Carl Jung, on art, free will and happiness
Carl Jung — The artist gives up free will…
Every creative person is a duality or a synthesis of contradictory aptitudes.
On the one side he is a human being with a personal life, while on the other side he is an impersonal, creative process…
The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him.
As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is ‘man’ in a higher sense–he is ‘collective man’–one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic life of mankind.
To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.