Creativity, Health and Art

In the Last Few Years creativity, like existentialism, has become increasingly inflated and hazy. Everybody is for it, but nobody knows what it is. “Creative” has come to be a synonym for “good” with some invitingly romantic connotations. A creative person is somehow non-conforming, artistic, and expected to wear a beard (one reason it is so hard for women to be creative). Creative persons deserve admiration, even deference, and one's own sophistication is displayed by indulging them. Accordingly, artists who seem to embody the stereotype of creativity are venerated. Note Dylan Thomas’ American career; or Joyce Cary's Gully Jimson and his movie apotheosis; or the tributes paid to Kerouac's logorrhea, and to his beats.

Yet the stereotype reflects not creativity, but the fantasy rejection of an un-creative life by people living it and not quite capable of imagining a genuine alternative. To them creativity becomes nonconformity to this life, a seeking for distinction, for individual identity by being “different” from the group. But genuine individuality is independence from the group—negative or positive responses to one's own wishes, rather than to those of the group. Individuality is absent when persons conceive themselves as negatively or positively dependent on the group, which thus defines them.

Ambivalent awe for creative artists is familiar at least since Murgher and Puccini romanticized “la vie de Bohême,” the marginal substructure of artists pushed from the center of society by industrialization. (The middle classes were wondering even then whether something was not missing in their life. But do-it-yourself creativity had not yet been invented.) The current, enthusiastically positive connotation of “creative” combines the traditional American approval of productivity with a new emphasis on originality, and a vague yearning again to experience production as an individual process leading to meaningful objects and finally to a meaningful life. “Creativity” is idea