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Essay: Creativity—the healthy muse

2006; Elsevier BV; Volume: 368; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/s0140-6736(06)69905-4

1474-547X

Albert Rothenberg,

Mind wandering and attention

Not long ago, I decided to re-read a novel by Thomas Mann about the experience of chronic illness. I felt immersed in a sense of contemplation within seemingly endless time. Both moving and enlightening were the metaphorical power of this masterpiece, its insights about life and death, and its elegance of literary style. Other types of artistic productions—visual, musical, and dance—similarly draw us into meaningful looking, listening, and thought. All, together with outstanding scientific discoveries, enhance and change our lives, and are results of creativity, defined as the production of something both new and valuable. Given the magnitude of creative achievement, I am often perplexed about the recurring tendency in western history to connect creativity with mental disability and illness. It cannot be denied that a number of well-known creative people, primarily in the arts, have been mentally ill—for example, Vincent Van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, Robert Schumann, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath. The list has recently been made, in various ways, questionably large. Psychiatric diagnoses of eminent people have been derived not from clinical sources but from general and popular biographies revealing apparent clay feet of creative heroes, unproven gossip and hearsay, and a field called pathography, in which both literary and psychological analysts describe correlations between artists' psychological constitutions and pathological elements they see in subject matter or characters. Other studies have purportedly found psychopathology in people attending art or writing classes or achieving positive scores on various creativity measures. A factor in the conundrum, difficult to assess or measure, is the influence of the angst of modern times, the widespread social disruption and anxiety that became overt during the romantic period of the 19th century and continues today. This has cultivated an image of the suffering artist and favoured artistic content—alienation, self-obsession, violence and sadism, extreme visual and sound imagery—seemingly connected with mental illness. Artistic expression has come to be considered therapeutic, a term that, though not always used rigorously, conjures up illness and its effects. Some mentally ill individuals have been attracted to the arts where themes and styles provide them with some experiential advantages. The confused beliefs and purported findings have primarily arisen because both creativity and mental illness involve deviations, sometimes fairly extreme ones, from normative modes of thought. I am for the moment leaving aside people who perform creatively in everyday activities. Symptoms of mental illness differ from normal thinking and behaviour, and creativity requires special or uncommon capacities. But there are sharp differences in effects; mental illness symptoms—compulsions, obsessions, delusions, panic attacks, depression, and personality disorders—deviate in stereotyped and frequently banal ways, whereas creativity involves novel and rich results. A common claim is that extreme euphoria and productivity are features of both creative work and bipolar illness. With the illness, however, these features are involuntary, devoid of judgment, and distorted, whereas creative artists' productivity is purposeful, and euphoria results almost always from exceptional accomplishment. Suffering is an intrinsic component of mental illness but, despite the traditional romantic belief, such disruption seldom contributes to creative inspiration. Suffering for creative people generally comes from lack of recognition and its consequences, neither direct cause nor effect of mental illness. The list of successful mentally ill creators should induce hope but not treatment resistance in suffering patients. Although the content of the list is dramatic, it is dwarfed by the number of highly creative people both in modern times and throughout history without evidence of disorder, including Czeslaw Milosz, Henry Moore, Sigrid Undset, Jane Austen, Anton Chekhov, George Eliot, John Milton, Johann Sebastian Bach, even William Shakespeare as much as we know of him, who have had problems like other human beings, but "here's the rub": was the author of Hamlet's suicide-contemplating soliloquy depressed? As a matter of empathy, that is unlikely, as I shall explain. Studies using test or clinical assessments have not proven a connection between creativity and mental illness. Almost all have had methodological and conceptual inadequacies: absent or poor controls, investigator bias, unreliable testing tools. None have demonstrated validity with respect to actual creative performance. Shared deviations from the normative—unusual and remote associations or preferences, and divergent thinking (as opposed to convergent thinking toward a single correct solution)—perfuse the criteria used. The solution to the conundrum of mental illness in creative individuals lies, I believe, in the nature of the creative processes themselves. If the factors directly producing creations were in some way derived from, or even facilitated, by illness, there would be a necessary connection. I have, from many years of objectively controlled research interviews and controlled experiments, identified three specific cognitive creative processes: articulation, janusian process, and homospatial process. I conducted individual interview series systematically focused on work in progress with a large number of outstanding creative people in the arts and sciences throughout Europe and the USA; the creative processes discovered are all healthy and adaptive. The process of articulation consists of concomitantly separating and connecting (as with the articulate speaker who keeps both words and ideas distinct and separate within a connected flow). One effect of this process is a new and valuable integration of an artwork in which distinct and separate identifiable parts are interconnected within a whole. Effective character creation is produced by the author's continuing articulation of self. Hamlet cannot simply be considered Shakespeare himself because, in cogent empathy, the character is composed through separating and connecting concomitantly of features of Shakespeare's internal and external self with others such as grieving parent, lost adolescent, man of intellect. Similarly, the scientist articulates a creative theory rather than using linear stepwise logic alone. Parts of the theory come together within the framework or whole; they fit together like an intricate jigsaw tableau rather than a linear analytical tract, one reason that elegant and meaningful theories have been likened to works of art. The homospatial process consists of actively conceiving two or more discrete entities occupying the same space, a conception leading to the articulation of new identities. In this process, which is a basis for constructive and creative imagination, concrete entities such as rivers, houses, human faces, and mathematical, physical, and sound patterns are superimposed in the mind and totally fill its perceptual space. For example, the author of the poetic metaphor "the handles were branches of stars" mentally superimposed upon each other images of the individual entities, handles and branches, together with the sound-related words. This generated the integrating sound and visual idea of stars. We have, in several controlled experiments, found significant effects of superimposed or homospatial visual stimuli on creative production. The janusian process consists of actively conceiving multiple opposites or antitheses simultaneously. This simultaneous opposition is neither simple combination nor blending of different elements, but under logical and clear states of mind, previously considered antagonistic and opposing beliefs, ideas, or actualities are formulated as coexistent. Nobel laureate Edwin McMillan told me that his discovery of critical phase stability, the concept leading directly to development of the synchrotron high-energy particle accelerator, occurred when he conceived the idea that certain particles would be out of phase and get the opposite sense, be going at both too high and too low energy. My controlled experiment showed that Nobel laureates in science scored significantly more highly on features of the janusian process than patients with a wide range of psychiatric diagnoses, a result differentiating creativity and mental illness. The three creative processes are goal directed, productive, and under rational governance, the hallmarks of healthy, adaptive functions. Although they deviate from ordinary thinking and are difficult to use, they are not, like symptoms of mental illness, involuntary and disruptive. These symptoms tend to block or derail creativity, whereas mental health is facilitating. When a creative person is mentally ill, creative production must be carried out during periods of low symptom activity and anxiety. Jackson Pollock, the father of abstract expressionism, was clinically diagnosed with bipolar illness and alcohol dependence. In the 1930s, he engaged in Jungian analytic therapy, which commonly involves the analysis of drawings. He submitted a large number all derivative from other artists: surrealists, Mexican muralists, Picasso, and his mentor Thomas Hart Benton. None (see Untitled, above left) gave any evidence of his own breakthrough artistic mode. It was not until the summer of 1939, when he was improving by his own statement devoid of moodiness and anxiety and attending parties where he was the only non-drinker, that he introduced abstract expressionist painting (see example, above right). He explained these artworks as both obscuring an image and expressing it at the same time, a janusian formulation developed during his period of remission and low anxiety. Other factors also are involved in creativity. Some of the shared ones between outstanding creators and those who perform creatively in everyday activities are self-affirmation, aversion to dogma, flexibility, and affinity for difference and novelty. Creativity of all types is a premier form of psychological adaptation, the effect of a healthy muse, because it involves the ability to change and improve all features of the environment. Albert Rothenberg is Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Born in New York, he attended Harvard College, graduated in medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine, and received his psychiatric training at the Yale University Department of Psychiatry. He has been Principal Investigator of the research project "Studies in the Creative Process" since 1964. Albert Rothenberg is Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Born in New York, he attended Harvard College, graduated in medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine, and received his psychiatric training at the Yale University Department of Psychiatry. He has been Principal Investigator of the research project "Studies in the Creative Process" since 1964.