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PARTISAN REVIEW
together. Hence our feelings about the relation of neurosis and
creativity are likely to be colored by our views on the social position
of the artist; and in a period of respectability and cultural timidity
it is not surprising that abnormality and unconventionality are often
confused, and both frowned upon.
When we speak of the artist as "mad" or "neurotic" the terms
do not simply refer to the state of his mental health; they give a
mythic picture of the creative man: inspired, rebellious, dedicated,
obsessive, and alienated, as well as neurotic; and they also suggest
the evil and irrational underworld of experience dredged up by the
modern writer. Thomas Mann's celebration, for example, of the
role of disease in the making of art stems from a sense of the moral
and psychological ambiguities in any work of
art
as well as in the
life of the artist, and from Mann's belief that the artist has been
chosen to enrich the imagination of the community though he is
in some ways outside its pale. On the other hand, many recent
demands for normality have questioned the need for anything
against the grain, irresponsible, or offbeat in art. The fact is that
the work of writers like Gide or Joyce represents a different kind
of experience from that of the common run of fiction; and it is
this experience, rather than the neurosis of the author, that is
rejected in the name of normality, which is taken to be synonymous
with whatever is conventional and popular.
Perhaps it is because philistinism has been associated with
health, in our culture, that many of us prefer to make some con–
nection, however loose, between art and neurosis, though there is
still very little evidence of a scientific nature to support such a
view.
It
is true that most advanced art, at least in our time, seems
to have thrived in an atmosphere of abnormality, and that the lives
of most creative figures read like case histories. But, as Lionel
Trilling has pointed out in a remarkably cogent essay ("Art and
Neurosis," PR, 1945), there is no reason to believe that neurosis itself
is the creative force. There is also the question of the work: is it
neurotic or not?-and if not, what does it mean to say that the
artist is a neurotic? Even
if
neurosis is shown to have something
to do with art, we still have to ask whether all neuroses are related
to all art or whether only some kinds of art are traceable to certain
neuroses, and whether the neurosis of the artist produces, conditions,
