Notes for a conversation between Philip Carr-Gomm and John Wilson 28th September 2023 held by onlinevents.co.uk
“Trauma & Creativity’ – a conversation that explores the mysterious relationship between creativity and suffering. We’re all familiar with the stereotype of the ‘tortured artist’ and the idea of the ‘wounded healer’, but do we have to suffer in order to access the deepest wellsprings of creation? Is there a relationship between trauma and creativity, and how can we best serve our clients so that any trauma they have experienced can enrich their creativity rather than stifle it?
You can access the conversation via this link
When I prepared for this conversation I made notes and gathered material from the internet. The material was so interesting I thought I’d share it here:
3 TOPICS TO EXPLORE:
- Is suffering /trauma necessary to be creative?
- How can we best serve our clients so that any trauma they have experienced can enrich their creativity rather than stifle it?
- Is being trauma-informed helpful in this context, or are there risks with this approach?
Is suffering /trauma necessary to be creative?
“If you read the books of art, they say: ‘who made any work of happiness? Nobody. It comes from tragedy.’ But I don’t believe that anymore. I want to start making work from happiness.”
Marina Abramovic
We’re all familiar with the stereotype of the ‘tortured artist’ and the idea of the ‘wounded healer’
The tortured artist is such widespread idea, Wikipedia even has an entry for the ‘tortured artist trope’:
“The trope has been criticized for romanticizing mental illness, treating it as a necessary ingredient for creativity. According to a study conducted at the University of Southampton, artwork is perceived to be superior if the observer is told that the artist is mentally ill. However, research has found that famous artists’ less renowned work was produced when their mental illness was the most acute.”
For a potentially interesting view on the wounded healer, see:
John Merchant, Shamans and Analysts: New Insights on the Wounded Healer, 2011
Do we have to suffer in order to access the deepest wellsprings of creation?
OTOH:
“For me, the myth of “great art” arising out of suffering is a damaging notion perpetuated by the books that we love and the records we cling to in our adolescence. We grow up hearing how “love hurts”, studying plays that romanticise a double suicide of two “star-crossed lovers”, and mythologizing the 27 club of rock stars that died too soon, or great artists of genius that painted masterpieces before ending their own lives. It’s no wonder the trope of the suffering artist is so deeply ingrained in both our minds and our culture. But I have come to know it as a tired trope trotted out only by those who have been fortunate enough to not yet have experienced their own personal chaos. I don’t recognise this myth of bright-burning creativity in my own tale of losses and darkness. On the contrary, in the midst of the hell of the past few years I was almost certainly not at my most creative, oftentimes unable to get out of bed, paralysed by deep grief (and what I would later find out was something called “complex PTSD”). Catherine Anne Davies makes music as The Anchoress. The second album, The Art of Losing, is out 12th March 2021, for more information visit The Anchoress website
Research shows that mental illnesses often impede a person’s creativity, rather than enhancing it. Although the Karolinska Institute (2013) found that authors had an increased likelihood of having bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, unipolar depression, anxiety disorders, substance abuse and suicide, this correlation does not equate to causation. Many people diagnosed with mental illnesses find solace in expressing themselves through creative means. Perhaps there are so many artists with mental illnesses because of the therapeutic nature of creative endeavours. Despite this research, it is widely supported that decreased creativity is a common symptom of mental illness.
There is nothing intrinsically beautiful about mental illness or suffering, yet there is the widespread misconception that they are beneficial to artistic expression. it’s a damaging stereotype that glorifies mental illness and diminishes genuine artistry. Mental illness is not a catalyst for creativity, it’s the thing that stops people from functioning until they have fleeting moments of productivity to make that art. Maddison Moore
“the art was evaluated more positively when van Gogh’s eccentric behavior was mentioned.” But why is this? It seems like the more we view an artist as idiosyncratic, the more authentic we believe them to be. This is a pernicious standard to set – particularly for young artists trying to break into the field. Mental health struggles and creative talent do not need to go hand-in-hand. Jim Morrison drank himself to death at the age of 27; Kurt Cobain, at the same age, pushed a shotgun to the roof of his mouth and pulled the trigger. Sylvia Plath ended her life by putting her head in a microwave. Each had much creative potential extinguished by early death.
But Picasso lived to be 91. Salvador Dali until 84. Harper Lee passed away only a few years ago at 89. Indeed, there are great artists out there, deserving of myriad superlatives, who have never struggled with mental illness. At least, none that were life-ending or destructive. We do not view the works of Jane Austen, John Milton, or Igor Stravinsky as any less deserving of credit simply because their works did not come from a place of instability.
Albert Rothenberg, an American psychiatrist, and Doctor of Medicine, has carried out long-term research on the creative process in literature and art. Of creativity and depression, he has said: “Studies using test or clinical assessments have not proven a connection between creativity and mental illness. Almost all have had methodological and conceptual inadequacies: absent or poor controls, investigator bias, unreliable testing tools. None have demonstrated validity with respect to actual creative performance.”
“Turn your pain into art”: it’s a phrase most of us have heard before. Van Gogh painted “The Starry Night” while battling anxiety and addiction; Sylvia Plath died by suicide by putting her head in a gas oven, her death eerily predicted a month before in her only novel The Bell Jar; Frida Kahlo obsessively painted her pain, physical and emotional.
History is full of long-suffering creative geniuses. The list is so long, in fact, that it has become normal to see pain as an essential ingredient for art. “Tortured artists” – a stereotype that we still attach to celebrated musicians, such as Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain – are considered to produce the best masterpieces.
The theory that achieving something great requires suffering dates back to ancient times. The Greek myth of Philoctetes tells the story of a man who as a result of a wound, is exiled on an island, and during that time he invents the bow and arrow from scraps of material he finds in a cave. His invention becomes an important weapon used by the Greeks in their battles. Philoctetes is a figure who exists in the margins, much like all artists. His wound (a symbol of his emotional suffering) is the reason he is excluded from society but also seen as the facilitator for his invention, which in turn fulfils his deep longing for social acceptance.
Pain, however, is less an artistic necessity and more a result of “contagion” – a term used for the spreading of a harmful idea or practice. Social contagion refers to the way in which ideas, emotions and behaviours spread from person to person. In the context of the struggling artist, it allows mental illness to fester; to be glamourised and admired; even encouraged in the name of art.
Creativity or creative careers do not, in themselves, cause mental health problems. Nor do mental health conditions necessarily spread from artist to artist, claims Professor Victoria Tischler, an expert in art and health at the University of West London, but working in a creative environment can certainly affect mental health and lead to the spreading of the tortured artist ideal. The creative sectors are rife with poor conditions and high-pressured environments, not to mention low wages, long hours, unstable employment (particularly in times of austerity), and bullying that allows mental illness to remain hidden or seen as under-performance.
Earlier this year, a study by the Inspire Wellbeing charity and Ulster University found that creative workers were three times more likely to suffer from mental health problems. Having a creative career can come at a high price: 60 per cent of creative workers who took part in the study spoke of having suicidal thoughts. Many artists, writers and musicians suffer untimely deaths, some of which could presumably have been prevented if mental illness wasn’t so romanticised by society and seen as an inherent part of creative self-expression – a pattern that musician Jeff Tweedy (who suffered from drug addiction) described as “a destructive myth”.
We revere longsuffering depressives, and their madness is seen as intrinsic to their art. But it’s a damaging stereotype that glorifies mental illness and diminishes genuine artistry. Mental illness is not a catalyst for creativity, it’s the thing that stops people from functioning until they have fleeting moments of productivity to make that art.
Lumping creativity in with suffering massively diminishes the impact it has on the artists. The glamorisation of drug use is rampant when it comes to these figures, which might be cool when Pete Doherty is hanging out of a window with Kate Moss – but it loses its appeal when you learn he nearly lost both feet because of intravenous drug use. Amy Winehouse’s death continues to be used as fodder for the tortured artist trope, and the arrival of Sam Taylor-Johnson’s exploitative biopic Back to Black shows we still haven’t learned to leave it alone.
It’s a dangerous precedent to set that creatives need to be miserable to make music, and the need to have an air of danger or an edge about them to make their material seem more real and even more raw fails them. Our cultural understanding of mental illness has greatly improved in recent years, but the public fascination with tortured artists hasn’t caught up. Suffering and stardom don’t have to be synonymous. Poppy Burton Far Out Magazine
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/everything-wrong-with-the-tortured-artist-trope/
I always cite the wonderful example of Hounds Of Love to counter this weight of cultural evidence of the necessity of sadness – a deep and multifaceted album created when Kate Bush was at her happiest and most productive: “I know there’s a theory that goes around that you must suffer for your art – you know, all that stuff about, ‘It’s not real art unless you suffer’”, she said in her 2015 interview with Classic Pop, “But I don’t believe this at all because I think, in some ways, this was the most complete work that I’ve done; in some ways, it’s the best and I was the happiest that I’d been, compared to making other albums.” Catherine Anne Davies The Anchoress website
OTOH:
It’s clear that psychological turmoil can have an awakening effect on creativity too:
“Musicians and writers sometimes find that their inspiration fades away when their lives are comfortable and stable, and that a period of turbulence — a breakup, illness, or depression — can reawaken their creativity. To give one example, Bob Dylan’s 1974 album Blood on the Tracks was heralded as a return to the height of his creative powers, after years of indifferent albums. The album emerged from the breakup of his marriage, with many of the songs describing his sorrow and grief. …
In 2017, I led a study on the experiences of asylum seekers and refugees in the UK, and found high levels of trauma amongst them. The original trauma which led them to leave their homelands was overlaid with the trauma of trying to negotiate a hostile immigration system, with little or no support. At the same time, we found some evidence of post-traumatic growth in our sample. Significantly, we also found a very high level of creativity. Creativity seemed to serve both as a coping strategy and an expression of personal growth. Some participants had formed their own choir and sang regularly, while others practiced arts and crafts…
So in my own case, it may be that the turmoil of this period of my life led to psychological growth. The turmoil brought about an opening inside me and uncovered some latent creative potential.
The Suffering Artist
In her book When Walls Become Doorways, the psychologist Tobi Zausner shows that this is true of physical illness too (which in itself usually brings a great deal of psychological turmoil). Zausner describes myriad cases of artists whose creativity was enhanced by serious illness, including figures such as Michelangelo, Toulouse-Lautrec, Monet, Matisse, O’Keeffe, and Kahlo. Zausner compares a period of illness to a “creative chaos” which may initiate a transition to a new phase of heightened or different creativity. Illness creates new possibilities because it disrupts psychological equilibrium, breaks old habits, and forces artists to develop different creative strategies. As Zausner puts it, “life’s lowest moments can hold our greatest potential for creativity and transformation. When the wall of illness becomes a door of opportunity, the worst of times can bring out the best in us.”
All of this suggests that there is some basis for the myth of the “suffering artist.” Artists are usually not people who have always been stable and contented. It is likely that, at some point in their lives, they have been through periods of intense psychological and/or physical suffering. However, the myth of the suffering artist is perhaps misleading in the sense that artists do not generally produce great work while they are in the midst of suffering, but afterwards. They produce great art once they have passed through suffering and undergone growth and integration as a result of it. In other words, it is not suffering itself that produces great art, but the psychological growth that arises from suffering.
Trauma can break us down, but it can also break us open. It can unlock hidden potential inside us, open up new abilities and character strengths. It’s almost as if, when trauma and turmoil break us down, there is an opportunity for us to reform at a high level of order, to fuse back together in a more integrated and higher-functioning way.” Steve Taylor Phd
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/out-the-darkness/202011/post-traumatic-creativity
See the book: Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament by Kay Redfield Jamison
The anguished and volatile intensity associated with the artistic temperament was once thought to be a symptom of genius or eccentricity peculiar to artists, writers and musicians. Kay Jamison’s work, based on her study as a clinical psychologist and researcher in mood disorders, reveals that many artists subject to exalted highs and despairing lows were in fact engaged in a struggle with clinically identifiable manic-depressive illness. Jamison presents proof of the biological foundations of this disease and applies what is known about the illness to the lives and works of some of the world’s greatest artists including Byron, Van Gogh, Schumann and Woolf. (In particular BPD III)
CONCLUSIONS: We need to make a distinction between suffering and mental illness.
Creativity may help healing, and may be correlated with mental illness (perhaps specifically BPD) which doesn’t mean suffering is causal or necessary in the first place.
Yes, a higher than normal percentage of creative people seem to suffer from mental health issues. But this doesn’t make suffering causal. If we assume its causal, we risk romanticising suffering, and perpetuate the notion it is required if you want to be creative.
Having said that, as Steve Taylor points out above, suffering can open us up to our creativity.
How can we best serve our clients so that any trauma they have
experienced can enrich their creativity rather than stifle it?
In her book When Walls Become Doorways: Creativity and the Transforming Illness, Tobi Zausner presented her analysis of the biographies of eminent painters who suffered from physical illnesses. Zausner concluded that such illnesses led to the creation of new possibilities for their art by breaking old habits, provoking disequilibrium, and forcing the artists to generate alternative strategies to reach their creative goals.
Taken together, the research and anecdotes support the potentially immense benefit of engaging in art therapy or expressive writing to help facilitate the rebuilding process after trauma. Writing about a topic that triggers strong emotions (“expressive writing”) for just fifteen to twenty minutes a day has been shown to help people create meaning from their stressful experiences and better express both their positive and negative emotions….
Creativity for Healing Grief & Loss
The common thread between those I spoke to about making music or writing in the midst of grief was that the art became a tool to make sense of the trauma. It was not made “great” because of the pain but instead became a method to begin to understand what they had been through. The following quote from Proust is splashed across the inside of my album and encapsulates for me the essence of this healing process:
“Ideas come to us as the successors of griefs, and griefs, at the moment they change into ideas, lose some part of their power to injure the heart”. Marcel Proust
Catherine Anne Davies The Anchoress website
Creative expression seems to help healing from suffering (encouraging Post-Traumatic Growth) regardless of whether that suffering might have acted as a catalyst for that creative expression or not.
See the book Faith, Hope and Carnage by Nick Cave & Sean O’Hagan and a book to be published by Lesel Dawson, Creative Grieving: Art, Loss and the Imagination
This research-led but accessible book seeks to build on the research generated (and contacts made) from the Good Grief Festival. While there are books on creativity’s relationship to the grieving process, these tend to be aimed either at an academic audience or at those interested in practicing art psychotherapy; none have tried to illuminate its diverse therapeutic benefits for a general audience. This book aims to fill this gap. Drawing on current psychological and therapeutic approaches to grief, it will argue that the imagination is crucial to the processing of loss because grief typically involves a wound of the imagination. Creative Grieving will begin with a substantial introduction that uses current ideas on grief, cognition and memory to suggests the ways in which creativity can be constructed as therapeutic; the introduction will also propose how artistic expression fits into the Dual Process Model of Coping with Bereavement (Stroebe and Schut, 1999). This will then be followed by six vivid case studies that illuminate the complex and diverse ways that creativity can help the bereaved to process loss.
https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/projects/creative-grieving
see The Good Grief Fest: 250+ events attended by 25,000 people. 400+ speakers
https://www.goodgrieffest.com/
CONCLUSIONS:
The phenomenon of Post-Traumatic Growth tells us that enhanced creativity can be one of the characteristics of that growth. Would the person have eventually manifested that creativity if they hadn’t experienced trauma? We will never know.
The relationship between creativity and suffering may be bi-directional: ie experiencing suffering may act as a catalyst to creativity, and being creative may help in the healing from that suffering. These may be separate/independent phenomena.
Is being trauma-informed helpful in this context?
Or are there risks with this approach?
Trauma is certainly in the zeitgeist at the moment. Everyone seems to be talking about it these days (guilty as charged). There appears to be a bottomless well of conferences on trauma and endless Instagram accounts discussing it. The Body Keeps the Score, an academic book about trauma by psychiatrist Bessel Van der Kolk, has spent almost three years (and counting as of 2022) at the top of the New York Times best-seller list, selling almost two million copies globally. Vox even called trauma the word of the decade.
‘Trauma Needs a Rebrand: Trauma, Psychedelics, the Limitations of Our Current Models, and Exciting Alternatives’:
https://www.brighterpathways.co/post/trauma-needs-a-rebrand
It can be difficult to contest the concept of trauma, for to do so can be seen to question people’s suffering. The result of this is that trauma ‘escapes the need for definition’ (Marlowe and Adamson, 2011: 623) and has ‘remained largely unexamined’ (Radstone 2007: 9). This Insight takes a critical look at trauma and the evidence base for the claims being advanced that it should become the predominant lens through which we consider social suffering. In taking the position we do, we acknowledge that distress and suffering are real and can have a debilitating effect on individuals and communities and that as practitioners and as a society we should seek to respond to these in sensitive and helpful ways.
In this paper, we caution that the current turn to trauma does not necessarily reflect a radical shift away from a bio-medical model but risks reifying another similarly reductionist understanding of human experience and how to respond to it. Despite its claims to be strengths-based, trauma discourse often focuses on symptomatology, highlighting dysfunction and pathology within individuals who have experienced violence and abuse. This, as the feminist scholar Emma Tseris points out, ‘seems to be at odds with widespread claims made about the empowering or de-pathologising capacities of trauma-informed practices’
Our argument in this Insight is that trauma is but one perspective on human suffering, and it may not be the most helpful. We present an overview of the available research detailing reviews of trauma-informed approaches (synonyms TI care, TI practice, TI service system)
Trauma-informed approaches: a critical overview of what they offer to social work and social care. Insight 70. By Mark Smith and Sebastian Monteux:
Is Gabor Maté Sacrosanct? Gabor’s trauma approach can cause problems—but these are impossible to discuss https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/addiction-in-society/201703/is-gabor-mat-sacrosanct
The Game of Trauma – James Hillman. “The story of your trauma becomes the trauma.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-o5zZ731Ic
AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH? James Hillman’s Acorn Theory. What if a client’s creativity can be arising in them – not as a result of past suffering – but as the potential held by their future beginning to show forth? Their past may influence, colour, shape or distort that creative outpouring, but is not the origin of it.
See: James Hillman, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 2017
“The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.”
Rainer Maria Rilke