Tonight I feel compelled to write about obsession. You think you know where I am going with this … but you don’t hehehe 🙂

Yesterday I read a great blog written by Johhny Ska – Obsession. Johnny and Jimmy Ska are talented comedians who write a fair amount of insightful blogs. Some of them I don’t agree with, but this one really struck a chord. So then I had to re-read something in one of my favourite books … Eric Maisel’s “Coaching the Artist Within”. Then, of course, I had to spend some time online researching how it relates to gifted people, because I knew there would be people on here that would be interested in that. And lo and behold if there is not an article on the subject written by Eric Maisel on talentdevelop.com (a website devoted to all things “gifted adult”). Which, naturally, went over basically the same stuff as he did in the book. And so here we are.

I said it over at Johnny Ska’s blog and I’ll say it here. Too many people see obsession as being a purely negative thing. People think of the word “obsession” and invariably connect it with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, or with stalkers. Clinical definitions of the word don’t help:

“…an unhealthy and compulsive preoccupation with something or someone”.

The term obsession refers to images, ideas, or words that force themselves into the subject’s consciousness against their will, and which momentarily deprive them of the ability to think and sometimes even to act.

Classical psychiatrists had described the experience of a person whose consciousness was besieged by an intrusive thought and who, although lucid and in possession of his faculties, was incapable of stopping it.
Here’s what Freud has to say about obsession:

“Obsessive ideas . . . are nothing but reproaches addressed by the subject to himself because of anticipated sexual pleasure, but these reproaches are disfigured by an unconscious psychic process of transformation and substitution.”

WTF? Freud always seemed to me to be one wholly obsessed by sex. Sheesh. But I digress.

Of course, here they are all talking about obsession as a negative. And of course there are negative obsessions, such as washing your hands 100’s of times a day, counting things over and over again. Obsessing over a person. Nobody wants those type of obsessions – they are horrific.

But what of positive obsession? The type of obsession that is intgeral to our efforts to make meaning with our creative endeavours? Yin/yang, balance to everything.

Or, as Eric Maisel puts it:

“Defined this way, it is obviously always unwelcome. But suppose a person is caught up thinking day and night about her current painting or about the direction she wants to take her art?

Thoughts about painting “intrude” as she balances her checkbook or prepares her shopping list. She can hardly wait to get to her studio and her rhythms are more like Picasso’s on painting jags than like the rhythms of a “normal” person.

This artist is obsessed in an everyday sense of the word–and more than happy to be so!”
So how does Eric Maisel define positive obsession exactly?

“A fair working definition is as follows: positive obsessions are insistent, recurrent thoughts or sets of thoughts, pressurized in feel, that are extremely difficult to ignore, that compel one to act, and that connect to one’s goals and values as an active meaning-maker and authentic human being.

For Van Gogh, for a period of time, sunflowers obsessed him. For Dostoevsky, for decades, the question of whether an innocent–a “saintly man”–could survive in the real world haunted and obsessed him.

Georgia O’Keeffe obsessed about how to represent the desert, thrilling herself when her imagery of bleached bones satisfied her for a time.

It is no accident or coincidence that effective artists harbor preoccupations that rise to the level of positive obsession.
And about ‘blocked’ artists (ie visual artists, musicians, writers etc etc):

I’m convinced that their lack of motivation is in large measure the result of this absence of positive obsessions. Most creators — and all would-be creators — simply aren’t obsessed enough.

For an artist, the absence of positive obsessions leads to long periods of blockage, repetitive work that bores the artist himself, and existential ailments of all sorts.
Imagine a world without the works of Van Gogh, Dostoekvsy or Beethoven, that were created out of their obsession.

“The cypresses are always occupying my thoughts.” ~ Vincent Van Gogh

“Most inner-oriented artists share a common characteristic, a certain quality of obsession.” ~ Kenneth Coutts-Smith

“I’ve been called many names like perfectionist, difficult and obsessive. I think it takes obsession, takes searching for the details for any artist to be good.” ~ Barbra Streisand

“The painter’s obsession with his subject is all that he needs to drive him to work.” ~ Lucian Freud