Letters to the Editor*: Comments on “The Spiritual as a Creative Force in the Person,” by James A. Knight.

It was a pleasure to find Dr. James Knight's paper on creativity and spirituality in the Journal ( “The Spiritual as a Creative Force in the Person,” Vol.  15, pp.  365-382.)

Because psychoanalysts treat troubled people, other aspects of their personalities are often overlooked, or at least, not directly considered. Yet one could say that when patients are feeling better, they are “inspirited,” and their exhilaration comes from the overcoming of difficulties and self-preoccupations: the “breathing free” that comes with change and mastery, the ability to supersede the mundane and live on a higher level, the spiritual or perhaps at times even cosmic level. This is what the creativity of psychoanalysis releases.

Whatever the personality of those creative people devoted to the arts, and even where they may appear superficially “mad,” there is at least in the realm of their work their devotion, which is spiritual. Dr. Knight starts his paper by saying: “Many creative persons have recognized and spoken of the spiritual as a creative force within them.” How interesting that Beethoven is reputed to have said: “All men have a spirituality in them.”

Religion and spirituality have long been linked together. Yet it is not in religious dogma that spirituality is manifest, but in worship, in lofty thoughts and escape from the mundane.

Because poetry is more directly expressive of thought and feeling, and its metaphors and cadences more readily perceived, at times the work of poets is particularly revealing of this spiritual quality.

The poet William Blake demonstrates a combination of religious and spiritual elements perhaps more than any other, or at least, more plainly. In his little book, Songs of Innocence, he asks, in his poem “Holy Thursday”:

Is this a holy thing to see,

In a rich and fruitful land,

Babes reduced to misery,

Fed with cold, usurious hand?