Posted by dj on July 19, 2000, at 10:41:56
"The temporary loss of interest in the external world, characteristic of depression, may invoke intense activity in the inner world. Apart from its genetic and physiological base, what might provoke the depression? Arieti, a psychiatrist who has made a serious study of the thought processes characteristic of Artists speculates that the creative person senses a defect, or incompleteness, in the usual way of looking at the world and finds them suffocating. He needs to break with conventional wisdom. After all, to knock your head repeatedly against the brick wall of complacency is depressing…
All of these Artists evidence and transmit enthusiasm but what about this depression business? Let’s take a closer look.
The word "depression" is encrusted with all kinds of connotations and superstitions...depression is normal...But depression can wear many faces... The artistic personality, the cyclothymic, simply has an intensification of these normal cycles…
...."healthy ego" ...means strong character, a character capable of living with ambiguity, ambivalence and doubt, neither succumbing to dogmatism nor flying off in an unreal world. According to their psychological profiles based on the MMPI, artists are typically and paradoxically both sicker and healthier than ordinary mortals. They are sicker in the sense of being bombarded with ideas and fantasies; healthier in being able to shape and control the process and shape something new out of it…
They need, periodically, to get away from all the noise and bustle, if only in their heads.
They are nonconformist in the deeper sense, in the sense of skepticism of all conventional and popular ways of thinking, modern or ancient. They take almost nothing for granted. They are, therefore, radically open to new thought, to new association...
Feeling and temperament, thought processes and behaviour come as I tried to emphasize earlier, in packages. The package is character, in this case the Artist character…
The Technocrat
"...a technocrat is someone who emphasizes the technical conceptions of a problem to the detriment of their social and human consequences..."
Patricia Pitcher, "Artists, Craftsmen & Technocrats: The Dreams, Realities and Illusions of Leadership", 1995, pgs. 41-44
poster:dj
thread:40944
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20000717/msgs/40944.html