The Act of Creation

by Arthur Koestler

  Projective empathy -- again in a technical sense -- is based on a similar confusion: an arrow drawn on paper is felt to manifest a dynamic tendency to move (probably a consequence of our own unconscious eye-movements); a church spire seems to 'soar' upwards, a picture has 'movement' and 'balance', and so on. Not only motions, but emotions too are projected from the self into lifeless objects; my car, climbing a hill, 'groans' and 'pants' under its 'effort'; the weeping willow weeps, the thunder growls. The tendency to animism, to project unconsciously life and feeling into inanimate bodies, is well-nigh irresistible -- witness the two millermia of Aristotelian physics; we can only conclude that it is a basic feature of our psychic make-up.

  Equally inveterate is the tendency to project our own emotions into other living beings -- animals and people. The first leads to anthropomorphism -- ascribing to our pet dogs, horses, and canaries reasoning processes modelled on our own; the second to what one might call 'egomorphism' -- the illusion that others must feel on any subject exactly as I do. A more complicated projective transaction is transference -- where A projects his feelings, originally aimed at B, on to a substitute, C: a father figure, sister figure, or what have you, each further transferable to D, E, etc. The Who's Who of the subconscious seems to be printed with coloured inks on blotting paper.

  Introjection is meant to signify the reverse of projection, though the two phenomena are often indistinguishable from each other.* When somebody bangs his head on the doorpost, I wince; when a forward in a soccer game has a favourable opportunity to shoot, I kick my neighbour's shin. Adolescents unconsciously ape their hero's mannerisms; our super-egos were supposedly moulded by our parents at a time when the self was still in a fluid state. Throughout his life, the individual keeps introjecting chunks and patterns of other people's existence into his own; he suffers and enjoys vicariously the emotions of those with whom be becomes entangled in identificatory rapports. Some of these personality-transactions have lasting effects; others are more transitory, but at the same time more dramatic. Laughter and yawning have an instantly infectious effect; so have cruelty, hysteria, hallucinations, religious trances. In the hypnotic state 'the functions of the ego seem to be suspended, except those which communicate with the hypnotizer as though through a narrow slit in a screen' (Kretschmer); the personality of the hypnotizer has been substituted for the dormant parts of the ego; the 'slit' acts as a gap in the frontier between the self and non-self, letting in the contraband.

  Freud, though disappointed at an early stage with hypno-therapy, kept stressing the affinities between hypnosis and love on the one hand, hypnosis and mass-behaviour on the other. In states of extreme enamouredness (the German technical term is Hörigkeit -- bondage, servitude, subjection) its object replaces the super-ego or the hypnotist. The poetry -- or pathology -- of the condition lies in the total fascination of the bondsman by the bond, an attenuated but protracted variant of the hypnotic rapport. Awareness is focussed on the object of worship, the rest of the world is blurred or screened. The perfect symbol of the hypnotic effect is in Stendhal's "Charterhouse of Parma": young Fabrice, in his prison cell, stares for hours on end through a narrow slit in the screen covering his window, at the figure of Clelia across the street.

  The 'hypnotic effect' of political demagogues has become a cliché, but one aspect of mass-psychology must be briefly mentioned. The type of crowd or mob to which Le Bon's classic descriptions still apply, is fanatical and 'single-minded' because the subtler individual differences between its members are temporarily suspended; the whole mass is thus intellectually adjusted to its lowest common denominator,* but in terms of dynamic action it has a high efficacity, because the impulses of its members are aligned through narrow slits -- or blinkers -- all pointing in the same direction; hence their experience of being parts of an irresistible power. This experience of partness within a dynamic whole leads to a temporary suspension of individual responsibility -- which is replaced by unconditional subordination to the 'controlling centre', the leader of the crowd. It further entails the temporary effacement of all self-assertive tendencies: the total surrender of the individual to the collectivity is manifested in altruistic, heroic, self-sacrificing acts -- and at the same time in bestial cruelty towards the enemy or victim of the collective whole. This is a further example of the self-transcending emotions serving as catalysts or triggers for their opponents. But let us note that the brutality or heroism displayed by a fanaticized crowd is quasi-impersonal, and unselfish; it is exercised in the interest, or supposed interest, of the whole. The same S.S. detachments which mowed down the whole male population of Lidice were capable of dying at Oradur like the defenders of Thermopylae. The self-assertive behaviour of a mass is based on the participatory behaviour of the individual, which often entails sacrifice of his personal interest and even his life. Theories of ethics based on enlightened self-interest fail to provide an answer why a man should sacrifice his life in the defence of his family -- not to mention country, liberty, beliefs. The fact that men have always been prepared to die for (good, bad, or futile) causes, proves that the self-transcending tendencies are as basic to his mental organization as the others. And since the individual cannot survive without some form of social integration, self-preservation itself always implies a component of self-transcendence.

  Excepting saints and maniacs, our emotions nearly always consist of mixed feelings, where both tendencies (and both branches of the autonomous nervous system) participate in the mixture. Love, of course, is a many-splendoured thing, both with regard to its variety (sexual, platonic, parental, oedipal, narcissistic, patriotic, canine-directed, or feline-oriented as the technicians would say), and also with regard to the extraordinary cocktail of emotions which each variety represents. Much less obvious is the fact, that even such a simple and scientifically respectable drive as hunger should give rise to mixed emotions. If I may return to the subject (p. 294) for a moment: on the one hand, food is 'attacked'; it is 'wolfed'; one 'puts one's teeth into it'; biting and supping are the very prototypes of aggression. On the other hand, the 'feeding drive' is stimulated or inhibited by the company participating in the meal; and the sacred element in the rituals of mensality (still surviving, for instance, in the funeral and wedding feasts) I have already mentioned. The teeth are tools of aggression, but the mouth is a preferential zone of affectionate bodily contact in billing and kissing. The German idiom Ich habe dich zum Fressen gerne -- I love you so much I could eat you -- and the English 'devouring love' are symbolized by the behaviour of young mothers mock-devouring the baby's fingers and toes; it may be a distant echo of the gentle cannibal. Incidentally, we are told that among certain tribes practising ritual cannibalism, to be eaten is regarded as a great compliment; perhaps the male of the praying mantis feels the same way.

  Lastly, the seemingly most altruistic social behaviour may have an admixture of conscious or unconscious self-assertion. Professional do-gooders, charity tigresses, hospital matrons, prison visitors, missionaries, and social workers are indispensable to society, and do an admirable amount of good; to pry into their motives, often hidden to themselves, would be ungrateful and churlish.

  Summary

  Weeping is an overflow reflex for an excess of the participatory emotions, as laughter is for the self-asserting emotions. Its nervous mechanism and bodily manifestations are the opposites of those of laughter with regard to facial expression, respiratory pattern, bodily posture. In laughter tension is exploded, emotion denied; in weeping it is gradually drained away without break in the continuity of mood; thought and emotion remain united. The self-asserting emotions worked off in laughter depend on the sympathico-adrenal system, which galvanizes the body into activity; lachrymation is controlled by the parasympathetic division whose action is inward-directed and cathartic. The self-transcending emotions which overflow in tears cannot be satisfied by any specific muscular activity; they tend towards passivity and self-abandonment, and are consummated in glandular and visceral reacti
ons.

  The various causes of weeping which have been discussed -- raptness, weeping in sorrow, in joy, in sympathy, or in self-pity -- all have a basic element in common: a craving to transcend the island boundaries of the individual, to enter into a symbiotic communion with a human being or some higher entity, real or imaginary, of which the self is felt to be a part. Owing to the peculiarities of our cultural climate, the participatory emotions have been virtually ignored by contemporary psychology, although they are as real and observable in their manifestations as hunger, rage, and fear. They are grounded in the hierarchic order of life where every entity has the dual attributes of partness and wholeness, and the dual potentialities of behaving as an autonomous whole or a dependent part. The classification of emotions which I have proposed is based on this general principle of polarity, to be found on every level of the organic and social heirarchies (cf. Book Two). The dual concept of adaptable matrices with fixed invariant codes is derived from the same principle.

  In the development of the individual, as in the evolution of cultures, the manifestations of the participatory tendencies show a progression, comparable to that of the aggressive-defensive emotions from primitive and infantile to adult forms. The 'symbiotic consciousness' of infancy, with its fluid ego boundaries, is partly relegated to the subconscious strata -- from which the artist and the mystic draw their inspirations; partly superseded by the phenomena of projection and introjection, empathy and identification, transference and hypnosis. Similarly, the participatory bonds of primitive magic are gradually transformed into symbolic rituals, mythological epics, and mystery plays: into the magic of illusion. The shadows in Plato's cave are symbols of man's loneliness; the paintings in the Lascaux caves are symbols of his magic powers.

  The participatory emotions, like their opposites, can be accompanied by feelings of pleasure or un-pleasure which form a continuous scale, and add a third dimension to emotional experience. Lastly, identification, in itself a self-transcending experience, can serve as a vehicle (or trigger) for vicarious emotions of anger and fear.

  NOTES

  To p. 294. The point has been succinctly. made by Walter de la Mare:

  It's a very odd thing -- As odd as can be -- That whatever Miss T. eats Turns into Miss T.

  To p. 296. 'In relation to the dissolution of the ego complex, identification can receive a somewhat different interpretation according as ego-components are projected into the outside world or as elements from the outside world are incorporated into the personality. In very fluid dream processes such a distinction cannot usually be very accurately drawn; but in schizophrenia, for example, both possibilities can be most clearly experienced.' (Kretschmer, 1954, p. 93.)

  To p. 297. The expression 'lowest common denominator' is mathematically nonsensical; it should, of course, be 'highest'. But the 'highest common denominator' in a crowd of large number is still pretty low; thus the faulty idiom conveys the right idea, and the correct expression would only create confusion.

  B. VERBAL CREATION

  XV

  ILLUSION

  The Power of Illusion

  Literature begins with the telling of a tale. The tale represents events by means of auditory and visual signs. The events thus represented are mental events in the narrator's mind. His motive is the urge to communicate these events to others, to make them relive his thoughts and emotions; the urge to share. The audience may be physically present, or an imagined one; the narrator may address himself to a single person or to his god alone, but his basic need remains the same: he must share his experiences, make others participate in them, and thus overcome the isolation of the self.

  To achieve this aim, the narrator must provide patterns of stimuli as substitutes for the original stimuli which caused the experience to occur. This, obviously, is not an easy task, for he is asking his audience to react to things which are not there, such as the smell of grass on a summer morning. Since the dawn of civilization, bards and story-tellers have produced bags of tricks to provide such Ersatz-stimuli. The sum of these tricks is called the art of literature.

  The oldest and most fundamental of all tricks is to disguise people in costumes and to put them on a stage with masks or paint on their faces; the audience is thereby given the impression that the events represented are happening here and now, regardless of how distant they really are in space and time. The effect of this procedure is to induce a very lively bisociated condition in the minds of the audience. The spectator knows, in one compartment of his mind, that the people on the stage are actors, whose names are familiar to him; and he knows that they are 'acting' for the express purpose of creating an illusion in him, the spectator. Yet in another compartment of his mind he experiences fear, hope, pity, accompanied by palpitations, arrested breathing, or tears -- all induced by events which he knows to be pure make-believe. It is indeed a remarkable phenomenon that a grown-up person, knowing all the time that he faces a screen onto which shadows are projected by a machine, and knowing furthermore quite well what is going to happen at the end -- for instance, that the police will arrive just in the nick of time to save the hero -- should nevertheless go through agonies of suspense, and display the corresponding bodily symptoms. It is even more remarkable that this capacity for living in two universes at once, one real, one imaginary, should be accepted without wonder as a commonplace phenomenon. The following extract from a London newspaper report may help to restore our sense of wonder: [1]

  Twice a week, with a haunting, trumpeted signature tune and a view of terraced roofs stretching away into infinity, "Coronation Street", Granada Television's serial of North Country life, goes on the air. It has now had 200 issues and is coming up to its second birthday next week. It is one of Britain's most popular television programmes. Enthusiasts call it a major sociological phenomenon. In fact all marathon TV serials with fixed settings and regular characters are cunningly designed to turn the viewer into an addict. Coronation Street eschews glamour and sensational curtains and concentrates on trapping the rugged smug ambience on North Country working and lower middle-class life. It will follow a local event like a council election or an amateur theatrical through instalment after instalment with the tenacity of a parish magazine. Its characters provide parts that actors can sink their teeth into and digest and assimilate. They have become deeply planted, like the permanent set of seven terraced houses, the shop on the corner, the Mission Hall, and the pub. The characters have devotees who insist on believing in their reality. When the buxom Elsie Tanner was involved with a sailor who, unknown to her, was married, she got scores of letters warning her of the danger. Jack Watson, the actor who played the sailor, was stopped outside the studio by one gallant mechanic who threatened to give him a hiding if he didn't leave Elsie alone. The strongest personality of them all, the sturdy old bulldog bitch, Ena Sharples, has a huge following. When she was sacked from the Mission Hall of which she was caretaker, viewers from all over the country wrote offering her jobs. When she was in hospital temporarily bereft of speech, a fight broke out in Salford between a gang of her fans and an Irish detractor who said he hoped the old bag would stay dumb till Kingdom come. Moreover, when one of the seven houses on the set became 'vacant' because its owner was said to have moved -- in fact because the actor in question had been dropped from the programme -- there were several applications for renting the house; and when at a dramatic moment of the serial the barmaid in the 'Rover's Return' smashed an ornamental plate, several viewers sent in replacements to comfort her.

  Of course, these people know that they are watching actors. Do they nevertheless believe that the characters are real? The answer is neither yes nor no, but yes and no. The so-called law of contradiction in logic -- that a thing is either A or not-A but cannot be both -- is a late acquisition in the growth of individuals and cultures (Book Two, XV). The unconscious mind, the mind of the child and the primitive, are indifferent to it. So are the Eastern philosophies which teach the unity of opposites, as well as Western t
heologians and quantum physicists. The addicts of Coronation Street who insist on beheving in the reality of Ena Sharples have merely carried one step further the momentary split-mindedness experienced by a sophisticated movie-audience at the climax of a Hitchcock thriller; they live in a more or less permanently bisociated world.

  The Value of Illusion

  But where does beauty, aesthetic value, or 'art' enter into the process? The answer requires several steps. The first is to recognize the intrinsic value of illusion in itself. It derives from the transfer of attention from the 'Now and Here' to the 'Then and There' -- that is, to a plane remote from self-interest. Self-assertive behaviour is focussed on the Here and Now; the transfer of interest and emotion to a different time and location is in itself an act of self-transcendence in the literal sense. It is achieved through the lure of heroes and victims on the stage who attract the spectator's sympathy, with whom he partially identifies himself, and for whose sake he temporarily renounces his preoccupations with his own worries and desires. Thus the act of participating in an illusion has an inhibiting effect on the self-asserting tendencies, and facilitates the unfolding of the self-transcending tendencies. In other words illusion has a cathartic effect -- as all ancient and modern civilizations recognized by incorporating various forms of magic into their purification-rites and abreaction therapies.