More thoughts (but this time from others) to go along with
my previous (and ongoing) thoughts:
It is true that may creative people fail to make mature personal relationships, and some are extremely isolated. It is also true that, in some instances, trauma, in the shape of early separation or bereavement, has steered the potentially creative person toward developing aspects of his personality which can find fulfillment in comparative isolation. But this does not mean that solitar, creative pursuits are themselves pathalogical...
Avoidance behavior is a response designed to protect the infant from behavioural disorganization. If we transfer this concept to adult life, we can see that an avoidant infant might very well develop into a person whose principal need was to find some kind of meaning and order in life which was not entirely or even chiefly dependent upon interpersonal relationships.
Anthony Storr
Solitude: A Return to Self
It may, after all, be the bad habit of creative types to invest themselves in pathalogical extremes that yeild remarkable insights but no durable way of life for those who cannot translate their psychic wounds into significant art or thought.
Thoedore Roszak
In Search of the Miraculous
A particularly piercing portion from Into the Wild, which I'm reading currently:
McCandless was thrilled to be on his way north, and he was relieved as well - relieved that he had again evaded the impending threat of human intimacy, of friendship, and all the messy emotional baggage that comes with it. he had fled the claustrophobic confines of his family. He'd successfully kept Jan Burres and Wayne Westerberg at arm's length, flitting out of their lives before anything was expected of him. And now he'd slipped painlessly out of Ron Franz's like as well. Painlessly, that is, from McCandles' perspective - although not from the old man's.
Jon Krakauer
Into the Wild
