There's a certain form of neurosis from which we can learn a great deal, in breaking into this problem of emotional blockage to creativity [and much more], and which is an understandable kind of thing.
This is the compulsive-obsessive neurosis.
These are rigid and tight people, people who can't play very well. These are people who try to control their emotions and so look rather cold and frozen in the extreme case. They are tense; they are constricted. And these are the people who in a normal state [of course when it's extreme it is a sickness that has to be handled by psychiatrists and psychotherapists] generally tend to be very orderly and very neat and very punctual and very systematic and very controlled and who make excellent bookkeepers, for instance, and so on.
Now these people can be very briefly described in psychodynamic terms as "sharply split," possibly more sharply split than most of the rest of the population, as between what they are conscious of, what they know about themselves, and what's concealed from themselves, what is unconscious or repressed. Split between the conscious and sub/unconscious, in which the latter is said to be the source of primary creativeness.
As we learn more about these people, and learn something about the reasons for the repressions, we are also learning that these reasons obtain for all of us in a lesser degree, and so again we've learned from the extreme case something about the more average and the more normal. These people have to be this way. They have no alternative. They have no choice. This is the only way in which such a person can achieve safety, order, lack of threat, lack of anxiety, that is via orderliness, predictability, control and mastery. These desirable goals are all made possible for him by these particular techniques. The "new" is threatening for such a person, but nothing new can happen to him if he can order it to his past experience, if he can freeze the world of flux, that is, if he can make believe nothing is changing. If he can proceed into the future on the basis of "well-tried" laws and rules, habits, modes of adjustment which have worked in the past, and which he will insist on using in the future, then he feels safe and he doesn't feel anxious.
Why does he have to do this? What's he afraid of? The answer is - in very general terms - that he is afraid of his emotions, or of his deepest instinctual urges, or his deepest self, which he desperately represses. He's got to! Or else he feels he'll go crazy. This internal drama of fear and defense is within one man's skin, but it tends by this man to be generalized, projected outward on the whole world, and he is then apt to see the whole world in this fashion. What he's really fighting off are dangers within himself, but then anything that reminds him of or resembles these dangers within himself, he fights in the external world whenever he sees them. He fights against his own impulses to disorderliness by becoming extra orderly. And he will be threatened by disorderliness in the world because it reminds him, or threatens him with this revolution from the suppressed, from within. Anything that dangers this control; anything that strengthens either the dangerous hidden impulses, or else weakens the defensive walls, will frighten and threaten this kind of person.
Much is lost by this kind of process. Of course he can gain a kind of equilibrium. Such a man can live his life out without cracking up. He can hold things under control. It is a desperate effort at control. A good deal of his energy is taken up with it and so he is apt to get tired just simply controlling himself. It is a source of fatigue. But he can manage, and get along by protecting himself against the dangerous portions of his unconscious, or against his unconscious self, or his real self, which he has been taught to regard as dangerous. He must wall off everything unconscious.
There is a fable of an ancient tyrant who was hunting somebody who had insulted him. He knew this someone was walled up in a certain town, so he ordered every man in that town to be killed, just to be sure that the one person wouldn't get away. The compulsive-obsessive does something like that. He kills off and walls off everything unconscious in order to be sure that the dangerous portions of it don't get out.
What I'm leading up to is that out of this unconscious, out of this deeper self, out of this portion of ourselves of which we generally are afraid and therefore try to keep under control, out of this comes the ability to play - to enjoy - to fantasy - to laugh - to loaf - to be spontaneous, and, what's most important for us here, creativity, which is a kind of intellectual play, which is a kind of permission to be ourselves, to fantasy, to let loose, and to be crazy, privately. [Every really new idea looks crazy, at first.]
The compulsive-obsessive gives up his primary creativeness. He gives up the possibilities for being artistic. He gives up his poetry. He gives up his imagination. He drowns all his healthy childishness.
The best real life example of a compulsive-obsessive was this particular man in his elderly years. He was a man who very characteristically saved things. He had all the newspapers that he had ever read, bound by weeks. I think each week was bound with a little red string, and then all the papers of the month would be put together and tied with a yellow string. His wife told me that he had a regular breakfast every day. Monday was orange juice, Tuesday was oatmeal, and Wednesday was prunes, and so on, and God help her if there were prunes on Monday. He saved his old razor blades. He had all his old razor blades saved and packaged nicely with labels on them. I remember that he labeled everything, as such people will do. He had everything organized, and then put little stickers on them.
This compulsive-obsessive kind of man can?t play. He can?t let go. Such a man tends to avoid parties for instance because he?s so sensible and you?re supposed to be a little silly at a party. Such a man is afraid to get a little tight because then his controls loosen up too much and for him this is a great danger. He has to be in control all the time. Such a person will probably make a horrible subject for hypnosis. He will probably get frightened by being anesthetized, or by any other loss of full consciousness. These are people who try to be dignified, orderly, conscious, rational at a party, where you are not supposed to be.
Now this is what I mean when I say that the person who is comfortable enough with his unconscious is able to let go that much anyhow ? a little crazy in this party sense; to be silly, to play along with a gag, and to enjoy it; and to enjoy being nutty for a little while anyhow. This is like a conscious, voluntary regression ? instead of trying to be dignified and controlled at all times. [I don?t know why this comes to mind: It?s about one person who is described as ?strutting,? even when he is sitting on a chair.?]
This kind of primary creativeness that has been described here which comes out of the unconscious is very probably a heritage of every human being. It is a common and universal kind of thing. Certainly it is found in all healthy children. It is the kind of creativeness that any healthy child had and which is then lost by most people as they grow up.
One example in which we all have probably experienced ourselves, is in dreams. You know that in our dreams, we can be an awful lot more creative than we are in waking life. We can be more clever, and wittier, and bolder, and more original, and so on and so on.
With the lid taken off, we find generally more creativeness than appears to the naked eye.
General experience therefore is that psychotherapy or getting down to these deeper layers which are ordinarily repressed, will release a common heritage ? something that we have all had ? and that was lost.
That?s all folks.
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Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love.
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But never mind now that I read it over it misses the question.
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