The secret of creativeness, like that of the freedom of the will, is a transcendental problem which the psychologist cannot answer but can only describe. The creative personality, too, is a riddle we may try to answer in various ways, but always in vain. Nevertheless, modern psychologists have not been deterred from investigating the problem of the artist and his art. Freud thought he had found a key to the work of art by deriving it from the personal experience of the artist.17 This was a possible approach, for it was conceivable that a work of art might, like a neurosis, be traced back to complexes. It was Freud’s great discovery that neuroses have a quite definite psychic cause, and that they originate in real or imagined emotional experiences in early childhood. Some of his followers, in particular Rank and Stekel, adopted a similar approach and arrived at similar results. It is undeniable that the artist’s personal psychology may occasionally be traced out in the roots and in the furthest ramifications of his work. This view, that personal factors in many ways determine the artist’s choice of material and the form he gives it, is not in itself new. Credit, however, is certainly due to the Freudian school for showing how far-reaching this influence is and the curious analogies to which it gives rise.
[156] Freud considers a neurosis to be a substitute for a direct means of gratification. For him it is something inauthentic—a mistake, a subterfuge, an excuse, a refusal to face facts; in short, something essentially negative that should never have been. One hardly dares to put in a good word for a neurosis, since it is apparently nothing but a meaningless and therefore irritating disturbance. By treating a work of art as something that can be analysed in terms of the artist’s repressions we bring it into questionable proximity with a neurosis, where, in a sense, it finds itself in good company, for the Freudian method treats religion and philosophy in the same way. No legitimate objection can be raised to this if it is admitted to be no more than an unearthing of those personal determinants without which a work of art is unthinkable. But if it is claimed that such an analysis explains the work of art itself, then a categorical denial is called for. The essence of a work of art is not to be found in the personal idiosyncrasies that creep into it—indeed, the more there are of them, the less it is a work of art—but in its rising above the personal and speaking from the mind and heart of the artist to the mind and heart of mankind. The personal aspect of art is a limitation and even a vice. Art that is only personal, or predominantly so, truly deserves to be treated as a neurosis. When the Freudian school advances the opinion that all artists are undeveloped personalities with marked infantile autoerotic traits, this judgment may be true of the artist as a man, but it is not applicable to the man as an artist. In this capacity he is neither autoerotic, nor heteroerotic, nor erotic in any sense. He is in the highest degree objective, impersonal, and even inhuman—or suprahuman—for as an artist he is nothing but his work, and not a human being.
[157] Every creative person is a duality or a synthesis of contradictory qualities. On the one side he is a human being with a personal life, while on the other he is an impersonal creative process. As a human being he may be sound or morbid, and his personal psychology can and should be explained in personal terms. But he can be understood as an artist only in terms of his creative achievement. We should make a great mistake if we reduced the mode of life of an English gentleman, or a Prussian officer, or a cardinal, to personal factors. The gentleman, the officer, and the high ecclesiastic function as impersonal officials, and each role has its own objective psychology. Although the artist is the exact opposite of an official, there is nevertheless a secret analogy between them in so far as a specifically artistic psychology is more collective than personal in character. Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is “man” in a higher sense—he is “collective man,” a vehicle and moulder of the unconscious psychic life of mankind. That is his office, and it is sometimes so heavy a burden that he is fated to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being. As K. G. Carus says: “Strange are the ways by which genius is announced, for what distinguishes so supremely endowed a being is that, for all the freedom of his life and the clarity of his thought, he is everywhere hemmed round and prevailed upon by the Unconscious, the mysterious god within him; so that ideas flow to him—he knows not whence; he is driven to work and to create—he knows not to what end: and is mastered by an impulse for constant growth and development—he knows not whither.”18