INSPIRATION – INVENTION – GENIUS
For Chopin – writes G. Sand – the creation was spontaneous, miraculous; he found it without looking for it, without foreseeing it: it came complete, sudden and sublime.
By Roberto Assagioli, Lecture 1934, Translated by Gordon Symons, from the Assagioli Archive Florence, doc. 23482. Original Title: Le Energie Latenti In Noi – Intuizione, Ispirazione, Genialità
Today we will examine another group of manifestations of the unconscious that often have a higher value than that of the normal personality, and that the personality, even if we wish it, does not succeed in producing. They, therefore, derive from a higher psychic level than the ordinary one, and therefore can be called superconscious.
These are the manifestations which are called: Inspiration, Invention, Genius.
The cases in which the superconscious faculty appears most clearly to be independent from the ordinary personality are those of the so-called prodigy calculators. They have the ability to instantly or very rapidly come up with the solution to an arithmetic problem that would normally require long and arduous calculations. Here are some examples among the
Little Colburn at eight years of age, gave immediate answers to problems like these: cubic root of 268.336.125 (p. 645); how many minutes there are in 48 years (25.228.890), to which the boy immediately added: “and 1.513.733.400 seconds”. (W. Mackenzie, Modern Metapsychic, p. 132-133).
Some of these marvelous calculators have begun to express their faculty at a very early age: for example Fuller at 3 years, Ampère at 4 years. Furthermore, if any of these calculators, such as Ampere and Gauss, have shown scientific genius, the majority have been of mediocre intelligence, and some have even been deficient. It is also remarkable that in many cases the faculty has waned or disappeared with increasing age.
These calculators have often been asked how they arrived at their results, but they could not explain it. Here is Perrot’s interesting analysis of how he uses his faculty:
“Since I was a child I used to calculate in an absolutely intuitive way, so much so that I often had the idea of having already lived at another time. If a difficult problem was proposed to me, the result flowed directly from my feeling, without at the first moment knowing how I had obtained it; I then looked for the way starting from the results. This intuitive way of grasping, which never failed, grew parallel to the requests made of it. I still often have the feeling that someone is near me whispering the desired result to me, the direct way, and usually it is a path that few or no-one has traveled before me, and that I would not have found if I had searched for it “. (Psyche, I. n. 6 p. 446).
In adults, the autonomy of the creative faculty is proved by the fact that it makes its products reach waking consciousness in a generally spontaneous, sudden, imperative and impersonal way.
This is demonstrated by the study of inspiration, which is precisely the passage of high psychic elements from the superconscious to the conscious.
The same characteristics of independence from normal consciousness are found, often to a large extent, in the creative and inventive faculties from which the works of art, scientific discoveries and technical discoveries derive. Among the musicians we find cases of surprising earliness. Mendelssohn began composing at 5 years. Haydn at four, and Mozart at three! At that age the personality is in an almost rudimentary state, so it cannot be certain that it produces the compositions.
For Chopin – writes G. Sand – the creation was spontaneous, miraculous; he found it without looking for it, without foreseeing it: it came complete, sudden and sublime. ” And the great naturalist Buffon attests: “You feel like a little electric shock that hits your head and at the same time captures your heart: that’s the moment of genius”. De Musset said: “You don’t work, you listen; it is like a stranger who speaks in your ear”. And Lamartine: “It is not I who think, but it is my ideas that think in me”.
But there is more: in some cases, inspiration arises during sleep, awakening the sleeper. I do not believe that there is any need to adduce further evidence of the existence and great autonomy of the superconscious psychic faculties. Let us now try to find out how they work, and what their relationships are with the conscious personality, with the rest of the psyche.
First of all, we must not confuse inspiration with creation. An analogy will help us to clearly distinguish the various moments of artistic and intellectual production, and to penetrate its intimate mechanism, or rather the organic creative process.
There is a close parallel between psychological creation and physical generation; in both there is for example the moment of fertilization, of conception. In the first, the fertilising element is often constituted by an external stimulus that strongly affects the imagination, which arouses deep emotions, intense feelings and thus sets in motion the superconscious faculties. A well-known example – and all the more remarkable as it relates to a writer who usually produced in a slow and reflective way, with the maximum of conscious cooperation – is the Cinque Maggio, by Alessandro Manzoni.
The unexpected announcement of Napoleon’s death deeply moved the writer and quickly inspired his hymn. The poet in fact said clearly and nobly that it was that emotion that introduced the “genius” (we would say his superconscious) “to the poetry”.
Sometimes, on the other hand, it is multiple, less intense external stimuli that act directly on the unconscious, so as to be unnoticed by the artist’s consciousness. In many other cases the determining stimulus is not external, but internal; it consists of a tendency, an impulse, a feeling, or a problem that is stirred in the soul of the artist, and that not being able to find outlet, a satisfaction and solution in life, is expressed in a creation of the imagination, entering in this his driving force. It is the sublimation and artistic transfiguration of personal feelings. This was expressed in the simplest and most effective way by Heinrich Heine: “From my great sorrows I draw my little songs.”
Examples of in-depth analyses of this genesis can be found in various psychoanalytic works, which however must be taken with much benefit of evidence, given the tendency of psychoanalysts to exaggerate. The most reasonable and convincing analyzes are supported in the book by Baudouin Psychanalyse de l´Art (Paris, Alcan).
The internal stimulus can also be of a higher nature. It can be a vivid intuition of a higher reality, a spark of spiritual illumination, a spark emanating from our deep soul; this was more frequent in times when art had a religious character, in which the poet was a prophet and seer.
In the aforementioned cases, in which the initiating stimulus of superconscious production is internal, we can well speak of a self-fertilization, of the creative relationship between two different parts or elements of the same psyche.
But there is also a third possibility: that of stimuli of a supernormal nature, that is, coming from psychic currents and influences that act telepathically on sensitive and receptive souls. The supernormal phenomena of which we have spoken must make us take this hypothesis into consideration, which could be confirmed by the not rare cases of contemporary inventions and simultaneous manifestations in distant places of the same tendency, the same mentality, the same style.
Then follows the period of gestation, or inner elaboration, which, like the physical one, can be carried out easily and without causing disturbances, but more often it is, instead, tiring, troubled and painful, and whose duration is very varied. Sometimes it operates very quickly, almost immediately; at other times it can be very long.
Sometimes the artist has a sense of it from a special sense of unease, abstraction, and momentary outflows. But in other cases, the only warning is negative: it is a sense of aridity, listlessness, inability to produce. The artist often incorrectly interprets this state as a drying up of his creative faculties, and he torments himself, and tries to stimulate inspiration with artificial means, which is mostly vain, and harmful.
When there are outflows, they can give rise to an aware and voluntary collaboration of the artist with his own unconscious. Collaboration that takes place in different ways, depending on the type and psychological structure of the person. Finally comes the moment of birth, of full eruption in the conscience, that is of the inspiration itself, and of external production. Even this, like physical birth, can be easy and spontaneous, or difficult and painful; it may require artificial help, and sometimes the product fails to become viable. In some it produces exaltation and joy; for others – for example De Musset – it was instead something tormenting to which he tried to escape with all kinds of excesses.
The birth of the artistic product can take place at various stages: this can be – as in the case of the newborn – complete and vital in its various parts, but need further care, to be nourished, to have greater development; or it may still be like a foetus, a sketch that requires further elaboration. Thus the work of art can be already perfectly cast, or even require only a slight revision or finishing; or only his complete design can come, his plot, which must then be developed consciously. The respective proportions and the mutual relationship between spontaneous processing and conscious activity can be varied and complex. For example, there may be a conscious and almost hallucinatory splitting.
This fact, and in general the modalities of inspiration, have been observed and exhibited admirably by Pietro Ubaldi in his book Le Noùri.
If we read the allusions that Dickens made in his letters to the independent personality, so to speak of his heroes, and compared these allusions to the facts we already know, we would no longer consider them as mystifications. Mrs. Camp – who, as he himself stated, was his greatest creation – spoke to him generally in church, and in a voice similar to an inner warning.
De Curel, an ingenious and refined playwright, begins by treating his subject in the usual way, and perhaps even with greater difficulty and fear than other writers do. He later found that a number of these personalities arose in him and spoke to him in the same way that Mrs. Camp spoke to Dickens in church. These characters are not clearly visible, but move around him in a scene, be it home or garden, which he sees in the same vague way, as we see any scene in a dream. From this moment he no longer composes or creates, he only does a literary revision; the characters speak and act alone, and even when the writing is interrupted and while the writer is asleep, the drama develops by itself in his brain. When he is distracted and does not think about his work, he sometimes hears passages of sentences that are part of scenes that he has not yet dealt with. This means that the subliminal elaboration of the drama has gone beyond or preceded the point at which the supraliminal work has stopped.
De Curel sees in these small doublings of the personality a sort of sprout, of outgrowth of the original personality, which the latter gradually reabsorbs – although not without a painful struggle – as soon as the drama ends. (F.H. Myers – The Human Personality and His Survival, p.135-137).
Our own Pirandello, an ingenious and tormented anatomist of dissociations and psychological complexities, made similar declarations; indeed, he posed this problem directly on the scene, in his original work Six Characters in Search of an Author.
The genesis of the artistic creations and inventions that we have outlined, the existence of various semi-independent psychic levels, and the possibility of extra-individual influences, also explain certain curious and paradoxical facts concerning the relationships between the author and his work . Sometimes the conscious state of mind is distinctly different, indeed even opposed to that of what is being created. It often happens that the author experiences a strange sense of disinterest, almost of an inner distancing from what he has produced; if he then rereads what he wrote after some time, he has an impression of novelty, and almost of wonder, that it came out of his pen. But there is more: it can also happen that the author does not understand his work well, does not grasp its deeper meanings; while another, a sympathetic observer or critic, knows how to see and highlight them.
A few years ago I witnessed a typical case of this kind. An intuitive and highly spiritual doctor read various poems in the presence of the author, and commented them in an acute and inspired way, highlighting the deep spiritual symbols that these contained. After reading, the poet said that he had never imagined that in his poems there were those meanings, but that now he had to admit it.
What we have said about inspiration and creation gives us the key to understanding the problem of genius, because the mode of production remains the same whatever the intrinsic value – aesthetic or scientific – of the work that has come to light.
I can illustrate what I have set forth with the example of a very noble artist, who for the special conditions in which his work has been revealed and unfolds, gives us another lesson: how truly wonderful is the potential of the human soul!
Ernesto Masuelli is a brave man who remained blind at 19, while fighting for his country. He had never devoted himself to art, and he did not do so even after his glorious mutilation. Only about two years ago, casually and as if for fun, he tried to model plasticine. The results were so interesting as to induce him to dedicate himself more assiduously to modeling. Thus a talent developed in him that has the character of the most complete spontaneity and that, due to his lack of sight, has something supernormal about it.
Masuelli, to my questions about his way of creating, replied verbatim: “I don’t watch over my hand while I work. I feel that I am what I do, I am the subject I represent at that moment and I leave my hands to act alone. I modeled the infantryman in three quarters of an hour in a dream-like state, almost unconscious. I work serenely with joy “. In Masuelli we find all the characteristics we have indicated: spontaneity, superconscious inspiration and creative joy.
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