‘What artists do is say the quiet bits out loud’

The triumph of stupidity, as recent international events remind us, needs no explanation; it’s practically a law of nature. The stupid, the ridiculous, the broken and the depraved eventually take charge, as Bertrand Russell complained in 1933, and anyone with any familiarity with history knows this to be true. And yet the dark age gives way to a new renaissance, and art and thought are again reborn, with the efflorescence of creativity banishing the shades of ignorance and mistrust back to the holes from which they rose.

Why? Why does creativity survive and what can we do as teachers to help its flame brighten?

The inspiration for this essay came from a chance encounter with Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, a beautiful dissertation on desire and love where, in the course of placing love firmly at the centre of our strivings for the higher truths, Plato opens a discussion on madness, which the Greeks saw as a visitation from the gods, in the course of which, after introducing the holy Muses, he goes on to make the following astonishing statement: “But he who without the divine madness comes to the doors of the Muses, confident that he will be a good poet by art, meets with no success, and the poetry of the sane man vanishes into nothingness before that of the inspired madmen.”  

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This is certainly something that should be inscribed over the doors of every art and writing academy – and probably science and engineering schools as well. Too often, the divine madness of creativity is banished from these institutions in the name of something one can measure and mark. Yet, as teachers, we know that our students will face the harsh demands of creativity and problem-solving in their daily professional lives, for creativity at its simplest level is the discovery of novel solutions to intractable problems – problems that cannot be solved just by following the rules. And so they deserve to be taught – in fact, students should demand to be taught – how to deal with its infuriating vicissitudes.

It is my view, based on the experience of running a graduate writing course, that creativity can be taught, and in the face of its steep decline first identified in 2011 by Kyung Hee Kim, of the College of William and Mary, and subsequently confirmed by other researchers as the deepening “creativity crisis”, it is our absolute duty to do so. 

But first let me get something out of the way. Current creativity research is dominated by a neuroscience enamoured with gadgets and allergic to the insights from other fields, including the still-vigorous field of psychoanalytic studies. In my view, this has led to that stagnation of research noted in a 2023 survey published in the Creativity Research Journal describing research as “a bit stuck, at a plateau...” and mired in methodological problems endemic since its beginnings. Progress, and certainly progress offering actionable assistance to educators, has stalled, while the theory and practice of psychoanalysis offers not only a compelling account of creativity, still unavailable to neuroscience, but also useful tools for its inculcation.

French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who developed Freud’s work, placed special emphasis on what he called The Symbolic, including language, and located the psyche firmly in the social rather than biological. For Lacan, as for Plato, desire is the driving force propelling us in our endless search for happiness and completion, a search destined to remain unsatisfied because, as Lacan says, we are beings forged in language, and so fated to be caught in its endless unravelling. That is to say, the urge to be creative is as inescapable as desire itself, and creativity is not a weird and perhaps unwelcome side-effect but central to the dynamics of the psyche.

Freud saw art and creativity as both a treatment for and a symptom of neurosis. It was an attempt by the artist to bring their repressed desires into consciousness in a disguised and socially acceptable form and so, according to Freud, is inherently transgressive. Lacan developed this insight further by noting that the repressed desires being given expression are merely the disavowed underside of social discourse, and that what artists do is say the quiet bits out loud. 

All this offers not only valuable clues about why creativity has such a chequered history, being alternately celebrated and condemned to the Gulag, but also why it cannot be extinguished and how we might help our students as they struggle with their own. If the processes of creativity are fundamentally unconscious, as Freud and Lacan suggest, then anything that helps us access and free that unconscious and the secrets it conceals is invaluable – especially when confronting the “creative blocks” that even the most brilliant minds experience, whether they be Archimedes in his Eureka moment or famed chemist Kekulé dreaming the answer to the maddening problem of the structure of benzene. And while all this talk of madness, the unconscious and occult dreams might make a modern educationalist blush, there are proven tools taken from psychoanalysis, such as free association and dream analysis used by generations of writers and artists to negotiate their madness and deliver the goods, and which we ignore at our peril.

The ancients saw madness as both an affliction and a gift, and it remains so today. As teachers, our role is to help students confront and embrace their creative lives, guiding them along the path to their ultimate goals. It is the thrill of being immersed in Divine Madness that calls us to these higher truths, a call we must answer in a world overwhelmed by intractable problems. Against the squawking of hucksters shouting down everything else, this is our vocation: to serve the divine madness being offered us, and live in the truths of the world.

Stephen Sewell is a screenwriter and playwright, and an honorary senior lecturer at Australian National University. 

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