Reflections on Andrew Brink’s Creativity Studies

Andrew Brink’s study of psychodynamics and creativity, Loss and Symbolic Repair: A Psychological Study of Some English Poets (1977), along with its companion volumes, Creativity as Repair: Bipolarity and Its Closure (1982) and The Creative Matrix: Anxiety and the Origin of Creativity (2000), have changed the way I regard works of art, both visual and literary. Brink’s exciting and richly illuminating studies on creativity urge not only a reappraisal of a rather parched academic field, but offer an important new paradigm for this subject by connecting relational anxiety with the creative drive.

At the heart of Brink’s thesis is a much-needed expansion of John Bowlby’s theories of early infant-maternal attachment, the ideal of which is described as consistent and free of conflict. Attachment theory, based upon a relational model of human development, replaces the Freudian drive model, and therefore reflects the implications of human interpersonal relationship, early attachment, and the effects of integration—or non-integration—of the disruption of interpersonal connections. Brink posits that the purpose of the creative drive is to facilitate the movement of an individual’s psyche toward repair of damage that can result from ruptures in interpersonal relationships, such as early parental loss or compromised parental care, highlighting the creative person’s impulse to integrate interpersonal anxiety. Brink speaks of the process of creating a work of art as an attempt at the ordering of chaotic intrapsychic emotions; ultimately, as a result of this complex process, an aesthetic object—such as a painting, poem, or novel—is yielded, which is a metaphorical reflection of the artist’s inner condition.

In areas of creativity with which I am familiar—art history, visual studies, and aesthetic theory—criticism tends to focus on formalism in general: forms of art and individual works, decontextualizing the artwork from its creator. Why is so little attention paid to the process of creativity, to the function of the very

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process itself within the human psyche? Indeed, a number of previous studies of creativity have been made, and many of them entail some level of value. However, earlier studies tend to be limited in scope and short on empirical reality; furthermore, none treat the process in the context of human development in the way that Andrew Brink pioneered. What distinguishes Brink’s thesis is that it does not separate art from life. Via this methodology, a work of art is seen in the context of the artist’s personal history. Brink is no genetic determinist, but he recognizes that the creative drive is an impulse toward psychobiological homeostasis, in that its purpose is reparative. To be sure, as Brink puts it in his Creativity as Repair, “In the humanities the healing proclivities of body and mind are scarcely ever mentioned, yet growth and change of the person are basic assumptions of the educational process” (p. 7).

Brink’s The Creative Matrix: Anxiety and the Origin of Creativity, published as Volume 10 of The Reshaping of Psychoanalysis: From Sigmund Freud to Ernest Becker series by Peter Lang in 2000, makes the case for a new conception of creativity, which shows that created objects are “richly encoded” with their creators’ developmental and relational anxieties, impelling the very creation of such objects themselves. To use a psychohistorical term, Brink writes, aesthetic objects can be thought of as “anxiety containers” (p. 179). However, he cautions that it is perhaps risky to assume with certainty that “all art is a self-healing adaptive response to dangerously stressed attachments” and offers his thesis as a “project to be studied” (p. 190), given the rarity of reliable corroborating data and the still-developing nature of adult attachment behavior. He nevertheless advises that when the question arises regarding “how it can be said that creativity in the arts is always an emergency response to anxiety” when evidence of anxiety is not directly observable—for example, in a peaceful Pieter de Hooch depiction of a domestic interior—that the rule is to “look deeper” (p. 189). To be sure, when we look beyond the “peaceful” surface, we find that according to de Hooch’s 1684 burial records in Amsterdam, his body was delivered to the burial grounds from an insane asylum; there is no extant record of reasons for his admission. Further, “peacefulness” notwithstanding, de Hooch’s repeated motif of open doors, sometimes with solitary

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figures standing in them facing away from the viewer, is very haunting, as is his treatment of light and tonality, often bifurcating a canvas into light and dark. Again, such question-raising elements, both biographical and pictorial, comprise a “deeper look” below the surface, and together they present a picture of an externalized complex emotional state, if not literal anxiety. The “deeper look,” the probing for personal meaning contained in iconography in the context of a life history, yields much richness of understanding regarding “how anxiety enters psycho-physical systems and creativity arises to reduce its stressfulness” (p. 196).

I first learned of Andrew Brink’s work from the Journal of Psychohistory. I have since my adolescence had a serious interest in psychology, but my interest in art and art history dominated, and my undergraduate studies culminated in what was the exciting onset of feminist art-historical studies. Since then, I have been interested in sociological aspects of the production of visual art and have continued to pursue my interest in psychodynamics by reading psychohistorical studies revealing the link between a mass group process and psychodynamic meaning, principles of which can be applied to trends in visual art. When I first read Obsession and Culture in 1997, I was excited about the connections to be made between psychopathology and creativity in a way which so richly and meaningfully surpassed the “mad artist” paradigm. Brink posits that individual obsessions revealed in popular works of art resonate with others on a mass scale, and that such resonance in turn reveals the depth and strength of such obsession on a cultural level. This notion was very critical to me for understanding the purpose that works of art serve within culture. More recently, I have developed a strong interest in psychobiographies of individual artists and the role of biography in art history and creativity; a review of his book on the subject, Desire and Avoidance in Art, which I wrote for the Journal of Psychohistory, frames this perspective. As a graduate student in Visual Studies at Harvard’s Division of Continuing Education, in my coursework as well as in the thesis I am currently writing, I rely on Brink’s books, theories, and case studies as guides; they enrich my understanding of the study of visual arts as no other scholarship does.

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From Andrew Brink I have learned that the feelings and concepts expressed metaphorically by an artist in an aesthetic object resonate with the consumers of that object and are, in a sense, expressed by the creative person on their behalf. If, for example, a painting, its formal shape supporting its psychic message, expresses something with which many people can identify, it takes its place as a “good object,” to use Bowlby’s well-known term, collectively among the viewing public. Therefore, an art object, created by a single artist and based on his or her own life, can be intuitively enjoyed and understood by many. It was my hope that Brink would write a beginner’s guide to writing psychobiography to aid academics and others in understanding the developmental and psychodynamic concepts necessary to make sense of creative visual artists and writers and their work. Regrettably, the ill treatment he received in the Bertrand Russell project led to his becoming disillusioned with academia and less willing to devote his energies in this direction.

I am ever hopeful that Brink’s work on creativity will become more widely known and understood. Even he conceded that the Humanities and Psychoanalytic Thought Program, which he coordinated at the University of Toronto, constituted “a partial exception to the ban on study of emotion” within the humanities, though he felt it was surrounded by an intractable status quo. Indeed, his brilliance was matched by his courage as he persisted in seeking to uphold and promote the teaching of psychohistory. The paradigm offered in Andrew Brink’s creativity studies—that relational anxieties are at the core of creative motivation—will continue to guide my approach to research in visual studies, facilitating a deeper understanding of the visual power and richness of meaning in works of art, and for that I am indebted. Informed by psychohistorical methodology, Andrew’s approach to psychobiography was layered and holistic; and, as he noted in a Clio’s Psyche interview, he believed that “there is no advance towards an understanding of what promotes a more peaceful world other than by psychohistory and psychobiography.” By promoting Andrew’s writing through the universities and institutions with which we are affiliated, we can build upon his legacy—as he himself wrote regarding Bertrand Russell—“so that his most

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fervent hopes for humanity may be forwarded” (Bertrand Russell: A Psychobiography of a Moralist, p. 162).

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