Special Interview: Eric Maisel Discusses The Van Gogh Blues

It is my pleasure to present Dr. Eric Maisel to you for a discussion of his most recent book, The Van Gogh Blues.  As many of you know, I am an avid reader and as such, my standards for books I am willing to recommend are high. And as many of you, my loyal readers, are quite discriminating, I know I'll hear about it if I don't keep them that way.

The Van Gogh Blues has impressed me as a book worthy of your attention for a number of reasons.  I appreciated Dr. Maisel's frank discussion of traditional psychology and how it has and has not served the creative person well.  His normalizing of the existential depression that many creatives experience, how this is a distinct experience from what we commonly call clinical depression, and how this existential depression can be engaged and worked with in a productive manner resonated with me personally and called to mind many of the individuals I coach.  If you appreciate the breathe of fresh air that comes from reading authors who admit life has challenges, that they generally don't end, that there aren't 3 Simple Steps to Everlasting Bliss AND who manage to leave you feeling solid, validated, hopeful, focused and ready to roll up your sleeves despite all that, I do recommend you check out this worthy read.

And now, I present Eric Maisel:

L: Eric, for those who are not familiar with your book, could you give some background on The Van Gogh Blues?

E: For more than 25 years I’ve been looking at the realities of the creative life and the make-up of the creative person in books like Fearless Creating, Creativity for Life, Coaching the Artist Within, and lots of others. A certain theme or idea began to emerge: that creative people are people who stand in relation to life in a certain way—they see themselves as active meaning-makers rather than as passive folks with no stake in the world and no inner potential to realize. This orientation makes meaning a certain kind of problem for them—if, in their own estimation, they aren’t making sufficient meaning, they get down. I began to see that this “simple” dynamic helped explain why so many creative people—I would say all of us at one time or another time—get the blues.

To say this more crisply, it seemed to me that the depression that we see in creative people was best conceptualized as existential depression, rather than as biological, psychological, or social depression. This meant that the treatment had to be existential in nature. You could medicate a depressed artist but you probably weren’t really getting at what was bothering him, namely that the meaning had leaked out of his life and that, as a result, he was just going through the motions, paralyzed by his meaning crisis.

L: Although, being a creative person does not mean all experiences of depression are existential by definition, true? Given that a creative person may still experience clinical depression, how is one to know the difference?

E: When you’re depressed, especially if you are severely depressed, if the depression won’t go away, or if it comes back regularly, you owe it to yourself to get a medical work-up, because the cause might be biological and antidepressants might prove valuable. You also owe it to yourself to do some psychological work (hopefully with a sensible, talented, and effective therapist), as there may be psychological issues at play. But you ALSO owe it to yourself to explore whether the depression might be existential in nature and to see if your “treatment plan” should revolve around some key existential actions like reaffirming that your efforts matter and reinvesting meaning in your art and your life.

L: Eric, at several points in your book I found myself feeling very validated (and curious where you found the stash of my personal journals that you seemed to quote in so many examples!). I often joke about my quarterly "Dark Night of the Soul" and appreciated your normalizing the existential depression so many creatives, like myself and many of my clients seem to flow in and out of. I was curious, however, about your use of the word "force" in the sense that we must force meaning on our lives. Would you share more about your choice of this particular word, which has such strong connotations? How did you come to conceptualize the process in this way?

E: I believe that it is very important that, as a species, we engage in a paradigm shift from seeking meaning to making meaning. “Forcing life to mean” is a phrase that the novelist Hermann Hesse used in his journals and it captures what I believe is our central existential task, to decide what cherished principles we want to uphold and how we want to represent ourselves in the world and then to act accordingly, whether or not what we have decided looks meaningful, proper, or appropriate to anyone else. The individual is the only arbiter of meaning in his or her life—there are no legitimate meaning police and we ought not allow there to be any meaning police of any sort. Rather than “looking for meaning in all the wrong places,” or even in the right places, we reflect on how we want to be and then live life that way, making our own meaning as we passionately create ourselves.

L: In anticipation of our interview, I asked my readers if they had questions they would like me to pose and I received some that the practical Midwestern woman in me just loved. The first comes from a fellow blogger who asks whether you feel one can create meaningfully and successfully without being bestowed the monetary accomplishment of popular society and culture.

She adds, "As I get older I meet so many artists and musicians some of whom are so amazingly and richly talented, gifted,really , but their talents go largely unnoticed and unacknowledged....year after year.

Van Gogh painted masterpieces that in the end, are some of the most powerful ever created...they have affected human's association with the concept of painting itself. Yet, Van Gogh, unless he or any of us can really know anything beyond our deaths, never knew what treasures he made for our world.

If relationships are to be a large measure of our meaningful endeavors and lives...one could argue Van Gogh's contemporaries, for the most part, would not have supported his vision, and could therefore, have at least in some way, thwarted his pure meaning.

So much "depression" I see in my friends, and in myself, is the knowledge or feeling that our work might have real value and meaning, but remains unacknowledged, despite continuing efforts on our parts.

E: A lack of success and a lack of recognition are profound meaning crises that must be addressed just as any meaning crisis must be addressed, with all of our heart and all of our energy. We have the following options: We reinvest meaning in our art and reinvest meaning in our marketing efforts and make a new go at doing excellent work and also at becoming an excellent advocate for our work, in the hope that this time recognition and success will follow. That is, we try again, only harder and smarter. In addition, we invest meaning elsewhere, in other meaning avenues and other meaning containers, and especially in intimate relationships (Van Gogh was happy for one year, when he was in such an intimate relationship). There are no other existential answers: we try again (perhaps differently and hopefully with a better payoff) and/or we try something new.

L: Another practical question, which I just love for it's simplicity, is from a woman working in the corporate environment where the practices and company culture are increasingly going against her value system. Unfortunately, as is true for so many, she can't financially afford to leave it right now. She asks,

"How the heck do I make meaning at a meaningless job?"

And "Do you have any plans for a workbook to help facilitate the meaning making process?"

E: To answer the second part first, I am working on a new book that is all about making meaning. To answer the first part: again, there are only a handful of possible choices, none of them perfect. The first is to see if we can reinvest meaning in our current meaningless job by identifying any parts of the job that do feel meaningful and focusing our energy and attention there, insofar as we can. For instance, if you are a teacher and love your classes but hate faculty meetings, you reinvest meaning in your classes and plead a headache as often as you can and get out of as many meetings as possible—or spend the meetings dreaming of Tahiti or plotting your novel.

The second is to see if, by investing meaning elsewhere (say, in a creative project), you can create enough meaning capital that you can stand the meaninglessness of your day job. The day feels different if you go off to work or if you write for an hour on your novel and then go off to work. In the latter case you may have built up enough meaning capital that the rest of the day can be endured.

Third, you find your way out: you bite the bullet and announce to yourself that your meaning needs come before you financial needs and that you really must find another line of work. Reality bites; and we must meet its bite with our full endowment, which sometimes means getting the heck out.

L: You know, Eric, THIS is why I really enjoyed your book. So few people are willing to say "Reality bites!"  But you know, sometimes it DOES!  So many self-help and popular psychology books don't seem to want to admit that.  Unfortunately when an expert declares something can be easily done, in just a few steps or a few weeks, it sets the reader up for failure and that can lead to low self esteem. If you are a person who tends toward depression, existential or otherwise, that can certainly trigger a spiral.  You, refreshingly, say that not only is it hard but that we have to do this work over and over again.  BUT you also say it is work that we CAN do. We just have to be vigilant, recognize our internal dynamic and work with it so that we don't succumb.  In the end, it boils down to taking responsbility, personal responsibility for the meaning in our lives.

An interesting question related to how we meet that responsibility and engage with the meaning making process was posed by another reader. She asks:

How much have you been influenced by Frankl's logotherapy? "We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life-daily and hourly. […] Life ultimately means taking responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual." This sounds somewhat like Frankl asks us to make meaning. Are you familiar with Frankl's work and could you contrast your approach from Frankl's?

E: Yes, I know Frankl well. Our main point of difference is that he has a spiritual bent and I am an atheist. Frankl does not actually ask people to make meaning, he asks them to find meaning: hence his title, “Man’s Search for Meaning.” For me, this is an enormous difference and puts him in another camp. He indeed asks us to take responsibility for our life, as I do, but for him there are ultimate meanings to discern and for me there are only personal meanings to make.

In “The Unheard Cry for Meaning,” for instance, he says: “I wanted to convey to you the secret of life’s unconditional meaningfulness” and again, “A logotherapist cannot tell a patient what the meaning is, but he can at least show that there is a meaning in life, that it is available to everyone and, even more, that life retains its meaning under any conditions.”

I do not agree with this point of view and do not believe that life has unconditional meaningfulness—to my ears, that sounds like god talk.

L: Very interesting, Eric.  I know I have readers scattered among both camps and appreciate your giving food for thought here. I welcome any readers to present their views and further thoughts in the comments below. 

For those who wish to learn more and keep abreast of your work, how might they do so?

EM: They might subscribe to my two podcast shows, The Joy of Living Creatively and Your Purpose-Centered Life, both on the Personal Life Media Network. You can find a show list for The Joy of Living Creatively here and one for Your Purpose-Centered Life here. They might also follow this tour, since each host on the tour will be asking his or her own special questions. Here is the complete tour schedule. If they are writers, they might be interested in my new book, A Writer’s Space, which appears this spring and in which I look at many existential issues in the lives of writers. They might also want to subscribe to my free newsletter, in which I preview a lot of the material that ends up in my books (and also keep folks abreast of my workshops and trainings). But of the course the most important thing is that they get their hands on The Van Gogh Blues!—since it is really likely to help them.

L: Thank you Eric, for sharing your thoughts with us. It was a pleasure to serve as a host for your tour.

Comments

[Rachel]

Laura: Thank you so much for this interview! And thank you for asking my questions! I LOVE how honest Maisel is - reality bites - that is not only refreshing but also tremendously helpful. It avoids the "there's something wrong with me" thoughts I've struggled with - no, reality bites sometimes. That's just the way it is but I can try to approach it in a way that is more helpful than fighting it. In order to do that, though, acceptance is paramount. Reality bites, now what can I do to make the bite less painful for me?

[Di]

Stunning!

Thank you so much.

[Laura Young]

You are welcome! It really is refreshing when experts don't sugar coat things. Rachel, you said it well, and I popped up a link to your post on meaning making in the next post.

[Angela]

What a fantastic interview! And thank you for introducing me to Maisel and his work. This looks like something I can really sink my teeth into - unlike The Secret, you know? I'll be exploring more of his work.

[michael munson]

Angela, Maisel has quite a few other books. My partner and I are working our way through them. He also has some really nice sets of podcasts, which are great for listening to in the car or while working out. He really does have some juicy stuff! Practical and deep.

If you didn't find enough meat in The Secret, have you looked at any of Esther and Jerry Hicks' books? I found they offer a bit more substance.

[Peter]

I really appreciate what Maisel says about creating meaning, and there is no doubt that creative people can suffer internal struggles unimaginable to the rest of the population, but I’m a little concerned about what people might take away from this. I hope no one falls into the trap of believing that depression is actually an aid to creativity, the way too many people believe that booze fuels the alcoholic writer’s output or that sex and drugs create the rock and roll. Creativity is inherently active and by definition, depression inhibits all sorts of activity. Depression rarely plays a role in any work of genius but is often a factor in writer’s block, dreadful music and unfinished, abandoned canvasses.

I’m really not sure that what Maisel terms existential depression should be called depression at all. Perhaps in a culture that worships the “action hero” and in which the vapid, yellow smiley-face is considered an ideal, the artist’s need for solitude, contemplation, introspection and quiet observation only SEEMS like depression.

It reminds me of the time I was walking through the late, lamented Marshall Field’s store on State St. in Chicago and an elderly tourist told me, “Smile! Things can’t be that bad!” when I was merely lost in thought about the remainder of my Christmas shopping. I wonder what story he told when he got back to Kansas about the guy who told him to “keep his f-----g opinions to himself” and that he had no business telling other people how they were supposed to feel.

OK, so I can get a little cranky at times. But I was in a perfectly good mood until someone took it upon himself to inform me that I HAD to be.