Monday 30 April 2012

Art and shamanistic doubling


From this book:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0520038452

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"Good art teaching (and creativity itself) is dependent on a greater than usual tolerance of anxiety because of the need to work through one's total personality. This requires a more than average strength of the ego. It is wrongly thought that creative people thrive on neurotic illness. This is not so. The philistine can ignore his illness by living with only a part of his personality and can keep his illness from showing. The creative person faces his illness and its attending anxieties so that they noisily dominate his behaviour. But he is not more neurotic for this reason; rather the reverse is true. If satisfactory human relationships are proof of mental health, as is universally accepted, then the creative mind is healthy through establishing at least one good object relationship: with his own work acting as an independent being. He is able to accept what Adrian Stokes has called the "otherness" of the work of art. This acceptance requires the entire apparatus of projection, integration, and introjection, which is part of any good relationship." p 108

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Cultural barriers to objectivity