Abstract
By analyzing eminent artists’ depictions of their experiences as taken from too-long-neglected interviews with Sigmund Koch and juxtaposing these with Ricoeur’s regressive and progressive hermeneutics and contemporary concerns in narrative psychology, the authors open new avenues of inquiry into self, identity, and art. Using interviews with Toni Morrison and Arthur Miller, they demonstrate how the creative process involves a concurrent interrogation and dislocation of the self, as well as a moral responsibility to a collective other. While the artists engage in regressive and progressive processes in their art, they also engage in the same processes in telling about their lives and their art. These enable transformative experiences for an artist’s sense of self and identity as well as the genesis of creative work. The regressive and progressive processes hold true not only for Toni Morrison and Arthur Miller, but also for other artists and individuals negotiating the long-term tasks of development.
Understanding individuals’ construction of self and identity through the life stories they tell has long been a hallmark of narrative psychology. In this paper, we look to the life stories told by artists to explore how exactly that construction happens. More specifically, we draw from a rare source of archived data—the Aesthetics Research Project, an endeavor conducted by Sigmund Koch in the 1980s, in which he engaged 12 eminent artists in interviews about their lives, the process and content of their work, and its impact. Looking at artists’ responses as narratives of self and identity, we uncover how those individuals engage simultaneously in what Ricoeur calls progressive and regressive hermeneutics; thereby, in a concurrent exploration of their origins and a dislocation from their autobiographical experiences they generate creative work. Additionally, we suggest that such a process is grounded in a moral responsibility to a collective other. We also find that this process functions not only in the genesis of an artist’s work but also in the narratives about her or his work and life. What we witness in the stories of two artists are models for how individuals—not just artists—might engage in the world in both subjective and intersubjective ways to fashion who they are as part of the long-term tasks of development. As Freeman (1985) writes, linking Ricoeur with developmental theory, the process of self-understanding across the arc of one’s life demands not only distanciation and interpretation of experience (as one might read a text), but also creation.
In the pages that follow, we briefly review the history of psychological investigations into creativity and argue that the use of narrative psychology—particularly the work of Paul Ricoeur—provides the opportunity to understand self, identity, and aesthetic experience in necessary regressive and progressive terms. We also call attention to the significance of the Aesthetic Research Project, Koch’s endeavor to link more closely the arts and humanities with psychology, in which his intention was to create a new type of theoretical work that would explicate some of those dimensions of reality most dear—and most tacit—to the individuals engaged in the practice of art (Koch, 1987a). From there, we move through an analysis of the narratives of two artists with the use of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics. In the closing pages we explicate our theoretical developments relating to self, identity, and aesthetic experience, developments that are inherently limited given the ineffability of art, but nonetheless far-reaching for narrative psychology.
Psychology’s foray into art and creativity has a long history spanning the provinces of psychoanalysis, cognitive science, and psychobiography, among others. Central to many of those inquiries is the relationship between the artist and her or his work, and the interplay between the two. Starting with Freud’s (1910/1953c) inquiry into Leonardo da Vinci’s creative processes, the psychological understanding of art and creativity has undergone a series of permutations. Others working in the psychoanalytic tradition—such as Melanie Klein (Segal, 1991), Marion Milner (Raab, 2003), and D.W. Winnicott (Gedo, 1989)—departed from Freud’s pathographic template to explore the more transformative aspects of creativity. Contributions from cognitive psychology, such as the work of Howard Gardner (1994) and the phenomenological case studies of Howard Gruber (Lavery, 1993), have yielded important insights into the unfolding of creativity over a lifetime. And especially in the last 30 years, the use of psychobiographical inquiries into the nature of creativity and aesthetic experience has gained increased popularity. Many relying on this approach (e.g., Elms & Heller, 2005; Runyan, 2005) have sought to use biographical data to understand historically significant lives. This mode of inquiry embraces the personological tradition of personality psychology, often accompanied by the increasingly popular narrative lens. Inquiries into artistic lives, when done in this tradition, attempt to avoid the pitfalls of reductionism and the inventive reconstruction of psychological facts.
Despite this long history of worthwhile investigations, still missing is an explanation of the creative process that fully accounts for the far-reaching transformations of self and identity that can happen through art. As the psychologist Ciaran Benson (2001) advocates in his work to re-conceptualize an understanding of the boundaries of the self,
An appropriate theory of self must be available to support any description of aesthetic absorption if it is to deal adequately with the transformation of the autonomous, detached perceiver of an art object into that of a subject intimately engaged with and centered in “the world” of the art work. (p. 178)
While Benson speaks of the perceivers of art, we believe that his point is equally relevant to the creators of art. In the current paper, we argue that the transformative potential in creative activity demands a conception of self that is at least partially built around the loss of the self. We believe that this notion of self loss has gone largely unrecognized in previous psychological research. In addition, we find that artists serve as models for us all as they draw upon the past and transcend it both to lose and to reconstruct the self and identity.
To extend the theoretical possibilities of narrative psychology’s approach to art, we draw on the work of French philosopher Paul Ricoeur. We look specifically to Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (1970), in which Ricoeur illustrates a dialectic that seeks to combine an interpretation focused on grasping subjective meaning with one that demystifies meaning. To do so, Ricoeur discusses sublimation as it functioned in Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900/1953b), explaining that while such a concept deals with conflicts of the past, what results from sublimation can become cultural or aesthetic phenomena. Essentially, whereas psychoanalysis is conceived of as a largely regressive means of understanding an individual, Ricoeur suggests the theory itself is incomplete because sublimation implies progression, and therefore old energies can be marshaled for creative purposes to solve underlying conflicts. Understanding the progressive aspect of the method is rooted in phenomenology, in which the goal is to grasp the subjective meaning of one’s experience in the creation of social or cultural phenomena. Within narrative psychology, prominent examples of research that has drawn upon this facet of Ricoeur’s work come from Gregg (1998), who looks to North African life narratives to reveal the multiplicity of identity in a changing society where individuals integrate, differentiate, and reject their core characteristics amidst the fluid demands of culture. Additionally, Nielsen’s (1999) re-reading of several Norwegian autobiographical stories has used Ricoeur’s progressive and regressive hermeneutics to understand the ways adults seek resolution to early, often negative, life experiences through the existential projects sketched in their narratives.
Ricoeur’s double hermeneutic can be illustrated very concretely in Freud’s famous case study in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920/1953a) of the boy who had the habit of holding a piece of string to which was attached a wooden reel and uttering fort (German for “gone”) when he threw it into a corner followed by a joyful da (German for “there”) when he jerked it back. This game, Freud observes, was one of endless disappearance and return, with the most evident amount of satisfaction emerging in the latter half. About this, Ricoeur (1970) observes, “The work of art is also a fort–da, a disappearance of the archaic object as fantasy and its reappearance as a cultural object” (p. 314). Ricoeur suggests that within artistic practice there is a dialectic between exploration of one’s current and future life and that which is rooted in the past. Ricoeur goes on to explain how art and its motion between disguise and disclosure are uniquely situated to be understood through a double hermeneutic:
If Michelangelo’s Moses, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet are creations, they are so in proportion as they are not mere projections of the artist’s conflicts, but also the sketch of their solution. Because of their emphasis on disguise, dreams look more to the past, to childhood. But in works of art the emphasis is on disclosure; thus works of art tend to be prospective symbols of one’s personal synthesis and of man’s future and not merely a regressive symptom of the artist’s unresolved conflicts. . . . From now on regression and progression do not represent two truly opposed processes; they are rather the abstract terms employed to designate the two end limits of a single scale of symbolization. (pp. 521–523)
Symbolization thus becomes the means through which regressive and progressive energies may come together. In an earlier work, The Symbolism of Evil (1967), Ricoeur dealt with primary and secondary symbols, advocating a hermeneutics that sought to understand the multiple meanings of symbols, what he claimed as a necessary responsibility of philosophy. Perhaps most importantly, Ricoeur emphasized that symbols were the means through which human subjectivity is mediated.
Sigmund Koch and the Aesthetics Research Project
At the end of a long and eminent career as theorist and critic of psychology, Sigmund Koch directed an extensive project through which he pursued his career-long interest in the links between psychology and the arts and humanities. Koch engaged 12 well-known artists from several disciplines at the Aesthetics Research Center at Boston University in order to understand the endeavors and experiences of artists to a depth not previously explored in psychology. Although Koch sought a group that represented several different art forms, his more important criterion in choice of artist was that she or he had made a widely recognized, intrinsically excellent, and long-lasting contribution to her or his field. The artists included choreographer and dancer Eric Hawkins, architects Ulrich Franzen and Edward Larabee Barnes, composers Norman Dello Joio and Milton Babbitt, playwrights Edward Albee and Arthur Miller, novelists Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison, visual artist and art school founder Mercedes Matter, poet Richard Wilbur, and dancer and dance company director Violette Verdi.
Each artist was a collaborator in a study of her or his work with Koch and “expert discussants” (with the approval of each artist, another artist, scholar, or critic from the relevant field participated in the interviews). All conversations took place in the Mulgar Library at Boston University during the years 1986 through 1988, with the support of a grant from the Ford Foundation, and were videotaped to form an archival resource on the arts. Each artist participated in four 2-hour sessions that investigated the vicissitudes of the creative process. In the first session, Koch explored the personal and professional development of the artists participating in his project. In the second and third sessions, he encouraged the artists to speak at length about the creation of one of their major works. And in the final session, participants stepped back from their work to assess its placement in their respective fields.
However, Koch was wary to “psychologize” what he found. In an interview with Arthur Miller in which Miller argues that discerning the roots of the creative process is a nearly impossible task, Koch makes explicit a fundamental element about his inquiry:
I would be the last person to feel that there was some ultimate explanation or explication of the creative process. . . . This is infinitely complex, as you say, and markedly ineffable. . . . We’re in a scientistic society, and I’m talking not within science but within the modern sensibility . . . that presumes you can find some kind of simplistic or, in some sense, complete explanation of everything. But the mystery and ineffability of what an artist does is hardly acknowledged by many. . . . There are still many people in my field, fortunately not all of them any longer, who would tend to think in these terms—why shouldn’t a theory of creativity be possible? This is gibberish. But it’s very important to establish exactly the senses and the boundaries in which one has simply to stand in awe of the ineffable. … There is interest in making explicit whatever can be made explicit. (Koch, 1987a, tape 2A, 0:09)
The present study
The present study builds on Koch’s work by drawing on the notions of self and identity as psychological tools for understanding that were not as prevalent during his time as they are today. Through a narrative analysis of an archived data resource that would be very difficult to replicate, this work intends to lead to elaborated theory about self and identity, as well as refined methodological strategies within the domain of narrative research.
When Sigmund Koch conceived of his endeavor, he noted that a systematic representation of all artists was not the intention of his project (Koch, 1999). Similarly, the present study does not seek to make a systematic representation of all artists or even all those who participated in the Boston University Aesthetics Research Project. This paper will utilize interviews with only two of the artists who participated: novelist Toni Morrison and playwright Arthur Miller. We began this work asking the following questions: How does the practice of art help shape a sense of self and identity for Morrison and Miller? What is the relevance of the practice of art as it relates to a search for the good in both self and others for these two artists? Our intention was, and is, to extrapolate a useful heuristic for understanding creative activity that we believe will also open new avenues of inquiry within the theory and practice of narrative psychology.
Collecting and analyzing the data
We applied Ricoeur’s ideas to our selected portion of Koch’s data set. Working with 2 hours of videotaped interviews at a time (which provided the benefit of seeing participants’ facial expressions and body movements), we broke the interview down into story segments (Gee, 1991) for organizational purposes as others have done while working with Ricoeur’s method (Gregg, 2007). Story segments are small narratives with a plot structure—a dialogue between the artist, Koch, and/or a third discussant; or a monologue by the artist on a particular topic with a distinct beginning, middle, and end. Initially we read through these story segments multiple times, guided by a thematic analysis approach (Braun & Clarke, 2006). A theme, as Braun and Clarke note, “captures something important about the data in relation to the research question, and represents some level of patterned response or meaning within the data set” (p. 82). The purpose of approaching the videotapes initially with a thematic analysis was to discern the important points of organization within the narrative. In the present study, elements that repeated or were loaded with affective or visual content were often important for identifying the themes around which participants organized their narrative.
The regressive and progressive readings of the narratives depend on identifying the thematic points of organization in a narrative, which serve as the links between the narrative movements backwards and forwards. Gregg (2007), drawing on Ricoeur’s double hermeneutic approach to understand the life narratives of individuals living in North Africa, observes that narratives are rife with symbolic organization that is often rooted in religious, moral, or aesthetic systems. Discerning how such systems “vicariously gratify and defend against deep, often unconscious motivations” involves a process of “peeling away existential, moral, and aesthetic meanings as defensive distortions that conceal the underlying impulses and conflicts” (p. 30). Gregg thus makes the point that a regressive and progressive reading of a life narrative depends on locating the myriad ways that individuals organize their story.
A regressive reading of the narratives seeks out object-relational content and conflict states, asking: What conflicts does the artist address? What events from the earlier part of the artist’s life is she or he trying to transform? Object-relational content refers to persons, places, or events that the artist is still heavily invested in and speaks about repeatedly. Conflict states refer to persons or situations in which the artist identifies a distinct struggle that has been central to her or his personal or professional development.
The second task of interpretation is a progressive one, which involves an understanding of how “deep motivations are developed through rhetorical and aesthetic devices to serve as vehicles for the articulation of authentic, sublime meanings—meanings that cannot be explained as defenses against what they indeed defend against” (Gregg, 2007, p. 30). The progressive reading is concerned with what the individual is trying to transform in her or his life. What is the authentic “project” this person is seeking to live? What is the individual seeking to define her or his identity in terms of, and how can those personal constructions give rise to social and cultural change (Nielsen, 1999)? Particularly relevant here is the work of Jean-Paul Sartre (1960/1968), who conceived of an existential “project” as an ideology of existence, characterized by the totalizing aspects of one’s life. Sartre’s psychoanalytic stance, unlike Freud’s, did not interpret phenomena as a result of only the past. Instead, what Sartre tried to uncover was an “emerging gestalt” which was one’s ever-developing project, the identity-rooted goal to which each personal action relates (Charmé, 1984).
Results
Toni Morrison
Overview
Toni Morrison’s interviews with Sigmund Koch reveal the complex interactions between identity and aesthetic experience; more specifically, they reveal the dislocation of the self through the creative process and a moral engagement with an other that is inherent in her writing. For her, the practice of art serves as an anchor to bring a sense of coherence to her identity. Her novels, including The Bluest Eye (1970), Song of Solomon (1977), and Beloved (1987), are lauded for their epic themes, their depiction of the cultural inheritance in the lives of African-Americans, and a use of dialogue that is often closer to song than speech. During the first two interviews with Koch, Morrison talks about her early life growing up in Ohio, her experiences at Howard University, and the publication of the her first novel, The Bluest Eye. During the next four interviews she describes in vivid detail the genesis and background to her novel Beloved, before discussing the function of the novel in the 20th century during the last two interviews.
Interpretation
For Toni Morrison, the practice of art affects her identity by providing her access to her “interior self.” Morrison’s description of herself as a child positions her as a static character in a house perpetually flowing with activity, a girl who craves privacy as a means of developing her interior self, which was complex and inextricably linked with reading. Juxtaposed to this is an exterior self that was both decorative and attention-craving, as a second child who believed she had no status in the family. Her earliest desire for privacy was squashed by the large number of family members in the house and also by the economic circumstances she became aware of only retrospectively; she moved a lot, they were very poor, and one landlord set fire to the apartment they were in.
Via the extended family members who often lived with her, she was exposed early on to storytelling and the related world that belonged to her ancestral link to post-slavery. One of Morrison’s most poignant images is that of her great-grandmother alone in a house in Indiana on an 88-acre spread of land. With her sisters she watched her from a distance, almost afraid to enter her house since the woman embodied a phantasmagoric presence, indicative—as Morrison relates later—of the immense history that her great-grandmother lived through. Her description of her great-grandmother as a character embodying a type of magical realism serves as a point of organization in her narrative to delineate her personal connection to the history of slavery and to her family tendencies towards storytelling that, for her, were representative of black history.
These two images—Morrison herself as a static character in a busy house, and her great-grandmother as a figure emblematic of her link to post-slavery—serve the self-representative functions of allowing her narrative to move both regressively and progressively. Regressively these images signify the conflict of finding that “interior, real self,” and embracing family tendencies she long felt hesitant towards. She notes in the first interview, having never lived in an all-black neighborhood, that the task of growing up was
to hang on, to cultivate, to nurture our own culture while at the same time penetrating inroads into the mainstream culture. How that was done has always been, at bottom, the subject of most of my work. How one does that, the mistakes one makes, and what you give up, what you throw away, what you hold on to, what is necessary. (Koch, 1987b, tape 1A, 0:22)
Her parents and grandparents relied on memory to quote long poems and stories that were part of the history of the race, explaining events with tendencies that veered from a fact-based approach. Eventually, though, she found their lack of scientistic inclinations denied her the publicly verifiable information that her fact-driven attitude sought out. However, when she turned to writing fiction, one can see the ways in which Morrison starts to privilege the progressive power of her interior self and the storytelling that she heard in her youth:
As I became a writer, I went there like a homing pigeon, to that very place that I had a great deal of disdain for as a high school student and a college student. All that way of knowing seemed so backwards, so unintelligent, interesting, but hopelessly ineffective. But as a source for not facts but truth, it was, for me, home, and the home of my imagination has always rested there. (Koch, 1987b, tape 1A, 0:31)
Here she notes the transformative power of art to draw on early conflicts and core experiences which subsequently invigorated her art, and also illuminated an understanding of her identity. It is through art that Morrison becomes able to make external what had long been most internal to her. Ricoeur’s comment that art can function progressively by sketching the solutions to earlier conflicts shines through clearly here.
It follows that Morrison uses her art as a means of establishing a sense of coherence in her identity. When Koch asks her to speak in generalities about her creative process, she says:
I’m always interested in how central to the lives of men the construction of the house is, and the construction of the population of the house, and how different it is from women. And I remember when we were talking earlier about the first story I wrote, and I was describing to you my son on the couch. He also climbed up on the couch and threw up his orange juice on the paper I was writing on, and I remember distinctly writing around it. Because I had just solved a sentence, a problem, and I wasn’t sure that the sentence would last. I could always clean up orange juice, and I always would say that I think it had some meaning for the rest of my life, because I was always writing around the edges of somebody else’s needs. (Koch, 1987b, tape 3A, 0:12)
This image she presents of writing around the needs of others organizes her narrative in both regressive and progressive ways. Looking at what conflicts or events Morrison is trying to address, it is important to note that up until the time that she wrote Beloved, she worked multiple jobs amidst raising children, negotiating the needs of others to such an extent that she wrote not with daily discipline but with compulsion. Writing for her became a means of survival. As she puts it,
I was doing it because it was the only order I could create . . . the only place that was sovereign for me. It was simply an oasis for me. I had to write. I was thinking so much of getting it right and shaping it, that I never thought of another reader, of a public. (Koch, 1987b, tape 3A, 0:22)
Divorced with two children to tend to, she found herself in a state of uncertainty and interpersonal isolation in which any available time she had was devoted to writing.
By the time Morrison began writing Beloved, she had received a fair amount of critical acclaim which allowed her to organize her day around her writing for the first time in her life. But, instead of negotiating the needs of others, she found new problems in disengaging herself from the psychological space that she created in the novel, which resembled the physical and psychological space of her early years. Her narrative functions progressively here when she talks about trying to maintain a sense of coherence as she discovers the problems of merging her personal and occupational identities together for the first time. Unlike her earlier experiences writing, her work on Beloved shows a turn towards the collective, towards an other, in a way she had not yet experienced in her writing. Beloved “became a way to talk about the history, and the past, and the subject, but I have a lot of fears about writing about the slave world, because it was too big, it lasted so long.” For her, “there was some aspect of it . . . that was unspoken and unimaginable, but had to be described. I suppose it’s like learning to walk, to learn what it means to you” (Koch, 1987b, tape 2A, 0:08). By making external what is most internal to her there is a certain dislocation of the self in writing. Even so, Morrison still demonstrates the ability to use art as a means of turning personal conflict into social or cultural phenomena.
Her desire to illuminate the complexities of people who had been passed over by much of recorded history reveals that, for Morrison, her art can open up a dialogic space between herself and the created subject that affects her identity by developing a moral engagement with an other. Two poignant images serve as a relevant point of organization into a discussion of otherness in her narrative, emerging around three women. In the second set of research conversations, Koch asks Morrison to discuss the genesis of Beloved (1987), a novel in which the murdered child of a former slave returns to her mother, Margaret Garner, in the tumultuous years following the Civil War. Morrison describes a salient image in the novel in which one of the main characters looks into the water and falls in love with her face. The three women in the story, she implies, are aspects of one another, and gazing into a reflective space has to do with “finding the self in the other which is the beloved, the thing you love regardless of what you do, or what loves you regardless of what you do. The benevolent other—the one whose love you cannot leave” (Koch, 1987b, tape 2B, 0:48). The three women in the story coincide with another important image that appears in her narrative about the enchanted world that she inhabited at first through her familial life and later creatively. Morrison recalls observing her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother together in one room, and ties it to groups of three women who appear regularly in her books. She speaks about this image in a regressive way, noting,
this comes from being quite overwhelmed with being the fourth. . . . I saw my mother, her mother, and her mother in one room, and it must have overwhelmed me in some way because I have repeated that idea without any other details, just the trinity, so to speak, has surfaced often in my work. (Koch, 1987b, tape 1A, 0:35)
At the same time, Beloved is not a work rooted only in the personal but also speaks to historical and social circumstances in which Morrison felt her history enmeshed.
Progressively, Morrison again uses art as a means of transforming the facticity of the image of three women to draw a conclusion about identity herself: there is continuity of the self that exists between the four women, the fourth being Morrison as the writer and observer. Yet on a more social level it elicits what has been unanswered about the world of post-slavery and the complexities of the people who inhabited that world. Morrison says:
I had never thought I would write a book about that period because I never thought that I had the stamina. I just didn’t want to live there, imaginatively, for four or five years. The story seemed to me to be a part of some other stories, that formed a triangle of which the best qualities a woman had—nurturing, love, generosity, and ferocity—frequently was displaced from the self to a thing outside. … I think this instance of Margaret Garner’s situation in which it is so important not to permit the best part of her, the thing that was most beautiful, unsullied, that cannot be tampered with, that cannot be made to suffer, would drive her to a position in which she had no life. (Koch, 1987b, tape 2A, 0:11)
By living imaginatively in the difficult psychological space of her novel, Morrison implies that there is a loss of the self to these enormous circumstances she writes about, a tremendous exertion of stamina that firmly situates her as speaking on the social level, thus providing her with the means to an identity.
Hortense Spillers—professor of English, literary critic, and discussant in the second set of interviews about the genesis of Morrison’s creative work—applauds the tendency of the characters in Beloved to seem not only physically real but psychologically imaginable. Morrison states that her goal was “to make them concerned with their own life and the spirit and the blossoming of that life. … You’re not a father but this man. You’re not a mother but this girl. And it’s something only art can do” (Koch, 1987b, tape 2A, 0:27). Morrison’s work takes on a progressive movement here, intent to fill in the important details in the lives of those often ignored by history. In the final research conversation, which asks about the placement of Morrison’s own work and the trajectory of the novel in the 20th century, she echoes this point again, noting that she has nothing but contempt for the notion of art for the sake of art. What has been necessary since the novel came to form has been the confrontation with situations that were social and political, and not merely rendering an interesting technique. “That is the respectable work of art. That is what it is for” (Koch, 1987b, tape 2A, 0:29).
Arthur Miller
Overview
Arthur Miller’s legacy as a playwright includes such works as All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1952), and A View from the Bridge (1955), among many more. In Miller’s interviews with Sigmund Koch, he discusses each of those works and several others, always with an attention to the social context in which he lived and the system he was living under. Miller reveals that he long attempted to create a social conscience in his work by drawing on his personal experiences growing up in the Depression and the circumstances outside himself, highlighting his belief that the divide between one’s internal and external life is non-existent. He speaks about the moral commitment inherent in art, and how such a commitment builds a system of values into his identity. In the present analysis, Miller does not speak through vivid images as Morrison did, to serve an organizing function in her narrative. Instead, when he discusses his life and art, he draws on value statements that serve the regressive and progressive functions that her uses of images performed.
Interpretation
According to Miller, there is no divide between his internal life and the social and political context in which he lived. Growing up in the era of the Depression, he became especially conscious of the enormous history he was living through:
It is one of those cases where my own internal development corresponded to the destruction of the old order. … Those were revolutionary years. Again, the correspondence between my own inner development and the social collapse made my aesthetic what it is. Namely, that there is no division between the internal life of a human being and his own social, political environment. One is the fish in the water and the other is the water in the fish. (Koch, 1987a, tape 1A, 0:42)
Miller’s statement here serves as a major point of organization in his narrative, showing that his identity is shaped by blending together the familial experiences of his early life with the societal conditions of his time period in order to create a social conscience, which he accomplishes through the practice of art. He conceives of his identity as inextricably linked to the circumstances of the external world.
Looking at his narrative regressively, this statement refers to the economic crises that characterized the 1930s, which provided Miller with a great—and at times debilitating—amount of empathy towards others. When families around him in Brooklyn were financially ruined, and while some committed suicide, Miller was unable to rely on the idea that people brought on their own troubles, which he cites as a major development in his thinking. Within his own family he observed the “basic American strand of risk-taking and high dreams of success and a certain reliance on the continuation of the system as it stood” (Koch, 1987a, tape 1A, 0:18). His father emigrated to the US from Poland by himself at a young age and immediately went to work making women’s coats. His mother, who read widely and quickly, hoped that her children would somehow become connected to the arts. Although his father knew nothing of that, Miller portrays him as seeing quite clearly into the social issues portrayed in a play, and “he was totally honest that way because he had no pretensions. I found that very valuable later on in life when I began to write” (Koch, 1987a, tape 1A, 0:32). Yet Miller notes what is salient in the center of many of his plays is a father and a son with various relationships to each other. Miller explained that this recurring theme is in part rooted in his own experiences within his family.
His narrative takes on progressive movement here with respect to his statement about the lack of division between internal and external development. The conflict with his father around his father’s belief in the capitalist system, and the burdensome amount of empathy that Miller felt during the Depression, are understood through the larger social context in which he lived. “This sublimated my own conflict with my father and made it possible to deal with him as a social figure” (Koch, 1987a, tape 1B, 0:33). If his work was entirely personal he could not have written it. He found that he could write autobiography unashamedly if he wrote on the social level. In doing so, Miller implies that his writing is not rooted merely in the family sphere of his early experiences but always understood through the larger social context, since the former does not exist outside of the latter. Writing, for him, is a means of transforming the enormous amount of empathy he always felt and applying it to a social level.
Miller also implies that the practice of art requires an ever-present social commitment, transcending mere commentary, and instead demanding a direct engagement with history. His value-laden statements come in the form of a critique of modern theater as he differentiates himself from most contemporary playwrights. He speaks about theater as a mass art which faded with the arrival of movies, decreasing the social involvement in theater and making it elitist. Miller’s comment that serves a symbolic function about the degree of his moral commitment deals with his belief that the majority of playwrights now are “people who are not related . . . to the prophecy of the great drama of the past. That is, saving the country from itself. … The artist back then took it as a given that his play had to do with the salvation of his people” (Koch, 1987a, tape 4A, 0:08).
Regressively, Miller’s critique of modern theater refers to the importance of theater he saw early on in his life. In the 1930s and 1940s, when theater was more of a mass art, going to the theater was part of one’s spiritual existence. Similarly, he claims, the Greek and Elizabethan periods produced a great number of renowned playwrights partially based on an audience who took the theater to be a central element to their lives. In the increasing commercialization of theater, its ability to assume moral responsibilities dissipated, bringing us closer, in Miller’s view, to Toqueville’s claim about America, “We know the price of everything but the value of nothing.”
The progressive movement of Miller’s art attempts to transcend what he sees as a recurring problem where the social and political circumstances are ignored, endemic in his view of certain modernist tendencies to focus on form and ignore substance. These modernist practices are essentially evading one of the most basic responsibilities that the artist has, in Miller’s opinion. Similarly, he laments critics who strive for a scientific objectivity they never ascertain in an attempt to make blanket statements about his plays when they are unfamiliar with the historical context in which he was writing. He tells a story in this context of meeting a woman in New York during one production of The Crucible who spent seven years in solitary confinement in China. She saw the play and thought someone understood what she had been going through, observing that the questioning used by judges in The Crucible was not at all unlike the questioning she had been subjugated to in Mao’s China. Miller notes that this work, like his others, involves a certain statement of values in the sense that it is meaningful not only to him but to others, too. By using his plays to achieve this aim, he sees himself instilling in the present an ideal held by playwrights of the past who refused to turn away from societal wrongs.
For Miller, the theater was the most appropriate forum for ideological critiques, a forum where there was a constant integration of action and meaning. In one of his initial conversations with Koch, Miller notes that early in life he was markedly introverted but led a totally extraverted life. “I suspect that what I was doing was following a life of fantasy. And that to me was real life,” he remarks (Koch, 1987a, tape 1A, 0:19). What serves as an important point of organization in Miller’s narrative is this description of himself as an adolescent, enmeshed in theatrical work because he believed that it was the primary means towards upward social mobility. When he read Dostoevsky, “it all changed,” as Miller became aware that art should serve a purpose that is meaningful to others and capable of action in the world, too.
A regressive interpretation of Miller’s statement should address his early experiences in which he saw facts and learning as obstacles that got in the way of his natural inclinations toward acting. While his mother despaired of his scholarship, she forgave everything because she saw him as an extension of herself. At college at the University of Michigan, Miller saw the chance of becoming a playwright as quite remote. He considered pursuing a career as an historian but surrendered the idea when he found the discipline of history inundated with facts. The development of his interest in writing is explained as largely spontaneous: making an impromptu speech at his bar mitzvah that captivated the audience; writing a comedic piece that was stolen by a well-known comedian and subsequently broadcast over the radio; winning an award for a play he wrote in college but being entirely unaware if it was any good. Looking at Miller’s early experiences, it seems that his fascination with history and the belief that his generation was particularly historical, combined with his interior life of fantasy, were crucial in informing his belief about the necessity of meaning and action in art. Yet before “it all changed” by reading Dostoevsky, Miller appears to be addressing his apparent talent but lack of commitment to the arts. His description of himself as performative is very much a “not-Me” description that he feels a certain amount of disdain for.
Interpreting Miller’s narrative progressively to understand how action and meaning become central constructs in his identity requires moving beyond the radicalization that he underwent during the Depression. History continued to move his progress along as a playwright as his work became less explained by spontaneous events—as in adolescence—and instead by what concerns mattered most to him in the external world. The process of identity development becomes one of spontaneity transformed into increasing differentiation of focus on social concerns and hence a greater cohesion of identity. After he wrote The Crucible, the Cold War was in full effect, and in Miller’s terms, circumstances were down to the bare bones of human behavior. He suggests that in the early 1960s, “You had to create an ethos out of yourself” (Koch, 1987a, tape 3B, 0:36). His work at this point began to examine what lies inside the human being that could create the basis for an epic, whilst also concerning itself with the idea of personal conscience. The prophetic idea underlying American history that we were heading towards self-perfection was annihilated with World War II. In the silence and indifference that Miller felt in the 1950s, the goal of his work began to shift: “My plays in that period are attempts to discern whether there is in anybody, in the human animal, in the ones that I deal with, a more extant kind of moral energy” (Koch, 1987a, tape 3B, 0:34). Miller privileges the progressive power of art here to maintain fidelity to what he sees as one of his most fundamental commitments: the constant integration of meaning and action in a work of art and hence in his conception of his own identity, too.
Discussion
In the pages that follow, we describe how the dislocation of the self that Toni Morrison and Arthur Miller encounter through the creative process arises both from their interrogation of their past, in light of their present and anticipated future concerns, and from a transcendence of those experiences. Secondly, we explore how that dislocation takes place on moral grounds. And thirdly, we discuss how such facets of the creative process speak to important ways of understanding self and identity within the theory and practice of narrative psychology.
We believe that it is especially important to call attention to Ricoeur’s progressive element in the narratives of Morrison and Miller, because it is there where we can see the integration and development of identity, both personal and social, amidst a seeming “loss.” For Morrison, being a writer moves her concurrently towards her early experiences of storytelling within her family, her link to post-slavery, and the interiorized “real” self that she struggled to gain access to as a child. Though at first glance this appears to be simply a stretch back to her origins, we argue that via creative activity Morrison integrates those disparate elements of her past, and, in essence, moves beyond them. According to her, writing and storytelling were “a source for not facts but truth, it was, for me, home, and the home of my imagination has always rested there” (Koch, 1987b, tape 1A, 0:31). Such early experiences provided an unshakable template and grounding from which she would go on to craft other works of fiction. For Miller, too, his career as a playwright allowed him to integrate aspects of his past into what looks like autobiography written on a social level. However, it was not merely self-referential. His development as a playwright, as he describes, was largely unexpected—the result of a long search to portray the inextricable link between one’s own identity and the socio-political conditions of one’s time, which would frame his work from thereon out. Reading Dostoevsky showed Miller how to portray such a link, as writing then became a means through which he could best understand the circumstances of the world around him. Personal history faded as it coalesced into a framework from which Miller continued to draw.
The point here is not far off from Romantic poet John Keats’ (1970) conception of how creativity bears on the self. Artists, Keats argued, are particularly well suited to demonstrate negative capability, a type of paradoxical functioning that embraces such ambiguity and loss of self-consciousness. Keats believed that what was found through imagination was always saturated with uncertainty, paradox, and a type of ineffable authority. Artists demonstrate negative capability regularly, he claimed, content to embrace the idea that certain questions they attempt to answer through art cannot be resolved. Keats adds that this intentional open-mindedness is a unique capacity that involves an openness to sensations, perceptions, and change; essentially, a lack of fixedness in one’s view of the world and one’s view of the self. To be in a state of negative capability is “to tolerate a loss of self and a loss of rationality by trusting in the capacity to recreate oneself in another character or another environment” (Hutter, 1982, p. 305).
Paradoxically, such absorption is both deeply personal and impersonal at once. Morrison had to draw on an interrogation of her roots to write Beloved; Miller harked back to the difficult economic times he lived through to produce Death of a Salesman. Yet neither work is an autobiographical account. The self becomes lost as a referent; the work marches on in a process whereby the person engaged in creative activity is reconstituted and altered, founding a more porous sense of self and identity in the hereafter. More than a loss, the life-long process of creativity and absorption in an aesthetic task carries a transcendence rooted largely in a responsibility to that which is outside the self. Such a conception of selfhood answers Benson’s (2001) call for a theory of self that speaks to the transformation inherent in aesthetic absorption, or, in this case, creative activity.
We must also add that such dislocation does not take place on putatively intrapersonal grounds; there is a great intersubjective element. As Miller’s and Morrison’s narratives show, much of their creative work—in both regressive and progressive terms—demanded a moral responsibility to the collective. Koch (1999) proposed that understanding artists within a moral dimension was perhaps better suited than psychological theory to an explanation of the creative acts of eminent contributors to our culture. He wrote, “The artistic commitment requires enormous degrees of discipline, steadfastness, self-criticism, gallantry in the face of frustration, and indeed heroism in the disposition to confront and explore the full range of one’s experience” (p. 47). We also find value in understanding artists within a moral dimension; however, we do not follow Koch in his implied abandonment of psychology. Several contemporary practitioners of narrative psychology like Gregg (2007) and Raggatt (2006) on the dialogical self not only leave room for the moral but also call for a greater attention to values and ethics in the study of self and identity. For example, the literary scholar Paul Eakin (1999) suggests that the text of a life story is rife with value statements that reveal the ways in which myriad social institutions have impacted one’s subjectivity. Eakin goes on to say that behind the discourses of value we can find metaphors for the self and one’s life story. Below we describe how these can be found in both Morrison and Miller.
Morrison says that her depiction of black men and women in the world of post-slavery illuminates the complexities of people who had been passed over by history. As she notes, there is always a need for a confrontation with social and political situations. “That is the respectable work of art. That is what it is for” (Koch, 1987b, tape 2A, 0:29). While one could argue that being an artist allowed Morrison to integrate her various “selves,” the content of much of her work is a clear example of the ways in which she marshaled old energies—how she felt her history enmeshed with the world of slavery—to transcend mere autobiography. Several images in her novels may be traced back to early life experiences she points to in her narrative, specifically the recurring image of three women. Yet to make a direct correspondence between such content and her autobiographical experiences would be inaccurate, if for no other reason than she repeatedly stresses the social responsiveness inherent in much of her work. It appears as though her early life experiences and awareness of her connection with slavery serve as starting points from which she could engage with the demands and task of culture.
In Miller’s interviews with Koch, he regularly condemns young playwrights and critics who fail to acknowledge the responsibility inherent in art. In his plays, what is paramount is the assertion of meaning in the sense that it’s meaningful to him and to others, too, yet it also must address the changing social and political climate. One may configure a regressive interpretation of the content of Miller’s work by looking to his claim that he saw his own development mirrored by historical progress. Certainly, many of his plays portray individuals suffering quite clearly from a political or social system—as he saw his own family and others around him suffer—and indeed a father and son are at the heart of several of his works. However, an interpretation that stops there misses the progressive side of the dialectic by which those experiences become a way for Miller to portray a host of societal wrongs.
Finally, while these narratives are clear examples of the regressive and progressive vicissitudes of the creative process, it is important to add that the very act of narration points in both regressive and progressive directions here as well. Put another way, Morrison and Miller told stories about their lives in both regressive and progressive ways. The process relevant to the construction of self and identity via the creative process—drawing on the past, transcending it, and the related dislocation of the self from the task of doing so—takes place not just as one fashions a work of art, but also as one fashions one’s own life story. As McAdams and Pals (2006) note, a fully comprehensive framework for understanding the whole person should incorporate self-defining life narratives. We would add to that framework the importance of the personality psychologist’s appreciation of the extent to which narratives are told regressively and progressively.
Perhaps more pointedly, such an approach allows us to go beyond the reification and categorization of identity that occurs in some contemporary research on self and identity, and understand not only the creative process but also the narrative construction of self as inextricably tied to experiences of the past. However, as both an artist moves forward with her or his work and an individual fashions a story of who she or he is, the remnants of the past become less singularly discernible amidst the transformative influences and demands of culture. Looking at self and identity in this way, researchers arrive close to the possibilities of critical personality psychology as one of us has outlined elsewhere, where personality is understood as “an expression of (i) a multifaceted organization that includes individual, interpersonal, social, cultural, and political contexts; (ii) individual and social change; and (iii) the moral dimensions of human psychology; i.e. complex subjectivity” (Ouellette, 2008, p. 1). The theoretical implications of this approach are far-reaching, as this type of work may shed new light on the concepts of self and identity, which are never value-free, and help us understand individuals’ responses to both internal and external challenges as part of their search for the good, for both self and others.
Concluding thoughts and future directions
Future research could continue to draw on the extensive amount of data compiled from the Boston University Aesthetics Research Project, exploring the lives of the 10 other artists involved in the interviews. One could look across factors of age, gender, race, and occupation to answer questions about identity through a multiple case studies approach (Roberts & Rosenwald, 2001). The participants in Koch’s interviews were well known and had accomplished a certain degree of extrinsic recognition during the course of their lives; therefore research to come in this area could use Koch’s project as a guide to ask similar questions of younger, unrecognized artists, or simply creative, productive individuals in any field. McAdams and Logan (2006) provide a fine example of this sort of work in their narrative study of academics working in the sciences and the humanities. The patterns of narrative identity that the authors tease out deal similarly with the constellation of early experiences into life-long “projects.” In the present study, the ways in which the creative process affects both a personal and social identity for Toni Morrison and Arthur Miller could be extended to other creative individuals. However, looking at non-famous individuals, as McAdams and Logan do, can draw attention to the factors of time and resources, which must be considered in this arena.
Finally, the question looms large about what Koch imagined these interviews would contribute to the discipline in the long run. He long believed that the links between psychology and the arts and the humanities should be more present than they were in his own time. That hope took form in his work at the Boston University Aesthetics Research Project. Not only did Koch attempt to build the aforementioned links, he did so without “psychologizing” the artists who spoke with him. In the interviews, he stayed as close to their experiences as possible, believing that what they had to say could contribute to an experientially grounded psychology (Koch, 1999). Indeed, Koch was right. In the present work, by adhering similarly to the artists’ experiences and words, the moral implications of such an approach could be quite far-reaching within narrative psychology. With regressive and progressive considerations, we find an individual neither trapped in the past nor unrealistically invested in the future, but rather synthesizing the two. The task of personality, both understanding it and living it, may very well be a constant engagement with one’s own double hermeneutic.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors are especially grateful to Mark Freeman for his wonderful insight and suggestions, and to Idelle Nisilla at the Ford Foundation for her kind assistance. The authors also extend their thanks to three anonymous reviewers who provided valuable suggestions for improving this manuscript.
Funding
The authors wish to thank the Professional Staff Congress–City University of New York for funding this research.