Sensorial Disability and Creation (I)

Review of Psychopedagogy/Revista de Psihopedagogie, 1 (2008), pp.119-132 ISSN 1584-4919 SENSORIAL DISABILITY AND CREATION (I) Ph.D.lecturer ANCA ROZOREA University of Bucharest The article, presented in this number and in the following one of the „Psycho- pedagogy magazine“ is structured in two parts: the first one – theoretical-interpretative – and the second one – a stating research. The aimed objectives are: firstly – making evident, analyzing and interpreting the way of sublimation through art of the consequences of sensorial (visual and hearing) disability and, that way, making easier the „encounter“ with ones of the poetic and plastic creations of persons with this type of disabilities; secondly – remarking the tendency to activate or not, in the case of young people, of some social stereotypes regarding persons with sensorial disabilities and the possibility of their transfer even to the artistic creations of these persons. „The abnormality” of the creator and suffering as value Generally, the „normality” and its correlative prefixed meaning an absolute logical opposition – the „abnormality” (that means without normality) are assimilated to ways of existence of the human being which implicate either the state of stability and of health or the state of instability, of dissolution and of illness. The semantic and phenomenological delimitation of these human realities depends on the socio-cultural, normative, and value-giving patterns of a historically determined society, on one side, and on the other side, on the scientific perspective in which we interpret them (philosophical, moral, medical, psychological, anthropological, social perspective etc.). In the virtue of the ambivalent structural-functional disposition of the human person, the normality and the abnormality are „situations-states” equally possible on the existential axis of a person, without fixed borders, with reversible dynamic and direction (especially if the normality is interpreted as equivalent to health and the abnormality as equivalent to illness, in general and to the psychical illness in particular). K. Schneider remarked, in connection with this, that „the normal personalities are those who are out of the average. The average standard stays for rule and not for standard of value. There for, a border between normal and abnormal personalities does not exist, because the average is permanently subject to variations”. (Schneider, K., 1957) 119 Review of Psychopedagogy/Revista de Psihopedagogie, 1 (2008), pp.119-132 ISSN 1584-4919 The mental health varies as signification and aspect depending on the conditions of existence and on the spiritual standards of the human-kind’s history (E. Fromm). The state of health coincide with the normality as far as the human being can develop adequate acting patterns, adapted to the permanent changes produced on the economical, social, political, cultural plans etc. by a proper perception of the reality and by fitting needs, personal aims, ideals etc. to social standards and to her own standards; only this way the human being can gain her stability and can exercise the independence in thinking, feeling, acting, decision, conception, behavior, always aiming to development and self-accomplishment (including to moral valorization, to transcendental spirituality and to creation). In exchange, abnormality includes all types of manifestations which suppose the psycho-individual lack of balance (from the disorder of the personality’s system to different forms and grades of social lack of adaptability, of deviation from the normative and value-system of the socio-cultural integrative environment). The abnormality can be the favorable „host” of an illness (somatic but firstly psychical illness), but is not equivalent to illness, to its complete clinical evolution, because illness is only a way of manifestation of the abnormality. G. Ionescu (1995) consider that abnormality refers especially to conducts and behaviors and illness is an individual fact, with a certain psychical dynamic which, as it is stopped, can lead to partial or total recovery, so to normality, which, above all, means, for the individual, regaining his „exterior and interior liberty” (H. Ey). Without insisting on the patterns for the interpretation of normality (from considering it as Utopia, as health, as average value or as process) we agree the points of view of the anthropology and of the trans-cultural psychiatry, according to which the interpretation of the normality can not be made in a general way, but in the limits of different socio-cultural and civilization patterns of the society, according to the values accepted as normal. In the same interpretative order, the abnormality is a deviation from the statistic standard, in a positive way (exceptional persons, who play a creative role in history and with special performances) or in a negative way (persons with functional deficit, with performance deficit, with a disorganized and disharmonious personality-system), not being necessary identified with the pathology (to which, unfortunately, it can sometimes tend); it implies „pathos”, that means the direct and concrete feeling of suffering and of helplessness, generalized and permanent on the level of the entire being. In connection with this, it is impossible not to ask our-selves (and not to try dramatically to find answers) if the great creators which history will not be able to forget, or persons with different disabilities (sensorial, neuromotional disabilities, disorders of language or behavior) were or they still are abnormal persons only because they occupy privileged positions on Gauss’s curve or because suffering represented or represents for them a „way of living”…? Illness, disability, unfavorable psycho-social conjuncture, suffering can not really be challenges, possible stimulant impulses for creation, particularly when there is aptitude and talent? 120 Review of Psychopedagogy/Revista de Psihopedagogie, 1 (2008), pp.119-132 ISSN 1584-4919 Octavian Paler offers a possible answer: „If suffering played a role in culture that happened because it was combated. It is difficult for me to think that an artist owes something to the unhappiness to which he was confronted. Unhappiness did not produce values. It was transformed in a value.” (O. Paler, 2005). History, however, offers lots of examples in which suffering, even illness or disability were ennobled by eternal creations. F. M. Dostoievsky, an epileptic, asked himself pathetically, referring to the transformative value of his spirituality produced by the pathologic „ecstasy” which occurred before his crises: „Who cares if my state is morbid? Who cares if this exaltation is an „abnormal” phenomenon if the moment that it generates, when I return to health, turns to reach superior harmony and beauty and gives me in an extreme way a feeling of plenitude, of measure, of quietness and of fusion in an impulse of the prayer with the highest synthesis of life?” The excessive introversion and the schizoid constitution of Vincent van Gogh (in fact, schizophrenia, conforming to the diagnostic of the great psychiatrist and philosopher K. Jaspers), together with the hypo-maniacal states, did not prevent him from being a pure intellectual and an exceptional painter, from having, like Delacroix said, „a storm in his heart and a sun in his head”. The strong personality and the compositional genius of great L. van Beethoven were not destroyed by his later deafness; Apperce, in his doctorate dissertation (1929) wrote, concerning this subject: „a good musician can read a score from the beginning to the end without hearing it, or his interior hearing is enough. A composer gives birth to his work in his mind, he „hears” it, he understands it, without having to listen it; his brain, his imagination produce the masterwork.” Therefore, Beethoven’s deafness, together with poverty, loneliness and suffering, „isolated” him from the world by a barrier of silence, but „brought him together” with himself by analysis of his interior life, giving birth to forms that have not, still, equals in originality, force and perfection. The victory against himself, the transfiguration of suffering in equanimity and happiness, in brilliant creation (like „Arietta” from the Sonata op. 111) are the sign of „approaching himself and a superior reality” (C. G. Yung) by suffering assumed in the most elevated way possible. In a similar way, F. Goya, suffering unexpectedly, at the age of 46, by an atrocious illness of the nervous system (with troubles of sight and hearing, paralysis, partial blinding and other manifestations generating tormenting suffering) was not prevent from continuing to paint, approaching all styles, becoming a giant who revolutionized the romantic art and who expressed a prodigious scale of emotions, from the demonic visions, fruit of his hallucinations and confusions, to the most nuanced lyrical aspects. The hypomaniac H. de Balzac was always performing on the world’s stage, his ambivalent personality, with cycloid, enthusiastic and labile orientation being sustained not only by an extraordinary talent, but also by an iron will; all this comes to light in his masterly literary works and in his characters, transformed in authentic, metaphorically shaped human types. 121 Review of Psychopedagogy/Revista de Psihopedagogie, 1 (2008), pp.119-132 ISSN 1584-4919 Megalomaniac, with a precarious health, distracted, hyperesthezic at social contacts, with a schizoid and autistic structure, with multiple organic symptoms and

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