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Gaffer Variety:
Creativity and Craziness One, 010:
By Willie Gaffer:
October 17, 2005:
Recently I had a query from a reader who wanted me to send him a copy of an essay I wrote several years ago. The essay was called "Creativity and Craziness" and it was published in my book, "The Gaffer's Shorts. That book was published in 1997, a very long time ago. I no longer have the essay in question in electronic format so I could not send it to the person. However, I did take a look at the work and decided it was worth a rewrite for this column. It expresses in one essay, much of my thinking on the human psychology. The essay is too long for a single weekly column so I will rewrite and post it in installments. This is the first installment.
There is an intimate relationship between creativity and craziness which I intend to illuminate in the following discussion. I believe those creative abilities which are so foreign to adults and so natural to children reside in the same dark corridors of our mind-soul wherein lurk the madmen of our mind-soul. What is important about this is, I believe it is possible to access these creative forces without releasing the lurking madmen.
A full discussion of creativity and craziness could easily justify a set of doorstop sized books. Perhaps some qualified person will write that set someday. In the interim, let us consider this piece to be an overview of the subject. Although the progression of ideas will be coherent each one will be treated lightly. There will be no exhaustive discussion on any particular idea.
I begin with the rather insulting premise that, except for small children, we are all crazy. I believe I am crazy and all the people I know and love are crazy. I wouldn't have it any other way. To be sure, there are varying degrees and circumstances of this condition. Sometimes we call craziness a mental illness. Sometimes we call it a phobia. Sometimes we call it a neurosis. Some of these conditions are severe and tragic. Some are so common we don't even think of them as worthy of consideration. Never mind treatment. The inordinate fear of heights or spiders or snakes, for instance, or the lack of creative talent.
Some people are crazy and we make them managers. They suffer from the rather bizarre delusion that people can be managed and they know how to do it, even though, in general, they cannot even manage their own lives. Some people are crazy and we call them eccentrics because they are wealthy. Then they go out and off someone with a high powered rifle. We should deal with them as murderers, not crazy people, unless we are willing to treat all murderers as crazy people and excuse them on that basis. Some people become crazy by systematically suppressing their sense of conscience until they reach the point where we call them sociopaths. This is one baby step from the criminal condition we call psychopath.
We have no need to examine all manifestations of craziness for our discussion. I will proceed by looking at just one very severe condition called multiple personality disorder. From there we can look at the relation between this extreme condition and the personality problems which plague us ordinary folks. I can then discuss how these ordinary problems relate to our creative talent and I will describe techniques or practices for recovering the creativity we always see in healthy children. I will finish by briefly discussing some other theories and practices for human growth, pointing out some reckless ones which we would be better off to avoid. I will try not to ramble. Apparently I do that so often, Mrs. Gaffer has named it the Gaffer Syndrome.
We know there have been, and still are, some very terrible methods of dealing with craziness. We have, in our history, burned people alive and drowned them to satisfy an insane notion of demonic possession. Exorcism is still practiced by some very serious, fiendish madmen in our culture. In the few disgusting cases I have looked at, I concluded that these priests were simply engaged in the physical and emotional torture of people whose only crime was being a victim of multiple personality disorder.
Instead of trying to heal these victims, the priests victimize them further. This exorcism is nothing more than a process of coercing an emotionally diminished person into remaining diminished so he does not offend the priesthood. Exorcism is a barbaric practice with no basis in logic or fact. It has nothing to do with any Divinity. The people who practice these barbarisms should be in prison along with their partners, the priest pedophiles.
There really are better ways to deal with this emotional disorder. First we must define multiple personality disorder. Technically it is an extremely rare mental condition in which two or more independent and distinct personalities develop in a single person. Each personality may alternately inhabit the person's conscious awareness to the exclusion of the other personalities. These separate personalities are usually so much different from one another in behavior that we must recognize them as individuals. They even have different names. The classic story by Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, takes a fictional look at this phenomena. The dramatized story Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber is a much more painful look at a real case history.
My theory is that multiple personality disorder is an extreme case of a rather pedestrian condition which I will call personality fragmentation, a form of craziness. Think of the human being as a complete masterpiece of personality, spontaneous and filled with curiosity, love, trust, generosity, joy, and creativity, just as we find in a very young child. We expect to find this complete package in a child but we are always very surprised when we find anything like it in an adult.
In the adult we usually find a small subset of what the human started with. We must then ask the questions, "What happened to the missing attributes? How did the process of aging diminish this person to the point where he is not even aware that something has been lost?" We all know people who are always worn out, eternally angry, eternally defensive, cynical, submissive or cowardly. These people were not born this way. Whither went the missing pieces?
I believe these missing pieces, which I call fragments, are still within us and usually suppressed, but very much part of our subconscious selves. The fragmentation occurs as a result of the traumas we all suffer and our solutions to them. The persistence and magnitude of the trauma are both important. Each event can be large or small but when it is severe or when it occurs often or continuously, we will change ourselves in a way designed to mitigate the pain it causes.
Sometimes this is good. Most of us have touched something hot enough to cause a burn. Few of us touch the same hot thing twice. We change our behavior immediately. This learning and adjusting ability is a survival attribute but it can be turned against us when we encounter emotional traumas. A parent or other trusted adult can cause profound changes in a child's personality through simple repetitive actions. An act as seemingly harmless as calling a child "Mr Big Shot" can cause him to suppress part of his creative self, if it's repeated whenever he expresses an idea. Thus, when we reach maturity, most of us have various sized fragmented blocks of ourselves suppressed.
This brings us to the major difference between ordinary dysfunctional fools, like you and me, and the clinically defined multiple personality. In these poor souls we find the trauma was not only persistent but was also physically and emotionally extreme. In this case the victim will withdraw and suppress major parts of his personality. Not only that, this suppressed part is very likely to be enraged. Justifiably so. If this withdrawal occurs in stages over time, we can get more than one suppressed personality or alter ego. This becomes a dangerous problem when the multiple personality victim loses control to an alter ego to the extent that he is not aware of what is happening.
This is a good place to stop. I will continue this discussion
in my next essay.
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