Churchill's Black Dog and Other Phenomena of the Human Mind

by Anthony Storr

  The mid-life crisis may occur at any time between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five. When an artist lives long enough to be said to have entered a third period of creative production, he will usually be in his fifties or sixties.

  Third-period works are those of an artist who is looking inward rather than outward. He is concerned with an internal process rather than with appealing to his public. Very often, third-period works are unconventional in form. They seem to be exploring remote, suprapersonal areas of experience and may, for this reason, appear incomprehensible. The last quartets of Beethoven, which exhibit all the qualities to which I have just referred, were initially considered impossibly “difficult.” From Beethoven’s death in 1827 until the beginning of this century, performances of the last five quartets were rare. Today, they are among our most treasured musical possessions; but everyone who knows anything about music agrees that this last set of quartets is in an entirely different category from the six of Opus 18, or the five quartets which are usually grouped together as belonging to the middle period.

  The same kind of late change can be seen in the works of Liszt, Brahms, Richard Strauss, and J. S. Bach. It can also be detected in the novels of Henry James, whose three periods are sometimes facetiously referred to as those of James I, James II, and James the Old Pretender.

  Michelangelo is an interesting example of an artist who is claimed by Jaques as having had a long fallow period in mid-life, between forty and fifty-five. What Jaques does not mention is that Michelangelo turned to poetry. The majority of his sonnets were written during the last thirty years of his long life. A very late change of style can be detected in the last sculpture of Michelangelo, the Rondanini Pietà, on which he was still working six days before his death at the age of eighty-nine. Michael Ayrton has described this piece in his introduction to Michelangelo’s sonnets:

  The Rondanini Pietà is a statue so stripped, so bare, so passive and so patient that all the spent strength of the titan is drained away and only the spirit remains within a slim and fragile shell of stone.… The Dead Christ, slim and worn as a sea-washed bone, is as remote from the all-conquering athlete of The Last Judgement as sleep is from earthquake. The thrust is gone, the weight is gone, the articulation no longer describes energy. In the Rondanini Pietà is the still centre.18

  Enough has been said to illustrate the point that, even toward the end of life, psychological changes are still taking place. There is often a lessening of interest in interpersonal relationships. Both Jung and Freud survived into their eighties; and both almost abandoned interest in psychotherapy in favor of abstract ideas. Instead of being concerned with conventional achievement or with impressing others, there is a wish to be rid of superfluities, a greater concern with essentials. So far as we know, man is the only creature who can see his own death coming. The realization concentrates the mind wonderfully. He prepares for death by freeing himself from mundane goals and attachments, and turns toward the cultivation of his own interior garden. This is surely the common factor which links Jaques’s “constructive resignation” with Erikson’s “ego integrity” and Jung’s “individuation.”

  We are living in a culture in which the proportion of the elderly and old is constantly increasing. At the same time, unemployment is a major problem, and one which brings increasing pressure on those in work to seek early retirement. It is important that psychologists and psychiatrists should devote more attention to adult development, and to increasing our understanding of psychological changes taking place in older people. It is still too often the case that retirement is seen as having to give up work because of incapacity, and hence often accompanied by depression. It is known that a good many people die shortly after losing a spouse. I am impressed with the number who die shortly after retirement, though I cannot give statistics. My friend Kingsley Martin, the famous editor of the New Statesman, dreaded retirement because, he said, all the editors he had known had died within two years of doing so. Within three years of his own retirement, he had a stroke. Although he did not die, he was never really well again.

  Suppose that properly controlled studies demonstrate that the processes we see taking place in creative people are examples of a more general pattern, a part of normal human development. Our attitude to retirement might change, and the prospects of keeping our aging population well and happy might improve. If retirement could be looked upon as an opportunity for self-development and fulfillment rather than as a kind of defeat, it would greatly increase the happiness of a large number who now regard the prospect with dread, and also encourage them to get out of the way of the young. Perhaps we should all retire at fifty. There seems no realistic prospect of decreasing the number of the unemployed in most Western countries in the foreseeable future.

  NOTES

  1. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–64), 7:264.

  2. G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), p. 10.

  3. Ibid., pp. 11, 12.

  4. C. P. Snow, The Physicists (London: Macmillan, 1981), pp. 132–33.

  5. Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965).

  6. John H. Crook, The Evolution of Human Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 83.

  7. Erikson, Childhood and Society, p. 259.

  8. Daniel J. Levinson, with Charlotte N. Darrow, The Seasons of a Man’s Life (New York: Knopf, 1978).

  9. George E. Vaillant, Adaptation to Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977).

  10. L. M. Terman and Melita H. Oden, The Gifted Child Grows Up (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947).

  11. C. G. Jung, “The Aims of Psychotherapy,” in Collected Works, 20 vols., trans. R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953–79), vol. 16, para. 83.

  12. Quoted in William McGuire, Bollingen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 20.

  13. Jung, “The Stages of Life,” in Collected Works, vol. 8, para. 772.

  14. Ibid., para. 775.

  15. Elliott Jaques, “Death and the Mid-Life Crisis,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 46, part 4 (1965). Reprinted in Work, Creativity and Social Justice (London: Heinemann, 1970), pp. 38–63.

  16. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Lawrence Grant White (New York: Pantheon, 1948), p. 1.

  17. Anthony Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self (New York: Free Press, 1988).

  18. Michael Ayrton, introduction to The Sonnets of Michelangelo, trans. Elizabeth Jennings (London: Folio Society, 1961), pp. 14–15.

  7

  Psychoanalysis and Creativity

  ALTHOUGH FREUD’S WRITINGS on art and artists constitute a comparatively small fraction of his total output, the editors of the English Standard Edition list twenty-two references to writings “dealing mainly or largely with Art, Literature or the theory of Aesthetics.”1 Freud’s papers “Leonardo da Vinci,” “The Moses of Michelangelo,” and “Dostoevsky and Parricide” will be known to every student of his work.

  There is no doubt that Freud had a deep appreciation, and love, of poetry and other forms of literature. His schooling had made him familiar with the Latin and Greek classics, and, throughout his life, he read widely, not only in German, but also in English, French, Italian, and Spanish. After Freud abandoned neuropathology for the study and treatment of neuroses, his writings contain far more references to novelists and playwrights, more especially to Shakespeare and to Goethe, than to the writings of other psychiatrists.

  Freud’s own talent as a writer was recognized early in his life. When he was only seventeen, he wrote to his friend Emil Fluss:

  At the same time my professor told me—and he is the first person who ventured to tell me this—that I had what Herder so neatly calls an “idiotic” style, i.e. a style at once correct and characteristic. I was duly surprised at this amazing fact and hasten to spread the news of this happy event
abroad as far and wide as possible—the first of its kind. To you, for instance, who, I am sure, have until now not been aware that you are exchanging letters with a German stylist. So now I would counsel you, as a friend, not as one with a vested interest—preserve them—bind them together—guard them well—you never know.2

  In 1930, Freud became the fourth recipient of the Goethe Prize for Literature awarded by the city of Frankfurt. He could hardly have written so well himself if he had been unable to appreciate style in literature, but his aesthetic appreciation of the other arts was far more limited. Music, for example, was actually distasteful to him. When Freud was a boy, his sister Anna began to have music lessons. But the sound of her practicing disturbed the studies of the wunderkind and Freud’s parents had the offending piano removed from the apartment. Freud’s own children were not allowed to pursue music in the home, and his nephew Harry wrote of him: “He despised music and considered it solely as an intrusion.… He never went to a concert and hardly to the theater.”3 Had Freud been musical, he would have been forced to pay more attention to aesthetic form, since the content of music cannot be verbally defined with any precision, while its effect, at any rate in classical music, is highly dependent upon the forms chosen by the composer. However, as Freud modestly acknowledged in his paper “The Moses of Michelangelo,” aesthetic form remained a puzzle to him:

  I may say at once that I am no connoisseur in art, but simply a layman. I have often observed that the subject-matter of works of art has a stronger attraction for me than their formal and technical qualities, though to the artist their value lies first and foremost in these latter. I am unable rightly to appreciate many of the methods used and the effects obtained in art. I state this so as to secure the reader’s indulgence for the attempt I propose to make here.

  Nevertheless, works of art do exercise a powerful effect on me, especially those of literature and sculpture, less often of painting. This has occasioned me, when I have been contemplating such things, to spend a long time before them trying to apprehend them in my own way, i.e. to explain to myself what their effect is due to. Wherever I cannot do this, as for instance with music, I am almost incapable of obtaining any pleasure. Some rationalistic, or perhaps analytic, turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected and what it is that affects me.

  This has brought me to recognize the apparently paradoxical fact that precisely some of the grandest and most overwhelming creations of art are still unresolved riddles to our understanding. We admire them, we feel overawed by them, but we are unable to say what they represent to us. I am not sufficiently well-informed to know whether this fact has already been remarked upon; possibly, indeed, some writer on aesthetics has discovered that this state of intellectual bewilderment is a necessary condition when a work of art is to achieve its greatest effects. It would only be with the greatest reluctance that I could bring myself to believe in any such necessity.4

  Freud’s disclaimer was not false modesty. His lack of aesthetic appreciation of the visual arts is attested from another source. Freud was a passionate collector of antiquities, especially of Roman, Etruscan, Assyrian, and Egyptian statuettes. In May 1938, a few days before Freud’s journey to England from Nazi-occupied Vienna on June 4, the photographer Edmund Engelman recorded for posterity the appearance of that famous apartment at Berggasse 19.5 Freud’s consulting room and study are overflowing with an unbelievable number of antique statuettes, crowded together so closely that the outline of any individual piece is hardly discernible. These are not the rooms of an aesthete, but those of a compulsive collector. Freud once told Jung that, were he to suffer from a neurosis, it would be of obsessional type. His accumulation of objects and the manner in which he arranged them bears this out.

  Freud’s principal interest, therefore, was in the subject matter of works of art, not in the skill, style, or manner in which they were presented. In An Autobiographical Study, Freud wrote that analysis “can do nothing toward elucidating the nature of the artistic gift, nor can it explain the means by which the artist works—artistic technique.”6 And in his paper on Dostoyevsky, he wrote, “Before the problem of the creative artist analysis must, alas, lay down its arms.”7

  Since content, rather than style, was the problem to which Freud addressed himself, it was reasonable that he should apply the same method of interpretation to works of art as he did to dreams, fantasies, and neurotic symptoms. The subjects which an artist selects, and the ways in which he chooses to present those subjects are, of course, partly dictated by the conventions of his time. But his choices are also determined partly by his personality and by his personal history, even though, in some instances, he may himself be unconscious of the connection.

  As an example of Freud’s procedure, one cannot do better than turn to his essay on Leonardo. In recent years, this monograph of 1910 has been somewhat discredited, since Freud’s interpretation of a fantasy memory of Leonardo’s, in which a bird is supposed to have struck his lips with its tail, has been shown to be based upon a mistranslation. The bird was a kite and not a vulture; and whereas vultures can be shown to have mythological connections with the mother, kites cannot. However, this error of Freud’s does not invalidate the other interpretations which he advances.

  Freud is careful to point out that he does not regard Leonardo as a neurotic, although he suggests that he may have had some obsessional traits of character. On the basis of slender information, Freud nevertheless builds up a convincing explanation of Leonardo’s homosexual orientation. Leonardo was an illegitimate child, and for his first few years lived only with his mother. Freud supposes, with reason, that the absence of a father combined with the excessive caresses of a lonely mother might well have made heterosexuality difficult of achievement. When Freud comes to discuss Leonardo’s paintings, what interests him is the presumed relation of their content to the circumstances of Leonardo’s childhood. The famous, ambiguous smile which appears on the faces of some of Leonardo’s subjects is traced back to a presumedly similar smile on the face of the artist’s mother; and the androgynous appearance of some of his portraits is attributed to Leonardo’s homosexuality. Freud comments at some length upon the picture of the Virgin and Child with St. Anne.8 As many critics have observed, St. Anne seems hardly older than her daughter, the Virgin Mary. Freud first notes that the subject of mother, grandmother, and child may have suggested itself to Leonardo because, once he had been removed from the sole care of his mother, he was brought up in a household which included his paternal grandmother as well as his stepmother. Freud goes on to suggest that the similarity in age between the Virgin and St. Anne may be a reflection of the fact that Leonardo did, in effect, have two mothers: his real mother and then his stepmother, who was also supposed to have been devoted to him. As it appears that this subject is one rarely chosen by artists, Freud’s interpretations carry conviction. However, this method of interpretation can only be applied to representational art. What, one wonders, would Freud have said if he had been confronted by a canvas of Mark Rothko’s? It can also be said, with justice, that Freudian interpretation always leads back to the artist’s personality: that is, it may reveal something about the artist, but does not tell us much about the work of art itself.

  It has sometimes been alleged that, because Freud used the same methods of interpretation for works of art as he did for neurotic symptoms, he did not distinguish between the two. But it must be remembered, as Richard Wollheim has pointed out in a lecture on Freud and the interpretation of art, that Freud was aiming at a general theory of how the mind works, and that his interpretation of art appears, at any rate at first sight, to be consistent with such a theory. We all express, in our speech and in our actions, desires and wishes of which we are only partially conscious, to which psychoanalytic interpretation can be applied. There is no reason to exclude works of art from this kind of scrutiny. In the Freudian scheme, works of art are regarded as being largely the result of subli
mation; that is, of a mechanism by which instinctual impulses are diverted from direct expression and transformed into something more acceptable to society. Although sublimation is technically classified as a mechanism of defense, it is described by Anna Freud as pertaining “more to the study of the normal than to that of neurosis.”9 However, although sublimation is a mechanism of defense employed by normal people, Freud was evidently of the opinion that artists needed to, or were driven to, employ sublimation more than most of us, and were therefore closer to neurosis than the average. As late as 1917, in the twenty-third Introductory Lecture on Psycho-Analysis, Freud wrote:

  An artist is once more in rudiments an introvert, not far removed from neurosis. He is oppressed by excessively powerful instinctual needs. He desires to win honour, power, wealth, fame and the love of women; but he lacks the means for achieving these satisfactions. Consequently, like any other unsatisfied man, he turns away from reality and transfers all his interest, and his libido too, to the wishful constructions of his life of phantasy, whence the path might lead to neurosis.10

  Freud considered that fantasy was derived from play, and regarded both activities in a negative light since they were, in his view, a denial of, or turning away from, reality:

  The growing child, when he stops playing, gives up nothing but the link with real objects; instead of playing, he now phantasies. He builds castles in the air and creates what are called daydreams.11

  The creative writer does the same as the child at play. He creates a world of phantasy which he takes very seriously—that is which he invests with large amounts of emotion—while separating it sharply from reality.12