I re-read an essay today by the pianist Claudio Arrau written and published in 1967 in a magazine called "High Fidelity". I think the first time I read this essay, I made a comment about it. Those of you that know me know that I have been interested in C.G. Jung from a very early age. For me he has always offered fresh ideas and insights that have helped me make sense of my world, my mind and keep the wheels on the road. For all my artist and musician friends, I would highly recommend this essay. Arrau of course wrote very little and performed a lot. A dominant figure in 20th century classical music.
"A Performer Looks at Psychoanalysyis" by Claudio Arrau
Friends and pupils often have heard me say that in my ideal music
school, psychoanalysis would be a mandatory part of the general
curriculum. That and the art of dancing.
Psychoanalysis to teach a young artist the needs and drives of his
psyche; to make him come to know himself early rather than late and thus
sooner to begin the process of fulfilling himself, which until the end
of his life must become his main driving force as a human being and as
an artist. Indeed, only insofar as this will be his goal, his conscious
or unconscious goal, will he grow as an artist and become worthy of the
name. I would include the art of modern dance for the use of its
liberating, expressive movements in the release of psychophysiological
blocks, tensions, and inhibitions and for the greater awareness and
projection of feeling.
We have all heard of psychic blocks; of musicians suffering
breakdowns, of fingers, muscles, and memory suddenly collapsing and
refusing to function, of fear so acute that high notes in singers vanish
and all technique and mastery seem to evaporate. At such dire times, we
say that he or she needs psychoanalysis. Yes, indeed, but at such time
analysis usually comes too late. Only the most aware, the most
intensely driven by the will to live and the courage to be, ever make it
to full light and health. Others flounder in a perpetual half-light of
suffering, the mind's real Purgatorio.
In my ideal school, a young artist would never be driven to such an
impasse. Learning and guidance would light the way from the beginning,
the same as in ancient times the Mysteries helped initiate the Greek
neophyte into the stream of life. But, unfortunately, in our own
society today, with its insistence on the competitive and material
aspects of life above all else, growth and development are not the
natural order of things. Although, as Jung pointed out over and over,
life often does take matters into its own hands and carries us along,
sometimes to our good fortune, life can also play us terrible tricks --
putting out stumbling blocks when we are not looking, or bringing us to
dangerous precipices down which we sometimes fall, and from which only
the most heroic ever find the way back.
Psychoanalysis has come a long way since Freud published 'The
Interpretation of Dreams' in 1900. We know today that there are many
ways to self-knowledge and self-fulfillment, which in the end is the
cure of any neurosis (or at least must be the aim of any cure), whether
it be lengthy analysis going back to the age of one, or Tillich, or
Buber, or Zen, or sheer life-giving everyday good sense. But to me, the
most pertinent way for the life of the artist is a return to the ancient
knowledge and wisdom as embodied in the writings of Jung and expounded
in his idea of the Collective Unconscious.
This, as distinguished from the personal unconscious, is the sum of
man's total psychic history from the beginning of time, which has come
down to us in mythology, fairy tales, religion, and ancient customs and
rituals. As man's mind and soul evolved, as he fought his psychological
battles of attainment, renewal, realization, and conscious awareness and
gave them concrete form and symbol in his learning, art, and literature,
so was formed the whole mystical and mythological store of our entire
psychic past. Individually, in our own time and lives, we go through
the same psychic battles as recorded in mythology, only without the aid
of the Wise Old Man to guide us (save when we find one in the guise of
the analyst in time of need); we undertake heroic journeys just as the
great heroes of mythology -- Hercules, Perseus, and Theseus -- did, and
sometimes we are even helped in our tasks by similar miraculous advice,
forewarnings, and assistance. And like Prometheus, we challenge the
Gods, courting disaster, which we sometimes reap and sometimes triumph
over. Over and over again, we repeat what Man in his short and
dangerous passage from birth to death has undergone consciously and
unconsciously from the beginning of his history.
In the course of a lifetime of struggle and achievement, the artist,
creative and recreative, as society's culture bearer, carries out the
patterns of individual growth and development, and sometimes final
realization, more clearly than other people (or we see the patterns more
clearly, if for no more reason than that the life of the artist is more
often recorded).
If the artist's gifts are exceptional, he will often show in his
early years the qualities symbolized in the archetype of the Divine
Child, which, as Jung describes it, "is a personification of vital
forces quite outside the limited range of our conscious mind: of a
wholeness which embraces the very depth of Nature. It represents the
urge, the strongest, the most ineluctable urge in every being, namely
the urge to realize itself. It is, as it were, an incarnation of the
/inability to do otherwise/ [Jung's italics], equipped with all the
powers of nature and instinct, whereas the conscious mind is always
getting caught up in its supposed ability to do otherwise."
This is the unconscious power of the child prodigy. But passing
over from the divine innocence of unconscious security to the young
manhood of conscious responsibility takes an act of supreme courage and
heroism. For the young artist, it represents one of the most difficult
periods of his life. He must pass through a great test in which he wins
his standing in society (the first prize in a competition usually as his
reward) along with the Princess, even as Tamino does in his Rite of
Initiation in Mozart's 'Magic Flute'. First he must slay the terrible
dragon (attain conscious understanding), then he must pass through the
test of fire and water (with Sarastro, the force of conscious knowledge
and commitment, as guide), and only then does he attain Pamina (his
soul), and his heart's desire. In doing so, the dark, terrible forces
of the unconscious (Queen of the Night), which always seek to drag him
down, sink into the deepest layers of his psyche from where he can then
begin to draw his creative power, but this time mastered by his
conscious mind.
If passing the heroic test -- usually preceded by such depression,
discouragement, and fear and trembling that the young artist often
contemplates suicide -- were all that had to be achieved, life would be
comparatively simple. But in the life of the artist, as well as life in
general, it is only the first of many essential tasks that he must
accomplish.
From the age of twenty to forty or fifty, man is in the full flush
of his life force. Eros is behind him and in him. His work makes
strides, he wins success and recognition, and he usually marries at this
time. But even with Eros within him and the drives of ego-attainment
running instinctively, each accomplishment, each success, must be a
conscious labor. No less than Ulysses, the artist must pass trial after
trial, until little by little he reaches his life's goal and finds his
soul in the guise of Penelope waiting for him.
This is if all goes well. Most of the time, as life goes, it
doesn't. Eros may be within us, but so is the Death Wish (in the
Jungian sense of the symbolic fear or urge to slip back into the dark
unconscious state of an earlier stage of development), and we do the
most inexplicable things. We frustrate ourselves constantly. Out of
fear -- fear of failure and, strange as it may seem, fear of success as
well -- we artists suddenly fall sick before major appearances. We
create frightful emotional upsets, we risk losing what we hold dearest.
We fall and break an arm. We have car accidents. Singers suddenly
become hoarse, can't make their high notes, and often tighten their neck
muscles into such a vise that it is amazing that their vocal cords can
function at all. Instrumentalists suddenly lose the use of some fingers
or suddenly can't play the simplest (or the most difficult) passages.
Or out of competitiveness and the wish for almightiness, as it were, the
least sign of imperfection can cause one to give up in the middle of an
otherwise fine performance. Worst of all, the struggle may suddenly
lose all meaning, and the artist, lost in a terrible maze of conflict
and despair, may give up performing altogether. This giving up is a
real death, the death of the soul. One descends into the abyss and the
return takes the most heroic battle with the Furies (the dark aspect of
the unconscious) which man is ever called upon to make and which
requires all the remaining power of his soul to overcome. If he wins,
he is a true hero who accomplishes his own rebirth.
The no less terrible, if less dramatic, effects arising from the
failure to deal with psychoneurotic blocks are the blocks of
communication. The blocks of emotional life and feeling which hinder
the flow of communication and expression are often the result of
teaching and upbringing, but more basically of the fear of commitment,
the fear of putting one's stamp on an interpretation, so to speak. In
the end the failure of communication is the failure of psychic growth
and development in general. Most often, communication is blocked
through unawareness and often through sheer vanity, where the artist
becomes the victim of his own success and, disconnecting himself from
his essential being, becomes increasingly isolated from the source of
his creative powers.
Fortunately, in young artists emotional blocks of communication
frequently can be broken through with the right kind of teaching. I
have been astonished many times to see pupils with seemingly nothing to
express, virtual emotional blanks, suddenly experience an inner
emotional explosion through the sheer means of playing with the whole
body instead of stiffly with only the fingers, arms rigidly at the
sides. It is as if the newfound freedom of movement works back on the
psyche to awaken and release the dormant creative imagination and enable
it to begin to grow and blossom. It goes without saying that the
potentialities of creativity must be there to begin with. Where there
are no such potentialities, a good psychic and physical shaking-up will
be a stimulant but only for the moment.
As the first half of an artist's life is dominated by Eros and the
outward driving instinct for work and attainment, so the second half of
life must be a time of stocktaking, a turning inward to the essence of
one's being where unessentials fall away and only the most meaningful
and deepest sides of our nature and gifts are fulfilled. This period of
life can be as much a crisis in an artist's life as the very first
gropings for the identity of self and purpose. Then there is the fear
before the demands and dangers of life. Now there is the terror of the
dissolution of life and the oncoming night of nothingness and death.
This does not mean that from the age of fifty or so an artist begins
to flag and accomplish less. Just the contrary happens if everything in
his psychic development has gone well. His energy is as enormous as
ever. Only now, if, as Jung describes it, the full process of
individuation has taken place, or is taking place -- the process by
which a man, through ever greater consciousness, effort, and wisdom
finally attains his complete selfhood in harmony with the cosmos -- does
he do his best and most meaningful work. If this last task is achieved,
it produces a new wave of creativity arising from still deeper sources
than anything before.
In our time, Picasso, Stravinsky, Chagall, Casals, Klemperer,
Rubinstein, Ansermet, among many other great old men, are the best
examples of the power of individuation, of what I call continuous and
endless evolvement, where the limits of one's persona begin to break
down and evaporate, leaving behind all vanity, which can lead into the
final fusion with the All. In the creative field, the continuous
invention, active imagination, endless curiosity, and the wisdom of
concentrated expression are wondrous facts in Picasso and Stravinsky
particularly. Only the greatest creative spirits ever attain so far --
the saying of more through less.
In creative life, or in the recreative, there are all kinds of
levels of realization and fulfillment and at all stages of development.
Mozart died not quite thirty-six, Schubert at thirty-one, and Beethoven
at fifty-seven. Yet each fulfilled himself creatively in the fullest
sense if quite differently. Mozart shows a creative power of such
magnitude from 'Idomeneo' to 'The Magic Flute' that one can virtually
say that he tossed out of himself one great masterwork after another.
Schubert's creative forces toward the end of his life grew in depth and
richness (the 'Great' C-major Symphony, the Quintet, Op. 163, and the
three Op. Post. piano sonatas among other major works) so that had he
lived, I feel he would have gone on to give us still more masterworks.
Beethoven underwent many rebirths and finally a complete transfiguration
at the end. Sometimes he even tried to fight the early battles over
again (on a higher level), as in Opus 106 when (probably tempted by the
new Broadwood piano under his hands) he tried to go back to the time of
the 'Appassionata' in an attempt to give birth to yet another heaven-
storming sonata. But he was now beyond such things and far on the way
to a spiritual transformation of the highest order, and the attempt
after the fiery opening proclamatory bars seems to break up under his
fingers. Instead, he goes on to the profoundest slow movement of his
entire corpus and then concludes -- the virtuoso once more to the fore
-- with the most ragingly difficult fugue imaginable, as if to say, "Now
that will show you." Beethoven always won every battle. That is why
his message to mankind and especially to young people is still so
powerful today.
Closer to our time, Mahler showed the same ability to overcome the
dark night of the soul and over and over again to transcend the death
wish, achieve rebirth and renewal on ever higher levels, and win through
to the final exaltation and apotheosis of the last symphonies. We know
today that Mahler consulted Freud about some of his most personal
problems and we can be certain that he was helped, at least to some
extent (even one good talk with a wise person can open a window to self-
understanding), for toward the end of Mahler's life his anguish and fear
of death had given way to a firm belief in the indestructibility of the
human soul and the divine possibility of man's fulfillment on earth.
When Jung wrote that life takes care of us, he uttered an often basic
truth, but only for those most positively and consciously oriented.
When we have the drive and courage to enter contests (never mind that
not everyone can win -- it's taking the risk that counts), when we take
on the responsibility of marriage and family, when we overcome obstacles
and win successes, that is life taking care of us. (At this point, what
with the renewed interest in contests vis-a-vis our political
competitiveness with the Soviet Union, it is most important to remind
young artists that contests are only a practical means in the launching
of a career and, while important psychologically as a test of endurance
and courage, are not the meaning of art. In my ideal school, young
artists would compete but there would be no first prizes, only many
prizes for different gifts.) When we need a guide and mentor most (our
own private Merlins) is when we come to crossroads and crises. Only the
most informed and aware get help out of their own beings. The rest are
fortunate if they have the luck to come across a helping hand.
From the time I was fifteen, when my teacher Martin Krause died,
until I was twenty, I went through the most difficult and unhappy years
of my life. I continued to work. I won the Liszt Prize twice in
succession at sixteen and seventeen, but hardly a day passed when I
didn't think of death. Then at twenty, twenty-one, after my first
United States tour and my return to Berlin, I was overwhelmed by the
difficulties of the struggle before me and wanted to give up then and
there. But a friend brought help. This friend had heard of how much
analysis had helped Edwin Fischer to continue to play (Fischer's problem
was a stage fright of paralyzing proportions -- when he was able to
overcome it, he gave some of the most demonic never-to-be-forgotten
performances I have ever heard), and since Fischer was Krause's older
and more famous pupil, I decided to go to an analyst too. Actually, at
that time I would have gone to a witch doctor if help had been promised.
My analyst, Dr. Hubert Abrahamsohn, not only helped me (in three years I
had enough interest in life to enter the Geneva Concours of 1927 and win
First Prize) but he has remained my friend and mentor to this day. His
help and teaching (he started out as a Freudian and came to Jung and
finally to what today is called Existential Psychology) opened so many
windows for me that I could finally interpret my own dreams -- or at
least recognize them as dreams of anxiety, forewarning, and, sometimes
in moments of despair, of a foretelling of fulfillment. Over a period
of thirty years, analysis helped clear my personal psychic jungle until
my full creative forces could flow freely. Layer after layer of
covering and unessentials were stripped away in a process which must
continue until one's death. In this sense the old saying that "when one
stops growing one dies" is literally true.
If so far I have not mentioned women artists, it is not an
oversight. The psychology of woman differs from man's as wholly as her
sex. The woman artist in today's world is not only confronted by the
problems of her own individual feminine psychological development but
with making her way in a man's world. Since man's goal is to achieve
his total personality through work, attainment, and family, a career is
his natural state -- nay his necessity. A woman artist must also
fulfill herself as a woman. If she can do that and succeed in her
career as well, without ambivalence, she is indeed blessed. But since a
woman artist's career can be no less demanding, no less ego-centered
than a man's -- the more demanding it is indeed, the greater will be the
conflict which will arise in the fulfillment of her personal life. Due
to her many ambivalences, a woman artist's chance to win through to a
great career is consequently more difficult than a man's. She has to
battle twice as hard, I think, and fairy tale and myth are rarely on her
side. (Patriarchally grounded, they are usually concerned only with the
princess who has no other aim in life than to live happily ever after
with her prince charming.)
Even in this day of rather waning patriarchy, when we seem to be on
the threshold of a new society based on the equally strong personalities
of both sexes, the normal man shuns the strong, independent woman; he
has no need of her. It takes an exceptional man to effect a happy
marriage with a woman artist, and lucky she is if she finds such a man.
But more often she doesn't find him; she wins him, as Psyche, through
trials of patience, courage, and love, finally wins back Amor.
In the Jung canon of the Collective Unconscious, the archetypes of
the Anima and the Animus figure prominently. The anima is man's womanly
aspect, the part of himself which he must not reject as unworthy but
which he has to absorb and integrate into his psyche to become a total
man. The less of this integration he accomplishes, the more of a child
he remains. The woman must absorb her animus, her masculine aspect, in
order to achieve full femininity.
The creative artist, I think, is among the few happy ones most able
to achieve the union of opposites into the total whole which is the goal
of the process of individuation -- the attainment of the unity of the
total self. In the artist, the tensions to be overcome may be greater,
but the union -- the whole -- can become more perfect. The dragon
slaying done with and the hero battles won, the artist can now allow
himself to remain open to the sources of his imagination, divination,
and creativity -- his unconscious -- which now no longer will appear as
an aspect of the dark dread but of beneficial wisdom. Without that
source, no amount of intellect, reason, ego-stability, and control would
ever have enough meaning in art.
One last thought. I am often asked by friends and pupils: isn't
psychoanalysis dangerous to artists, isn't it important for artists to
have conflicts and neuroses and problems and to suffer? Yes,
absolutely. But then psychoanalysis or self-analysis or group
psychotherapy doesn't do away with conflicts and suffering. It is the
finding of a 'modus vivendi' with conflict and suffering -- of how to
deal with them and live with them -- that matters. For the artist,
tensions and handicaps, once understood, conquered, or sublimated, are
important and need not be erased, for it is these very tensions that
give the creative process its intensity and are a vital source of
creative power. But what psychoanalysis can do is to eliminate the
handicaps of fear -- the fear of being unique, or of not being unique.
For the truth is that every artist, who in a greater or smaller way is a
true artist, is unique.
from
Arrau on Music and Performance by Joseph Horowitz
