“The artist’s life cannot be otherwise than full of conflicts, for two forces are at war within him on thè one hand thè common human longing for happiness, satisfaction and security in life, and on thè other a ruthless passion for creation which may go so far as to override every personal desire. The lives ofartists are as a rule so highlyunsatis factory, not to say tragic, because oftheir inferiority on thè human and personal side, and not because ofa sinister dispensation.
There are hardly any exceptions to thè rule that a person must pay dearly for thè divine gift ofthe creative fire. lt is as though each ofus were endowea at birth with a certain editai of energy. The strongest force in our make-up will seize and all but monopolize this energy, leaving so little over that nothing ofvalue can come of it. In this way thè creative force can drain thè human impulses to such a degree that thè personal ego must develop all sorts of bad qualities — mthlessness, sel&shness, and vanity (so-called “auto-eroticism”) and even eveiy kind ofvice, in orderto maintain thè spark of life and to keep itself from being wholly Dereft.
How can we doubt that it is his art that ejmlains thè artist, and not thè insufficiencies and conflicts ofhis personal life?These are nomine; but thè regrettable results ofthe fact that he is an artist, that is to say, a man who from his veiy birth has been called to a greater task than thè ordinary mortai. A special ability means a heavy expenditure of energy in a particular direction, with a consequent drain from some other side of life.”
Carl Gustav Jung
