Psychopathology and Creativity*

The first stage of Freud's research can be globally characterized as having been in those areas in which psychic processes take place against the subject's conscious wishes, or at least without the subject's being able to control them. To a certain extent, one may characterize these as areas in which the ego is defeated, or in which that part of the ego is defeated that aspires to be reasonable and sensible. In the second stage of his research, Freud turned to the study of the ego itself and of its appendage, the superego, in order to determine in detail what the structure of the controlling agency is, and under what conditions it either achieves its aim, makes compromises or fails.

Yet, relatively early, Freud was drawn toward psychological problems connected with the products of civilization—chiefly religion, literature and the visual arts. Concern with the first of these was probably forced upon him by his psychotherapeutic practice, inasmuch as religion appears so frequently as a conflict-arousing agent, as well as a consoling one, in the lives of neurotics. Literature and the visual arts, on the other hand, were drawn into the orbit of Freud's researches by his personal bent—his own almost passionate admiration for them and his consequent quest for their meaning. Like Socrates, however, with whom Freud is connected by many strands in the history of ideas, he may have felt, at the end of his life, some regret about his not having “cultivated music” (Plato).

One may be tempted to surmise that it was some constitutional deficit that kept Freud from full appreciation of that sublimest of all arts. It is my feeling, however, that what alienated Freud from music was more likely the fact that, in this cultural realm, the reasonable and sensible ego suffers irretrievable defeat, for the effect of music is to penetrate to layers of such archaic intimacy that any attempt to translate it into a rational syntax is bound to fail.