Solitude_A Return to the Self

by Anthony Storr

  Analysts spend their lives listening to people who have encountered problems in their intimate relationships. It is surely remarkable that, when they came to write their autobiographies, the two most original analysts of the twentieth century devoted scarcely any space to their wives and families, or indeed to anything save the development of their respective ideas. Both Freud’s An Autobiographical Study and Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections are exceptionally uninformative about their authors’ relations with others. We may applaud their discretion, and sympathize with their desire for privacy; but we may also justly conclude that their own accounts of themselves demonstrate where their hearts were centred.

  It is true that many creative people fail to make mature personal relationships, and some are extremely isolated. It is also true that, in some instances, trauma, in the shape of early separation or bereavement, has steered the potentially creative person toward developing aspects of his personality which can find fulfilment in comparative isolation. But this does not mean that solitary, creative pursuits are themselves pathological. Even those who have the happiest relationships with others need something other than those relationships to complete their fulfilment.

  The development of imagination in human beings has made it possible for them to use the impersonal, as well as the personal, as a principal means of self-development, as a primary path toward self-realization. The great original creators are demonstrating one aspect of a human potential which can be found in everyone, albeit in embryo form in most of us. Although we may strive to do so, none of us develops our various potentialities equally; and many creative people appear to nurture their talents more carefully than they do their personal relationships.

  The idea that individual self-development is an important pursuit is a comparatively recent one in human history; and the idea that the arts are vehicles of self-expression or can serve the purpose of self-development is still more recent. At the dawn of history, the arts were strictly functional; and functional for the community, not for the individual artist. The Palaeolithic artists who drew and painted animals on the walls of their cave dwellings were not making works of art in order to express their personal way of looking at the world, but were attempting to work magic. As Germain Bazin writes:

  The primitive artist was a magician whose drawing had all the virtue of a magic spell, an incantation.

  Bazin believes that early man painted and carved natural forms ‘to ensure the fertility of his prey, to entice it into his traps, or to acquire its strength for his own purposes’.2 Herbert Read refers to cave paintings as exemplifying ‘the desire to “realize” the object on which magical powers were to be exercised’.3

  The act of drawing sharpens the perceptions of the draughtsman; an idea passionately advanced by Ruskin, who believed that it was only by trying to capture the external world in form and colour that the artist learns to apprehend it. In the case of early man, we can be sure that the more accurately he drew his potential prey, the more he could be said to ‘know’ the animal which he was depicting. The more knowledge he had, the more likely he was to be successful in the hunt.

  If naming things is the first creative act, as Bazin alleges, perhaps drawing is the second. Drawing is comparable with forming concepts. It enables the draughtsman to experiment with images separate from the object which originally engaged his interest, and thus gives him a sense of mastery over that object. Belief in the power of the image was probably the reason that Egyptian sculptors made effigies of the dead. The image was believed to guarantee survival after death. Bazin tells us that, in the Nile valley, ‘the sculptor was known as “He-who-keeps-alive”.4

  When anthropologists study the art of other cultures today, they describe it as being social in character. Raymond Firth states that

  the primitive artist and his public share essentially the same set of values … In contrast to what is generally the case in Western societies, the artist is not divorced from his public.5

  The majority of pre-industrial societies seem not to have a word signifying ‘art’ as such, although they of course have words for particular artistic activities like singing or carving. As Western civilization developed, belief in the magical power of the image declined, but painting and sculpture continued to serve communal, rather than individual, interests. Artists were craftsmen who were not expected to be original, but to carry out the orders of their patrons. Their chief task was to remind worshippers, who were often illiterate, of the tenets of the Christian religion; and, to this end, they painted the walls of churches with scenes from the life of Christ and the saints. The medieval artist was recruited from the lower ranks of society. Because painting and sculpture involved manual labour, the visual arts were regarded as inferior to literature and the theoretical sciences. It was only from about the middle of the thirteenth century AD that the names of individual painters began to be recorded.

  Moreover, even when artists painted portraits of particular people, the individuality of the subject was considered less important than his rank or office in society. Colin Morris writes:

  We must admit from the beginning that it is not possible to be certain, with any portrait before 1200, that it is in our sense a personal study.6

  Jacob Burckhardt claims that, in Europe, consciousness of individuality first developed in Italy.

  In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness – that which was turned within as that which was turned without – lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues. Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation – only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air; an objective treatment of the State and of all the things of this world became possible. The subjective side at the same time asserted itself with corresponding emphasis; man became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such.7

  The art of representational portraiture of recognizable individuals became highly developed before self-portraiture became at all common. As Peter Abbs notes in his thesis ‘The Development of Autobiography in Western Culture’, the Renaissance artist often followed the convention of including himself amongst the figures depicted in a commissioned painting, or used himself as a model for one of the saints or other holy figures whom he was portraying. But self-portraiture as a means of self-exploration, or of boldly displaying the true inner man, only began to develop in the late fifteenth century, reaching its zenith in the seventeenth century in the long series of Rembrandt’s self-portraits.

  Music also began by serving communal purposes. E. O. Wilson supposes that, just as birdsong has the function of communicating information about the singer to other members of the species, so human music originally furthered the ends of human tribes. ‘Singing and dancing serve to draw groups together, direct the emotions of the people, and prepare them for joint action.’8

  Raymond Firth writes that, in the kind of communities which he studied,

  Even songs, as a rule, are not composed simply to be listened to for pleasure. They have work to do, to serve as funeral dirges, as accompaniments to dancing, or to serenade a lover.9

  He might have added that rhythm co-ordinates muscular action, lightens the toll of manual labour, and postpones fatigue. Our own Western music is a legacy of the Church. It must be remembered that, for centuries, the church was the central meeting-place of every town and village. The function of music was collective: the evocation of group emotion as part of the act of worship.

  Pre-industrial societies have little notion of a person as a separate entity. A Nigerian psychiatrist told me that, when a psychiatric clinic was first set up in a rural district of Nigeria to treat the mentally ill, the family invariably accompanied the sufferer and insisted upon being present at the patient’s interview with the psychiatrist The idea that the patient might exist as an individual apart from the fam
ily, or that he might have personal problems which he did not want to share with them, did not occur to Nigerians who were still living a traditional village life. In his book Social Anthropology, Sir Edmund Leach refers to

  the ethos of individualism which is central to the contemporary Western society but which is notably absent from most of the societies which social anthropologists study.10

  The growth of individualism, and hence of the modern conception of the artist, was hastened by the Reformation. Although Luther was an ascetic who attacked wealth and luxury, he was also an individualist who preached the supremacy of the individual conscience. Until the sixteenth century, the ultimate standard of human institutions and activities was not only religious, but promulgated by a universal Western Church. As Tawney eloquently demonstrates in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, however often men exhibited personal greed and ambition, there was none the less a generally agreed conception of how the individual ought to behave. The idea that anyone should pursue his personal economic ends to the limit, provided that he kept within the law, was foreign to the medieval mind, which regarded the alleviation of poverty as a duty, and the private accumulation of wealth as a danger to the soul.

  The Reformation made possible the growth of Calvinism, and the establishment of the Protestant work ethic. It was not long before poverty was regarded as a punishment for idleness or fecklessness, and the accumulation of wealth as a reward for the virtues of industry and thrift.

  Durkheim later pointed out that the growth of individualism was also related to the division of labour. As societies grew larger and more complex, occupational specialization led to greater differentiation between individuals. The growth of cities furthered looser, less intimate social relations; and, whilst the individual gained personal freedom by being emancipated from the intimate ties which characterize smaller societies, he became vulnerable to anomie, the alienation which results from no longer conforming to any traditional code.

  In the thesis to which I have already referred, Abbs points out that, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it was not until 1674 that the word ‘self’ took on its modern meaning of ‘a permanent subject of successive and varying states of consciousness’. He goes on to list a number of instances of ‘self’ forming compounds with other words which all entered the language at roughly the same time.

  Self-sufficient (1598), self-knowledge (1613), self-made (1615), self-seeker (1632), selfish (1640), self-examination (1647), selfhood (1649), self-interest (1649), self-knowing (1667), self-deception (1677), self-determination (1683), self-conscious (1687).11

  Abbs also remarks that the word individual originally denoted indivisible, and could, for example, be used of the Trinity or of a married couple, meaning ‘not to be parted’. Abbs writes:

  The gradual inversion of meaning for the word ‘individual’, moving from the indivisible and collective to the divisible and distinctive, carries quietly within itself the historical development of self-consciousness, testifies to that complex dynamic of change which separated the person from his world making him self-conscious and self-aware, that change in the structure of feeling which during the Renaissance shifted from a sense of unconscious fusion with the world towards a state of conscious individuation.12

  In societies in which the function of the artist, whether painter, sculptor, musician, or story-teller, was to serve the community by giving expression to traditional wisdom, his skills were valued, but his individuality was not. Today, we demand that he shall display originality, and that what he produces shall bear the unmistakable imprint of his uniqueness. We treat a genuine Titian with reverence; but if some art historian tells us that it is only a copy, however beautiful, we are likely to pass by on the other side. The commercial value of a work of art depends upon its demonstrable authenticity rather than upon its intrinsic merit. Art has become an individual statement and, for the artist himself, a means whereby he can pursue his own self-realization.

  Autobiography developed from the confessional. St Augustine provided the model in his Confessions. However, the word ‘autobiography’ was not introduced until much later. A quotation from Southey dated 1809 is the first example of the word’s use given by the Oxford English Dictionary. Over the centuries, autobiography changed from being a narrative of the soul’s relation with God to an enterprise far more like that of psycho-analysis. In recounting the circumstances of his life from childhood onward, the autobiographer sought to define the influences which had shaped his character, to portray the relationships which had most affected him, to reveal the motives which had impelled him. In other words, the autobiographer became a writer who was attempting to make a coherent narrative out of his life, and, in the process of doing so, hoping perhaps to discover its meaning.

  The modern psycho-analyst is concerned to make coherent sense out of his patient’s life-story in much the same way. As I suggested earlier, this is an important aspect of the therapeutic endeavour. Psycho-analysis is not necessarily successful in ridding people of neurotic symptoms or in altering the basic structure of personality; but any enterprise which promises to make sense of the chaotic aspects of an individual’s life will continue to appeal to people on that ground alone.

  The literary genre of autobiography is now so popular that men and women of little interest and no distinction feel impelled to record their life-stories. It may be the case that, the less a person feels himself to be embedded in a family and social nexus, the more he feels that he has to make his marie in individual fashion. Originality implies being bold enough to go beyond accepted norms. Sometimes it involves being misunderstood or rejected by one’s peers. Those who are not too dependent upon, or too closely involved with, others, find it easier to ignore convention. Primitive societies find it difficult to allow for individual decisions or varieties of opinion. When the maintenance of group solidarity is a prime consideration, originality may be stifled. Bruno Bettelheim studied Israeli adolescents who had been brought up in kibbutzim. He found that the high value placed upon shared group feelings was inimical to creativity.

  I believe they find it nearly impossible to have a deeply personal opinion that differs from the group’s, or to express themselves in a piece of creative writing – not because of the repression of feelings alone, but because it would shatter the ego. If one’s ego is a group ego, then to set one’s private ego against the group ego is a shattering experience. And the personal ego feels too weak to survive when its strongest aspect, the group ego, gets lost.13

  A manual on how to rear children which has had a wide circulation in the Soviet Union, stresses the need for fostering obedience in young children, since this ‘provides the basis for developing that most precious of qualities: self-discipline’. The author goes on to ask:

  What about developing independence in children? We shall answer; if a child does not obey and does not consider others, then his independence invariably takes ugly forms.14

  Soviet children are reported to be, on the whole, better behaved, less aggressive, and less delinquent than their Western counterparts. Whether they are less original is a question which I cannot answer; but judging from the way in which Soviet artists and musicians have, in the past, been forced to conform to collective norms, it seems improbable that originality, in a collectively-based society, is either prized or encouraged.

  What has been called ‘the culture of poverty’ includes amongst other characteristics crowded living quarters, forced gregariousness, and an absence of privacy. Although many other factors, including lack of education, may be operating, such communal living may be one reason why the very poor lack spokesmen in the shape of writers. Writers come predominantly from the middle class in which privacy is more easily obtainable, and in which solidarity with friends and neighbours is not so stringently demanded.

  It is not only the highly creative who would not whole-heartedly agree with Bowlby’s contention that intimate attachments to other human beings are the hub around which a person�
��s life revolves. For the deeply religious, and especially for those whose vocation demands celibacy, attachment to God takes precedence over attachment to persons. Although such people may succeed in loving their neighbours as themselves, the injunction ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind’ is truly ‘the first and great commandment’.15 Throughout most of Europe’s recorded history, it was assumed that ultimate happiness was not to be expected from human relationships and institutions, but could only be found in man’s relation with the divine.

  Indeed, many of the devout believed that human relationships were an obstacle to communion with God. The founders of the monastic movement were the hermits of the Egyptian desert, whose ideal of perfection was only to be achieved through renunciation of the world, mortification of the flesh, and a solitary Life of contemplation and rigorous discipline. It was recognized very early that the life of the anchorite was not possible for everyone, and so the ‘coenobitic’ tradition arose in which monks no longer lived alone but shared the life of dedication to God in communities. Intimate attachments, or desires for such attachments, are not unknown within the walls of monasteries, but they are regarded as intrusive distractions and firmly discouraged.

  Although learning was not a necessary feature of monastic life, the libraries of the monasteries preserved the learning of the past, and attracted those monks who had scholarly interests. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the monasteries led an intellectual revival, and were pre-eminent in history and biography.16 Perhaps monastic discipline and the absence of close personal ties not only facilitated the individual’s relation with God, but also fostered scholarship.