Grief and the Healing Arts

Creativity as Therapy

Sandra L. Bertman, Sandra Bertman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780895031891
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351865524
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

For nearly three decades, Sandra Bertman has been exploring the power of the arts and belief--symbols, metaphors, stories--to alleviate psychological and spiritual pain not only of patients, grieving family members, and affected communities but also of the nurses, clergy and physicians who minister to them. Her training sessions and clinical interventions are based on the premise that bringing out the creative potential inherent in each of us is just as relevant-- perhaps more so--as psychiatric theory and treatment models since grief and loss are an integral part of life. Thus, this work was compiled to illuminate the many facets that link grief, counseling, and creativity. The multiple strategies suggested in these essays will help practitioners enlarge their repertoire of hands-on skills and foster introspection and empathy in readers.

LESSONS FROM CULTURES OLD AND NEW

Culture, Creativity and Death

J. Havelka

Creativity relates to death. Indeed, in its fullest meaning, human culture attempts to create a vision of reality that transcends death of our mortal existence and projects it into the sphere of immortality. Culture is a perennial and massive compensatory activity of humankind. It provides a lofty inspiration and promise of transcendental potentialities of human beings in their encounter with the life-threatening and life-diminishing potency of death. Culture is a noble attempt to escape life’s impermanency by promoting the timeless aspects of our existence. Thus, culture will always remain a heroic act of humanity’s final victory over death. Creativity, which is the expressive, formal mode of every culture, is a vehicle of human transformation through the trust and contact with the universal “Wholeness” [1, 2].

From time immemorial, human beings have been searching for something which is permanent and imperishable. In a creative act they try to prevent, in a unique way that is both noble and pathetic, the impending threat of mortality and the end. Humankind past, present, and future follows Virgil’s celebrated dictum: “Exigi monumentum aere perennius”—‘I have created a monument enduring in eternity.’ All human cultures create works of art in stone, silk, gold, silver, marble, on paper, leather, in sound, movement, and words that are expected to withstand decay, destruction, and death.

Thus, we all use our creative potentialities to defeat and to mitigate our most pervasive fear, that of passing away, that of impermanence and the loss of personal significance. In endless shapes of artistic forms there emerges the central motive of human existence: to attain both a personal significance beyond the threat of death while still living and a claim to immortality through the memory of others.

In essence, it is a death-denial that forms the driving force behind every genuine creative act. In this context, human creativity is “cosmocentric”: it both mitigates our inevitable diminishment and molds our destiny into a continuity that endures in the universal context. There the Promethean spirit of our individuality challenges the mystery of Thanatos. In whatever walk of life, whatever human condition we find ourselves, this cosmocentric, creatively oriented tendency penetrates our living. Through this unique process of liberation from the fear of death, we eventually discover the most basic meaningfulness of our existence. It is meaningfulness through creative intentionality. Such intentionality, as Rollo May correctly notices, is life’s organized patterning, which gives meaning to our experience [3, 4]. We intend to be to such an extent that the fear of weakens.

Since death appears to undermine our wish to endure, we can counteract it through a creative act that protects and rescues our endangered existence. To face fully dying and death becomes possible through this intentional creative self-actualization. If, however, this self-actualization fails to materialize, it could lead to what Maslow [5] calls a “Jonah syndrome,” which is the fear of our potential greatness. This is essentially a deficiency condition that prevents our inner growth, restricts the range of our capacities, and inevitably leads us to anticipate death with horror.

Those who suffer from this fear syndrome keep retreating more and more from any possible risk and thus fail to challenge their own death. They cannot cope with the threat of disintegration, and progressively lose control of their vital energies that nourish every genuine creative intention. While sinking into a deeper anxiety about death, they run away from life. They mistrust their own unique meaningfulness. The “Jonah syndrome” characterizes a weakened, anti-heroic personality incapable of creative determination, be it in artistic expression or more generally in the process of higher maturation.

Contrasted with the “fear of greatness” is Tillich’s “courage to be,” the positive aspect of every creative act in its most fundamental encounter with the reality of death [6]. To encounter death courageously is to offer a challenge to our transience through the creatively expressed significance of every existence.

Generally speaking, we choose from two alternatives: we either defensively repress the thought of death or overcome it through a creative act. A non-repressive denial of death occurs in human creativity where our cosmocentric tendency is symbolically expressed as timeless and is oriented toward the universal Wholeness, where death loses importance.

Overcoming the fear of greatness requires a specific courage, a courage to create in spite of the natural biological limits imposed upon us by bodily death. In order to challenge this inevitable reality, we decide to act out something that allows us to reach beyond the boundaries of our physical limits. Through any genuinely creative expression, and its self-actualizing energy flow, we free ourselves, even if only temporarily, from death’s universal levelization. In any real, creative act of any culture, we attain a bold denial of death, which is, in a sense, the most essential form of human individuation in its progress toward spiritual maturity.

Creative courage shapes our destiny, unrestricted by the inevitable polarity of our birth and death, and, by symbolically offering a vision of reality that bypasses both of these, aims at cosmic unity. Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Tolstoy, Rodin, Balzac, and Pushkin—all these and many others—forge human destiny into an imaginative edifice that stands as a monument for the denial of death’s importance. These outstanding creators courageously formulated symbols, metaphors, myths, and poetical language that crystallize human potentially into its universal significance and thus exempt it from impermanence [7].

Although works of art sometimes deal with human fear, rage, violence, alienation, and hopelessness, they intimate a richer and deeper grasp of existence, thus promoting in us the courage to endure and overcome even the extreme adversities and tragedies that affect our lives and our dying. Without this creative courage to be, no work of art has its central meaning: to dissolve and transform our fears and anxieties that accompany every thought of death. In this context it is significant to note that both modern and contemporary art underplay or ignore the manifestations and meaning of death (entire movements such as Impressionism, Fauvism, Abstract Expressionism, and Cubism are examples). In contemporary art, the emphasis is mostly on the incidental, marginal, and often trivially decorative, an art that lacks a creative intention and courage to face and transcend mortality and mostly favors brutal commentaries on life’s violence or inane superficialities. Thematically and formally, most of modern art misses the sense of transcendence central to any genuine culture, and is disappointingly aiming at fashionable avant-gardism through a search for novelties for the sake of novelties, with a complete absence of spirituality.

Furthermore, creativity can be defined as a unique mental process leading to the expansion of experienced reality beyond the already established categorization and classification of it. It is a state of discovery, a new understanding of reality offered to others in an unrepeatable fashion. In it, the creative person formulates an expression based on the subjective, and thus his or her unique inner vision. The created expression becomes a symbolic translation of an internal insight. Only such a creatively shaped vision or insight can be communicated and indirectly shared. At this level the creative individual establishes contact, involvement, and engagement with others in terms of a unique interpersonal sharing. Although artists can never directly render the inner process of their vision of reality, they promote, in viewers and listeners, experiences of expanded reality of their own.

Creativity is at work not only in poetry, music, painting, ballet, sculpture, and the minor arts but also in the new establishment and reorganization of personal relationships. This creative involvement of one person with another person reveals new feelings of inner growth, new ways of confirming the other individual, and a deeper, sharper, and more spontaneous awareness of them. Genuinely creative people want to induce in others change, growth, and a maturation of relationships. They desire an enriched involvement with another and thus hope to prevent in themselves (and in others) personal and even social isolation, alienation, and an unhealthy introverted ego-preoccupation.¹

The non-creative person, however, seems to be missing the basic precondition for promoting creativity, namely, to be engaged in an activity that invariably relates to the enrichment and expansion of one’s own and other people’s lives. Non-creative individuals miss that base from which their life is actively directed toward an original discovery and a deeper development of the most significant human values that always point beyond individual death toward life’s transcendence. Also, these individuals seem to be unaware of the vital connection with the realities of life that are deeper and richer than the personal achievement required by social conditioning. For non-creative individuals, any work in whatever field of activity is done primarily in order to succeed within the socially approved sphere of behavior. In contrast, the creative person is active and committed as it were “sub specie aeternitatis,” that is, from the point of view of cosmic and thus eternal meaningfulness that transcends death [7].

A further aspect of the creative person’s involvement is a subjective tendency to actualize the self, to harvest potentialities that can directly or indirectly stimulate other people’s growth. Essentially, it is a potent urge to expand in every dimension that of being meaningfully alive. This creative commitment is distinctly different from the ego’s desire and security-seeking orientation, which is threatened by the prospect of death. This vital creative involvement is active beyond the fear of life and consequently beyond the fear of death, which characterizes the ego’s primary deficiency. This essential creative motivation is engaged in a life-affirming commitment.

In some, this creative tendency may remain hidden under various strata of psychological defense, organized as a protecting wall around the safety- and security-seeking ego. These defensive strategies absorb our mental energies and commit them to the exclusive services of the threatened ego; the result is the rapid weakening and eventually the exhaustion of our basic mental energies. Under these conditions human neurosis sets in.

Should, however, these captive energies become free-flowing again, and differently employed, there could occur a condition of creative “freeing,” which strongly facilitates the person’s capacities for a healthier transformation of the ego. While preoccupation with the fear of death evokes a variety of psychological defenses, reactivity liberates us to overcome their damaging influences.

We experience ourselves more spontaneously when freed from defensive and eventually neurotic limitations; we open ourselves boldly to the as yet untold experience, and are exempted from oppressive anxieties of deat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Table of Contents
• Grief and the Healing Arts: Introduction
• The Five Stages of Grief
• The Arts, Personal Griefs, Professional Roles
• Some Ways Caregivers Use the Arts for Themselves and for Those They Companion
• Lessons from Cultures Old and New
• Basic Needs of Grieving People
• List of Contributors
• Index