ABSTRACT
Similar views appear to be only slightly less prevalent among psychologists and psychiatrists outside the psychoanalytic tradition. Thus, in a review chapter on "Personality, Situation, and Creativity," Martindale (1989) took the relation between creativity and regression for granted, stating that primary process states of consciousness are a necessary element for all creative activity (see pp. 215, 226). Even the behavioristically inclined psychologist Eysenck (1993) associated creativity with a weakening of "higher centers" and a consequent disinhibition of lower and more primitive functions of the mind and brain (p. 341). The romanticist inflection is especially obvious in Jamison's (1993) eloquent book, Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, in which the "tumultuous passions" of Lord Byron are presented as the very paradigm of creative activity. "From virtually all perspectives," wrote Jamison (with considerable exaggeration), "there is agreement that artistic creativity and inspiration involve, indeed, require, a dipping into prerational or irrational sources," an ability to regress to earlier, more primitive levels of mental life to "summon up the depths," and to experi-
For over 100 years, many of the most influential and innovative artists, writers, and critics have been sharply
critical of the organicism, personalism, and emotivism central to the romantics, with their valuing of nature, emotion, and spontaneity over calculation and selfconsciousness and their yearning to overcome the Cartesian division of subject from object. Neither Baudelaire nor Mallarme, the key protomodernists of the 19th century, considered spontaneous, irrational processes of free fantasy to be the key to artistic creativity. Baudelaire emphasized instead the role of dispassionate deliberation, conscious craft, and an alienated stance; he placed artifice above nature in his hierarchy of aesthetic worth and praised the dandy's "unshakable resolution never to be moved" (Abrams, 1984, p. 135, pp. 109-144). Mallarme called on the poet to cede his initiative to words, that is, to eliminate his own personal and emotional contribution and signature by standing back and letting words clash and interact like objects independent of the poet's intentions: He called for "la disparition elocutoire du poete, qui cede I 'initiative aux mots [the elocutionary disappearance of the poet, who cedes initiative to the words]" (as cited in Abrams, 1984, p. 138). Both were precursors to the sometimes virulent antiromanticism of T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, and Wyndham Lewis, influential formulators of a modernist aesthetic that recoiled from (what they saw as) the mushy emotivism and personalism inherent in the pathetic fallacy of romantic subjectivism, which Hulme described as "the state of slush in which we have the misfortune to live" (as cited in Bate, 1952, p. 561; see also Schwartz, 1985).
