Insanity & Creativity

” In our sanity we only create what we find. “

~ D.W.Winnicott

As I reached the end of Winnicott’s writing on ‘Living Creatively’, this simple line took me by surprise as many times Winnicott surprises me.

As I read this line again, a certain kind of simplicity along with a mystery enraptures me in the world of my own thoughts. As he wrote this line, I wonder what he had in mind.

And while I read it, what strikes me is, that it is in our ‘insane’ moments we end up creating or discovering things or ideas which we had no clue about ( that they belonged to us and ‘in’ us!).To elaborate it further, I’ll take an example of my own life- one which is very close to me i.e. writing poetry.

I have a storehouse of vocabulary from which I pick up words to write, and over these years, it hardly takes me few minutes to pen down my thoughts ( just like now), but underlying my ‘poetic’ moments is something which I now presume is of great significance, and that is what perhaps was the mystery in the beginning.

As I pluck a layer of this petal of mystery, I understand ( also as I have often wondered) that may be these moments of sheer creativity had that magical element in them, and that is why they served as very satisfying and blissful moments to me.

Bringing in the theme of insanity, as I have been hearing in the past one year from my teachers, I do feel that patients in their ‘insanity’, in their symptoms reveal to us that which had been hidden for long, that which could only be reflected or perhaps divulged in an ‘out of the ordinary’ way and it is in this very arena where they end up creating something which becomes apparent only after it has been created.

This creation may include a variety of art forms- for a patient with Hypochondriasis, it may be some kind of guilt in indulging in ‘gundagardi’ in his college days that led him to ‘acquire or create’ the symptom of his inner nerves being twisted and crossed thus leading him to experience pain almost in the entire body. In the ‘sane’ world, innumerable tests do not report anything, but his so called ‘insanity’ has depths which are hard to imagine, for he has created a symptom from his inner layers of mind, that which astonishingly not only causes him pain, but makes the other person (me) question and wonder his creativity.

Philip in his writing on ‘Clutter’ says :

“Clutter may not be the way we hide things from ourselves but the way we make ourselves look for things. It is, as if it were self-imposed hide and seek.”

Perhaps here is where we can come close to the unconscious, its majesticity along with dynamicity, for it hides many a things which one finds may be in moments so ‘insane’, so undefined that their worth becomes far greater than the usual ‘conscious’ utterances!