Creativity Without Dual Training

I am an academic who discovered the personal unconscious inadvertently when I began to doodle and invent motifs in idle moments while a PhD student at the University of London, United Kingdom. At first this drawing seemed innocent enough but it soon acquired a power of its own, then a necessity. Drawing, augmented by painting in watercolor, continued into my first teaching job with the Department of English, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. I was hired to teach 17th-century literature, along with introductory courses, which I did credibly while being preoccupied with tense, anxious, and urgent imagery from my unconscious. Fortunately, there was enough freedom to comply with the creative urgency, along with dream recording, for about 10 years until the feeling was no longer quite so importunate. Many of the drawings and small paintings still exist, but I think of them less as art than as ideograms of the unconscious by which I communicated with a realm of lost feelings, especially from early childhood.

As a result of this spontaneous imagery I had to change my view of myself from a gentle, compliant pacifist to somebody struggling with hurt, anger, and aggression — and eventually sadness. Had it not been for the ongoing exercise in creativity, I would almost certainly have become depressed — which so far I have been spared. Depressiveness has always been a tendency of mine offset by curiosity about the origin and meaning of creativity. Having been left sadder and perhaps wiser by re-experiencing the irregularities of my birth and childhood (cesarean delivery, mother at risk for her life and debilitated for the first year before recovery to become an attentive mother) I have become profoundly curious about how children thrive or fail to thrive.

My direct experience of analysis is limited and from a long time ago. As a child from six to about twelve years of age I had some searching and helpful, though intermittent, analytic treatment with a woman therapist in Madison, Wisconsin. The family physician had given up on my constant complaints about sore feet, etc., and my parents were enlightened enough to find a child analyst. Using modified Kleinian play therapy, together with talk, the foot pains were persuaded to vanish, replaced by real feelings about the family in which I lived. Unfortunately, I never went on with analysis, being too busy with academic pursuits. There were times when I considered it — as when my father turned up to lecture at University College, London, where I was a graduate student and had skin eruptions. (A shrewd physician-psychotherapist enabled me to make the connection.) But I regret missing the chance to go into treatment with a good London analyst as I could have afforded an inexpensive student analysis then available. Conflict and anxiety have lost me time and energy but my resilience is such that I have not gone into treatment. This was probably a mistake as there are emotional limitations of which I know without fully feeling them or having explored their origin in analysis.

All these experiences inevitably pushed aside my conventional study of literature, replacing it with a consuming interest in psychoanalytic insights into the genesis and management of emotion — especially as seen in the products of creativity. In 1972 I originated an undergraduate course called “Motivational Criticism” in which theories of creativity were considered. I was especially impressed by Henri Ellenberger’s idea of creative illness, which he attributed to both Freud and Jung in The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970). Creative illness certainly explained what I had been going through by compulsively drawing and painting, but I never mentioned this to students. Instead, I constructed a series of psychobiographies of creative writers and

Page 55

artists, from John Donne to Pablo Picasso and John Lennon, to illustrate the principles of how the creative urge arises from the “inner necessity” of certain developmental configurations.

By reading amongst post-Freudian analysts, especially in the “British School,” I became aligned with those having least “metapsychology” and most empirical humility in the assertions they made about child development. Perhaps because I was brought up by a convinced Darwinian father (a well-known University of Wisconsin plant geneticist) I turned towards psychobiology. The theories of John Bowlby in particular impressed me by their soundness and, while attachment theory may not have had the imaginative reach of more speculative theories, I much preferred it and continue to build upon it. During the years I was struggling to write convincing psychobiography — especially of subjects such as the depressed 18th-century English poet William Cowper, who had lost his mother early — I introduced myself to Bowlby and we became friends. As a tribute to Bowlby, when I was Coordinator of the Humanities and Psychoanalytic Thought Programme at Trinity College, University of Toronto, I organized a conference on “John Bowlby and Attachment Theory” in October, 1993.

While at McMaster in 1979 I helped found the Bertrand Russell Editorial Project as I had written my MA thesis at Toronto on Russell the essayist and had joined his anti-nuclear weapons campaign while living in the U.K. during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Familiarity with Russell’s early life through little-known family letters and documents showed me a Russell very different from the rational philosopher and even from the reforming social activist. I later published my findings as Bertrand Russell: A Psychobiography of a Moralist.

For ten years I was Associate Member of the Department of Psychiatry at McMaster, the only one from the Humanities Faculty. To strengthen my psychobiographical writing and teaching about creativity I had interacted with the then young and vital psychiatrists who were setting up the innovative department. I was nominated for membership by Dr. Nahum Spinner, probably the most scholarly among them and an inspiring teacher. By this time I was finding the English Department dreary and the Russell Project stifling in its phony guardianship of Russell the master logician and philosopher as it required that Russell’s thought be separated from his subjective life in the presentation of his papers for publication. My best and most interesting students were in the Social Sciences faculty, so I set up new courses in sociology on theories of psychobiography and creativity — enjoying the support of colleagues in psychiatry. (All this happened in days of openness and freedom which are unimaginable now.)

By far my most important intellectual stimulation came from an invited group in Psychiatry known as The SAD Society (SAD standing for the Study of Affective Disorders). Organized by Dr. Paul Grof (brother of Stanislav Grof), the group was wonderfully open and free-ranging on all topics connected with depression. Briefly in 1988 I joined the team as “psychotherapist” to help patients in a primarily lithium-monitoring clinic. But this fascinating work came to an end after a few months when Paul took an offer to become research director at the Royal Ottawa Hospital. In like manner, I was offered the job of Coordinator of the Humanities and Psychoanalytic Thought Programme at University of Toronto.

“Hum and Psy,” as it was affectionately called, was a new interdisciplinary undergraduate program in need of leadership, which I gave for five years, 1988-1993. The program centered on literary, philosophical, and religious studies; it offered lectures on Freud (Charles Hanly), Jung (Donald Evans), and the British School of Object Relations (Phyllis Grosskurth [see interview in Clio’s Psyche, September, 1996]), while I ran the general seminar for all students. There was a sizable group of other courses with some psychoanalytic content upon which students could draw. The program attracted highly talented students, some of whom were in personal analysis, intending careers as psychotherapists, social workers, and teachers. In 1990 I organized an international conference on “Freud and the History of Psychoanalysis.”

Clearly, I was never “trained” to take on the sort of work in applied psychoanalysis towards which experience inclined me. I found that, while the Toronto analytic community was very kind and welcoming, having no credentials as an analyzed person or a therapist excluded me from their councils. As Coordinator of the Humanities and Psychoanalytic Thought Programme I needed to be closer to analytic organizations than it was possible to get. And I became aware that there were various

Page 56

factions with ideological persuasions hard to serve by the sort of open university enquiry upon which I insisted. Up to a point I could embrace them all, but this still left the question as to why the Coordinator had no training other than his research PhD in English literature. I believe that I was highly successful in the job, but, after five years, problems of credibility with the analytic community were beginning to arise. Having “played the Bowlby card” in the second conference, it was time to get on with my own work and not become embroiled in the politics of psychoanalytic education (or lack of it) in Toronto.

Perhaps my best hope is for good reception of my books, articles, and reviews. Intrigued by the reasons I earlier had discovered for Bertrand Russell’s tortured and torturing relations with women, I decided to pursue the theme further. Obsession and Culture: A Study of Obsession in Modern Fiction is the result. It discusses the extent to which male obsessional personality organization (with typical Don Juanism) pervades Western literary culture. [See review in Clio’s Psyche, September, 1996.] My just-completed book draft, tentatively called The Creative Matrix: Anxiety and the Origin of Creativity, starts with Freud’s “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety” (1926) and shows how John Bowlby’s attachment theory emerges from it to stimulate rethinking about the meaning of creativity.

Page 57