Anthropomorphized Creativity
It starts at 2 o'clock in the morning, a blank sheet in front of your eyes and a blank brain behind. Whether for grades, for money, for for glory, for love, or for self respect, you have to put your thoughts down in a coherent form, but you cannot. You beg for the ability to shift out of neutral and get writing, but it doesn't come. And like any human being since we started carving into bone and shaping clay, you start to put in your mind's eye a face to what you are seeking. It has eyes, brows, a nose, and of course, a slight contemptuous smirk. That same tendency that has lead to the fashioning of idols now comes to you.
"The secret of creativeness," (Carl Jung's phrase) like the philosopher's stone, is an abstraction that has tempted many great minds into building theoretical structures that try to explain the creative process, and that fail to do so for a majority of creative artists. Jung calls it a "transcendental problem which the psychologist cannot answer but can only describe." In his essay "The Artist" Jung attempts to describe the creative process using the ideas and metaphors of his eponymous theories. These attempt to replace the artist, a living, breathing human being, with abstractions according to which the artist is an "impersonal creative process." While I recently read through his essay "The Artist," and through Nathaniel Hawthorne's story "The Artist of the Beautiful," what came to my mind were those authors whose own creative processes did not fit Hawthorne's and Jung's notions. I can only chalk this up to my contrarian nature and to my choice of authors. Although more likely, it is because of my own idolatry.
The author Harlan Ellison doesn't relish being asked about the secret of creativeness, at least so far as it pertains to himself. Questions about it prompt him to give a brief explanation of how he gets his ideas from a mail order business in Schenectady, New York. (They also cause him to change colors all through the spectrum.) His glib response points to the difficulty of describing the creative process in a way that will carry from one artist over to many.
The challenge is compounded by the prejudices we have about the human mind in general. Every idea about the human mind is an abstraction that cannot but repel as many people as it attracts.
He pushed culture towards science-based reasoning and separation of church and state. With the Age of Enlightenment and Voltaire’s philosophy, Candide is a great story that both entertained the audience of the time and taught them a lesson on what the future of civilization should be. The plotline of this tragedy and love story starts with Candide, an
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that 25% of people suffer from a mental illness and that 50% of people will develop one during their life ("Surveillance Report," 2011). Mental illness is also associated with “chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, arthritis, asthma, and diabetes” (Pederson et al., 2013, p. 695). Rural communities have higher rates of chronic illnesses, mental health issues and fewer providers thus making this population vulnerable to health disparities. The purpose of this paper is to explore mental illness in the rural community, ways to improve accessibility to care, and improve outcomes through the role of a rural nurse educator.
The essence of art is truly in the eye of the beholder, and Joseph Beuys redefined the meaning of artistry when he once said that “every man is a plastic artist who must determine things for himself.” One may find himself or herself asking the million dollar question: “Who is Joseph Beuys?” Joseph Beuys was a German-born conceptual artist who started to pursue art as a career after serving as an airman in the Second World War. Beuys's assorted body of work ranges from the conventional methods of drawing, painting, and sculpture, to process-oriented, or time-based "action" art. With his time-based “actions”, Beuys suggested how art might exercise a healing property on both the artist and the audience when psychological, social, and political are the influence.
Sporre, Dennis J. The Creative Impulse: An Introduction to the Arts. 4th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996. 310-378.
created through the human psyche, It is in ourselves that we can undermine the process.
A Creativity Researcher For More Than 30 Years, ihaly Csikszentmihalyi Is A Professor Of Human Development And Education In The Department Of Psychology At The University Of Chicago. He Has Written 13 Books, Including The Best-Seller Flow: The Psychology Of Optimal Experience (Harper Collins, 1991). Here Are Highlights Of His Books “Creativity”. This Book Is About What Makes Life Worth Living. The Creative Excitement Of The Artist At Her Easel Or The Scientist In The Lab Comes As Close To The Ideal Fulfillment As We All Hope To, And So Rarely Do. Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Interviewed More Then Ninety Of Possibly The Most Interesting People In The World - People Like Actor Ed Asner, Authors Robertson Davies And Nadine Gordimer, Scientist Jonas Salk And Linus Pauling, Senator Eugene Mccarthy - Who Have Changed The Way People In Their Fields Think And Work To Find Out How Creativity Has Been A Force In Their Lives. The Author Defines Creativity In A Mode He Designates As “Capital C”, Distinct From Individual Creative Impulses Or Acts That Occur Without Initiating Significant Cultural Change. The Creativity With A Capital C That Is Of Interest To Csikszentmihalyi Is The Act Of Creativity By Which Culture And Cultural Evolution Are Seminally Altered. What Made Galileo And Einstein Think Otherwise And But Couldn’t It Be This? What If They Hadn’t? They Aren’t Around To Ask. But There Are Others Who Are. Creativity Provides A Groundbreaking Overview Of Those Characteristics Shared By Some Of The Most Extraordinary Visionaries Of Our Most Recent Century, Painstakingly Gleaned From Hundreds Of Hours Of Personal Interviews. Finally, It Proposes Ways In Which We Can Capitalize On These Commonalities In Order To Further Creativity In O...
Creative inspiration - particularly artistic inspiration -- has often been thought to require the sampling of dark "depths" of irrationality while maintaining at least some connection to everyday reality. This dive into underground forces "reminds one of a skin-diver with a breathing tube" wrote Arthur Koestler in his influential book, The act of creation (8).... ... middle of paper ... ...5) Mental Disturbance and Creative Achievement, Biographical study of prominent 20th century figures by Arnold M. Ludwig -- finds high achievers in social, business, and science professions have higher rates of mental disturbance than the population as a whole. Rate of artistic professionals nearly twice as high.
Jojic, Dr. Mirjana. "Will Budget Cuts Threaten Mental Health in Your State?" ABC News. ABC News
Mental health is a crucial part of our being and has a profound effect on how we live our lives. It determines how we socialize, how we reason, how we deal with our emotions, and how we handle stress; and when impaired and/or neglected, it can have crippling effects on the way in which we function on a cognitive or even physical level. Anyone can become susceptible to mental illness or compromised mental well-being. However, throughout history mental health has often been overlooked by society and mental illness, in particular, has been long stigmatized. This has left many of those affected untreated, poorly treated, destitute, and even outcast from society. Through education and the changing attitudes of society, mental health treatment has
However the eastern culture has a tendency to ignores the aspect of mental health, which may be one of the reasons why a great amount of the population are unaware of the mental health disorders. Deeming mental health illnesses as an unknown aspect of health contributes to the stigma that is evident in societies. By taking community health nursing, and psychological disorders in the same semester, I was able to relate the stigma associated with mental health with social determinants of health such as income, employment, social exclusion, and housing. Social determinants of health are factors that can act as barriers to improving health, or factors that support health. For instance, if an individual is severely depressed and is unable to get out of bed to go to work, the individual will lose his/her job. Upon losing one 's job, the individual may not have a source of income, and may not have the means to have housing and is then evicted. This individual may or may not have the social support to receive assistance in this crisis, which can lead to homelessness or substandard housing. This is the unfortunate reality of what individuals with mental health illnesses, as well as physiological disorders may
The World Health Organization (WHO) highlights mental health as an important health issue through it’s overarching definition of health as a “state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity (1)." Mental health can be defined as the position in which a person is at an optimal level of psychological, social and emotional wellbeing (2). It is important to note that these definitions are framed within a health lense and it is necessary to understand that health is influenced by broader social determinants (Buse et al.
According to Bacon, Idols of the Tribe come from the physiology of human race. They are false statements based on “sense perception.” There are several causes and forms of these idols. First, there is the cloudiness and limits of sensory perception. Second is the desire to establish a prior cause, even when such a cause cannot be confidently established. The third cause is the tendency to assume that there is more order and reliability in the world then one actually finds. Finally, the forth cause is the failure of due attentiveness, that is, immediately believing what one wants to be true, impatiently rejecting difficult findings, or giving more attention to positive evidence than negative evidence (Article 1, 1/3). In my everyday life, the idols of the tribe can cloud my mind through past experiences. For instance, when I first drove in a car, I was very afraid. Since that day, I have had impression that driving is a scary experience.
For generations creative people have dealt with the stigma of mental disorder often attributed to them. The "mad" scientist, frenzied artist and profoundly intense writer; all have been common judgments of these professions for years. Despite the prevalence of these beliefs, psychological studies in this field have been sparse and often inadequate. To fill this investigative void, Ruth Richards and Dennis Kinney, Nancy Andreasen, and Kay Jamison developed studies to examine the link between creativity and mood disorders more completely and accurately.
Works of art such as books, paintings, poems, and sculptures oftentimes are said to express the feelings, personalities, interests, and desires of their creator. One method for interpreting these details from books and other literary works is known as psychoanalytic literary analysis. This analysis seeks to identify the nature of relationships between characters as well as the author’s relationship with the characters. In the analyses the critic will discuss interactions between characters and with the author and often go so far as to make assertions about the author’s conscious and unconscious reasons for telling their story in the way they did. While psychoanalytic criticism is well accepted it is not without its own critics. At times it
...ulture to change our mind set on these issues, the discriminating idea is deeply rooted into our brains and would need time to get completely over with.