The Difference Between Creative Self-Transformation and Self-Mutilation

Arguably, creative expression is necessary to personal development. But as modernist artists understood, expression actively creates new aspects of the self, rather than just representing a person's ideas. The act of communicating or expressing meaning is enough to transform personal experience by creating different ways of relating. Creativity does involve the self, but is based on self-formation, rather than self-protection or self-interest. It involves risk-taking and a degree of unpredictability. It is the difference between becoming who one 'is' and static being, if you remember that 'to be' is a verb.

Unlike the tortured soul image of creativity (the self-mutilating artiste), self-transformation involves healing and developing the potential to be different which was already there but unrealized/unnoticed. It does not mean alienating oneself or becoming overly mediated by the 'external' world, because an intrinsic part of ourselves is always how we relate to the world. It means living on a threshold (i.e., 'limit-experience') in which it is impossible not to face the world, and respond to different potential future as they emerge. Self-mutilation confirms the wounded self even as it denies the possibility of self-transformation, of actually dealing with the causes of suffering. It is a masochistic way of being, which leads to only seeing negative emotions as 'authentic' and valid. Joy, care, affective feelings are denied because the mutilated self cannot experience them without an overload of sensation. But sensation and 'pleasure' are not accurate ways to describe affect; they must exist for a self who perceives and judges them. The reason for emphasizing feelings of ecstasy is because they are fundamentally linked to our relationship to otherness, both the world and our own becoming-different. According to Martin Heidegger, "ek-stasis" - standing outside one's self excentrically - was the meaning of existence, but some point, this translation was forgotten. It is exciting to develop your potential and needs both in space/place and time, at the same time as it is scary. However, to think that uncertainty and risk can be represented as an object of horror would be to misunderstand how and why affect exists. Self-mutilation is a moment of creative self-transformation, but by itself should only be used as a means of self-defense in extreme circumstances. We need to help people heal so that they don't have to live in this agonizing, chronically stressed mode that relates to social domination.