Rank—Art and Artist (viii)—Partiality and Totality

Otto Rank
Art and Artist
trans. Charles Francis Atkinson
(1932/1989)

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[100] I have already, in another connexion, starting from the psychology of the neurotic and discussing psychotherapeutic possibilities of curing him, emphasized the therapeutic and indeed absolutely vital character of illusions

in contrast to Freud,

who regards them (even from a historical point of view) merely as infantile wish-fulfilments which we have to outgrow.

I believe, however, that everything that is consoling in life—that is, everything therapeutical in the broader sense —can only be illusional, and even the therapeutic effect of analysis I have tried to explain in my latest "technical" work by the unreality of the analytical situation.

Rank—Art and Artist (vi)—Life and Creation

Otto Rank
Art and Artist
trans. Charles Francis Atkinson
(1932/1989)

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[37]

Chapter Two
LIFE AND CREATION

...

[38]

...the fundamental problem of the relation between living and creating in an artist,...the reciprocal influence of these two spheres.
...creativity lies equally at the root of artistic production and of life experience. ...lived experience can only be understood as the expression of volitional creative impulse, and in this the two spheres of artistic production and actual experience meet and overlap. Then, too, the creative impulse itself is manifested first and chiefly in the personality, which, being thus perpetually made over, produces art-work and experience in the same way. ...

[39] In creation the artist tries to immortalize his mortal life. He desires to transform death into life, as it were, though actually he transforms life into death. For not only does the created work not go on living; it is, in a sense, dead; both as regards the material, which renders it almost inorganic, and also spiritually and psychologically, in that it no longer has any significance for its creator, once he has produced it. ...

...besides the original biological duality of impulse and inhibition in man;...[there is also to be reckoned with] the psychological factor par excellence, the individual will, which manifests itself both negatively as a controlling element, and positively as the urge to create. This creator-impulse is not, therefore, sexuality, as Freud assumed, but expresses the antisexual tendency in human beings, which we may describe as the deliberate control of the impulsive life. ...

[40] If we compare the neurotic with the productive type, it is evident that the former suffers from an excessive check on his impulsive life, and according to whether this neurotic checking of the instincts is effected through fear or through
[41]
will, the picture presented is one of fear-neurosis or compulsion-neurosis. With the productive type the will dominates, and exercises a far-reaching control over (but not check upon) the instincts, which are pressed into service to bring about creatively a social relief of fear. Finally, the instincts appear relatively unchecked in the so-called psychopathic subject, in whom the will affirms impulse instead of controlling it. In this type...we have, contrary to appearances, to do with weak-willed people...; the neurotic, on the other hand, is generally regarded as the weak-willed type, but wrongly so, for his strong will is exercised upon himself and, indeed, in the main repressively...

And here we reach the essential point of difference between the productive type who creates and the thrwarted neurotic... Both are distinguished fundamentally from the average type, who accepts himself as he is, by their tendency to exercise their volition in reshaping themselves. ...

Edward Vessel—some papers from researchgate

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Edward A. Vessel, G. Gabrielle Starr and Nava Rubin
"Art reaches within: aesthetic experience, the self and the default mode network"
(2013)

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[1]

INTRODUCTION

...

[2]

One aspect that has so far received little investigation is that of individual differences: although it is widely recognized that individuals can differ markedly in their aesthetic response, previous research in neuroaesthetics tended to utilize art pieces that were manipulated in a manner intended to have a consistent effect on observers’ preferences or that were generally highly regarded and often, widely known... It seems reasonable to expect that studying widely admired artwork can help uncover the universal aspects of aesthetic experience. But studying artworks that generate a diversity of responses can also be valuable.

Rank—Art and Artist (iib)—The Inessentiality of Biography (b)

Otto Rank
Art and Artist
trans. Charles Francis Atkinson
(1932/1989)

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[379] One of the radical mistakes made by most ordinary biographies and by psychography is the notion of a parallelism between experience and creation.

This certainly exists, if not causally, at least phenomenally connected. [sic] Quite as important, however, or even more so, is the opposition of life and creation, which has been emphasized, but not understood, since this is impossible without taking account of the creative feeling of guilt.

It is significant that many of the greatest artists (though by no means all) have a strong bourgeois tinge, and Kretschmer, in his study of men of genius, declared that genius needs a strong touch of conventionality.

Many whose work is of the highest value and who live wholly in their art lead a very simple, ordinary life, and this purely human side often comes to the surface in their work, in contrast to the divine quality of genius.

The Muse, too, whose idealization by the poet himself and whose apotheosis in the mother-principle by the psychographer look so fine, often comes off badly enough in real life. Not only that she

[380]

has to endure, even enjoy, the moods of the divinely inspired master, but she very often becomes for the artist a symbol of an ideology that is no longer adequate, which she may have helped him to create, but which he has now to overcome and throw overboard.

In that case... the artist is both unable to create without her and prevented by her presence from any further creation. His inclination may be to let her go, along with the earlier ideology, but his guilt-feeling will not allow it. ...

Not only will the artist who finds a creative issue from this conflict show its traces in his work, but his work will often enough be purely the expression of the conflict itself, whose solution has to be justified as much as the failure to reach a solution would have to be.

This is unsatisfying given everything that has preceded it.

his work will often enough be purely the expression of the conflict itself

If biography is "inessential" here, then what exactly is meant by expression ?

pleasure is the law, but try not to think too hard about it

Schooler, Ariely, and Loewenstein
"The Pursuit and Assessment of Happiness
can be Self-Defeating"
(2001)

[54]

3.2 Changing Goals

[one] reason why the pursuit of happiness may be self-defeating is that it may cause people to treat activities not as ends in themselves, but rather as a means towards something else, namely the gaining of happiness. ...considerable research indicates that when individuals engage in activities for external reward (e.g., money) the activities lose their intrinsic appeal... Typically, in such studies the extrinsic reward is entirely distinct from the intrinsic hedonic value of the experience itself—for example, getting paid for a task that one would typically enjoy. Nevertheless, it seems plausible that if individuals view gaining happiness as something above and beyond the intrinsic appeal of the activity itself, such a motivation might similarly detract from the utility that is derived from an experience. For example, one might go to a concert with the primary motivation of genuinely wanting to listen to the music. Such a motivation would be unquestionably intrinsic and thus should lead to a positive experience. However, if a person goes to a concert with the explicit goal of gaining happiness, then the music itself is no longer the primary motivation for the task. In short, the hedonic value of an experience may be compromised to the degree that one is engaging in a task with the goal of achieving happiness, rather than with the goal of genuinely valuing the activity itself.

Granted the risks inherent in lay cherrypicking from specialist literature, and granted also the risk of "saying in bad English what everyone already knew," I of course find the point urgent, the logic sound, and the example well-chosen.

The question then arises, why tf go to a concert if not to be happy? It's easy to think of happiness itself as being the intrinsic part of concertgoing; banishing it to the extrinsic is on the surface nonsensical. It may be, though, that what we are really dealing with here is even more subtle than the intrinsic-extrinsic question: namely consciousness and unconsciousness (and perhaps the liminal space between them, if such a thing indeed exists). It is the subtle difference between a gainful mindset and its opposite, whatever word we want to attach to that (I can't think of a good one).

As soon as we first become aware of these inner workings, we are thrust out (probably unwillingly, perhaps unwittingly) into the ongoing struggle to recover our naive enthusiasm; to get back "in" to "the space," as I seem to recall Kenny Werner putting it in Effortless Mastery. The struggle against ourselves and our own notions of utility is hard enough. Throw in all of society's pressures and conceits and it becomes virtually unwinnable.

Also Paul Goodman, in Growing Up Absurd (1960):

[235] enjoyment is not a goal, it is a feeling that accompanies important ongoing activity;...

From the present philosophy of leisure, no new culture can emerge. What is lacking is worth-while community necessity, as the serious leisure...of the Athenians had communal necessity, whether in the theater, the games, the architecture and festivals, or even the talk.

Two On-the-Spectrum Vignettes

Ericsson and Pool
Peak (2016)

Francesca Happé and Pedro Vital, two researchers at King's College London, compared autistic children who develop savantlike abilities with autistic children who did not develop such abilities. They found that the autistic savants are much more likely than the nonsavants to be very detail-oriented and prone to repetitive behaviors. When something captures their attention, they will focus on it to the exclusion of everything else around them, retreating into their own worlds. These particular autistic people are more likely to practice obsessively a musical piece or memorize a collection of phone numbers—and thus are likely to develop skills in those areas in the same way the people engaging in purposeful or deliberate practice do.

One of the best examples of this is Donny, an autistic savant who is the fastest, most accurate calendar calculator who has ever been tested. Donny can provide the day of the week for a particular date within a second of hearing the date, and he is almost invariably correct. ...

Donny is addicted to dates... The first thing that Donny does when he meets someone is to ask for the person's birthday. He has memorized all fourteen possible yearly calendars...and he has developed ways to quickly calculate which of those fourteen possible calendars applies to any given year. When asked which day of the week a particular date will fall on, Donny focuses first on the year in order to figure out which of the fourteen calendars to use, and then he refers to that mental calendar to determine the day of the week for the date in question. In short, Donny possesses a highly developed skill that is the result of years of obsessive study, but no sign of a miraculous innate talent.

In the late 1960s, a psychologist named Barnett Addis set out to see if he could train someone of normal intelligence to do the same sorts of calendar calculations that savants do. In particular, he had been studying how two calendar-calculating twins performed their feats. The twins, who each had an IQ in the 60-70 range, were able to provide days of the week for dates out to the year A.D. 132470 within an average of six seconds. Addis found that the twins' method seemed to involve finding an equivalent year between 1600 and 2000 and then adding up numbers that corresponded to the day of the month, the month, the year, and the century. With this understanding, Addis then trained a graduate student in that method to see if it actually worked. In just sixteen practice sessions the graduate student was able to calculate just as fast as either of the twins...

The lesson here is that there is clearly nothing magical about Donny's—or any other savant's—calendar-calculation abilities. Donny developed his abilities over years of working with and thinking about dates, reaching the point where he knows each of the fourteen different calendars as well as you or I know our phone numbers, and he has developed his own technique—which, in this case, researchers still have not completely understood—for determining which calendar to use for which year. It is nothing that a motivated college student in a psychology experiment could not do.
(pp. 220-222)

Steven Mithen
The Singing Neanderthals (2006)

At the age of five, Noel had been placed in a school for children with severe learning difficulties. He was autistic—unable to make contact with other children or initiate speech—and had patterns of repetitive and obsessive behaviour associated with this condition. One of these was listening to music on the radio and then playing it by ear the following day on the school piano. The psychologists Beate Hermelin and Neil O'Connor heard about Noel when making a study of autistic savants...

They examined Noel when he was nineteen years old, when he had an IQ of 61 and an almost total absence of spontaneous speech. Hermelin and O'Connor played Greig's 'Melody', Op. 47 No. 3, to Noel and to a professional musician, neither of whom were familiar with the piece. It was played from beginning to end, and then again in short sections. After each section, Noel and the professional musician had to play it back, along with the previous sections, until finally they played the whole piece from memory. Noel gave an almost perfect rendering of all sixty-four bars of 'Melody', retaining both the melody and harmonic components and making mistakes on only 8 per cent of the 798 notes. The professional musician was only able to play 354 notes, 80 per cent of which were incorrect. Twenty-four hours later Noel gave a second near-perfect performance.

By analyzing Noel's mistakes, and undertaking tests with further pieces of music, Hermelin and O'Connor concluded that Noel's musical memory was based on an intuitive grasp of musical structure. Through his obsessive listening to music, he had acquired a profound understanding of the diatonic scales in which the majority of Western music from between 1600 and 1900 is composed... Noel combined his tonal knowledge with a tendency to focus on discrete musical phrases, rather than attending to the piece as a whole as was the inclination of the professional musician. This interpretation of Noel's ability was confirmed when he was asked to repeat Mikrokosmos by Bartók under the same conditions. This piece was composed in the 1930s and eschews the diatonic scale, falling into the category of atonal music. Noel was now markedly less successful, making errors in 63 per cent of the 277 notes he played, in contrast to the 14 per cent of errors in 153 notes played by the professional musician.
(p. 294)

signals have meanings but stimuli need not

from
A PSYCHOLOGICAL INVESTIGATION
OF THE CONTENT OF MUSIC
Roger J. Watt and Roisin L. Ash
4th European Conference on Philosophy and Psychology, 1996

Meaning

The meaning of a signal

is

the intended and agreed mental action
of that signal.

Meaning
is bound up with
communication


, so that

signals have meanings

, but

stimuli need not

.

The meaning of a signal is
not just the action of that signal
:

meaning is reserved

for cases where

the action is intended

.

It would not make

much sense to allow

the sender

to

claim some meaning

to a signal

when

no recipient would be

aware

of that meaning

, and so

meaning is restricted

to cases where

the recipient

and

the sender

have

agreed

what the intended action should be
.

None of the actions of music
considered above,
per se,
would indicate that music has meaning
:

music does not mean tapping feet just because it has that action
;

music does not mean a cup of coffee
in Lochinver because that is what it is
associated with for some listeners
;

music does not mean the sea because that is what it is taken to express by
some listeners
or what it was intended to express by
the composer
.