Creative Block, Creative Illness, and Creative Surrender

Back in the early days of psychology, Freud described a specific “oceanic” ego condition that he regarded as the root of all religious experience (Freud, 1930/1961). Inherent in this oceanic state is a fusion between the inner and outer world. This state can be found in any creative activity and is, in fact, fundamentally necessary for successful symbol formation. The central feature of the oceanic state is a lack of differentiation, a dissolution of hardened cliches. In this state, preconceived categories and distinctions dissolve; notions of love, birth, and death, for example, coalesce into a single theme. The ambiguous phantasies, the low-level imagery of this state, have a disruptive effect on the ego, which is felt psychically as a form of self-destruction (death) that elicits great anxiety. Ehrenzweig (1967) likened the drama and pain of the artist’s search for creative stimulation to that of psychoanalytic exploration. He proposed that “creative sterility may be the result of ego rigidity” that interferes with the free flow of mental imagery by impeding the descent into the oceanic state.

The narrow focus of normal surface consciousness cannot encapsulate such undifferentiated phantasy, and thus the phantasies of the oceanic state resist verbalization. The elaboration of undifferentiated phantasies, such as those found in low-level memories, dreams, and creative visions, is therefore restricted to expressions that are only approximately correct in order to make them comprehensible to the surface mind. When, for example, we attempt to remember a dream upon waking, the surface mind immediately takes to organizing the dream contents into a precise mould: gaps are filled, the fluid and indefinite dream images are concretized, and incoherent details are eliminated, thus repressing the traces of unconscious dream phantasy. This secondary process is inevitable and autonomous. Within this process of giving definition to undifferentiated imagery, however, the transcendent, creative, symbolic power of the unconscious imagery is lost. The essence of creativity, therefore, lies in the flexibility of ego functioning. Ehrenzweig (1967) argues that accessing the oceanic state wherein creativity and symbols reside requires facing the disruptive effect that the state elicits within the ego. If resisted, the creative state takes on a “chaotic savagery” that overwhelms the ordinary state of consciousness. This marks the advent of the Creative Illness.

The symptoms of Creative Illness, likely familiar to artists and creatives with first hand experience of the almost manic state that the inner necessity to create elicits, often resemble those of a psychosomatic illness: depression, irritability, insomnia, and other symptoms of a similar nature; however, Ellenberger (1970) notes distinguishing characteristics unique to Creative Illness and outlines its progression through various phases.

1. The beginning phase: The German word “studieren” which means “to make oneself sick through study or worry” adequately captures the character of this state. This phase generally appears after a period of intense intellectual effort which precipitates the appearance of a nervous disorder.

2. During the illness: This phase is characterized by an obsessive preoccupation with the search for a thing or idea, “the importance of which [one] sets above everything and never loses sight of completely.”

3. The termination phase: The possession of a new idea is experienced as a sudden revelation that elicits feelings of euphoria and exultation. The termination of the Creative Illness is experienced “not only as a liberation from a long period of suffering, but as an illumination.”

4. The cured illness: Within the final phase, the individual experiences a transformation of personality that bears the impression of entering a new life. The intellectual or spiritual discovery resulting from the illness is experienced as a fundamental truth that is regarded with intense conviction.

The aridity of the first two phases, perhaps captured best by the notion of the “creative block,” can be compared to the earth’s rest that follows autumn. This intermediary period is due to an inner process of disintegration that dissolves the separations between the surface mind and deep self. Just as nature’s winter hibernation period sets the stage for new growth and rebirth come spring, the state of aridity in the creative block nearly always leads to creative fertility, resulting from the dyadic relationship between aridity and inspiration as “two aspects of the same phenomenon” (Ellenberger, 1970).

This development is painful and thus constitutes the Creative Illness, however, “it is through this development that the artist succeeds in bringing to the surface of [one’s] mind a world of images and thoughts buried in the depths of the unconscious” (Ellenberger, 1970). Entering the first stage in the creative use of symbols necessitates a “temporary giving up of the discriminating (differentiating ego) which stands apart and tries to see things objectively and rationally without emotional coloring” (Ehrenzweig, 1967). When the surface ego is abandoned, the oceanic state of undifferentiation opens to imagery that loses its definition and boundaries, merging with other images in “new symbolic equations” (Ehrenzweig, 1967). When the ego rhythm rebounds in response, however, the imagery is re-crystallized and compacted into existing cliches and categories, resulting in a perception that becomes flat and unreal; as the images are deprived of their disruptive effect on the ego, they become simultaneously deprived of their creative power.

If resolving this ego rigidity, which saps the images of the unconscious of their symbolic and creative power, necessitates the loosening of the rigid functioning of the ego, “the radical ejection of the surface ego is emotionally felt as death itself” (Ehrenzweig, 1967). Hanna Segel, however, maintained that the emotional acceptance of death is a precondition of creativity; “death, once accepted, becomes a feast of cosmic bliss, of liberation from bondage,” and it is the symbolic low-level imagery that emerges in its wake that infuses reality with life and richness (Ehrenzweig, 1967). The characteristic feature of the artist is therefore the capacity act in Creative Surrender–to be at home on many levels of the mind and make consciousness regress to the oceanic level at will, thereby accessing the unconscious level which lies teeming with “undifferentiated imagery that will give birth to a new flow of invention” (Ehrenzweig, 1967).

References

Ehrenzweig, A. (1967). The hidden order of art: A study in the psychology of artistic imagination. University of California Press.

Ellenberger, H. F. (1970). The discovery of the unconscious: The history and evolution of dynamic psychiatry. Basic Books.

Freud, S. (1961). Civilization and its discontents (J. Strachey, Trans.). W. W. Norton & Company. (Original work published 1930)