The Golden Hand of Creativity

Art has to do with woundings, of course, and the artist's pain will reach back like a taut fishing line into the pool of childhood … But the art is not a compensation for pain, not a rationalization, an alternative. Not a sublimation … the pain just opened the artist up, made her a channel for [grief]. What it was, originally, is no one else's business, this little pain that made the way open, the great generosity that refused to close it. (Lionel Basney, 1994)

The poet puts it beautifully, “the pain just opened the artist up, made her a channel for [grief.]” However, in my discussion of the young woman with a golden hand, I must make it my business to look behind her art to the pain she had endured: the pain she eventually surmounted by means of her artistic gift, and the strength and determination to see her art and her life come to fruition regardless of the formidable obstacles she faced.

Today, much is said about the connection between creativity and madness. Kay Redfield Jamison, in her book Touched by Fire, discusses the intimate relation between the creativity of many artists and their illnesses. It is very possible that Virginia Woolf would not have taken the extraordinary flights of association in her writing if she had not experienced them while she was hypomanic. Dr Richard Kogan, the psychiatrist and concert pianist, illustrates convincingly that must have been in a manic state to have been able to compose Carnaval . These are extreme examples of the felicitious joining of two inherited traits: the propensity for depressive illness and the gift to create.

In my experience with artistic patients, any genetic or inherited component of their illness was seen as part of the pain they had to deal with rather than as a contributing factor in their art. I choose to follow Lionel Basney's lead and examine the complex interplay between pain and creativity. Basley tell us that childhood pain, under certain conditions, stimulates creativity. Most artists