Schizophrenic Configuration and Art

Abstract

So far we have hardly discussed art. Now we can no longer escape the question: what has schizophrenia to do with serious art? Of course this is not the time for a thorough investigation of this question because some required preliminary research still waits to be done, despite the apparent abundance of literature on the subject.45As long as we do not really know how mental disturbances manifest themselves in the works of bona fide artists we cannot begin to answer such basic questions. It simply will not do to “explain” the work of controversial artists by pathographic investigations of their lives. What matters instead is whether a new productive or crippling component can be shown to exist in the works done during the periods of illness which is most probably attributable to the psychic changes produced by the illness. We are often assured that it is only a matter of the life and fate of a private person when an artist is psychopathologically dismembered and that nothing is said about his work. The assurances may be well intended, but the results are always different. Anyone who does not resist these invasions of privacy or does not try hard to achieve the separation we propose between an artist and his work soon finds himself chained to the person and detached from his work. In contrast we believe that we are doing less damage to the validity of works of art by trying openly to follow the configurative process in them and to invoke only the barest essentials from the lives of the artists. Above all we seek the productive forces which perhaps grew out of the illness, and we shall have to distinguish sharply between artists who as constitutional psychopaths tended to exceptional experiences, others who fell victim to temporary mental aberrations or tried to induce them with drugs, and finally the few who changed as personalities because of progressive psychoses (paralysis and schizophrenia). The number of artists whose works can yield valuable insights is not large because we must limit ourselves to those whose biographies are sufficiently well known to deliver up the required psychopathological data. But we shall have laid a foundation broad enough for a discussion about the basic relationship between the two psychic states of the artist (inspiration and configuration) and of the mentally ill, especially the schizophrenic (outlook and configuration) only after calling on the representation of the unreal, fantastic, and visionary from the whole history of creative art. This relationship is the one we earlier called the guiding problem for our investigation.