Carl Jung on the relationship between psychological suffering and creativity – The Marginalian
When AI started to colonize language – which is still our best tool to close the abyss between us, the container of thought and feeling that shapes the content – I asked chatGPT to compose a poem about the eclipse in the style of Walt Whitman. It brought back the book of cliches in rhyming couplets. Getting the form wrong – Whitman didn't rhyme – seemed like an easy fix with a line of code. Making poetry itself a mistake was an interesting question, a question that goes to the heart of why we make poetry (or paintings or novels or songs) – a fundamental question about what it means to be human.
I asked an old poet friend why he thought the conversation at GPT rang hollow when Whitman was able to pack an infinite amount of emotion into a single image, able to free the soul with a single word.
He was silent, then said: “Because AI did not suffer.”
On the other hand, this agrees with a dangerous myth: the archetype of the tortured genius given to us by the Romantics, who, in their time and their place, in the century of bloody revolts, deadly epidemics, and Puritanical punitive practices, should have needed to believe that their suffering – those lives of poverty and want of all the mistakes used for those who suffer, those who suffer, those who suffer, those who lose their lives, those who suffer. death – was a fair price to pay for such a creative volcano.
On the one hand, this is true: Art is the music we make with the confused cries of life – sometimes the cries of joyous surprise, but often the cries of destruction in the conflict between our desires and the will of the world. All artists' art is their way of dealing with what they live – desires, heartaches, triumphs, inner and outer battles. It is this painful eruption of the psyche – which used to be called a neurosis at the beginning of modern psychotherapy, and we can simply call it suffering – which reveals itself to us, and it is because of these revelations that we create anything that can touch other lives, that communication that we call art.
Our strength and our freedom lies in learning not to ignore our suffering or to make it love but to use the energy that is there like a wave that passes through us to shake us alive, and then it goes down into the ground of existence.
No one challenged the myth of the tortured genius without denying the reality and fertility of suffering more eloquently than Carl Jung (July 26, 1875–June 6, 1961), who thought deeply about the nature of creativity.
In 1943, the Kierkegaard scholar questioned Jung's view of the relationship between “mental disorders” and creative genius. With an eye to Kierkegaard's gift for letting his anxiety fuel rather than stifle his creativity, Jung informs him that he is a “whole” person and not “a man who speaks here and offends fragmented souls,” and writes:
True creative genius does not allow itself to be corrupted by analysis, but freed from the constraints and distortions of neurosis. Neurosis does not produce creativity. It is outdated and dangerous to health. It is also a failure. But modern people mistake illness for the birth of creativity – the usual crazy part of our time.
Of course, the unanswerable question is whether the artist would have been created if he had not been neurotic. Nietzsche's syphilis undoubtedly had a profound effect on his life. But one can imagine a noise Nietzsche had the ability to create without high blood pressure – something like Goethe. He would write something like what he wrote about, but less stiff, a little frowning – that is, a little German – restrained, responsible, logical and respectful.
A century before Alain de Botton offered his definitive view on the importance of rupture, Jung measured what makes suffering productive or alleviating:
Neurosis is a necessary doubt and always poses the final question of trust in man and God. Doubt is creative when it is answered with action, so is neurosis when we dismiss it as if it were a phase – a problem that only changes when it doesn't end. Neurosis is a long-term problem that has become a habit, a daily disaster ready to be used.
Jung looks at the advice he could have given Kierkegaard about how to deal with his suffering, which was the source of his philosophical writings:
It doesn't mean anything you What can I say? it he says to you. It depends it you must answer your answers. God is with you right away and He is the voice within you. You have to get it out with that voice.
Couple that with a forgotten young poet's extraordinary letter to Emily Dickinson about how to bear your suffering, and visit Kierkegaard himself for the amount of despair.
