Creative writing
afdybz
MythsofCreativity--Part1.pptxThree Myths of Artistic Creativity
By Irving Singer
In this article, Singer sets out to
Dispel “unwarranted assumptions” about artistic creativity
Discuss these assumptions as “mythic artifacts,” based on often repeated, perhaps outdated, beliefs, opinions that are likely untrue.
How does he know these are unwarranted, what does his initial assumptions say about his beliefs? And why does he use the terms mythic and artifact? Since artifact might be defined as human produced objects, or objectified ideas, in this case. What else could a view of creativity be, if it is not a human artifact?
2
He categorizes these as “myths”
Regressive
Associated with Freud
Wish fulfillment
Fantasies—daydreaming
Unconscious ‘displays’ such as dreams
Communication
Revealed individuality
Sigmund Freud, 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939, was an Austrian neurologist who became known as the founding father of psychoanalysis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud. We will cover one of these myths today. I will cover the other in aseparate online lectures.
3
As for the regressive, Singer tells us
Freud sees these as
Stimulating fulfillments we wish to see in our “conscious” lives
“. . . as residual duplications of characteristic stages of individual development.”
Remember all this is related to artistic creativity in particular and much creativity in general. So the artist is creating something of what one would wish to experience in life, that he/she is not experiencing. Or the artist is re- creating, with a wishful or desirous twist, out of some residual, left over, incomplete, fragmentary memory of a key stage of personal development
4
Singer states:
“. . . Freud wavered about the question of whether such regression is necessarily neurotic.”
Singer points out that in his later work Freud characterize ordinary adulthood as “normal or neurotic”—as if normal and neurotic are very much alike. Neurotic: a relatively mild personality disorder typified by excessive anxiety or indecision and a degree of social or interpersonal maladjustment. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/neurosis
5
Further,
Freud’s ideas about childen’s play is derived from the work of Konrad Lange who believed
“creative art is mature form of childhood play. . . both. . .art and play involve
Illusions
Flights from reality
Conscious self-deception
Konrad Lange, Born 1855, died 1921. Professor of art history at Tübingen. Early theorist in psychology and art. http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_von_Lange&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dkonrad%2Blange%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26hs%3Ddk%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26channel%3Dsb
6
Through this
“. . . The artist escapes from the hazards of everyday life by creating a more satisfying ideal of his/her own.”
Even other arts, music, architecture is thought to be based on” illusions of feelings.”
7
Singer adds
Freud’s spin on this differs from most, since he posited
“. . . That children’s play . . .
Is an “attempt to create a realm of one’s own by using things in the world that the child finds available and gratifying.”
Somehow indicates “that children want most of all to grow up and live the way adults do, but they cannot.”
Is not irrational, it is serious . . .
Further still
When children, as we all once must have been, or still are
“become adults . . . the connection with reality changes and their playing. . .” (our playing). . . “is permeated with fantasies . . . motivated by unsatisfied wishes.”
So what is a wish?
9
Aladdin-like wishes?
“. . . This is especially true of people who are unhappy . . .”
Happy people don’t fantasize!!!!
And imaginative constructions are ‘special types of fantasies . . . like daydreaming a continuation of and substitute for the play of childhood.’
Are you buying all this?
10
What about the lamp?
The artist then resembles a neurotic person, but the artist is
Resourceful
Often not pathological
May derive benefits from fantasies
produce more interesting fantasies than a “mere neurotic.”
Moreover (there must be something to the lamp)
There is a “social demand,” for artistic work
Since, “artists express for many people the fantasies they too experience but repress or are simply incapable of transforming into enjoyable productions.”
Thus there is creative value
12
According to Singer via Dr. Freud
“In their basic unhappiness, artists have fantasies of wish fulfillment that they manage to incorporate in artifacts, for which they may be subsequently rewarded, since the recipients of their work treat it as expressive of what they too experience?”
So let me get this straight, you guys, not me of course, like art, or creative objects, as such because through that art/object/outcome you find expressions of your own wish fulfillment, on some subconscious level? We’ll see how this works later in class.
13
Is that what’s inside the lamp?
Singer’s Critique
Freud’s theory is a “myth”
Not based on empirical or statistical data
Vague and Generalizes about
Repression
Wish fulfillment
Artistic process
Empirical—originating or based on observation and/or experience.
15
Further Singer poses other views of childhood play:
That play is of “three sorts”
Games
Games have rules that define the game—like adult rules
Art has rules, but rules don’t define art
Artistic rules are fluid
Undisciplined outbursts or enactments
There are no rules or control over such outbursts or enactments
But artist create consciously not just with outbursts or venting of feelings
Contrived behaviour
Which is deliberate and premeditated
Thus, even children’s play is not unconscious. Singer is using these to show that artists are not involved in childhood types of play.
16
Singer adds
“Freud’s principal error comes from the ambiguity of the term wish fulfillment”
Either an activity or pursuit undertaken to get what one wants
Or else as itself embodying a partial substitute for what one wants.
He doesn’t feel like everything we say or do, or express imaginatively can of should be linked with this overly ambiguous term.
17
Finally in his critique, Singer contends
“Working at a problem in art is like working at a problem in other areas of our life. It involves trying out different possibilities and imaginatively reconstructing actual facticities, while also deploying technical know-how in the making of one or another contrivance for eliciting affective as well as cognitive responses in an audience.”
Yes, but to critique Singer—why does one work at a problem in art? And where or what does the imaginatively, imagined come from? And how does the imaginative response of one elicit a response in another who has never had that imaginative formulation?
18
Myths 2 & 3:To be continued . . .
Along with a view of Jung
As for the lamp, according to Pynchon
From the Crying of Lot 49
So when this mattress flared up around the sailor, in his Viking's funeral: the stored, coded years of uselessness, early death, self-harrowing, the sure decay of hope, the set of all men who had slept on it, whatever their lives had been, would truly cease to be, forever, when the mattress burned. She stared at it in wonder. It was as if she had just discovered the irreversible process. It astonished her to think that so much could be lost, even the quantity of hallucination belonging just to the sailor that the world would bear no further trace of. She knew, because she had held him, that he suffered DT's.
Behind the initials was a metaphor, a delirium tremens, a trembling unfurrowing of the mind's plowshare. The saint whose water can light lamps, the clairvoyant whose lapse in recall is the breath of God, the true paranoid for whom all is organized in spheres joyful or threatening about the central pulse of himself, the dreamer whose puns probe ancient fetid shafts and tunnels of truth all act in the same special relevance to the word, or whatever it is the word is there, buffering, to protect us from. The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost.
