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What causes the difficulties that writers and artists often encounter? How are we to understand writer’s block or other creative blocks and inhibitions? Why do even productive writers and artists, who may love writing or making art, often dread to approach page or canvas, experience anxiety about their work, or live with inner voices of criticism and self doubt? In the Captive Muse I refer to those inner voices that say, Who ever you told you were a painter? a writer? a poet? You call that a painting? A story? a poem? Consider three related psychological elements that operate in writers and artists, and often get in our way: anxiety, which is an inevitable accompaniment to creative work; resistances, which are the psyche’s response to anxiety, including anxiety which may not even be registered consciously; and the inner voices of criticism and self-doubt which can increase anxiety and therefore resistance. We each experience these, though some experience them more than others, and with more problematical results. How we deal with these elements is decisive, perhaps as decisive as talent and imagination, for what we can achieve. Resistances (explained earlier as the ways we avoid what the psyche determines, often unconsciously and irrationally, to be dangerous) come in many forms. We sit down to write and suddenly we think of lunch though we just had breakfast and it’s only 9 a.m. (I refer to creative writing but this can apply to professional writing as well). We start to paint and suddenly want to e-mail everyone we know. We try to allow something new to emerge but find ourselves doing the same thing over and over or we start to do something new and promising, only to retreat from it before it quite takes shape. Resistances may be transient and easily overcome, or they may keep us from the work for years. Writer’s block is resistance writ large. So are painter’s block, musician’s block, and the performance anxieties that make one avoid the exhibit or the stage. The struggles faced by many writers and artists and by an even greater number of people who want to write or make art result from exactly such resistances, though they may appear instead to be the result of a perpetual and self-perpetuated lack of time, a mysterious procrastination, an unproved conviction that one has nothing important enough to say. Such resistances as impede or block the writer’s process or the artist’s process may be due to many things. We may encounter resistance because of the content of the work and our fears of revealing it.... or because of what the process unconsciously means to us. Creative work can stand for many things. It can represent an act of competition or aggression that feels too dangerous, or a prohibited self- aggrandizement or display. It can stand for our separateness where this is imagined to threaten our relationships with others or for a loss of separateness that may also feel dangerous, as if in the creative process we will be swallowed up. We may fear that because creativity often requires excluding others, we endanger our relationships by doing such work. Creative work can stand for and require attitudes and behaviors we may feel are forbidden us, such as aggression, curiosity, or expressing beliefs that are at odds with what we have been taught or what others may need from us. The resistances may be to the intense feelings creative work involves... to the giving up of control over rational, linear thinking that creative work often requires... or to feelings that may seem like they are a prelude to madness, too intense excitement, or too much joy.... We may fear we will be envied or attacked and so resist the work that threatens us with such reactions. (The author explains the sources and the nature of those inner voices that may support or berate us). Our inner voices are largely unconscious and are active within us in important ways. They may support or attack us. Think of those rotten lousy feelings that come on suddenly. Think of those comforting feelings you have at times, as if being held or reassured. Such good and bad feelings and the accompanying thoughts are not only functions of blood sugar levels or hormones or lack of hormones; they have to do with how we are interacting with those important beings now set up within us, and whether we have their love and approval for what we are doing or their disapproval and hate. Whether we will be able to proceed with creative work, with writing our stories, novels or poems, with painting our pictures or doing our sculpture, will depend in no small measure on whether those inner others are on our side, or whether, where they are not, we have other voices within and without that help us defy or ignore what might want to beat us down. We sit down at our desk or easel and encounter the anxiety that creative work inevitably involves and the resistances that the anxiety brings into being. We encounter those inner voices whose support we need but may not have. Because the anxiety and the resistances are inevitable, and the inner voices cannot be entirely escaped, it helps if we come to understand their nature, to acquaint ourselves with the particular forms they tend to take for us. We need to be able to tolerate the anxiety and to recognize the resistance for what it is and then to be able to work things out in the work itself rather than turning away. We need to know our characteristic resistances so we recognize the sleepiness or boredom or distractedness for what it is. We need to know how our inner voices make themselves heard and, if they are not our allies, to find others, both inner and outer, that can be. We need, when necessary, to turn to supportive others--writer or artist friends, writing or art teachers, and sometimes psychotherapists or psychoanalysts, who may in time become inner voices that lend us and our art their support. We need to learn to live with the understanding that sometimes the work will be bad, even terrible, but that such phases, too, are involved in the making of art.

 

Website: http://www.thecaptivemuse.com/