The creativity of art and the abysses of madness.
Is there still chaos within you, Nietzsche asked, is there still a dancing star?
There are used and abused words we use to name undecipherable territories or spaces of insignificance, exhalations of contained madness or empty abysses of failed genius.
One of these words is “creativity”. A serious word whose use should be protected from abuse. Creativity is an outstanding trait of human behavior, particularly obvious in certain individuals capable of recognizing, among thoughts and objects, new connections leading to innovations and changes. The criterion of originality, present in every creative activity, is not a sufficient criterion, if it is dissociated from a broader legality which allows the creative activity to be recognized by other individuals. The occurring of creativity according to rules is that which distinguishes it from arbitrariness.
The creative character is typified by a form of thought called divergent that, unlike convergent thought, which tends to the singleness of the response to which all the problems are reduced, presents an originality of ideas, a conceptual fluency, a sensitivity to problems, an ability to reorganize elements, a production of multiple, different responses. Diverging thought, where creativity is expressed, comes into play when the converging procedures have been developed to the point of allowing an adequate mastering of the sector of application, so that, up to a certain intellectual level, there exists a close interdependence between the two types of thought, which tends to decrease at the highest levels of intelligence. So to be creative it is necessary to have well organized the bases whence to launch flight, otherwise the outcome will be that of Icarus.
The amount of experimental research provides a profile of the creative personality: the creative person is motivated by curiosity, the need for order and success, he is authoritarian, aggressive, self-sufficient, rather uninhibited, informal, unconventional, independent and autonomous, has a vast capacity for work, self-discipline, versatility, he is constructively critical, hard to satisfy, has a large range of interests not inclusive of economic ones, interests of a feminine type, little masculine aggressivity, does not desire a lot of social relationships, is introverted, emotionally unstable, but able to efficiently use his instability, unadapted in psychological terms, but socially adapted, is intuitive, empathetic, considers himself creative and describes himself as such, is not very critical about himself, exercises a noteworthy impact on others.
Creativity is also related to the thresholds and sometimes the abysses of madness. C.Lombroso was the first to point out this connection in 1864 when he proved that Cellini, Goethe, Vico, Tasso, Newton and Rousseau had been subject to attacks
of “madness”, concluding that genius was the expression of a “degenerative psychosis”. K.Jaspers, who examined the same relationship in the cases of Nietzsche, Strindberg, Van Gogh, Hölderlin and Swedenborg, wrote: “The artist’s creative spirit, even when conditioned by the evolution of a disease, is beyond the opposition between normal and abnormal, and metaphorically can be represented as the pearl born of a fault in the shell: just as we do not think about the shell’s disease when we admire the pearl, thus, faced with the vital force of a work, we do not think about the schizophrenia that perhaps conditioned its birth.” And speaking of Strindberg: “There is an indisputable, scientifically proven connection between the highest degree of creative development and the most striking moment of the outbreak
of the psychological disturbance. This fact, which requires further confirmation in pathology,
is nonetheless meaningful also by the fact that it seems to modify the common opinion, according to which mental disease equals a complete emotional and psychological disaster, if it is true that in Strindberg’s case, such a connection does not appear in the least proven.”As to the relationship between perversion and creativity, J. Chasseguet-Smirgel, starting with S. Freud’s hypothesis according to which creativity and perversion have their roots in the pre-genital stage of the psychological evolution, presents the hypothesis that the two figures share the rebellion against “the fundamental law enacted by the Oedipus complex”, therefore both perversion and creativity live according to a double truth system that on the one hand recognizes reality, and on the other denies it, canceling it in a system of idealizing falsification, indispensable for a creative production.
The pregenital condition is also interpreted as the chaos before the law-regulated cosmos, so that creativity draws on chaos so as to reformulate the cosmos. S.Arieti identifies various techniques for developing creativity, beginning with the conditions that foster the creative process: the first condition
is “the ability to be alone, that can be viewed as a partial sensorial deprivation”, thanks to which the individual, by reducing his exposure conventional stimuli, is able to listen to his own internal life, drawing near to what psychoanalysis calls “manifestations of the primary process”; the second condition is inactivity, which allows the removal of the attention from external occupations, encouraging “the emerging of those daydreams, usually discouraged because considered to be outside of reality, but extremely useful for brief incursions in irrational worlds”; another important element is memory and the inner repetition of past traumatic conflicts. This explains creators’ rejection of psychotherapy, or even their desire or their obtaining, by alcohol or drugs, an increase of the psychopathological component, held to be fertile soil for creative production; a last requirement is ingenuousness, a Latin word coming from in-genuus, meaning born free, where the issue is not freedom to, but freedom from any conditioning, especially mental, that makes the world appear within an interpretative scheme which nips in the bud the astonishment of the world.
Indeed, creativity is not the production o novelties, but the faithful handmaiden of the very “astonishing” that one day generated philosophy, which, according to Aristotle “was born of sorrow and of wonderment.”

Umberto Galimberti