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

by Anthony Storr

  If we try to put together these varying notions of dreams—that they are concerned with mastering disturbing experiences; that they are sometimes attempts at solving problems; and that they may be a way of processing information—we might hazard the proposition that dreams are in some way an attempt of the mind to order its own experience. This is borne out by the fact that so many dreams are cast in the form of a story which links together the various episodes of the dream, however absurd or incongruous these separate episodes may appear.

  Many forms of play are also concerned with order. In his book Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga, the Dutch historian, convincingly supposes that play is the primeval soil in which all cultural manifestations are rooted. Without play, we should have neither craft nor art, neither poetry nor music. Huizinga points out that

  in some languages the manipulation of musical instruments is called “playing,” to wit, in the Arabic language on the one hand and the Germanic and Slavonic on the other. Since this semantic understanding between East and West can hardly be ascribed to borrowing or coincidence, we have to assume some deep-rooted psychological reason for so remarkable a symbol of the affinity between music and play.34

  Games, also, are a way of ordering experience. Games allow for the controlled expression and mastery of competitive and aggressive impulses within a structure of rules and defined area or framework like a playing field.

  So it appears that the three activities, play, fantasy, and dreaming, which Freud linked together as escapist or hallucinatory, can equally well be regarded as adaptive; as attempts to come to terms with reality, rather than to escape from it; as ways of selecting from, and making new combinations out of, our experience of both the external world and the inner world of the psyche. None of these activities is as far removed from “thinking” as they appeared to him; and, as we have seen, Freud considered that a principal function of thinking was to master the material of the external world psychically.

  If Freud had been able to accept that play, fantasy, and dreaming were attempts to come to terms with, and master, reality rather than to escape from it, he would not have had to lay down his arms before the problem of the creative artist nor have felt that the grandest creations of art were unsolved riddles to his understanding. Art and science, though very different activities, have certain aims in common. Both are concerned with seeking order in complexity, and unity in diversity. As the Gestalt psychologists were the first to affirm, the human tendency toward pattern-making is inborn and inescapable. We cannot see three dots but that we make them into a triangle. Human beings have to order their experience, both spatially and temporally, as part of their biological adaptation to reality, and the forces which impel them to do so are just as “instinctive” as sex. Although Freud did not call it that, I am sure that he appreciated the aesthetic aspect of scientific discovery; the intense satisfaction which accompanies solving a problem or inventing a new explanatory principle. The “eureka” experience is a pleasure closely allied to aesthetic appreciation; for part of what we admire about a painting or a piece of music is the order which the artist has imposed upon what would otherwise have appeared disconnected or chaotic. The nearest Freud comes to acknowledging this kind of pleasure is in his book on jokes. Having recognized that all jokes are tendentious, that is, ways of expressing sexual or aggressive feelings, he reluctantly admits that the techniques of jokes are themselves sources of pleasure. When things which appear incongruous are linked together, Freud supposes that we are economizing our expenditure of psychic energy. This brings pleasure, but of a rather minor variety. Freud calls it a “fore-pleasure”; that is, a slight pleasure which leads on to and makes possible a much greater pleasure. Freud supposes that the form in which writers dress up their fantasies is a kind of fore-pleasure or “incentive bonus” designed to bribe the reader into enjoying something much deeper; the work’s imaginative content, which the writer had to clothe in enticing form in order to make it acceptable.

  Because Freud thought of the id as a chaotic cauldron of seething instincts entirely governed by the pleasure principle, in which form was notably lacking, he regarded the need to select, to order, and to impose form upon experience as predominantly a conscious, rational phenomenon. Modern psychoanalysts, particularly Marion Milner and Anton Ehrenzweig, have realized that the drive toward order arises unconsciously. Indeed, Ehrenzweig called his last, posthumously published book The Hidden Order of Art.35

  Sir Ernst Gombrich, in his book The Sense of Order,36 links man’s need for pattern-making with his exploratory tendencies. In discovering more about our environment we create internal patterns or schemata. By doing so, we reduce the need to pay equal attention to every impinging stimulus, and only need to take notice of those stimuli which are novel; that is, those which do not fit in with our preformed schemata. A simple instance of this is descending a straight staircase. We only need to pay detailed attention to where it begins and ends, because we assume that each stair will be the same height and width as its fellows. Information theory, originally derived from practical work with telephone cables and other carriers of information, has thrown light on how we economize our intake by taking parts for wholes, and only pay attention to the unexpected. If we had no prior conception of regularity, we could not begin to make corrections to it; and if there were no regularities at all, our environment would be entirely unpredictable; a nightmare, as Gombrich calls it. One modern theory of schizophrenia suggests that sufferers lack some aspect of selective discrimination. Overwhelmed by stimuli which they can neither order nor disregard, they are compelled to withdraw as far as possible from the impact of the world.

  As we have seen, Freud’s idea was that the motivation of the artist and the motivation of the scientist could be sharply distinguished. The driving force behind the artist’s need to create was unsatisfied instinct, expressing itself originally in escapist fantasy. The driving force behind the scientist’s activity (about which Freud says little) is to master the material of the external world psychically. I hope I have convinced you that these two creative activities have more in common than Freud supposed. Both artists and scientists are concerned with creating order, a basic drive or need which, because we share it, makes us able to appreciate, and perhaps envy, what the great creators achieve.

  This way of looking at creative endeavor raises an obvious problem. If scientific and artistic creativity have so much in common, in what ways are they different? It is clear that a scientific hypothesis is not a work of art, nor is a work of art a scientific hypothesis.

  Leonard Meyer, discussing this question in his paper “Concerning the Sciences, the Arts—AND the Humanities,”37 points out that scientists are discovering something which is already there, like the double helix, whereas artists create something which has never previously existed, like the C-sharp minor quartet of Beethoven. We assume, with good reason, that the structure of the DNA molecule was, and always has been, the same. Watson and Crick did not create its structure but discovered it. But nothing like the C-sharp minor quartet existed before Beethoven composed it. He did not discover it; he created it.

  Meyer goes on to point out that there is a temporal progress in science which makes even the greatest generalizations, like Newton’s law of universal gravitation, out of date. It follows that scientists have no need to study in detail the original papers of Newton or any other innovator, since their discoveries will have become part of the general scientific edifice.

  The same is not true of works of art. Although styles change in the course of time, Beethoven is not an advance on Mozart, nor Picasso on Cézanne: they are simply different. Students of music and painting need to study all four. Meyer discusses a number of other differences which I need not pursue. What I am concerned with here is the similarity between the actual process of creative discovery as it takes place in the mind of an artist and that in the mind of a scientist. A new scientific hypothesis and a new work of art have in common that both are the product of men
tal activity in which abstraction, fantasy, and playing with various combinations of concepts all take part. Often, both are concerned with combining and transcending opposites. In my paper “Individuation and the Creative Process,”38 I have taken as a scientific example Newton’s synthesis between the discoveries of Kepler and those of Galileo, which resulted in a theory which transcended both: the law of universal gravitation. This is a classic example of how two sets of laws which were previously thought to be entirely separate could be both reconciled and superseded by a new hypothesis.

  My example from the arts was Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge,” the movement originally designed as the final movement of the Quartet in B-flat, opus 130. Martin Cooper wrote of this:

  What grips the listener is the dramatic experience of forcing—for there is frequently a sense of violence in this mastery—two themes which have, by nature, nothing in common, to breed and produce a race of giants, episodes or variations that have no parallel in musical history.39

  Newton’s synthesis is concerned with the facts of the external world; Beethoven’s with what he found in his internal world. It seems to me probable that the mental processes employed by each man of genius in seeking his solution were not dissimilar.

  Whereas the scientist is pointed toward discovering order in the external world, the artist is directed toward creating order within: toward making sense out of his subjective experience. What points the scientist in one direction, the artist in the other, is still obscure—although Liam Hudson has thrown some light upon the subject in his studies of the temperamental differences between young people who choose the arts and those who choose the sciences as subjects of study. Both types of creativity are, I believe, motivated by a “divine discontent” which is part of man’s biological endowment. Mystery and disorder spur man to discovery, to the creation of new hypotheses which bring order and pattern to the maze of phenomena. But mystery and disorder pertain to our own natures as well as to the external world. I venture to suggest that, just as it is inconceivable that all the laws of Nature will ever be discovered, so it is equally impossible to believe that the complexities of human nature can ever be grasped in their entirety.

  Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,

  Or what’s a heaven for?40

  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), 21:213–14.

  2. Sigmund Freud, “Some Early Unpublished Letters,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 50 (1969):425.

  3. Harry Freud, “My Uncle Sigmund,” in Freud As We Knew Him, ed. Hendrik M. Ruitenbeek (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973), p.313.

  4. Freud, Standard Edition, 13:211–12.

  5. Edmund Engelman, Bergasse 19: Sigmund Freud’s Home and Offices, Vienna 1938 (New York: Basic Books, 1976).

  6. Freud, Standard Edition, 20:65.

  7. Ibid., 21:177.

  8. Ibid., 11:59–137.

  9. Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (London: Hogarth Press, 1968), p. 44.

  10. Freud, Standard Edition, 16:376.

  11. Ibid., 9:145.

  12. Ibid., 9:144.

  13. Ibid., 9:146.

  14. Ibid., 12:218.

  15. Ibid., 12:219.

  16. Ibid.

  17. Ibid., 12:224.

  18. Ibid., 9:8.

  19. Ibid., 12:223–4.

  20. Ibid., 12:221.

  21. Ibid., 21:212.

  22. David Stenhouse, The Evolution of Intelligence; A General Theory and Some of Its Implications (London: Allen and Unwin, 1974), p. 31.

  23. Ibid., p. 67.

  24. Quoted in Paul Arthur Schilpp, ed., Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist (Evanston, Ill.: Library of Living Philosophers, 1949), pp. 7–8.

  25. Quoted in Antonina Vallentin, Einstein: A Biography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1954), p. 9.

  26. Freud, Standard Edition, 12:221.

  27. Ibid., 12:222.

  28. Ibid., 7:156.

  29. Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years (London: Greenwood Press, 1956), pp. 60–61.

  30. Freud, Standard Edition, 4:xxxii.

  31. Ernest Jones, The Young Freud 1856–1900, vol. 1 of Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), p. 388.

  32. Charles Rycroft, The Innocence of Dreams (London: Hogarth Press, 1979), p. 124.

  33. Stanley Palombo, Dreaming and Memory: A New Information-Processing Model (New York: Basic Books, 1978).

  34. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1970), p. 182.

  35. Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art: A Study in the Psychology of Artistic Imagination (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967).

  36. Ernst Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (Oxford: Phaidon, 1979).

  37. Leonard Meyer, “Concerning the Sciences, the Arts – AND the Humanities,” Critical Inquiry 1 (September 1974): 163–217.

  38. Anthony Storr, “Individuation and the Creative Process,” Journal of Analytical Psychology 28 (1983):329–43.

  39. Martin Cooper, Beethoven: The Last Decade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 388–89.

  40. Robert Browning, Andrea del Sarto, lines 97–98.

  8

  Intimations of Mystery

  IN HIS LECTURE “Belief and Creativity” William Golding writes, “I have always felt that a writer’s books should be as different from each other as possible.”1 He doesn’t tell us why, and professes to envy those authors who write the same book over and over again. I suspect that he is a man who feels compelled to challenge himself; always to set himself new tasks, to solve new problems. I have just reread all his published novels, and they are indeed so different from one another that it is hard to delineate connecting threads. The studied pastiche of Rites of Passage is remote from the visionary passion of The Spire. The ostensibly autobiographical Free Fall has next to nothing in common with The Inheritors. Yet, because this series of very different books is the work of one man, however many-sided, it must be possible to find some linking factors, some vision of man’s nature which runs through all his work.

  Bertrand Russell wrote of Joseph Conrad, “He thought of civilized and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths.”2 I think these words apply equally to William Golding. Although Golding calls himself an optimist, there is little evidence in his novels to support that claim. The madness of violence, of lust, and of fanaticism seem always just below the surface. Like Koestler, Golding sees man as a species which is irredeemably flawed, and which is only too likely to bring about its own destruction. This is, of course, particularly obvious in what is still his most popular book, Lord of the Flies. Has Golding ever read accounts of those American experiments in which boys were taken to a holiday camp, divided into two groups, and set against each other? The experiments had to be brought to an end lest murder be committed. Golding doesn’t need to read such mundane stuff. He knows it all already, both from his experience as a schoolmaster and from searching his own heart. “Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Spill her blood.”3 A savage chant and the putting on of war paint are enough to make Jack and his hunters lose their inhibitions against violence. The signal fire forgotten, it isn’t long before the sand is stained with human blood as well as with that of pigs.

  Sex, also, is more a matter of violent compulsion than of loving tenderness. Golding hates Freud, as well as Marx and Darwin. He calls them “the three most crashing bores of the Western world.”4 Yet, in The Inheritors, when Lok and Fa observe two of “the new people” having sexual intercourse, it looks to them like a fight:

  The two people beneath the tree were making noises fiercely as though they were quarrelling. In particular the woman had begun to hoot like an owl and Lok could h
ear Tuami gasping like a man who fights with an animal and does not think he will win. He looked down at them and saw that Tuami was not only lying with the fat woman but eating her as well for there was black blood running from the lobe of her ear.5

  Golding may dislike Freud, but this is precisely Freud’s picture of the child’s interpretation of the “primal scene”: “If children at this early age witness sexual intercourse between adults … they inevitably regard the sexual act as a sort of ill-treatment or act of subjugation: they view it, that is, in a sadistic sense.”6

  Sadism crops up in other places in Golding’s work. Evie, the tarty girl in The Pyramid, cries, “Hurt me, Olly! Hurt me—”7 But, at eighteen, he doesn’t know how to hurt her, nor how to adapt to the sexual rhythm she requires. Evie allows Captain Wilmot to beat her, and shocks the adolescent Oliver when her weals are displayed. In Pincher Martin, Mary so maddens Chris by her poised inaccessibility that he fantasizes:

  Those nights of imagined copulation, when one thought not of love nor sensation nor comfort nor triumph, but of torture rather, the very rhythm of the body reinforced by hissed ejaculations—take that and that! That for your pursed mouth and that for your pink patches, your closed knees, your impregnable balance on the high, female shoes—and that if it kills you for your magic and your isled virtue!8

  She agrees to go out with him, refuses to comply. Driving dangerously enough to scare her, he brings the car to a screaming stop and attempts to rape her on the verge of the road. In Free Fall, Sammy is frustrated by the utter passivity of Beatrice, the girl he adores but whom he cannot get to respond to him:

  What had been love on my part, passionate and reverent, what was to be a triumphant sharing, a fusion, the penetration of a secret, raising of my life to the enigmatic and holy level of hers became a desperately shoddy and cruel attempt to force a response from her somehow. Step by step we descended the path of sexual exploitation until the projected sharing had become an infliction.9