The Creative Solution

The key to the creative type is that he is separated out of the common pool of shared meanings. There is something in his life experience that makes him take in the world as a problem; as a result he has to make personal sense out of it. This holds true for all creative people to a greater or lesser extent, but it is especially obvious with the artist. Existence becomes a problem that needs an ideal answer; but when no longer accept the collective solution to the problem of existence, then you must fashion your own.The work of art is, then, the ideal answer of the creative type to the problem of existence as he takes it in – not only the existence of the external world, but especially his own: who he is as a painfully separate person with nothing shared to lean on. He has to answer to the burden of his extreme individuation, his so painful isolation. He wants to know how to earn immortality as a result of his own unique gifts. His creative work is as at the same time the expression of his heroism and the justification of it. It is his “private religion” – as Rank put it. Its uniqueness gives him personal immortality; it is his own “beyond” and not that of others.

E. Becker, p.171