[xmca] Creativity and Dementia

Vygotsky, Janet, and Bleuler share the view that mental functions are built on top of each other like geological strata, so that when the higher functions deteriorate (e.g. due to age, trauma or some other form of neuropathology) the lower functions are again exposed.
 
An example of this would be brain strokes, which sometimes destroy grammatical functions but leave vocabulary intact (although the reverse also happens). Similarly, in language attrition we often forget a second language but retain the first (although, again, the reverse can also occur).
 
In "Thinking and Speech" this argument is used as evidence that some forms of realistic thinking are both higher than and prior to autistic thinking, because for example in senile dementia people may lose realistic social thinking but retain the capacity to daydream. Animals, on the other hand, know only lower forms of the realistic function.
 
The problem is that this is also evidence for Bleuler’s argument that autistic thinking and the reality function run parallel and do not meet and transform each other! For Vygotsky, on the other hand, autistic thinking and realistic thinking meet at critical moments in life (age seven and again at thirteen) and autistic thinking becomes creative while realistic thinking becomes imaginative.
 
Since the two lines of development transform each other, it is a little hard for me to see how they can become thoroughly disentangled, how autistic thinking could become thoroughly creative and then somehow lose that capacity, or how realistic thinking could first become imaginative and then forget how.
 
But some people do lose the ability to create (and in fact according to Ribot this is not even pathological but a function of the fact that in normal working conditions the imaginative function and the rational function must grow apart). On the other hand, creative artists who go stark raving mad (such as Virginia Woolf or Richard Dadd) do not necessarily lose the ability to create (and as we’ve seen it’s possible to forget a first language before you forget your second).
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
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Received on Sun Sep 28 01:35 PDT 2008