48
PARTISAN REVIEW
to be a patient in analysis, I would guess that no psychoanalyst would
call this manifestation of the! ego a part of the sickness he is treating.
On the contrary, it would obviously be for
him
the very element on
which he could fasten hic;; hope of cure. And nothing is so characteristic
of the artist as this power of shaping a work.
The activity of the artist, we must remember, can be aped by
many who are not artists. The expressions of some schizophrenic peo–
ple have the intense appearance of creativity and a kind of interest
and even significance, but they are not works of art. Again, it is not
uncommon in our society for neurotic people to imitate the artist in
his life and even in his ideas and ambitions; they follow the artist in
everything except performance. It was, I think, Otto Rank who called
such people half-artists and confirmed the diagnosis of their neurotic–
ism at the same time that he differentiated them from true artists.
(Incidentally, the phenomenon of the half-scientist is yet to be noted:
for social reasons it is, as it were, a merely latent phenomenon-the
half-scientist is
put to work
by society and helped to be "creative"
and therefore we do not recognize him. Generally, we may observe,
the impulse to make psychological comments on the intellectual life
of scientists is not countenanced and does not often appear.)
Of the whole artist we may say that whatever elements of neu–
rosis he has in common with all
his
fellow-citizens, the one part of
him that is healthy, by any possible definition of health, is that which
gives him the power to conceive, to plan, to work, and to bring his
work to completion. It would be impossible to deny that whatever
disease or mutilation the artist may suffer is an element of his work
which conrlitions every part of it. It most immediately conditions
his
choice of subject; it has its effect on the quality of
his
form. But
disease and mutilation are available to all of us-life provides them
with prodigal generosity. What marks the artist is
his
power to shape
and control the raw material we all have.
The Philoctetes story, it seems to me, is not so much a scientific,
explanatory myth as it is a moral myth. It tells us, in its juxtaposition
of the wound and the bow, that we must be aware that weakness does
not preclude strength nor strength weakness. It is therefore not irrele–
vant to the artist, but when we use it to explain him we should re–
member that there are many myths about the arts-that in Apollo
the Greeks connected the bow with the lyre, two strengths together,
and that the myths of Pan and Dionysius even suggest that for some
kinds of art no bow is needed at all.
