List Digest, Vol 12, Issue 5

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All

In terms of Ann's question, the following caught my attention: "Inspiration,
mediumship, surrealism: The concept of creative dissociation (excerpts) By
Michael Grosso

Salvador Dali developed something he called "paranoic critical activity,"
the main idea being to try systematically to concretize one's obsessions.
Dali's were with putrefaction, ion, time, death, hell, and so on. Paranoiac
critical activity is similar to Victor Frankl's paradoxical intention.
Instead of denying or repressing the negative, we affirm and express it; we
force ourselves to look at it in a concrete way. We exaggerate, make it
monstrous, as Rimbaud said. We get the paranoia out of our system, so to
speak, and at the same time, transform it into something artistically
engaging or therapeutically helpful. This "activity" seems to me part of the
healing power of art. It must have worked for Dali, who said, "The only
difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad" (Bosquet, 1969, p.
83)...

Surreality - my candidate for the advanced development of creative
dissociation - was an attempt to revive the cult of the Muses... For Breton,
de Chirico, Dali, and company, dissociation was the basis of a cultural
revolution, a kind of post-religious eschatology that preached the necessity
for disengagement from and destruction of the prevailing reality principle.

(Cited from Grosso, Inspiration, mediumship, surrealism: The concept of
creative dissociation, 1998, www.nidsci.org/pdf/grosso.pdf, January 7,
2005)"

http://www.migraine-aura.org/EN/Salvador_Dali.html
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