Creative and salutogenetic Process

 

The knowledge of healing divides  arts and techniques . With one it has in common rationality and methodology, with the other, emphasis on emotion and intuition.

The explicit part of the therapeutic and creative process can be described as they are techniques.

The implicit parts are only to be circumscribed. Ultimately, they are only to be experienced. Both do have in common that the message of a disease as well as of a piece of art are the expression of symbolic feelings. On a symbolic level they can be solved or deciphered.

They also have in common that art is a kind of self therapy.

Many artists testify that they only managed to live through an illness – or even escaped death – by being creative, to work.

 

 

Introduction

In his film “Amadeus”, Miles Forman portrays Mozart’s ambitions to gain his father’s recognition, his love, by composing the requiem – without success. One may take it for granted that here Miles Forman tried to overcome an aspect in his own personal life.

 

Franz Kafka wanted to break free from the restricting circumstances of his childhood and loosen his father’s power over him by his novels.

 

Harry Mulisch describes during the course of a TV interview that, being a son of a Nazi and a Jew, he could only escape the tension of his childhood sanely by starting to write very early in his life.

 

Alexander Kluge answered when being asked how he could carry on  living facing the Holocaust, genocides all over the world and 9.11.2001:

“One may tell people about it, keep it alive”.

Apart from  the self-therapy point of view in arts, there are same patterns, that means there quite some patterns in common between medical aspects and arts.

 

The preliminary phase ….

 

During the preliminary phase of a creative act as well as in a certain period of illness, one usually senses a deficit, a lack of something, a problem or conflict. There usually is an aimless fear, an unspecific uneasiness or a general restlessness involved.

Both, artists and ill persons are seeking to break the tension. Ultimately, they need understanding and approval.

 

The ability to stand the lack of understanding and approval is not equally given to everyone, it depends from case / person.

If it the ability to cope with this lack is not given, the ill person may take pills, medicine.

The artist may become addicted to alcohol or other drugs.

If the ability to stand the lack of understanding or approval is strong,

the ill person may endure this and a draft of a treatment plan can be developed for the former,

For the latter, the artist, counts the concept of a creative work.

If frustration is handled badly, the preliminary phase of tension leads to chaos, helplessness, resignation, regression – or to disease.

If the ability is strong in tolerating unsolved problems, inconsistencies over a long period of time, in art we talk about the Janusthinking, like a Janis head has the two sides of our life, one stands for glamour  and one side for brutality.

 

…the phase of creating …..

If the artist survives this critical state, he starts working;

if the ill person survives, he starts receiving medical treatment. 

The process of handling one’s personal conflicts, which origins in the feeling of dealing with an imperfect world and life, leads to a painting, a 

sculpture, a composition or a novel on the one hand; a treatment plan on the other hand.

One may listen to Max Burch’s cello concert “Kol Nidrei” to understand the way how dolour over human violence can be anticipated artistically.

One may listen to a seriously sick persons story of woe to learn about the injustice and indifference that children are treated with by adults.

It needs to be pointed out, that creating as well as recovering, required endurance.

No one is an artist who keeps his ideas hidden; the ill person will not regain health by the knowledge of the origin of his illness.

Both artist and ill person need the practical implementation and struggling for success.

 

….. and the final phase …

 

If the artist gets through this phase, which may be most critical, he will be satisfied by the acknowledgement of his work.

If the ill person meets a competent or understanding therapist in this phase, he will be able to enjoy the results of his efforts to achieve health,

If the artist fails and does not get acknowledgement; or if the ill person feels misunderstood, they may take it as a challenge to be met in the future.

Japanese Potters say, “If it does not turn out to be a masterpiece, it was a good practice anyway

”Resignation means a death sentence to both artist and ill person.

 

Duality in arts and healing: outlawing

 

Artists as well as ill persons – and their therapists – share two social problems: artist’s obstacles usually are of ideal or materialistic nature, while the healer and his patient usually meet mental, psychosocial and biological obstacles on the way to health.

As both of them mirror the society they live in, their contemporaries often reject and exclude them ( and often acknowledge them not until after their death, because they are ahead of time!)

The fates of artists and intellectuals in dictatorships should not be forgotten; no less than the fates of infectious sick persons in civil societies.

Guantanamos, Gulgas and concentration camps show that power-hungry persons feel threatened by dissenters very easily.

The regularly out bursting panic about SARS, avail flu or other diseases show that healthy people skate on thin ice.

On the other hand, one should remember the late acknowledgement of many artists as Mozart, van Goch, Hoelderlin, who live in poverty during their lifetime.

One should remember the often embarrassing funeral speeches by saying “he of she went much too soon”.

 

 

 

 

… and becoming a member of the community

 

More dangerous than exclusion though is applause coming from the false people.

The charisma of artists is often killed very slowly by hidden defeating, hidden discrimination.

Late Immendorf described the creeping poison of success because he  was consuming success from a very early stage. The French artist Bourgeois said on the other hand, that she could not be killed by her success, because she was much to old when it arrived.

The ill person has to take care of the hidden wish of wanting to be ill.

It is propagated openly that health care is one of the last economic growth markets that remain. In  this complex of medicine and industry – one need not call it health care any more – is more money involved than in most other industries.

 

The position of a healer in between health and illness sections

 

Healers and artists can be compared with catalysts, who only are effective as long as they do not come together/match.

Artists are indicators of the present deficits and grievance of society.

Also healers healers have in a society  where the illness party with its

fascist manners has overtaken the regime, the role of (non parliamentary) opposition.

 

Conclusions

 

Artists and healers must avoid becoming mainstream, They are outsiders by definition.

 

Prospect

 

Therapists and artists, who want to stay effective, should not become part of the system or the world, whose outcasts they treat or whose deficits they portray – even when they deal with the wishful thinking, doing or creating beauty or the eternity.