Creativity: The Magic Synthesis

Ever since the invention of psychoanalysis its theorists have been expending their ink in explaining “creativity” to the rest of us. Strangely, they have illuminated little. Freud, as Silvano Arieti thoughtfully points out, cared more about identifying the motives for creativity than about examining the process itself. Jung, while focusing on the echoes between the individual and the collective imagination, did not often apply himself to the newness of creative work. Arieti takes up, and kindly puts down, the work of many other students of the psyche. He bows toward Nietzsche and Bergson, but unaccountably omits all reference to the theories of Coleridge, Valéry, Proust, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Hector Berlioz, to name only a few. He never touches on Keats or his notion of “negative capability.” In discussing poetry itself he insistently misreads Blake and clouds over other poetry in English but seems more at home with Ronsard, Petrarch, Dante.

Dr. Arieti is a psychoanalyst who has been a civilizing and humane influence on American psychiatry. His 1974 book, Interpretations of Schizophrenia, won a National Book Award, and he edited the six-volume American Handbook of Psychiatry. Yet in this crushingly argued volume of 448 pages, the only twentieth-century artists who receive more than momentary attention are Robert Frost. Wassily Kandinsky, Salvatore Quasimodo, and Peter Shaffer. Surely contemporary creation deserves a little more attention than that.

Arieti’s theory seems not only anachronistic but verbose. He invents such terms as “endocept“ and “paleologic thought-process“ to deal with what some others might call “inspiration,” or still others, “right-hemisphere brainfunction.“ He seems sadly literal in confronting works of art themselves, and only certain avenues of psychic inquiry are tolerable to him. In the end, despite straining hard to explain what perhaps need not be explained. Arieti can do no better than the rest of us: he ends by characterizing creativity as “a magic synthesis.“ One cannot quarrel with his conclusion, but was it really necessary to walk so far and carry so heavy a burden in order to pass “GO"?