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Chapter Two

LIFE AND CREATION

What would live in song immortally Must in life first perish... .

SCHILLER

Before we trace the rise and significance of this “artist’s art,” if one may so call it, as it grows out of the primitive artideologies, it is perhaps desirable to characterize more clearly its essential precondition: namely, the creative personality itself. In spite of all “ unconsciousness” in artistic production (a point to which we shall return later), there can be no doubt that the modern individualist type of artist is characterized by a higher degree of consciousness than his earlier prototype: the consciousness not only of his creative work and his artist’s mission, but also of his own personality and its productiveness. If, as it should seem, the instinctive will-to-art (Riegl), which creates abstract forms, has in this last stage of artistic development become a conscious will-to-art in the artist, yet the actual process which leads a man to become an artist is usually one of which the individual is not conscious. In other words, the act which we have described as the artist’s self-appointment as such is in itself a spontaneous expression of the creative impulse, of which the first manifestation is simply the forming of the personality itself. Needless to say, this purely internal process does not suffice to make an artist, let alone a genius, for, as Lange-Eichbaum has said, only the community, one’s contemporaries, or posterity can do that. Yet the self-labelling and self-training of an artist is the indispensable basis of all creative work, and without it general recognition could never arise. The artist’s lifelong work on his own productive personality appears to run through definite phases, and his art develops in proportion to the success of these phases, In the case of great artists the process is reflected in the fact that they had either a principal or a favourite work, at which they laboured all their lives (Goethe’s Faust, Rodin’s Porte d’enfer, Michelangelo’s Tomb of Julius, and so on), or a favourite theme, which they never relinquished and which came to be a distinct representation of themselves (as, for example, Rembrandt’s self-portraits). On the other hand, this process of the artist’s self-forming

and self-training is closely bound up with his life and his experiences. In studying this fundamental problem of the relation between living and creating in an artist, we are therefore again aware of the reciprocal influence of these two spheres. All the psychography and pathography (with its primary concern to explain the one through the other) must remain unsatisfactory as long as the creative impulse, which finds expression equally in experience and in productiveness, is not recognized as the basis of both. For, as I already showed in my essay on Schiller (written in 1905), creativeness lies equally at the root of artistic production and of life experience." That is to say, lived experience can only be understood as the expression of volitional creative impulse, and in this the two spheres of artistic production and actual experience meet and overlap. Then, too, the creative impulse itself is manifested first and chiefly in the personality, which, being thus perpetually made over, produces art-work and experience in the same way. To draw the distinction quite drastically between this new standpoint and earlier ones, one might put it that the artist does not create from his own experience (as Goethe, for instance, so definitely appears to do), but almost in spite of it. For the creative impulse in the artist, springing from the tendency to immortalize himself, is so powerful that he is always seeking to protect himself against the transient experience, which eats up his ego. The artist takes refuge, with all his own experience only from the life of actuality, which for him spells mortality and decay, whereas the experience to which he has given shape imposes itself on him as a creation, which he in fact seeks to turn into a work.

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1 Das Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage (chapters II and XVI). I found the same conception later in Simmel’s Goethe (Berlin, 1913).

And although the whole artist-psychology may seem to be centred on the “experience,” this itself can be explained only through the creative impulse — which attempts to turn ephemeral life into personal immortality. In creation the artist tries to immortalize his mortal life. He desires to transform death into life, as it were, though actually he transforms life into death. For not only does the created work not go on living; it is, in a sense, dead; both as regards the material, which renders it almost inorganic, and also spiritually and psychologically, in that it no longer has any significance for its creator, once he has produced it. He therefore again takes refuge in life, and again forms experiences, which for their part represent only mortality — and it is precisely because they are mortal that he wishes to immortalize them in his work. The first step towards understanding this mutual relation between life and work in the artist is to gain a clear idea of the psychological significance of the two phenomena. This is only possible, however, on the basis of a constructive psychology of personality, reaching beyond the psycho-analytical conception, which is a therapeutic ideology resting on the biological seximpulse. We have come to see that another factor must be reckoned with besides the original biological duality of impulse and inhibition in man; this is the psychological factor par excellence, the individual will, which manifests itself both negatively as a controlling element, and positively as the urge to create. This creator-impulse is not, therefore, sexuality, as Freud assumed, but expresses the antisexual tendency in human beings, which we may describe as the deliberate control of the impulsive life. To put it more precisely, I see the creator-impulse as the life impulse made to serve the individual will. When psycho-analysis speaks of a sublimated sexual impulse in creative art, meaning thereby the impulse diverted from its purely biological function and directed towards higher ends, the question as to what diverted and what directed is just being dismissed with an allusion to repression. But repression isa negative factor, which might divert, but never direct. And sO the further question remains to be answered: what, originally led to such repression? As we know, the answer to this question was outward deprivation; but that again suggests a merely negative check, and I, for my part, am of opinion that (at any rate from a certain definite point of individual development) positively willed control takes the place of negative inhibition, and that it is the masterful use of the sexual impulse in the service of this individual will which produces the sublimation. But even more important for us than these psychological distinctions is the basic problem of why this inhibition occurs at all, and what the deliberate control of the vital impulse means to the individual. Here, again, in opposition to the Freudian conception of an external threat as the cause of the inhibition, I suggest that the internal threatening of the individual through the sexual impulse of the species is at the root of all conflict. Side by side with this self-imposed internal check, which is taken to be what prevents or lessens the development of fear, there stands the will as a positive factor. The various controls which it exercises enable the impulses to work themselves out partially without the individual’s falling completely under their influence or having to check them completely by too drastic repression. Thus in the fully developed individual we have to reckon with the triad Impulse-Fear-Will, and it is the dynamic relationship between these factors that determines either the attitude at a given moment or — when equilibrium is established — the type. Unsatisfactory as it may be to express these dynamic processes in terms like “type,” it remains the only method of carrying an intelligible idea of them — always assuming that the inevitable simplification in this is not lost sight of. If we compare the neurotic with the productive type, it is evident that the former suffers from an excessive check on his impulsive life, and, according to whether this neurotic checking of the instincts is effected through fear or through will, the picture presented is one of fear-neurosis or compulsionneurosis. With the productive type the will dominates, and exercises a far-reaching control over (but not check upon) the instincts, which are pressed into service to bring about creatively a social relief of fear. Finally, the instincts appear relatively unchecked in the so-called psychopathic subject, in whom the will affirms the impulse instead of controlling it. In this type —to which the criminal belongs — we have, contrary to appearances, to do with weak-willed people, people who are subjected to their instinctive impulses; the neurotic, on the other hand, is generally regarded as the weak-willed type, but wrongly so, for his strong will is exercised upon himself and, indeed, in the main repressively so it does not show itself. And here we reach the essential point of difference between the productive type who creates and the thwarted neurotic; what is more, it is also the point from which we get back to our individual artist-type. Both are distinguished fundamentally from the average type, who accepts himself as he is, by their tendency to exercise their volition in reshaping themselves. There is, however, this difference: that the neurotic, in this voluntary remaking of his ego, does not get beyond the destructive preliminary work and is therefore unable to detach the whole creative process from his own person and transfer it to an ideological abstraction. The productive artist also begins (as a satisfactory psychological understanding of the “ willto-style”” has obliged us to conclude) with that re-creation of himself which results in an ideologically constructed ego; this ego is then in a position to shift the creative will-power from his own person to ideological representations of that person and thus to render it objective. It must be admitted that this process is in a measure limited to within the individual himself, and that not only in its constructive, but also in its destructive, aspects. This explains why hardly any productive work * gets through without morbid crises of a “neurotic” nature; it also explains why the relation between productivity and illness has so far been unrecognized or misinterpreted, as, for instance, in Lombroso’s theory of the insanity of genius. Today this theory appears to us as the precipitate left by the old endeavours to explain genius on rational-psychological lines, which treated such features as depart from the normal as “ pathological.” However much in the Italian psychiatrist’s theory is an exaggeration of the materialism of nineteenth-century science, yet undeniably it had a startling success, and this I attribute to the fact that genius itself, in its endeavour to differentiate itself from the average, has probably dramatized its pathological features also. But the psychologist should beware of deducing from this apparent factor any conclusions as to the production or total personality, without taking into account the feeling of guilt arising from the creative process itself; for this is capable of engendering a feeling of inferiority as a secondary result, even though the primary result may be a conviction of superiority. As I have said elsewhere, the fundamental problem is individual difference, which the ego is inclined to interpret as inferiority unless it can be proved by achievement to be superiority.

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1 This applies, not only to most artists, but also, as Wilhelm Ostwald for one has convincingly proved, to the scientific creative type (Grosse Manner; Leipzig, 1909).

Even psycho-analysis in its turn did not succeed in surmounting Lombroso’s materialist theory of insanity or supplementing his rational explanation by a spiritual one. All it did was to substitute neurosis for insanity: (which was at bottom Lombroso’s own meaning), thus tending either to identify the artist with the neurotic — this is particularly the case in Sadger’s and Stekel’s arguments — or to explain the artist on the basis of an inferiority feeling. (Alfred Adler and his school took the latter view.) * It is characteristic that during the last few years the psychiatrists (such as Lange-Eichbaum, Kretschmer, Plaut) who have contributed most towards clearing up the position of genius are precisely those who have managed to keep clear of the one-sidedness of these psycho-analytical schools.

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1A characteristic instance of how, in avoiding the Scylla of Lombroso, one may fall a victim to the Charybdis of analytical psychology is afforded by Victor Jonesco's book: La Personnalité du génie artiste (Paris, 1930), which I read only after the completion of my own work. A praiseworthy exception is Bernard Grasset’s original essay: Psychologie de l'immortalité (Paris, 1929)

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And if these researches have not made any important contribution to the understanding of the process of creating, psycho-analysis, even in its exaggerations, must at least be credited with having discovered that experience, in so far as it is the anthithesis of production, embraces not only the relations of love and friendship, but also those morbid reactions of a psychic and bodily nature which are known as “ neurotic.” A real understanding of these neurotic illnesses could not, however, be satisfactorily obtained as long as we tried to account for them in the Freudian sense by thwarted sexuality. What was wanted in addition was a grasp of the general problem of fear and of the will-psychology going therewith which should allow for the exercise of the will, both constructively and destructively, affecting the ego and the work equally. Only through the will-to-selfimmortalization, which rises from the fear of life, can we understand the interdependence of production and suffering and the definite influence of this on positive experience. This does not preclude production being a creative development of a neurosis in objective form; and, on the other hand, a neurotic collapse may follow as a reaction after production, owing either to a sort of exhaustion or to a sense of guilt arising from the power of creative masterfulness as something arrogant.’ Reverting now from the production-process to experience, it does not take long to perceive that experience is the expression of the impulse-ego, production of the will-ego. The external difficulties in an artist’s experience appear, in this sense, but as manifestations of this internal dualism of impulse and will, and in the creative type it is the latter which eventually gains the upper hand. Instinct presses in the direction of experience and, in the limit, to consequent exhaustion — in fact, death — while will drives to creation and thus to immortalization.

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1 How this feeling of guilt can hinder or, on the other hand, further productivity I have shown in my book: Wahrheit und Wirklichkeit (1929) in the section on the sense of guilt in creation.

On the other hand, the productive type also pays toll to life by his work and to death by bodily and spiritual sufferings of a “neurotic” order; and conversely in many cases the product of a type that is at bottom neurotic may be his sole propitiatory offering to Life. It is with reason, therefore, that from the beginning two basic types of artist have been distinguished; these have been called at one time Dionysian and Apollonian, and at another Classical and Romantic." In terms of our present dynamic treatment, the one approximates to the psychopathic-impulsive type, the other to the compulsionneurotic volitional type. The one creates more from fullness of powers and sublimation, the other more from exhaustion and compensation. The work of the one is entire in every single expression, that of the other is partial even in its totality, for the one lives itself out, positively, in the work, while the other pays with the work — pays, not to society (for both do that), but to life itself, from which the one strives to win freedom by self-willed creation whereas for the other the thing created is the expression of life itself. This duality within one and the same type is of outstanding significance in the psychology of the productive type and in the work it produces. For, while in the two classes of neurotics (frustrated by fear and by the will respectively) the form of the neurosis is of minor matter compared with the fact of breaking down the inhibition itself, by the curative process of dynamic equilibration, in the productive type the dynamism itself determines not only the kind but the form of his art. But this highly complicated problem is only mentioned here with 4 view to discussion later, and we will turn from the two artisttypes, which Miller-Freienfels, in his Psychologie der Kunst (Vol. II, pp. 100 et seq.) characterizes as “ expressive artists ” and “formative artists,” back to the problem of experience which is common to both.

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1 E. von Sydow distinguishes these polar opposites, from the standpoint of zsthetic, as ‘‘eros-dominated"’ and “‘eros-dominating"’ (op. cit., p. 164).

This problem, as was pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, only becomes intelligible through the conception of immortality. There appears to be a common impulse in all creative types to replace collective immortality —as it is represented biologically in sexual propagation —by the individual immortality of deliberate self-perpetuation. This is, however, a relatively late stage of development in the conception of immortality, after it has already become individualized — a stage preceded by attempts to create conceptions of collective immortality, of which the most important is religion. I have tried in another connexion * to show how, within religious development itself, the idea of the collective soul was gradually transformed into the idea of the individual god, whose heir the artist later became. In the foregoing pages likewise I have indicated that the initial conception of an individual god, subsequently to be humanized in the genius, had itself been helped on, and perhaps even only rendered possible, by art. But there was an early stage of artistic development, which was at the same time the climax of religious development, in which the individual artist played no part because creative power was still the prerogative of the god.

The individual artist, whose growth from the creative conception of a god has been sketched out, no longer uses the collective ideology of religion to perpetuate himself, but the personal religion of genius, which is the precondition of any productions by the individual artist-type. And so we have primitive art, the expression of a collective ideology, perpetuated by abstraction which has found its religious expression in the idea of the soul; Classical art, based on a social art-concept, perpetuated by zdealization, which has found its purest expression in the conception of beauty; and, lastly, modern art, based on the concept of individual genius and perpetuated by concretization, which has found its clearest expression in the personality-cult of the artistic individuality itself.

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1 Seelenglaube und Psychologie (1930).

Here, then, in contrast to the primitive stage, it is the artist and not art that matters, and naturally therefore the experience of the individual takes on the significance characteristic of the romantic artist-type.’ Here, obviously, not only do we see the tendency — in our view the basic tendency — of the artist-type to put oneself and one’s life into one’s creative work; but we see also how, in the eyes of this type, the problem of the relation between experience and creation* has become an artistic (zsthetic) one; whereas it is really only a psychological one, which discloses, indeed, important points of contact with art (considered as an ideological conception), but differs from it in essence. For the romantic dualism of life and production, which manifests itself as a mixture of both spheres, has, as a typical conflict within the modern individual, nothing to do with art, although obliged like art to express itself creatively. This romantic dualism of life and creation, which corresponds to our psychological dualism of impulse and will, is, in the last resort, the conflict between collective and individual immortality, in which we have all suffered so acutely since the decay of religion and the decline of art. The romantic type, flung hither and thither between the urge to perpetuate his own life by creating and the compulsion to turn himself and life into a work of art, thus appears as the last representative of an artideology which, like the religious collective-ideology, is in process of dying out. This does not prevent this final attempt to rescue the semi-collective “religion of genius” by taking it into modern individualism from bringing forth outstanding and permanently valuable works of art; perhaps, indeed (as Nietzsche himself, the ultra-Romantic, recognized), it requires that it should. On the other hand, it is just the appearance of this decadent type of artist which marks the beginning of a new development of personality, since the tendency to selfperpetuation is in the end transferred to the ego from which it originally sprang. (See later the chapter: “The Artist’s Struggle.”)

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1 What interests us today in Byron, for instance, is his romantic life, and not his out-of-date poetry.

2 See W. Dilthey’s book Erlebnis und Dichtung. The artist-personalities examined there in relation to this problem are, as is natural, chiefly romantic types (Lessing, Goethe, Novalis, Hdlderlin).

On this issue the romantic becomes identical, as a psychological type, with the neurotic — this is not a valuation, but merely a statement of fact — and for that matter the comparison may even be reversed, since the neurotic likewise has creative, or, at least, self-creative, forces at command. We can thus understand the experience-problem of the individualist type of artist also only by studying the nature of neurosis, just as the therapy of the neurotic requires an understanding of the creative type." Now, the neurotic represents the individual who aims at selfpreservation by restricting his experience, thus showing his adherence to the naive faith in immortality of the primitive, though without the collective soul-ideology which supports that faith. The productivity of the individual, or of the thing created, replaces — for the artist as for the community — the originally religious ideology by a social value; that is, the work of art not only immortalizes the artist ideologically instead of personally, but also secures to the community a future life in the collective elements of the work. Even at this last stage of individual art-creativity there function ideologies (whether given or chosen) of an esthetic, a social, or a psychological nature as collective justifications of the artist’s art, in which the personal factor makes itself more and more felt and appreciated. If the impulse to create productively is explicable only by the conception of immortality, the question of the experienceproblem of the neurotic has its source in failure of the impulse to perpetuate, which results in fear, but is also probably conditioned by it. There is (as I have shown) a double sort of fear: on the one hand the fear of life which aims at avoidance or postponement of death, and on the other the fear of death which underlies the desire for immortality.

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1This is a point of view which I endeavoured to present in my last technical work: Die Analyse des Analytikers und seine Rolle in der Gesamtsituation (1931).

According to the compromise which men make between these two poles of fear, and the predominance of one or the other form, there will be various dynamic solutions of this conflict, which hardly permit of description by type-labelling. For, in practice, both in the neurotic and in the productive type —the freely producing and the thwarted —all the forces are brought into play, though with varying accentuation and periodical balancing of values. In general, a strong preponderance of the fear of life will lead rather to neurotic repression, and the fear of death to production — that is, perpetuation in the work produced. But the fear of life, from which we all suffer, conditions the problem of experience in the productive type as in other people, just as the fear of death whips up the neurotic’s constructive powers. The individual whose life is braked is led thereby to flee from experience, because he fears that he will become completely absorbed in it— which would mean death —and so is bound up with fear. Unlike the productive type, who strives to be deathless through his work, the neurotic does not seek immortality in any clearly defined sense, but in primitive fashion as a naive saving or accumulation of actual life. But even the individualist artist-type must sacrifice both life and experience to make art out of them. Thus we see that what the artist needs for true creative art in addition to his technique and a definite ideology is life in one form or another; and the two artist-types differ essentially in the source from which they take this life that is so essential to production. The Classical type, who is possibly poorer within, but nearer to life, and himself more vital, takes it from without: that is, he creates immortal work from mortal life without necessarily having first transformed it into personal experience as is the case with the Romantic. For, to the Romantic, experience of his own appears to be an essential preliminary to productivity, although he does not use this experience for the enrichment of his own personality, but to economize the personal experiences, the burden of which he would fain escape. Thus the one artisttype constantly makes use of other life than his own — in fact, nature — for the purpose of creating, while the other can create only by perpetually sacrificing his own life. This essential difference of attitude to the fundamental problem of life throws a psychological light on the contrast in styles of various periods in art. Whatever esthetic designation may be applied to this contrast, from the spiritual point of view the work of the Classicist, more or less naturalistic, artist is essentially partial, and the work of the Romantic, produced from within, ¢otal.* This totality-type spends itself perpetually in creative work without absorbing very much of life, while the partial type has continually to absorb life so that he may throw it off again in his work. It is an egoistical artist-type of this order that Ibsen has described in so masterly a fashion. He needs, as it were, for each work that he builds, a sacrifice which is buried alive to efisure a permanent existence to the structure, but also to save the artist from having to give himself. The frequent occasions when a great work of art has been created in the reaction following upon the death of a close relation seem to me to realize those favourable cases for this type of artist in which he can dispense with the killing of the building’s victim because that victim has died a natural death and has subsequently, to all appearances, had a monument piously erected to him.’ The mistake in all modern psychological biography lies in its attempt to “explain” the artist’s work by his experience, whereas creation can only be made understandable through the inner dynamism and its central problems.

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1 These types, evolved from a study of psychological dynamics (see my Die Analyse des Analytikers), are, as I have since discovered, accepted as the essential key-concepts of all polar contrasts of style by P. Frankl in his Entwicklungsphasen der neueren Baukunst. True, Frankl’s work is not merely limited to architecture, but more narrowly still to the contrast in style between Renaissance and Baroque. We shall presently see, however (‘' Schénheit und Wahrheit’), that this contrast between totality and partiality is a general spiritual distinction between the Classical-naturalistic and the primitiveabstract styles.

2 Shakspere’s Hamlet and Mozart's Don Juan are familiar examples of the reaction after a father’s death, while Wagner's Lohengrin followed on the death of the composer’s mother. These works are supreme examples of artists negotiating with the problem of the Beyond. To these instances may be added Ibsen’s epilogue When We Dead Awake; here the death is that of the artist himself.

Then, too, the real artist regards his work as more important than the whole of life and experience, which are but a means to production — almost, indeed, a by-product of it. This refers, however, to the Classical type only, for to the Romantic type his personal ego and his experience are more important than, or as important as, his work; sometimes, indeed, production may be simply a means to life, just as to the other type experience is but a means to production. This is why Romantic art is far more subjective, far more closely bound up with experience, than Classical, which is more objective and linked to life. In no case, however, will the individual become an artist through any one experience, least of all through the experiences of childhood (which seem pretty universal). The becoming of the artist has a particular genesis, one of the manifestations of which may be some special experience. For the artistic impulse to create is a dynamic factor apart from the content of experience, a willproblem which the artist solves in a particular way. That is, he is capable of forming the given art-ideology — whether of the collective kind (style) or the personal (genius-idea) — into the substance of his creative will. He employs, so to say, personal will-power to give form or life to an ideology, which must have not only social qualities like other ideologies, but purely artistic ones, which will be more closely specified from the point of view of zsthetics. The subjective character of modern art, which is based on the ideology of a personal type of artist, imposes also a special outlook in the artist towards his own creative power and his work. The more production is an essential means to life (and not just a particular ideological expression of it), the more will the work itself be required to justify the personality — instead of expressing it— and the more will this subjective artist-type need individuals to justify his production. From this point of view as well as others it is easy to see that experience, in its particular form of love-experience, takes on a peculiar significance for the Romantic artist, whose art is based on the personality-cult of the genius-concept. The primitive artist-type finds his justification in the work itself; the Classical justifies the work by his life, but the Romantic must justify both life and experience by his work and, further, must have a witness of his life to justify his production. The fundamental problem of the Romantic artist is thus the selfjustification of the individual raised above the crowd, while the Classical artist-type expresses himself in his work — which receives a social justification by way of general recognition. But the Romantic needs, further, whether as contrast or as supplement to this social approval, a personal approbation of his own, because his feeling of the guilt of creation can no longer be allayed by a collective ideology any more than he can work effectively in the service of such an ideology. In this sense his artistic work is rather a forcible liberation from inward pressure than the voluntary expression of a fundamentally strong personality that is capable of paralysing the subjective element to a great extent by making collective symbolism his own. The artist who approximates more nearly to the Classical type excels less, therefore, in the creating of new forms than in perfecting them. Further, he will make much more frequent use of old traditional material, full of a powerful collective resonance, as the content of his work, while the Romantic seeks new forms and contents in order to be able to express his personal self more completely. Thus, as the artist-type becomes more and more individualized, he appears on the one hand to need a more individual ideology — the genius-concept — for his art, while on the other his work is more subjective and more personal, until finally he requires for the justification of his production an individual “ public” also: a single person for whom ostensibly he creates. This goes so far in a certain type of artist, which we call the Romantic, that actual production is only possible with the aid of a concrete Muse through whom or for whom the work is produced. The “experience ” which arises in this manner is not, like other sorts of experience, an external phenomenon set over against creative work, but is a part of it and even identical with it, always providing that the Muse — in practice, usually a real woman — is suited to this rdle or at least makes no objection to it, and so long as the artist can maintain such a relation on the ideological plane without confusing it with real life. It is this case, in which the conflict between life and creation reaches extreme intensity, that we so often see actualized in the modern type of artist. Here the woman is expected to be Muse and mistress at once, which means that she must justify equally the artistic ego, with its creativeness, and the real self, with its life; and this she seldom (and in any case only temporarily) succeeds in doing. We see the artist of this type working off on the woman his inward struggle between life and production or, psychologically speaking, between impulse and will. It is a tragic fate that he shares with the neurotic, who suffers from the same inner conflict. Another way out of the struggle is to divide its elements between two persons, of whom one belongs to the ideological creative sphere, and the other to the sphere of actual life. But this solution also presents difficulties of a psychological as well as a social order, because this type of artist has a fundamental craving for totality, in life as in work, and the inner conflict, though it may be temporarily eased by being objectivized in such an outward division of réles, is as a whole only intensified thereby. The same applies to another solution of this ego-conflict which the artist has in common with the neurotic, and one which shows more clearly even than the complicated love-conflict that it is at bottom a question not of sexual but of creative problems. From the study of a certain class of neurotic we have found that in many cases of apparent homosexual conflicts it is less a sexual perversion than an ego-problem that underlies them, a problem with which the individual can only deal by personifying a portion of his own ego in another individual. The same applies, it is true, to heterosexual love-relations, from which the homosexual differs only in that the selfward part of this relation is stronger, or at any rate more distinct. If the poet values his Muse the more highly in proportion as it can be identified with his artistic personality and its ideology, then self-evidently he will find his truest ideal in an even greater degree in his own sex, which is in any case physically and intellectually closer to him. Paradoxical as it may sound, the apparently homosexual tendencies or actual relationships of certain artists fulfil the craving for a Muse which will stimulate and justify creative work in a higher degree than (for a man) a woman can do. It is only as the result of the artist’s urge for completion, and his desire to find everything united in one person, that it is mostly a woman that is taken as, or made into, a Muse, although instances of homosexual relations between artists are by no means rare. Greece, in particular, with its high development of purely intellectual ideologies in art and philosophy, was of course the classical country of boy-love; and there is nothing contradictory in this, particularly if we understand the boy-friendship in the Greek spirit. For it was in the main, or at least collaterally, a high spiritual relation which had as its basis and object a “pedagogic” training for the boy. The master — whether philosopher or sculptor, or, in other words, artist in living or in shaping — was not content to teach his pupil or protégé his doctrines or his knowledge: he had the true artistic impulse to transform him into his own image, to create. And this, by the way, was the form of personal immortality characteristic of Greek culture at its height, which not only found expression in works of art or spiritual teaching, but sought fulfilment in a personal, concrete successor. This successor was no longer (or not yet, if we think of Rome) the physical son, but the like-minded pupil. This is why the spiritual relation of pupiland-master — which Christianity was to set up again as the centre of its doctrine of life — has remained a more important thing to the creative artist than the juridical father-and-son relation which psycho-analysis seeks to regard as fundamental, whereas it is spiritually of a secondary order.

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1See my account in Modern Education (New York: Alfred A. Knopf; 1932), Pp.24-6,

And in Greece, therefore, the state of being a pupil did not mean the mere acquiring of a certain discipline and the mastery of a certain material knowledge, as in the civilization of fatherright, but the forming of a personality — which begins by identification with the master and is then “artistically” developed and perfected on the pupil’s own lines. In this sense the Greek was creative before he arrived at creating works of art, or, indeed, without ever shaping anything but himself and his pupil. Socrates is the best known of many examples of this. This educative ideology of the artistic Greek nation, which is manifested also in boy-love in all its aspects, brings up the question: did that Greek art, which may seem to us today the main achievement of the Greek civilization, perhaps represent to the Greek a mere by-product thereof, an auxiliary, in fact, to the education of the men, who as the real vessels of the culture were thus enabled inter alia to practise art for its own sake? This brings us to another question: was not every great art, whether of primitive or cultivated peoples, bound up with some such cultured task, which lies beyond the bounds of esthetics, but also beyond all individual artist-psychology? In any case, there are numerous literary proofs of the high degree to which the Greeks were conscious of this national importance of their art. They said that men should learn from works of art and try themselves to become as beautiful and perfect as the statues around them. This gives us an insight into the characteristic way in which the Greeks extended their own creation of individual personalities to include a whole nation, which was not content to produce works of art for their own sake but strove to create an artistic human type who would also be able to produce fine works of art. Seen in this light, boy-love, which, as Plato tells us, aimed perpetually at the improvement and perfection of the beloved youth, appears definitely as the Classical counterpart of the primitive bodyart on a spiritualized plane. In the primitive stage it is a matter of physical self-enhancement; in the civilized stage, a spiritual perfecting in the other person, who becomes transferred into the worthy successor of oneself here on earth; and that, not on the basis of the biological procreation of one’s body, but in the sense of the spiritual immortality-symbolism in the pupil, the younger. Christianity took over this ideal of personal characterformation in the symbol of the Exemplar-Master, but, in proportion as it became a world-wide religion of the masses, it was unable to carry it out at the personal level. The collective immortality-dogma, which became symbolized in Christ, relieved the individual of this task of personal self-creation; Christ instead was no longer a model, but became a victim who took upon himself voluntarily the development of everyone’s personality. Correspondingly, Christian art remained stationary in the abstract collective style of the religious ideology, until in the Renaissance it was freed by the emergence of a new type of personality. It was not mere imitation of Classical Greece, but the expression of a similar ideology of personality that led the artists of the Renaissance to try to re-experience the Greek ideal of boy-love. We see, for instance, two of the really great artists, of entirely different social environment, expressing the identical spiritual ideology, with such farreaching similarity that the notion that the mere accident of a personal experience produced both cases must be dismissed. They both, Michelangelo and Shakspere, found almost identical words in their famous sonnets for the noble love which each of them felt for a beautiful youth who was his friend. Michelangelo’s case is the simpler in that we at least think we know to whom his sonnets were addressed, although it might equally well be the short-lived Ceccino Bracchi or Tommaso de Cavalieri, the object of a lifelong adoration. It is not even clear in some of his later sonnets whether his “idol” refers to his young friend or to Vittoria Colonna, whose platonic friendship came later. The content of Shakspere’s sonnets is a far more complicated matter. His ideal has been sought among the widely differing persons among the aristocracy of his day. His adoring friendship for the youth in question was not, as with Michelangelo, followed by a soothing maternal friendship, but was broken in upon by a young and beautiful woman. Here, as in his dramas also, woman figures as an evil, disturbing demon that the Elizabethan dramatist never succeeded in transforming into a helpful Muse, but always felt to be an obstacle to creative work ; whereas in his young friend he found the ideal which spurred him on and aided him. But whatever the decision reached by zealous scholars concerning the identity of the person addressed in his immortal sonnets, this “ biographical” fact seems to me unimportant as compared with the psychological evidence that this glorification of a friend is, fundamentally, self-glorification just as was the Greek boy-love. In this sense, not only are the sonnets in fact self-dedicated —as is creative work of every description — but they reveal that peculiar attitude of the creative instinct towards the creative ego which seeks to glorify it by artistic idealization and at the same time to overcome its mortality by eternalizing it in art. The fact that an idealized self-glorification in the person of another can take on physical forms, as in the Greek boy-love, has actually nothing to do with the sex of the beloved, but is concerned only with the struggle to develop a personality and the impulse to create which arises from it. This impulse is at bottom directed to the creator’s own rebirth in the closest possible likeness, which is naturally more readily found in his own sex; the other sex is felt to be biologically a disturbing element except where it can be idealized as a Muse. But the likeness to himself will not-only be found in the bodily form of his own sex, but also be built up with regard to the spiritual affinity, and in this regard the youthfulness of the beloved stands for the bodily symbol of immortality. In this manner does the mature man, whose impulse to perpetuate himself drives him away from the biological sex-life, live his own life over again in his youthful love; not only seeking to transform him into his intellectual counterpart, but making him his spiritual ideal, the symbol of his vanishing youth. The sonnets of both the Renaissance artists are full of such laments over the vanishing youth of the beloved, whose glorious picture it is the duty of the poem to preserve to all eternity. Just as we know, from the psychology of the creative genius, that his impulse to create arises from precisely this tendency to immortalize himself in his work, so we can be in no doubt as to whose transitoriness it is that the poet deplores with almost monotonous reiteration. In these sonnets there is so complete a revelation of the meaning and content of the whole output of their authors, and indeed of the nature of the artist’s creative instinct in general, that their high valuation and, no less, their intriguing ambiguity become comprehensible. Yet they are easy to understand if we regard them as the subjective completion of their author’s objective creations, for in their naive self-projection they admit their own transitoriness to be the reason for their own perpetuation in poetry. From this point of view, then, the biographical presentation, even when it can be done with certainty, seems to us inessential. We are by no means cast down when this method fails, for we can understand that beyond a certain point failure is unavoidable, since the creation of a work of art cannot be explained even by the reconstruction of an inspirer. Thus the factual and concrete biography of Michelangelo or Shakspere does not enable us to understand their work the better; rather we are left more amazed than before at their coincidence. Vasari, anyhow, declares that the one and only portrait by Michelangelo which was true to nature was that of his young friend Tommaso Cavalieri, “for he detested copying the actual appearance of anyone who was not completely beautiful.” The same ideal fashion in which he immortalizes the beloved in poetry corresponds exactly with Shakspere’s attitude to Ais ideal. For the English poet also has the conscious intention of immortalizing his friend’s beauty at least in his verse, if time is bound to destroy his bodiliness. This is the constantly reiterated theme in the Shakspere sonnets, and Michelangelo had the same feeling in the presence of the beloved youth: that his beauty should be incorporated into eternity. Not only is it evident from this self-immortalization in the work that the matter is at bottom one of self-immortalization expressed in another (in the ideal), but both these artists have expressed with great clearness, and to the point of monotony, the idea of oneness with the friend. Shakspere says:

“ What can mine own praise to mine own self bring? And what is’t but mine own when I praise thee? ”

(Sonnet XXXIX); and Michelangelo in one of his sonnets not only says that a lover “ transforms himself” into the beloved, but in a letter presses this transformation of the beloved into his own image, so far as to call his friend Tommaso “a genius who is a stranger in this world.” * This psychological solution of the much-disputed sonnetproblem shows how experience, and still more the whole attitude towards life, grows out of the struggle to create and so reduces the problem of experience to the problem of creativity. For the extent to which the artist succeeds in actualizing his love-ideal, in the service of his own self-immortalization, is of minor importance compared with the basic attitude that his work discloses— namely, one originating in dissatisfaction with artistic creation and so urging the creator in some form or other towards life — that is, towards the actual experiencing of his fundamental self. In any case his impulse to form man in his own image or in the image of his ideal inevitably brings him into conflict with real life and its conditions. These conditions are not artistic, but social, conditions, in which one individual has to respect another and is not permitted to remake him. Now, a certain measure of conflict is, of course, necessary to creative work, and this conflict is, in fact, one of the fields in which an artist displays his greatness, or, psychologically speaking, the strength of his creative will-power.

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1 The references are taken from Emil Lucka’s book on Michelangelo (1930).

By means of it he is able to work off a certain measure of his inner conflict in his art without entirely sacrificing the realities of life or coming into factual conflict with them. In any case, the destructive results of this ensemble of realities upon the neurotic, as we are able to observe them in his neurosis, show that what distinguishes him from the artist is that the latter constructively applies his will-power in the service of ideological creation. A certain type of artist, for whom Goethe may stand as the model, will learn to deal with his experiences and conflicts economically and in the end wisely, while another type exhausts his strength in chasing after stimulating experiences so that his conflict does not come out in production. For the artist himself the fact that he creates is more immediately important than what he produces, although we are inclined to make his classification as a particular type depend upon the result, his art-work. Here again we find ourselves at a point where art as the result of production must be sharply differentiated from the artist as a creative individual. There is, in fact, no norm for the artist as a type, although we are constantly tempted to set up more or less precisely formulated norms both for art and for the individual work of art. Production is a vital process which happens within the individual and is independent at the outset from the ideology manifested in the created work. On the other hand, the work can show an equal independence towards the artist who has created it, and can in favourable instances be compared with other works within the categories of art; but it can never be compared with its author or with the artist as a psychological type. Between the two— artist and art —there stands Life, now dividing, now uniting, now checking, now promoting. Here we must return once more to the relation of the artist to woman (or to the opposite sex). In the life of many an artist this is a disturbing factor, one of the deepest sources of conflict, indeed, when it tends to force or beguile him into closer touch with life than is necessary or even advantageous to his production. To make a woman his Muse, or to name her as such, therefore, often amounts to transforming a hindrance into a helper—-a compromise which is usually in the interest of productiveness, but renders no service to life. Here, again, everything naturally depends on the artist’s dynamic type and his specific conflict over life and production. There are artists for whom even a feminine Muse represents nothing but a potential homosexual relation; for they see in her not so much the woman as a comrade of like outlook and like aims, who could equally well—and possibly better —be replaced by a male friendship. On the other hand, there is an artist-type which is totally unable to produce at all without the biological complement of the other sex and indeed depends directly on the sexual life for its stimulus. For the type which is creative in and by means of sexual abstinence has its opposite in another type which, strange to say, is not only not exhausted by the sexual act but is definitely stimulated to create thereby. SchulteVaerting has described this type as the “sexual superman,” but it seems to me rather that here too some hidden mechanism of fleeing from life is involved, which impels the artist from biological mortality to individual immortality in production after he has paid his tribute to sexuality. This leads us to the profoundest source of the artistic impulse to create, which I can only satisfactorily explain to myself as the struggle of the individual against an inherent striving after totality, which forces him equally in the direction of a complete surrender to life and a complete giving of himself in production. He has to save himself from this totality by fleeing, now from the Scylla of life, now from the Charybdis of creation, and his escape is naturally accomplished only at the cost of continual conflict, both between these two spheres and within each of them separately. How this conflict and the triumph over it is manifested in creative working we shall seek to show in the chapter on “The Artist’s Fight with Art.” For the moment we are dealing only with manifestations and attempted solutions within the sphere of life, irrespective of whether these are concerned with persons of the same or of the opposite sex. In every case the artist’s relation to woman has more of an ideological than of a sexual significance, as Emil Lenk has demonstrated in a study on creative personalities (Das Liebesleben des Gentes; Dresden, 1926). Usually, however, he needs two women, or several, for the different parts of his conflict, and accordingly he falls into psychological dilemmas, even if he evades the social difficulties. He undoubtedly loves both these persons in different ways, but is usually not clear as to the part they play, even if — as would appear to be the rule — he does not actually confuse them one with the other. Because the Muse means more to him artistically, he thinks he loves her the more. This is seldom the case in fact, and moreover it is psychologically impossible. For the other woman, whom, from purely human or other motives, he perhaps loves more, he often enough cannot set up as his Muse for this very reason: that she would thereby become in a sense de-feminized and, as it were, made into an object (in the egocentric sense) of friendship. To the Muse for whom he creates (or thinks he creates), the artist seldom gives himself; he pays with his work, and this the truly womanly woman often refuses to accept. But if his relation takes a homosexual form, this giving is still more obviously a giving to himself; that is, the artistic form of giving through production instead of surrendering the personal ego. True, from the standpoint of the ego, the homosexual relation is an idealizing of oneself in the person of another, but at the same time it is felt as a humiliation; and this is not so much the cause as the actual expression of internal conflicts. For, in the dynamism which leads him to create, the artist suffers from a struggle between his higher and his lower self which manifests itself equally in all the spheres and utterances of his life and also characterizes his attitude to woman. She can be for him at once the symbol of the highest and the lowest, of the mortal and the immortal soul, of life or of death. The same applies too, as we shall see, to the work itself or to creation, for which the artist is prepared to sacrifice everything, but which, in the hour of disappointment and dejection, he frequently damns and curses. There is in the artist that fundamental dualism from which we all suffer, intensified in him to a point which drives him with dynamic compulsion from creative work to life, and from life back to new and other creativity. According to the artist’s personal structure and spiritual ideology, this conflict will take the form of a struggle between good and evil, beauty and truth, or, in a more neurotic way, between the higher and the lower self. It is a struggle which, as we shall presently see, determines the cultural-genetic start and development of the creative instinct itself. In the personal conflicts of the individual artist the fundamental dualism which originally led to cultural development and artistic creation persists in all its old strength. It cannot, however, be reconstructed and understood as a matter of individual psychology from an analysis of the artist’s personal past, because the modern individual not only comes into the world with humanity’s fundamental dualism, but is also potentially charged with all the attempts to solve it, so that his personal development no longer provides any parallels with the development of the race. For if we inquire into the relation between work and production in the artist, we must bear in mind that there are two kinds of experience, just as there are at least two ways of artistic production. Whereas in pre-analytical biography it was chiefly the artist’s later and proportionately more active experience that was brought into relation with his creativeness, psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on the decisive importance of infantile impressions, brought this more passive stage of experience into the foreground. This conception got no further, however, than the banal statement that even the artist was not immune from those typical experiences of childhood which one had come up against in analysing the adult. Just as Freud saw the cause of neurosis in these typical childhood experiences themselves and not, in the individual’s particular reaction to them, so did his school claim to see in those same childhood impressions the experiences which led to artistic creativity, though without being able to explain the difference between one outcome of them and another. An inexplicable “ remainder ” had therefore to be admitted, but this remainder embraced no more and no less than the whole problem of artistic creativity. Beyond this statement analytical psychography has to this day not progressed, as the latest comprehensive publication in this province shows.’ And although the CEdipus complex, and the sexual problem of the child that is bound up with it, still forms the centre, this is rather the sign of a fatal stoppage than a proof of the superlative importance of this family problem. The whole of analytical pathography has battened for more than a quarter of a century on the Cédipus problem, which was first applied to artistic creation by Freud (in his Interpretation of Dreams), without, however, reaching even the point at which I came out when I published my book: Das Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage (1912, planned in 1905), to which I gave the sub-title: Grundziige ener Psychologie des dichterischen Schaffens. In this book, as already mentioned, the CEdipus problem is treated mainly as a motive and only in a minor degree as an individual complex; hence its ideological significance was considered as well as its psychological. Although, under the spell of the Freudian idea, I gave pride of place to the individual as against the collective psychology (which I have since learned to appreciate as “ideology,” *) yet with respect to the latter, too, I certainly did not steer clear of psychological premisses in dealing with this collective motive which we find in myth and saga before the poets made a theme of it. But, be this as it may, the book has even now not been superseded; indeed, analytical art-criticism has not yet put itself in face of its problems — to which I must at this point return.

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1 Die psychoanalytische Bewegung, I, No. 4, July-August 1930 (also contains a bibliography of pyscho-analytical biography). In his introduction Dr. E, Hitschmann describes my book on the Incest-Motiv as fundamental for the analytical survey of art and the understanding of artistic creativity.

2 Seelenglaube und Psychologie (1930).

That the poets struggled so intensely with the Gidipus complex was regarded at the time as a proof of its ubiquity, and so it actually was so far as concerned individual psychology. But from the standpoint of the psychology of artistic production, the poets’ wrestling with the CEdipus experience seems to me to mean something essentially different: namely, that the artist reacts more strongly than, and certainly in a different way from, the normal person to this unavoidable average experience of the parental relation. This is not, however, because of the experience, but because of his peculiar reactivity, which in the case of artistic expression we call “ creative.” Now, from the comparison that I drew in my generalized formulation of “the artist” (also in 1905) between artist and neurotic, it results that the latter also reacts differently from the average person to these and similar experiences. Only, this distinctive reaction does not, with him, lead to production, but to inhibition or to fixation. The artistic reaction is thus distinguishable from the neurotic by an overcoming of the trauma or of the potentiality of inhibition resulting therefrom, no matter whether this is achieved by a single effort or is spread over the whole life-work. This overcoming, however (so far as my researches have taken me), is only possible — or at any rate only psychologically explicable — in one way, and this, as we have learned from the therapy which helps to overcome these development-inhibitions, is through volitional affirmation of the obligatory, which in every case not only works usefully, but is also definitely creative. Applied to the special case of the (Edipus conflict, it appears to me today that it is the willed afirmation of the inhibitive family ties that is the creative and at the same time liberating factor. But this affirmation of the given, which in relation to family symbols manifests itself as erotic desire (towards mother and sister) and thirst for battle (with father or brother), corresponds on the one hand to creative appropriation and on the other to a constructive victory over it. And with this we are back again at the fundamental process of artistic production, which consists in just this deliberate appropriation of that which happens and is given (including passive experiences) in the form of individual new creation. The CEdipus complex forms one of the cultural symbols of this conflict because it synthesizes the biological, psychological, and characterological sides of it. But, even so, it only symbolizes —even in the case of a child, for whom the CEdipus complex is already the expression of an inner experience and not merely adaptation to an outward destiny. It even seems to me as if the GEdipus myth itself, if taken in the Greek spirit," were an experience of this same striving for independence in human development: namely, the deliberate affirmation of the existence forced on us by fate. That which is dimly but unequivocally preordained for the hero by his birth, in the mythical account, he deliberately makes his own by embodying it in action and experience. This experience is a creative experience, for it serves to create the myth itself, and the sagas, poems, and tragedies based on it, whose various representations of the one theme are determined by the collective ideological outlook of the moment and the interpretation appropriate thereto. But the life of the individual hero himself will inevitably be destroyed, whether this human destiny be interpreted in terms of heroism, fatalism, or tragedy.

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1 See my explanations in Die analytische Reaktion (1929), pp. 68 et seq., and also in Modern Education, chapter vii.