“If we applied to the actions of creative artists the word “compulsive” it would be quite meaningless clinically. A mechanism which might signify a serious character disturbance if we encountered it in the business of everyday life has achieved an entirely different meaning rediscovered in this different setting, the creative process. To go one step further, there are reliable witnesses who tell us that Mozart heard his works before he composed them. He not only heard them in the way most composers hear before or while they write. He heard all the physical qualities as well–strings, woodwinds, brasses, and so on. He wrote down what he heard. If this is true, and from Mozart’s creative pattern it might well be true, he was hallucinated. A hallucination is the “sensory perception of an object which is not present.” If he was hallucinated, was a he sick man? Nobody would call Mozart’s symphonies the creations of a sick mind, even if it were historically proved that he heard them with all the qualities of acoustic perception, as our psychotic patients hear voices. Thus we see that something which is phenomenologically abnormal (to be hallucinated is not the norm) is not necessarily pathological. It may be supra-normal, above the norm. There are features which distinguish Mozart from an insane man: he was remarkably well integrated in his environment; none of his actions were “crazy.” Moreover, the things which he did hear were significant and beautiful to a great number of people, though perhaps not to everybody. He did not insist that what he heard could be heard by everybody else, nor did the mystics. For example, it can be said of Saint Teresa that she was, apart from her supranatural experiences, a practical woman with a sense of humor, quite different from a schizophrenic. And so were many other geniuses of art and the life of the spirit. All this shows that a person can see things or hear things which nobody else sees and yet be healthy–or even “healthier” than most of us; the word “health” is etymologically related to “whole” and to “holy.””
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