Little Chicks, Broken Dolls, and Krapp’s Last Tape

   

 

 

From Escape into life

 

John Hurt, Krapps Last Tape, London 1999

In Coming to Our Senses, Morris Berman, following Freud, describes three types of creative artists. Type I individuals can hardly be called artists at all, since they are defined by their extreme inhibitions toward making art. Conversely, few of us are as free of neuroses as a Type III, the most readily available example being the unconscious abandon of children.

Type I’s and Type III’s are therefore polar opposites. Creativity is blocked in Type I and totally open, or accessible, to Type III. Which leaves us with Type II, the “neurotic model”. Here is how Berman describes it:

The person fights back, for the spirit was not completely extinguished. But the result of this partial repression is a situation soaking in ambivalent emotions. The creative work has an obsessive quality to it; one is “married” to one’s work . . . Tension and passion are the characteristic modes.

There are degrees of Type II’s, for the category encompasses most practicing artists. At one extreme of Type II, according to Berman, the artist paradoxically “depletes the self,” and becomes “like a broken doll . . . exhausting himself for the sake of his art.” Fortunately, we’re not all as bad off as that; after all, it is possible to consciously aim for health. Thus Berman proposes Type IIb:

One stays fully conscious of the neurotic dramas [going] directly for the liberation from those dramas.

Self-awareness is the first step the IIb artist makes on the road to health.

I thought of Berman’s schematics of the artistic types after watching the film version of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. Krapp, played by John Hurt, struck me as a classic Type II and Beckett a Type IIb.

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