modified.

Thus in recent years one can detect renewed valuing among analysts of all schools of such experi- ences of their patients as the experience of alone- ness and of silence and of such procedures on the part of the analyst, during certain stages in the analysis, as non-intervention and “un-interpreting” (Khan, 1963). I am thinking, quite apart from Jung, of such analysts as Balint, Milner, Winnicott and Khan, i.e., analysts who have been particularly interested and concerned with art, play and crea- tion. There is, of course, clear evidence that Freud himself had been very interested in this problem, viz. his essays on Leonardo (I 9 14a), on Michael- angel0 (1914b), etc., and that he was indeed very aware of the active-passive and conscious-unconscious interaction in the creative process. This is well shown in his Recommendar~ons for Physicians on the ~sychoa~ly~c period of ~rearrne~~ (1912), when he enjoined upon analysts a “calm, quiet attentive- ness of evenly-hovering attention” in which “all conscious exertion is to be withheld from the capac- ity for attention;” and he cites, in this paper, an old French surgeon who had taken as his motto the words, “je le pansai, Dieu le gu&it,” and adds to this that the analyst should content himself with a similar thought.

Balint (196S), in Il”he Basic Fault, suggests that there are three areas in man. There is the area of the Oedipus complex. Here conflict is characterised by the presence of at least two persons, apart from the subject. Then there is the area of the basic fault - this is concerned exclusively with the two-person relationship, with mother and child. But then there is a third area. This is characterised by the fact that there is no external object present. The subject is on his own and his main concern here is to produce something out of himself. This Balint calls the level of creation, and it is when we approach this area that silence and non-interpretation are most relevant.

One cannot be with another person - be it patient, friend, husband or wife - during the actual state of creation; we can be with that person just before it and just after it. But during the actual work we may keep watch only from outside. This

REFLECTIONS ON CREATION. THERAPY AND COMMUNICATION 111

acceptance of aloneness in the creative work is diffi- cult to bear for all, analyst, patient and friend. How often do we not express or hear the demand that the other - mother, partner, analyst - should experience everything with one, or, even better, for one. And how often have 1 not heard the angry, resentful, accusing remark: “It is alI right for you; you don’t have to bear this pain.” But equally often the patient, friend or partner may express the fear that the analyst, the other, might intrude, might in fact try to do, it for him. The wish to ‘go it alone’ or to be ‘never alone’ are indeed very delicately balanced.

When I think about this particular quandary i tend to remember the myth that was the first myth to be committed to writing - by the Sumerians in approximately 3,000 B.C., the myth of the “Descent of the Goddess Innana into the Nether World.” Innana is accompanied to the very gates of the ‘underworld by her minister, Ninshibur, whom she describes as her ‘constant support’, her ‘minister of favourable words’. But when they reach the gates of the Nether World Innana must go on alone:

“Open the house, Neti, open the house, AI1 alone I would enter.”

Ninshibur is charged with carrying out the mourning rites. And he is to go to the four chief gods and entreat them to intervene on her behalf if she does not return within three days. He is thus her link to the upper world, the world of life, of reality - like the analyst?

So far 1 have reflected upon the problem of art and creation and the problems presented in psycho- therapy and other intimate relationships. I would now further postulate that the effectiveness of inter- and intra-personal communication also rests and de- pends on the sort of personal qualities that we find are essential for the creative and the therapeutic process.

Thus, for instance, the capacity to tolerate ‘not to know’ is a prerequisite without which one can- not do justice to the fact that every encounter is unique. Without it a person will be tempted to stereotype and to categorise; without it a person will not accept that be it at a party, in a profession- aI society, as analyst or as analysand, the under- standing of each other’s language is a slow and gradual process. After all, even the understanding of

one’s own inner language takes time, needs patience and is never complete.

And only the capacity to tolerate not to know can help one to respect the need in oneself and in the other person to keep a secret place, a need we all share even though we all thirst to meet, to communicate and to commune with each other.

When we confront silence in friend, partner or patient, we are inevitably faced with the problem:

(a) How not to make him feel that we have abandoned him.

(b) How not to make him feel that we are punishing his silence by our silence.

(c) And yet how to ensure that he does not feel that we are intruding on his silence.

Indeed, the interplay between word and silence lies along a razor’s edge: what to tell? when to teli it? what to hold back? to whom to tell it? how to tell it? For this razor’s edge divides individual strength from paranoid isolation and arrogance, pride and perfectionism from awareness of one’s essential aloneness (which is not loneliness!).

To sum up then: I suggest that creativity, thera- py and communication all depend on a person’s will and ability to bear doubt; to bear the pain and anxiety provoked when one jettisons the old and risks ~novation, the forming and making of the new, the as yet unsown. They ah demand great trust, trust that one can survive states of chaos, uncertainty and the terror of the unknown; trust that one will not disintegrate in excitement and ecstasy; trust in the predominance inside one of the spontaneous ordering force; and trust that one can tolerate imperfection - for the work can never be as wonder-full as the inspiration.

Thus alI three demand the sacrifice of omnipo- tence, of omniscience and of security. Instead what is required is a capacity for wonder and for awe; and a passionate need to fmd meaning and to dis- cover order behind the ~~ontinuitjes of the world of appearances.

And all these qualities, so essential to creativity and communication - without which a person can- not feel his life to be rich, meaningful and worth- while - all these qualities seem ultimately to de- pend on the accessibility of both the conscious and the unconscious processes of the mind and on a ready o&iI.lation between them and the synthesizing of them.

112 ROSEMARY GORDON

REFERENCES

BALINT, M. (1968) The Basic Fault, Tavistock, London. EHRENZWEIG, A. (1967) The Hidden Order in art, Weiden-

feld & Nicholson, London. FREUD, S. (1914a) Leonardo da Vinci: A Memory ofHis

Childhood. Standard Edition 13. FREUD, S. (1912) Recommendations for Physicians in the

Psychoanalytic Method of Treatment, Standard Edition 2. FREUD, S.(1914b) The Moses of Michaelangelo, Standard

Edition 13. GAUSS, K. F. (1949) in HADAMARD, J. Psychology of In-

vention in the Mathematical Field, p. 15, Princeton Uni- versity Press, Princeton, N. J.

JUNG, C. G. (1960) Psychological Factors Concerning Human Behaviour, Collected Works 8, Routledge & Kegan, Paul, London.

KHAN, M. (1963) Silence as communication, Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 27.

READ, H. (1959) A Concise History of Modern Painting, Thames & Hudson, London.

RUGG, H. (1963) Imagination, Harper & Row, New York. SPENDER, S. (1952) The making of a poem, The Creative

Process (Edited by GHISELIN, B.), p. 119, University of California Press, Berkeley.

WHITEHEAD, A. N. (1952) in The Creative Process (Edited by GHISELIN, B.), p. 119, University of California Press, Berkeley.