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The Myth of the Tormented Artist: Destiny or Decision?
By: Jennifer A. Neely, CSW
The myth of the tormented artist suffering for his or her art endures even as there is evidence to dispel it. Across the disciplines, creative people including poets, painters, and musicians are mythologized as being long suffering not only making sacrifices both personal and financial to facilitate their work, but in order to create it. In other words, a fable exists that it is necessary to have sorrows in order to put them to use. Is this phenomenon a foregone conclusion, a destiny, or a decision?
Artists themselves often believe the myth that "if I could only paint, write, sing, dance, I would feel better." It is a commonly held belief that being creative can be therapeutic. It oftentimes can be however, the converse also seems to be true, that if a creative person feels better then it is easier to write, sing, or dance. Psychotherapy is one way to promote a creative muse. In the New York Times, Sunday, January 23, 2005 Arts and Leisure Section (pg. 33) in an article written by Matthew Gurewitsch, Rolando Villazón discussed the benefits his work as an opera singer has gained from a nine year psychoanalytic treatment. He states his concern that is shared by many others: "What if analysis makes me a normal person and I can’t be an artist anymore." It hasn’t happened according to the article which goes on to point out in Mr. Villazón’s words: "What allows me to send my emotions to the audience, I think, is that I can control the tigers inside me."
Trauma influences creativity. Trauma can be defined as an abrupt rupture in any relationship. Witnessing unspeakable acts according to Judith Herman leads to the process of repression, dissociation and denial. Later theorists include sublimation, the use of creativity to take socially unacceptable ideas and make them acceptable as a defense against the overwhelming feelings caused by trauma. Grief work is necessary to integrate trauma. For artists, their work maybe a coping strategy for dealing with grief. The painter Alice Neel, born in 1900, was hospitalized after a suicide attempt in 1930. In this place she was not allowed to create artwork. She was let out on leave in 1931, tried to put her head in an oven to kill herself from breathing in the gas but was interrupted, and was then placed in a different hospital where she was encouraged to draw and paint. She improved over time and later sought out a psychoanalyst for on-going treatment. In 1974 the Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of the last forty years of her work.
Other illnesses can coexist in creative people just as in the general public. A skilled clinician needs to be consulted if someone has been depressed for longer than three months with no identifiable reason, if someone has moods swings from day-to-day or month-to-month, or if someone experiences everyone around them as good and the next moment as all bad, if in other words, there are no areas of gray between black and white.
Creativity is an essential quality in all of us. For some it can be an adaptive coping method to deal with otherwise inexpressible, longings, grief, or trauma. For others it can be an expression of the joy of living as natural and commonplace as breathing. A psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy can be one way of breaking the prophesy in the myth that it is necessary to suffer to be creative. This process allows for working through trauma and grieving losses so that creative people can find more of their energies freed to follow their bliss.
copywrite Jennifer A. Neely, 2005
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