Creativity and Madness

1
Creativity and Madness

• CREATIVITY works to reconcile once seeming
  irreconcilable truths cognition and emotion,
  ideal and real, Dionysian and Apollonian

• The accommodation of each thereto and the
  subsequent clarity of insight. . . . Insight into
  ones soul is insight into all meaning. This is
  the highest good! (Prolegemonon)

2
Thinking Differently

• Here is to the crazy ones, the misfits,
• the rebels, the troublemakers,
• the round pegs in the square holes.
• The ones who see things differently.
• They are not fond of rules
• and they have no respect for the status-quo.
• You can quote them, disagree with them,
• glorify or vilify them.
• But the only thing you can't do is ignore them.
• Because they change things.
• They push the human race forward.
• And while some may see them
• as the crazy ones, we see genius.
• Because the people who are crazy enough
• to think they can change the world,
• are the ones who do.

http//www.thecompleat.com/crazyones/video/index.h
tm
3
Thinking Differently

• There is a long tradition associating dysfunction
  with creativity . . . And it is a short step from
  thinking differently in a way useful to ones
  self and society to thinking differently in
  dysfunctional ways.
• dysfunction defined as activity that (directly
  or indirectly) fails to meet biological needs.
  Needs are viewed in a hierarchy of relative
  urgency from basic to self-actualization

4
SOCRATES on MADNESS in PHAEDRUS

• Socrates begins his tale with glorification of
  madness , which he divides into four kinds
• first, there is the art of divination or prophecy
• secondly, there is the art of purification by
  mysteries
• thirdly, poetry or the inspiration of the Muses
  (cp. Ion 533a foll.), without which no man can
  enter their temple. All this shows that madness
  is one of Heaven's blessings, and may sometimes
  be a great deal better than sense.
• There is also a fourth kind of madness which
  cannot be explained without inquiring into the
  nature of the soul

5
Everyones Crazy

• When we see things that arent there, are we
  crazy?

6
Im an artist, I cant help myself
7
Seeking the bilogical sources of dysfunction
(they are all biological)

• DEVELOPMENT
• ECOLOGY
• EVOLUTION
• PHYSIOLOGY
• PHYSIOLOGY is the proximate cause and involves
  
• input, integration, output

8
The Brainexcavating the paleopsychology of our
species

• The Brain of Man has not abandoned its ancient
  animal foundations, it has built upon them . . .
  . But it has also reconstructed them as the
  shifting earth beneath dictates . . . . We have
  done the best possible in the landscape in which
  we have found ourselves with the raw materials we
  have inherited.
  
  (Prolegomena to a Study of Mind (1973
  translation) ch. 42)

9
Subcomponents of our Naturehave been long
recognized

• When the gentler part of the soul slumbers and
  the control of Reason is withdrawn . . . the Wild
  Beast in us . . . becomes rampant.
  
  (Plato, The Republic, IX 571)
• We are conscious of an animal in us which
  awakens in proportion as our higher nature
  slumbers (Henry David Thoreau in Walden)

10
The Artist as Wounded Healer

• The Wounded Healer Shaman, Priest, therapist, .
  . . Artist
• The poet becomes a seer, by a long, immense, and
  conscious disorder of all the senses. (Arthur
  Rimbaud)
• Most wretched men /Are cradled into poetry by
  wrong They learn in suffering what they teach in
  song (Percy Bysshe Shelley)

11
The Artist as Wounded Healer

• The most gifted artists most effectively point
  to the source of the wound and the means by which
  it is healed
• the dis-integration of motivation, affect, and
  cognition for whatever reason and
• their re-integration in the workings of art.
• As healer, the artist is a role model . . . . We
  seek those with whom we resonate with comparable
  dis-eases.
• Neil Greenberg, Art and Organism

12
The Mind of the Centaur

• Dissonance-induced stress is a constitutional
  element in the growth and development of the
  central nervous systems of Homo sapiens
• They are born of the perpetual maelstrom of
  disintegration and renewal we call change
• The energizing effect of the stress responses is
  in proportion to the urgency of needs that have
  not been accommodated.

13
Stress and Coping

• The neuroendocrinology of stress is known to
  affect cognitive, affective, and motivational
  systems in ways that can help the organism cope
  --to restore harmony, homeostasis
• Specific neurobehavioral functions are
  selectively inhibited or facilitated, and
  receptive or active fields of neurons is
  enlarged, effectively increasing the possibility
  of new connections.
• Among the most effective mechanisms for restoring
  proportionate responses between systems is
  creativity, most strikingly manifest in works of
  art.

14
Disproportion

• Is there any excellence
• hath not an origin in
• disproportion or deformity?
• (Francis Bacon)

15
Stress and Creativity

• Two traits converge in this view of the artist as
  a wounded healer
• Creativity is an evolutionarily exaggerated
  expression of ordinary learning processes
  involving competitively created connections
  between multiple distributed systems involving
  perceptions, actions, and memory
• It involves creating connections not otherwise
  possible
• Stress affects all of these processes.

16
Creativity and Coping

• Stress-related behavior is difficult to interpret
  because of its paradoxical or biphasic expression
• Is energized by mild to moderate stress
• But may be impaired by high levels of stress
• Thus, effective coping behavior may be
  facilitated at low/moderate levels or at the
  transitions to and from high levels

17
the artists healing harmony

• The artists goal is often viewed as the
  restoration of harmony.
• Few still agree with Popes All discord, harmony
  not understood . . . Whatever is, is right.
  (Essay on Man Epistle 1.)
• HARMONY is now --as in medieval thinking-- the
  eagerly sought "accord between the structure of
  the universe, the canons of the social order and
  the good of the individual (Joseph Campbell,
  1972), representing needs ranging from
  physiological homeostasis to spiritual
  self-actualization.

18
the power of harmony

• Dostoyevskis TLE gives us an eloquently
  expressed window on the rapturous power of
  harmony
• There are moments, and it is only a matter of .
  . . seconds,
• when you feel the presence of the eternal
  harmony. . .
• a terrible thing is the frightful clearness with
  which it manifests itself and the rapture with
  which it fills you.
• If this state were to last more than five
  seconds, the soul could not endure it and would
  have to disappear.
• During these five seconds I live a whole human
  existence, and for that I would give my whole
  life and not think that I was paying too dearly
  . . .
• --Alajouanine, T. (1963) Dostoevsky's epilepsy.
  Brain 86209-221

19
the artists healing harmony

• Dostoyevskis rapturous harmony recalls the
  ecstasy of the timeless primary phenomenon of
  Eliade -- A fragment or aspect of the AHA! --
  the oceanic feeling of Freud, a transient loss
  of ego boundaries and fusion with ones
  environment, becoming one with the truth you
  seek, epiphany, eureka!
• Its energy derives from the resolution of stress
  for example, of the dissonance between the
  unsolved problem and the conviction that there is
  a solution.
• Neil Greenberg, Art and Organism

20
Harmony and Insight

• Dostoyevskis rapturous harmony recalls Oliver
  Wendell Holmes comment
• A moments insight
• is sometimes worth a lifes experience.

21
Insight

• INSIGHT bridges gaps, organizes, pulls together
  previously disconnected fragments into a coherent
  whole
• (Or a feeling of a coherent whole)
• It is a perception of another order of
  understanding

22
the compensating insight

• Our most creative artists are near the end of
  bell-shaped curve --flat in some cultures, steep
  in others--
• Much further and their works would be
  unrecognizable, beyond our ability to generalize
  and utilize their healing insights
• Or to take inspiration from their efforts

23
resolving stress, seeking harmony

• Creativity is a principal source of stress
  resolution and its wellspring is the microcosmic
  cerebral transcendence that is the essential
  phenomenon of extending connections -- growth
  (not least expressed in learning)
• The energizing power of stress derives from the
  unique neuroendocrinological profile of mild,
  moderate, or extreme states of stress.

24
Prousts Artist

• All the greatest things we know have come to us
  from neurotics. . .
• It is they and they only who have founded
  religions and created great works of art.
• Never will the world be conscious of how much it
  owes to them, nor above all of what they have
  suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.
  
  (Proust)

25
Creativity Creates Connections

• Creating connections is part of the restoration
  of balance in neurobehavioral systems contending
  with stress
• For example, Painting is only a bridge linking
  the painter's mind with that of the viewer
  (Delacroixs journal)
• But like all communications-- external expression
  --the corporealization of the psyche-- may also
  help forge bridges between different parts of
  the creative mind.

26
Connections between Subcomponentsare central to
our humanity

• Only connect! . . . Only connect the prose and
  the passion, and both will be exalted, and human
  love will be seen at its height. Live in
  fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast
  and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is
  life to either, will die.
• (E.M. Forster)

27
The Triune Brain

• Paul D. MacLeans (1968) triune view of the
  mammalian brain is a powerful heuristic that
  emphasizes the modular substrate of behavior

28
The Triune Brain

• But while each module is more connected with its
  components than with those of adjacent modules,
  its is the continuing development of each module
  and the relentless bias towards developing
  connections when stressed that reflects the path
  of evolutionary change

29
Integrated but distributed systems for
motivation, affect, and cognition mediate
behavior from reflex to reflection

• Archaic reflexes and homeostatic functions are
  embedded in recent systems that enable
  representations of the self as well as of the
  outside world.
• Connections with the cortex enable planning
  .
  . (Figure
  after D.A. Oakley 1985)
  

30
Integrated but distributed systems for
motivation, affect, and cognition mediate
behavior from reflex to reflection

• Homeostatic functions and archaic reflexes of
  motivation are energized by the systems of affect
  and are embedded in more recent systems that
  enable cognition and representations of the self
  as well as of the outside world.

31
Integrated but distributed systems for
motivation, affect, and cognition mediate
behavior from reflex to reflection

• Homeostatic functions and archaic reflexes of
  motivation are energized by the systems of affect
  and are embedded in more recent systems that
  enable cognition and representations of the self
  as well as of the outside world.
• 
  

32
Tolerance of Dysfunction

• Gradients of functionality are always recognized
  what differs is the tolerance of the extremes
• Many dysfunctional traits exist on a continuum
  with highly adaptive traits
• Expressions of more-or-less disproportion are
  appreciated to the extent that they reflect
  prevailing individual or social needs
  pathologically thin models, absent-minded
  scientists, Olympic athletes
• Dysfunction in one domain may be highly
  functional in another
• Some genes that are keys to highly adaptive
  traits can have dysfunctional collateral
  effects
• All evolution cares about is productivity
  (fitness) of the genome

33
Rationalization of Dysfunction

• Society recognizes and more-or-less appreciates
  expressions of adaptive disproportion that
  reflects prevailing needs
• pathologically thin models,
• absent-minded scientists
• Olympic athletes

34
Tolerance of Dysfunction

• IS this because ARTISTS are the ANTENNAE of the
  RACE?
• (Ezra Pound 1954)

35
Desperately SEEKING Dysfunction

• . . . addiction has also come to signify a
  perverse state of grace a hustling renunciation
  of worldly ambition, a willful abandonment of the
  will, a self-absorbed abnegation of the self. As
  long as artists and writers, musicians and
  filmmakers identify themselves with post-Romantic
  rebellion . . .

36
Phaedrus

• madness is one of Heaven's blessings (Socrates in
  Phaedrus)
• All the greatest things we know have come to us
  from neurotics. It is they and they only who have
  founded religions and created great works of art.
  (Marcel Proust)

37
out of control, in control
38
Where does creativity come from ?

• Sometimes the creative insight strikes like
  lightening, but it is
• orchestrated by cognition
• guided by motivation
• energized by emotion
• (These engage the same neural and endocrine
  subsystems as the stress response)

39
INSPIRATION

• Joan . . . you must not talk to me about my
  voices.
• Robert How do you mean? Voices?
• Joan I hear voices telling me what to do. They
  come from God.
• Robert They come from your imagination.
• Joan Of course. That is how the messages of
  God come to us.

40
PERSPIRATION THEORY

• Thomas Alva Edison
• Genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine
  per cent perspiration.

41
CREATIVITY as an AFFECTIVE DISORDER

• Genius, madness, and the wounded healer
• Is there any excellence hath not an origin in
  disproportion or deformity? Francis Bacon

42
CREATIVITY as an AFFECTIVE DISORDER

• great art is at the end of a continuum --
  recognizable by certain connections we have in
  common with the artist
• specific disorders TLE, depression,
  schizophrenia
• States of Consciousness (like sleep, awake,
  dreaming)
• Buddha is a title, not a name it means to be
  awake

43
INTEGRATING . . .

• Phantasy plays a most decisive function in the
  total mental structure it links the deepest
  layers of the unconscious with the highest
  products of consciousness, the dream with
  reality it preserves the archetypes of the
  genus, the perpetual but repressed ideas of the
  collective and individual memory, the tabooed
  images of freedom
  (Marcuse)

• It is through Art, and through Art only, that we
  can realise our perfection
• through Art, and through Art only, that we can
  shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual
  existence
• (Oscar Wilde)

Maybe LIFE like poetry requires the willing
suspension of disbelief. (Samuel Taylor
Coleridge)
44
What is more REAL than REALITY ?

• IMAGINATION alone, tells me what can be
• (Kennedy quoted Shaw you see things and say,
  why? I see them and say, why not?)
• SUR-REALITY

45
The Wounded Healer

• Wounded Healers get in control of their
  challenges to creatively serve others
• the shaman (Joan Halifax)
• the therapist (countertransference, Jung)
• the artist
• the archetype (Chiron, the Centaur)

46
Neurotics . . .

• All the greatest things we know have come to us
  from neurotics. It is they and they only who have
  founded religions and created great works of art.
  Never will the world be conscious of how much it
  owes to them, nor above all of what they have
  suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.
  (Marcel Proust 1921)

47
Is ART the CURE?

• Artists dont get down to work until the pain
  of working is exceeded by the pain of not
  working
• (Stephen DeStaebler 1993)
• At the deepest level, the creative process and
  the healing process arise from a single source.
  When you are an artist, you are a healer.
• (Rachel Naomi Remen)

48
Appreciation of DysfunctionHeres to the Crazy
Ones

• Here is to the crazy ones, the misfits,
• the rebels, the troublemakers,
• the round pegs in the square holes.
• The ones who see things differently.
• They are not fond of rules
• and they have no respect for the status-quo.
• You can quote them, disagree with them,
• glorify or vilify them.
• But the only thing you can't do is ignore them.
• Because they change things.
• They push the human race forward.
• And while some may see them
• as the crazy ones, we see genius.
• Because the people who are crazy enough
• to think they can change the world,
• are the ones who do.

http//www.thecompleat.com/crazyones/video/index.h
tm