I think this book is very helpful for my project, it is about the expression of childhood trauma and creativity. Below are some notes in this book, which is related and helpful.
"I thought, that traces of childhood trauma not evident before might become visible in his late works. But at first such traces were undetectable." (P.6)
"It seems to me that his brush was guided by a compulsion he neither understood nor recognized and indeed could not explain because it emerged from his unconscious, which had been imprinted with his earliest childhood experiences." (p.13)
"Little children often express their traumas in a painting the moment a brush is put into their hand. They do not know what they are portraying, and unfortunately adults are practiced in overlooking the revealing content of children's art." (P.14)
"Thanks to this protective care, he was able to store what he saw in a way that permitted him to keep expressing it in new forms in his art. Thus, he escaped psychosis as well as total emotional self-alienation (which characterizes the life of so many people) even though he suffered a severe trauma not only at the age of three but even at birth." (P.16)
[Buster Keaton: laughter at a child's mistreatment and the art of self-control]
"Alcoohol, cigarettes, nail biting- all serve the same purpose : to prevent feelings from coming to the surface at any cost, as children these people never learned to exprience their feelings, to feel comfortable with them, to understand them. They fear feelings like the plague and yet can't live entirely without them." (P.41)
⭐️ "Unless, like Buster keaton, one can find it in creativity. Although creativity permits survival and helps a person to live with psychic damage, it still conceals rather than reveals the truth. Thus, it cannot protect the person from being self-destructive. As later chapters will show, Friedrich Nietzsche(尼采) needed his entire philosophy to shield himself from knowing and telling what really happened to him." (P.43)
"Chaim Soutine (👈 research about this aritist) .... the great intensity of his work undeniably had its roots in childhood pain." (P.47)
"The absence or presence of a helping witness in childhood determintes whether a mistreated chuld will become a despot who turns his repressed feelings of helplessness against others or an artist who can tell about his or her suffering." (P.60)
"Therefore, we can no longer afford to deny our perceptions and evade the truth, even if it is painful, for only the truth can save us." (p.162)
"People whose integrity has not been damaged in childhood, who were protected, respected, and treated with honesty by their parents, will be- both in their youth and adulthood-intelligent, responsive, empathic, and highly sensitive. They will take pleasure in life and will not feel any need to kill or even hurt others or themselves. They will use their power to defend themselves but not to attach others." (P.170)
Comments