Psychoanalysis and Creativity in Everyday Life

Ordinary Genius

Gemma Corradi Fiumara

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135051419
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

Psychoanalysis and Creativity in Everyday Life: Ordinary Genius is an attempt to create a psychoanalytic space for the quest and questions of our everyday creativity. Official creativity is normally applauded to the point of obscuring all other types of creativity, with detrimental consequences for our psychic life. However, as Gemma Corradi Fiumara demonstrates, the creative force of ordinary subjects can be as vigorous as that of our acclaimed, official accomplishments.

Corradi Fiumara focuses on the unsung creativity which emerges from relationships and the world at large. She explores how understanding the operation of creative impulses in an everyday setting can crucially inform psychoanalytic clinical work. There are three main themes:

Donald Winnicott's Psychoanalytic Will

Melanie Klein and the Other Side of Genius

Genius: Ordinary and Extraordinary.

Psychoanalysis and Creativity in Everyday Life advocates an inclusionary view of human genius, and demonstrates that creativity and genius can be manifested in everyday life with the ordinary as its focus of attention. It will be key reading for psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists, philosophers and scholars in social studies.

1

Introductory Remarks

1. An epistemic space for ordinary genius

In the domain of the humanities, our psychoanalytic culture is both an addressive and an observational discipline – with therapeutic aims, moreover. In this area things primarily ‘exist’ if there is a cognitive/cultural space for them to develop. But then, when one happens to introduce an expression such as, for instance, ‘ordinary genius,’ it may resonate in our minds and almost function as a magnet in the pursuit of our concerns. For, in fact, we cannot ask the question ‘What is ordinary genius?’ It only exists as a worthy focus of attention if we are interested in the quest and question of the everyday, inconspicuous, silent forms of genius. And although it cannot be approached as a matter of factual research, once our attention has captured the psychic intensity of the question, it will definitely enhance the quality of observation, reflection and interaction.

At this point in the itinerary of hominisation we could in fact create the epistemic spaces for the quest(ion) of our everyday creativeness. What is advocated here is an inclusionary rather than exclusionary view; that is, the appreciation of creative agency in more others, even though ‘lesser’ others. Their creative force, their poiesis, might be just as vigorous as that of their authorial authorities – of their official geniuses. The resistance to standard culture, and the enhancement of psychodiversity, can be fruitfully contrasted with the common enchantment/authority derived from historic geniuses. In our everyday creative endeavours there is no claim to become sources of authority – as if in a turnover of epistemic power. ‘Theorists’ of ordinary genius only insist – and insist they do with acumen and farsightedness – that minds can be very different and also that they have some creativity to contribute. We could note in passing that the applications of official inventiveness in the domain of social life can also become disastrous: just think, for instance, about the horrendous derivatives of the right-wing and left-wing Hegelian heritage.

In order to create a stage for my thesis I should like to invoke a few remarks that are perhaps pertinent suggestions. Parsons, for one, suggests that a perception, or

the expression of feeling in a turn of phrase – all sorts of everyday things – may suddenly... show us ourselves and the world in a new light. These moments of illumination may be slight or epiphanic. Seeming to come from nowhere, they come from nowhere but within ourselves and … give us the sense of a deep internal process…¹

And of course renewed outlooks may bring about rapid changes. We begin by knowing little and believing much; sometimes ending up with an unsuspected hierarchisation of values. Whatever remains the same, we could tentatively say that the light is changing, and that we cannot find at noonday the pearly creative light of dawn.

Perhaps we could do well to reconnect the relative quiet of the analytic setting with the bustling world where our human creativeness – our ordinary genius – is persistently at work. In this way we could better differentiate what we call ordinary genius from the more official, exceptional forms of creativity. In fact, our common construal of (exceptional) genius is normally acclaimed to the point of rendering any other form of creativeness vulnerable to obscurity: eclipsed, foreclosed, ignored, silenced. Both ‘kinds’ of genius exist, of course, but ordinary genius seems usually neglected with undetectable, blinding consequences – as if we were immersed in a culture of forclusion or benumbment. And thus any discourse on creativity usually tilts towards forms of classical, historic, exceptional genius; this approach imbues our ‘normal’ world views – our current ontologies – to the point of excluding from our epistemic normality the ordinariness of our human creativity.

Interest in genius usually takes the form of an indirect exploration of the mind of the acclaimed geniuses, of enigmatic features that we strive to define. Almost as if genius was some fascinating, elusive entity or psychic character to be captured and revered. But we are not here interested in this question, because the creativity that we try to focus on does not pertain to scientific or artistic inventiveness. We would rather explore, for instance, that minimal, unsung creativeness surfacing from the immense variety of interpersonal relations with which we sustain the burden of life. And so, artistic or scientific genius is not our concern here. The aim is to appreciate, to take notice of, superior achievements or superlative quality in conducting obscure, ordinary, negligible affairs. Genius erupts into relationships and in the world in ways that require attention from our psychoanalytic domain. Beneath each and every creative nuance in our societal life lies an unacknowledged inventiveness that needs to be identified and appreciated. This is the creativity that we seek to explore and which we refer to as ‘ordinary genius.’ Of course it has always existed; and yet an effort to theorise the issue, to make it a focus of attention, may greatly enhance our capacities of insight.

By writing about the Psychopathology of Everyday Life² perhaps Freud meant to suggest that malady is not so exceptional or ineffable. Similarly, we could perhaps think that creativity is also no exception after all, and that it can be manifested in ordinary life. As Phillips and Taylor remark, by keeping the debate so exclusively about pathology the ‘mind doctors of the twentieth century’ have kept us and themselves in the dark about sanity, about our ordinary creativity.³ He also seems to suggest that if there are madnesses, there should surely be sanities; and sanities that are not simply the unlived lives of the supposedly sick. Sanities (virtues, qualities, genius) could perhaps be elaborated in the way that diagnoses of pathology are: ‘They should be contested like syndromes, debated as to their causes, and constitutions and outcomes, exactly as illnesses are.’⁴ One of the shortcomings of our definitory tendencies is that we may even come to regard our intellectual heritage – our itinerary of hominisation – in terms of what official geniuses have been doing or proclaiming that others should be doing; and thus the majority of creatures appear as excluded from the creativeness of humankind. But if we conceive of our intellectual history as a story of struggle for psychic survival and quality of life, then we could have doubts about clearly defined boundaries. Psychic life in fact is not a ‘given,’ which we try to name. It has to be actually shared and lived. Even the so-called ‘clinical material’ is not a given as it exists only if it is personally absorbed and represented. Formulating definitions would be close to essentialising our human manifestations. And thus we should appreciate the creative pragmatism of those who encourage us to explore a topic of interest without the constraint of a preliminary definition.⁵

As humanness is now thought to belong to everyone, so too creativeness can be recognised in everyone. Grotstein’s contributions seem to indirectly support this thesis. ‘What is a genius?’ he asks.

In my eyes a genius is one who sees patterns, structures or gestalten in an incipient or incomplete form … Put another way, a genius is one who sees through the camouflage of images and symbols and is in touch, so to speak, with the “thing-in-itself”… an experience that Bion terms a “transformation in O”.⁶

But then individuals capable of these psychic transformations are not so rare after all; they are quite real and frequently appear in everyday life. Running in the present book is in fact an inclination towards the very small, infinitesimal, momentary events that shape our worlds of experience. These lived occurrences also constitute the often invisible key moments identifiable in therapies as well as in the nodal points in our profound relationships. The underlying assumption being that growth is rooted in creatively lived experience.

In a historic perspective, the genius to interact with things that are different – as contrasted with our natural sympathy for what is similar – could perhaps be illustrated by the creation of a written language by the Sumerians.⁷ Even though pictograms already existed at the time, the most they could do was to enumerate objects or depict situations; they could not be used to communicate abstract thoughts or ambivalent affects. The written tradition was inaugurated when we became capable of achieving an unprecedented connection between distinct signs and distinct sounds, between two elements that do not resemble each other in the least. The gap that separates the use of pictograms from the use of writing is in fact so great that we can regard the ‘simple’ conjunction of graphic signs and specific sound vibrations as one of the major advances in the history of hominisation. And yet, it is not so easy to envisage a single individual genius inventing our written language. The inauguration of a written tradition is generally attributed to the Sumerians as a culture rather than to any particular individual who made the fateful connection. In fact the peaceful and agricultural Sumerians probably heeded the surrounding concert of nature and conversations so devotedly as to recognise the beauty and fascination of a variety of distinct sounds. The capacity to appreciate a sound so well that it can be sufficiently differentiated from others may be the precondition for linking it to a sign and thus disclose the immense perspective of a written tradition. From our capacity to communicate and record in writing we ‘quickly’ arrived to our globalised, on-line civilization.

Pristine authorship can thus be an illusion: innovative modes of thinking may well be at work even before an official genius proclaims them with sufficient clarity to determine paradigm changes. Even though a comprehensive logic capable of accounting for both affects and deductions has not been expressed in culture, it is possible (in principle, at least) that modes of relating that may generate a new rationality are already at work. It is not impossible that in Neanderthal times some members of the human community tended to ‘think Greek,’ that some of our contemporaries may incline to ‘think Neanderthal,’ and others still try to ‘think future.’

As if in passing, we could note that one of our official, historic geniuses – Galileo Galilei – happens to write:

Above all other stupendous inventions, what sublimity of mind must have been his who conceived how to communicate his most secret thoughts to any other person, though very far distant either in time or place, speaking with those who are in the Indies, speaking to those who are not yet born, nor shall be this thousand, or ten thousand years? And with no greater difficulty than the various collocation of twenty-four little characters upon paper?’⁸

Galilei says ‘What sublimity of mind must be his …,’ but perhaps theirs would be even more appropriate. While Galilei applauds the invention of written language, perhaps he seems to still think in terms of a single individual’s ‘sublimity of mind,’ rather than the mental sublimity of an entire community of ordinary people experimenting with signs and sounds.

This outlook may remind us of Marcus Aurelius’ popular ‘philosophy,’ when he suggests that, ‘If a thing is difficult to be accomplished by thyself, do not think that it is impossible for a man: but if anything is possible for a man and comfortable to his nature, think that this can be attained by thyself too.’⁹ And this inclusionary remark may well resonate elsewhere, as even the ‘sublime’ Kant tends to look into the direction of ordinariness. In his Anthropology he suggests that,

Purely natural minds (élèves de la nature, Autodidacti) can in many cases also count as geniuses, because, although indeed much of what they know could have been learned from others, they have thought it out for themselves, and in what is not itself a matter of genius, they are nevertheless geniuses.¹⁰

And here is a piece of testimony of an unknown ordinary genius confronting an aspiring historic genius in the thirteenth century. A simple chronicler, Salimbene de Adam of Parma (1228–1291) narrates that the great Frederick II of Sicily who, unlike the Sumerians, tended to do everything by himself, intended to discover which had been the first language ever spoken on earth, wondering whether it had been Hebrew, Greek or Latin. The enlightened monarch ‘arranged’ for a number of new-born babies to be kept in isolation, with the injunction that they be seen only for feeding and that no one should ever speak to them. The potential acclaimed genius had worked out that the language that the secluded infants would spontaneously begin to speak would be the first language that had ever existed on earth. But then the result of the experiment is unknown because none of the children survived it. And Salimbene remarks: ‘How could they have survived without the cuddles, gestures, smiles and endearments of their nurses?’¹¹ Here the Winnicott-like creativity is in the obscure reporter, rather than in the famous, enlightened monarch-scholar.

2. An Aristotelian legacy

As is known, Aristotle was more inclined to natural history than Plato and perhaps more sensitive to the ‘phenomenon’ of human creativeness – wherever it can be observed. In fact, if we invoke the Greek origins of our western thought, perhaps we could already discern significant remarks advocating the relevance of genius in everyday life. Aristotle, for instance, seems to suggest that in order to effectively express our inner world and live our lives, we need to create our own metaphors, rather than simply borrow those of the official culture – even if nascent metaphors tend to violate the conditions governing standard ways of thinking. The celebrated Aristotelian definition says that ‘Metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else.’¹² And he goes as far as to proclaim that ‘The greatest thing by far, is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt; and it is also a sign of genius.’¹³ Nothing less than that, in the philosopher’s view. Indeed a sign of genius for creativity and survival.

It is even more relevant for us that Aristotle’s view of our everyday use of metaphor can be significantly reconnected with aspects of his social/political philosophy; it is perhaps a philosophy tacitly aiming to safeguard some form of Platonic ‘essential’ genius, conducive to a distinction between geniuses and non-geniuses, wizards and muggles, citizens and slaves. In fact the philosopher seems to suggest, in a great variety of ways, that ‘slaves’ must speak ‘plainly’ before their masters and thus abstain from the genius of metaphor. He explicitly repeats that, ‘It is not quite appropriate that fine language should be used by a slave.’¹⁴ Their language should not include the beauty of our common metaphoric creativity. But why prohibit something that no one would be inclined to do? And so Aristotle must ‘secretly’ believe that even slaves are ‘tempted’ to commonly use metaphors, to actually manifest their genius in everyday life. If we could think of ‘fine language’ as an imaginative and metaphoric kind of language, then prohibiting it to slaves certainly indicates the suggestion of a social norm. But, for our purposes, what is even more enlightening is that slaves are implicitly recognised as capable of a fine language that includes the genius of metaphoricity. And thus, even trying to maintain servitude, he implicitly recognises that even slaves are capable of something that he explicitly regards as genius.

The creativeness of metaphoric language is potentially revolutionary in the sense that what is at stake is its capacity for profound turns of perspective. As is known, metaphors provide for the re-description of domains already seen through some standard, essentialist frame of reference allowing us to say, for instance, that a slave is in servitude because he is a slave; that some creatures are slaves simply because they are slaves. But then, as is known, re-descriptions can have major disruptive effects on previous ways of looking at situations. Again, in Aristotle’s words, ‘It is from metaphor that we can best get hold of something fresh.’¹⁵ But the ‘essential’ slaves of course should not get hold of something fresh or innovative such as, for instance, an idea of freedom.

Imaginative linguistic links might indeed serve to influence a world view and, obviously, slaves are not supposed to question the world views of their masters. If we regard a ‘slave’ as an emblematic figure standing for whoever has insufficient contractual power in a paralysing situation, the ...