Opposites, the Creative Instinct, and Our Unique Identity

an article by Lawrence H. Staples

the problem of the opposites

Jung recognized that the problem of the opposites is one of the most formidable obstacles to psychic integration. Even when we are able to integrate opposites there remains substantial tension between them. If the integration is so complete that the opposites literally merge, consciousness, as we know it, disappears. Consciousness of life depends upon the tension of opposites. So the problem is to bring them close together without a total merger in which one or the other of the opposites would lose its identity. This is indeed a challenging task.

To complicate, but also clarify, the problem of the opposites, I would like to share with you a quote from Jung that contains what for me is his most profound insight on the subject of guilt and its relationship to human existence. Jung said, “The one-after-another is a bearable prelude to the deepest knowledge of the side-by-side, for this is an incomparably more difficult problem. Again, the view that good and evil are spiritual forces outside us, and that man is caught in the conflict between them, is more bearable by far than the insight that the opposites are the ineradicable and indispensable precondition of all psychic life, so much so that life itself is guilt.”(1) It is important here to note that “side-by-side” for Jung does not mean a merger, mutual absorption, or synthesis of opposites.

The idea that life itself is guilt is based upon conceptions of how human consciousness works. As noted earlier, consciousness itself depends on the existence of polar opposites. Guilt, therefore, which attempts to keep us from our “evil other,” is closely related to the formation of the opposites in our psychic anatomy.

the creative instinct

Fortunately, there is a powerful tool that can help us resolve the problem of the opposites. This tool is creative work. Creative production in art, as in life, depends upon bringing two opposites, the masculine and the feminine, into close enough proximity to produce a “child”(i.e., a book, a symphony, a painting, etc.) without losing the identity of the opposites that created the “child.” When we begin to do creative work, we connect to the deepest forces that govern all creation. It connects us to God, to the self within, to put it in Jungian terms. Reflected in our language is the Judaeo/Christian idea and belief that God and the creator and sustainer of all existence are one. The words God and Creator are in fact interchangeable in English as well as in other Western languages, such as French and German. The ultimate product of this process of psychological, inner creation is a stronger ego that increasingly approximates a reflected image of the Archetypal Self, which is whole and contains all of the opposites.

The Archetypal Self, or God, represents the totality; no stone is left out, all the stones are included in this totality. But a colossal lie stands in the way of achieving this totality. This is not about the existence or non-existence of the opposites, the dark and the light. We know they exist. The lie is in labeling one side exclusively good and the other side exclusively bad, as we tend to do. We know that creation is enabled by the existence of, masculine and feminine opposites. If we make one side good and the other side bad, we reject one of the essential players in the creative drama.

There is an instinct deep within us, although difficult to access consciously, that tells us that embracing the one-sided formulas for salvation, including the Christian advocacy of the exclusive primacy of love, will actually keep us from the totality of our selves. It is an instinct that actually is our salvation. It emanates from our duality. It tells us that we must love and hate everything at the same time. We must love the dark and the light and we must hate the dark and the light. Wired as we are, light has no meaning without the dark and dark has no meaning without the light. Each of these depends on the other for its existence. Without the one, there can be no consciousness of the other, and nothing exists for an individual if he is not conscious of it. If we are unable to maintain simultaneously in consciousness both our hate and love feelings, we cannot protect ourselves if we are abused—physically, psychologically, or sexually—by those whom we deeply love and those whom we need to trust.

It is our duality that causes us to be drawn inexorably to movies (e.g., Crash, Lawrence of Arabia, or A Civil Action) or to great art, literature, or music (e.g., the opera Tosca or the play Hamlet).(2) In Tosca,(3) we see Scarpia, on his knees, praying in church, while leering lustfully at Tosca. In the movie, Crash,(4) a policeman saves the life of a black woman whom just days before he had humiliated and mistreated. We see Hamlet indecisive and cowardly one day, and the next brave and sure. In Lawrence of Arabia,(5) Lawrence risks his life to save a man who he deliberately kills shortly thereafter. In A Civil Action,(6) a greedy, money-driven, ambulance-chasing lawyer finds a cause for which he is willing to sacrifice his career and fortune. And then there is Peter loving Christ one moment and denying him the next. There is a Jekyll and Hyde in all of us, in all people. We are drawn, as if against our wills, to these conflicting portraits. We are drawn to them and have feeling for them because we see ourselves in them, whether we know it or not. We are drawn to images that reflect ourselves, but protect us from the direct experience. To know that we have the same base feelings in us as Scarpia, right along side all of our goodness, is difficult to bear. We are drawn, nevertheless, to these characters and images because nature seems to have planted deep within us a developmental process that, through the agency of feeling, attracts us irresistibly closer and closer to our opposites. It attracts us to our opposites so that we can come together with them, side by side, in an embrace of creativity that leads us eventually to wholeness. As we experience in literature, art, and life, we are ineluctably attracted to realness, to three dimensionality, to wholeness.

Life might be easier, simpler, and less painful if our one-sidedness could be a sustainable reality instead of a wish. But, there are always two sides, regardless of whether we are conscious of them. The solution to this dilemma involves finding a way to honor both sides of ourselves in consciousness. This is the answer, but it is not easy to hold on to it. It involves a creative solution to one of life’s most difficult problems. The answer lies in a creation that depends upon intimate contact of two opposites without either being lost or subsumed by the other.

our unique identity

Ultimately, the creative act of self-development results in the formation of our unique identity. It is the most particular manifestation of our self. We all have a unique identity, not just Picasso or Einstein or Beethoven or Frank Lloyd Wright. We are not conscious of our unique identity until we have done a lot of work on our selves. People who study art, music, literature, or architecture can identify the painter’s, composer’s, author’s, or architect’s work without seeing a signature. They know that the painting was by Caravaggio or Manet, or that a piece of music was written by Stravinsky or Wagner, or a book by Hemingway, or that a building was designed by Louis Kahn or Frank Lloyd Wright. The creative product of the artist is his signature, and we recognize it because we have studied his work.

Each of us also has a unique signature. But, we must pay attention to our selves and do our own work in depth, if we are to recognize our own signature. We must do this for the same reason we must study artists to know their works. Thus, an important part of the work of discovering our selves is creative production and in-depth analysis. With time and effort we can come to know and recognize our own special signatures. Our physical identity is more readily visible and accessible than our psychic identity. There is always something unique in our physical identity; for example, the parents and siblings of identical twins can usually tell them apart. We have mirrors and can see our physical selves.

It is far more difficult to “see” our psychic selves. There are no psychic mirrors readily available to us, unless we had exceptional parents who could fully, without harsh judgment, reflect our selves back to us. We may still be able to see our psychic selves if we find a therapist who will do for us what our parents could not.

Creative work can also help us see our selves. Creative work is a mirror that can reflect our selves back to us if we pay enough attention. Therapists can help us in this regard, by helping us interpret our creative work.

In his book, The Restoration of the Self,(7) Heinz Kohut wrote at length about psychically wounded people and the therapeutic methods he used to help them. He found none more effective, or so essential, as creative work. He found, importantly, that it made no difference whether the creative work was deemed good or artistic by any standards. The simple process of doing creative work helped restore the self. It is as if nature plants within us a built-in remedy for our worst affliction, the affliction of being separated from large parts of ourselves. We experience this separation as a kind of inner civil war that divides us internally. It produces the pain and suffering inherent in any civil war, whether in our internal world or outside. It seems that the human urge to do creative work, to use all our stones to heal and restore our wholeness, is a compensatory impulse and blessing that arises from the psychic civil war that wounded us. In my own work as a psychoanalyst, I have witnessed the truth of Kohut’s findings. I have watched patients grow in wholeness as they began to work creatively in a variety of media that helped them recover and restore cut off parts of themselves.

Creative work actually serves as a kind of inner parent that compensates for the flawed parenting we may have had as children. Creative work mirrors us in a way we were often not mirrored by our parents. Creative work mirrors us for the simple reason that we can see projected in it, if we look and interpret carefully, our own psychological and spiritual selves. Mirrors in all their manifold guises help restore the wounded self.

1    Jung, C.G., Collected Works 14, par. 206
2    Shakespeare, William, Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Grosset & Dunlap, New York.
3    Puccini, G., Tosca.
4    Crash Paul Haggis (director/writer/producer), Lion’s Gate Films (2005).
5    Lawrence of Arabia, David Lean (director), Robert A. Harris and Sam Spiegel (producers), Columbia Pictures (1962).
6    A Civil Action, Steven Zaillian (director), Walt Disney Studios (1999).
7    Kohut, Heinz (1983), The Restoration of the Self, New York, International Universities Press, especially pp. 53-54, 10, 17-18, 40, 158 and 289.

This article by Lawrence Staples is an excerpt from Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Way.

Lawrence H. Staples, Ph.D. is the author of the popular Guilt with a Twist and the recently published
The Creative Soul: Art and the Quest for Wholeness

 on sale now for $17.95 ea or  $30.00 for the pair!

$17.95 - Guilt w/a Twist$17.95 - Creative Soul$30.00 - Both Books

in the US call 1-800-228-9316
International call +1-831-238-7799
or visit
www.fisherkingpress.com

Lecture by Lawrence H. Staples in Washington, DC

The Jung Society of Washington will be hosting a lecture by Lawrence H. Staples


Friday, December 4, 2009


Event Title: THE CREATIVE SOUL: Art and the Quest for Wholeness

Where: Memorial Hall, 5200 Cathedral Ave., NW, Washington, DC

Friday, December 4, 2009

Time: 7:30 PM - 9:00 PM EST

Import this event into your Outlook calendar

What: Lecture
Who: Larry Staples, Ph.D.
When: Friday
Fees: $15:00, members in advance; $20.00, general; $10.00 sen/stu
Register for this event at www.jung.org


This lecture is about art in all its myriad forms-painting writing, sculpting, composing, etc., and how it serves our quest for wholeness and helps restore parts of us that were lost in the process of socialization.


In his book, The Restoration of the Self, Heinz Kohut wrote at length about psychically wounded people and the therapeutic methods he used to help them. He found none more effective, or so essential, as creative work. He found, importantly, that it made no difference whether the creative work was deemed good or artistic by any standards; the simple process of doing creative work helped restore the self. It is as if nature plants within us a built-in remedy for our worst affliction, the affliction of being separated from large parts of ourselves. We experience this separation as a kind of inner civil war that divides us internally. It produces the pain and suffering inherent in any civil war, whether in our internal world or outside. It seems that the human urge to do creative work is a compensa-tory impulse and blessing, which arises from the psychic civil war that wounded us. In my own work as a psychoanalyst, I have witnessed the truth of Kohut's findings. I have watched patients grow in wholeness as they began to work creatively in a variety of media that helped them recover and restore lost aspects of themselves.


The lecture will draw upon paintings by Frida Kahlo to demonstrate the contribution of art to the restoration of self and the attainment of wholeness. This lecture is also for people specifically interested in creative processes---writers, artists, composers, teachers, thinkers. Staples will share his insights based upon years of observing his clients, their art, and the creative processes that produced it. He discusses psychological factors that both block and trigger creative production. He also suggests techniques for unleashing creative work as well as unblocking it.


CEUs will be offered for this program.


Larry Staples, Ph.D., is a Jungian Analyst in private practice in Washington D.C. He is a diplomate of the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich and holds a Ph.D. in psychology. He is a member of the International Association for Analytical psychology (I.A.A.P.), Association of Graduate Analytical Psychologists (A.G.A.P.), Jungian Analysts of Washington Association (J.A.W.A.) and National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis and the American Boards for Accreditation and Certification (N.A.A.P.). Larry is the author of two books, Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Way and The Creative Soul: Art and the Quest for Wholeness. A third book about guilt's role in depression, anxiety, and paranoia is due to be published in late fall. He has also written a number of articles about the psychological problems of midlife. Special areas of interest include creativity, guilt, and midlife. He holds AB and MBA degrees from Harvard.

On Creativity and Healing

by Lawrence H. Staples

author of Guilt with a Twist
and
The Creative Soul:Art and the Quest for Wholeness

In his book, The Restoration of the Self, Heinz Kohut wrote at length about psychically wounded people and the therapeutic methods he used to help them. He found none more effective, or so essential, as creative work. He found, importantly, that it made no difference whether the creative work was deemed good or artistic by any standards. The simple process of doing creative work helped restore the self. It is as if nature plants within us a built-in remedy for our worst affliction, the affliction of being separated from large parts of ourselves. We experience this separation as a kind of inner civil war that divides us internally. It produces the pain and suffering inherent in any civil war, whether in our internal world or outside. It seems that the human urge to do creative work is a compensatory impulse and blessing that arises from the psychic civil war that wounded us. In my own work as a psychoanalyst, I have witnessed the truth of Kohut’s findings. I have watched patients grow in wholeness as they began to work creatively in a variety of media that helped them recover and restore lost aspects of themselves.

Creative work mirrors us in a way we were often not mirrored by our parents. It mirrors us for the simple reason that we can see projected in it, if we look and interpret carefully, our own psychological and spiritual selves. Mirrors in all their manifold forms and guises help restore the wounded self.

Humans simply cannot see themselves without a mirror. Some mirrors, however, are better than others. Some are flawed or distorted so that we see ourselves, but only partially or inaccurately. From early on in life, we depend upon other humans to reflect us back to ourselves. But later in life, if we are lucky, we find that creative work and dreams mirror us more faithfully. We discover that human judgment taints and/or limits what is reflected back. Once we discover that we can mirror ourselves through creative work, we gain a modicum of self-sufficiency. We are no longer entirely dependent upon others to see us.

We may wonder why it is that humans cannot see themselves directly, why it is we can only see ourselves indirectly, as an image reflected by mirrors of various types. As we know any reflective surface, other humans, dreams, and our creative production can serve as mirrors to help us see ourselves as an indirect experience. The secret behind our need for reflective mirrors to see ourselves may be found in ancient wisdom, which informs us that to look into the face of God is to die. This wisdom says that to see the totality, to observe the Tremendum directly, is dangerous. We could infer from this wisdom that to see our own totality, our self, would be equally dangerous. It may explain why Perseus, powerful as he was, could not look at Medusa directly. He could only safely see her in the mirror provided by his shield. At the bottom of the unconscious, represented by the Labyrinth, he would find his own dark side, and could not look at it head on. It doesn’t take too much imagination to suspect that seeing the darkest side of God, or our self, could be a shattering experience. That may be why we hide our darkest side as assiduously as we can in the shadow, necessarily protected from our seeing it until a reflective mirror appears to reveal it to us safely.

As Kohut has observed, we do not have to be professional, creative artists to do creative work that helps us integrate and restore lost parts of ourselves. The integration of opposites takes place through the mirroring effect of the work and its symbols and images, regardless of whether or not our output is deemed by others to be artistic or good. It is the creative process that integrates opposites. It helps make us whole. It helps make us whole because it brings back to us the missing opposites that we early in life cut off from our psychic bodies.

An example of the attempt to integrate the opposites, and to make one’s self whole through art and its mirroring power, is provided by the life of Frida Kahlo, a Mexican artist, whom I am sure most of you know.

Frida was raised by parents who could not have been more opposite. Her mother was Mexican, rigidly Catholic, cool and puritanical. Her mother had grown up in an age when Mexican women were not allowed to say the word buttocks; rather they would say “that which I sit on.” Nor could they say the word legs; rather “that which I stand on.” And, as in the movie Like Water for Chocolate, they were not allowed to look at their bodies. They were taught to feel guilt and shame about their bodies and themselves. Much of what we would call normal life today was cut off from them. Frida’s mother was severe and frowned on much of what Frida did and who she was.

Frida’s father was a Jew who had immigrated from Germany. He had a completely different cultural and religious experience from her mother. Many accounts report him to have been overly solicitous of and close with Frida, especially after she hurt her foot when she was nine years old. All the children in her family were girls and she became her father’s favorite, and tried to be the boy for him that he never had, but yearned for. She was torn by the wholly different views and values of her parents but behaved in ways that were more acceptable to her father. She was every bit the tomboy, but she was also a lively and mischievous young girl. In her life, she was very unconventional when compared to traditional Mexican women at the time. She drank, she smoked, she was bisexual, had several abortions, was assertive, and was successful in a chosen career in which she distinguished herself.

At the age of 16, Frida nearly died in a terrible accident, breaking her leg and foot, her vertebra in three places, and her shoulder and ribs. She was left partly crippled.

After she recovered, she began to paint. It was as if her paintings were a collage on which she was pasting herself back together. Her paintings were mostly self-portraits. She could literally see herself in her paintings, her mirrors. She was fascinated with her body, which her mother had disallowed. While she was recuperating, she had had a mirror installed over her bed. Some instinct led her to sense the deep need for mirroring that she had not received as a child. Raised in such rigidity, conflicting worldviews, and values, she was cut off from parts of herself, and her painting was an attempt to create her own mirror so that she could restore herself. Her accident when she was sixteen profoundly affected her life and her ability to live it fully. Her painting was essentially her autobiography and a healing endeavor.

Lawrence H. Staples, Ph.D. is the author of the popular Guilt with a Twist and the recently published
The Creative Soul: Art and the Quest for Wholeness

 on sale now for $17.95 ea or  $30.00 for the pair!

$17.95 - Guilt w/a Twist$17.95 - Creative Soul$30.00 - Both Books

in the US call 1-800-228-9316
International call +1-831-238-7799
or visit
www.fisherkingpress.com

Dealing with Guilt's Contradictions: a lecture and workshop

“Dealing With Guilt's Contradictions”
by LAWRENCE STAPLES, MBA, Ph.D.

LECTURE:
Friday, April 24, 2009 7:00 - 9:30 P.M.
First Congregational Church UCC, St. Louis, MO
Fee: Friends - $15 Others - $20
Full-time Students - $10 2 CEUs

This lecture presents an unconventional view of the role of sin and guilt in our lives. In common parlance, the words “good” and “guilt” do not belong together. Personal and clinical experience, however, have repeatedly confirmed for Dr. Staples the useful role that sin and guilt can play in our psychological development. Examples might include divorces, giving up family-approved careers, or expressing qualities previously rejected as unacceptable, such as selfishness or the contra-sexual side of ourselves. Dr Staples concludes we MUST eat forbidden fruit and bear guilt if we are to grow and reach our full potential.

WORKSHOP:
Saturday, April 25, 2009 9:00 A.M. - 1:00 P.M.,
First Congregational Church UCC, St. Louis, MO
Fee: Friends - $55 Others - $65 (lunch included)
Full-time Students - $33 (no lunch) 3.5 CEUs

Guilt is a major cause of depression, anxiety, paranoia and suicide. This view is not widely held among medical and mental health professionals. Long before the advent of the DSM, Lady Macbeth's guilt-induced decline into mental disorder and suicide dramatically and accurately portrayed the psychological damage that guilt can inflict on the human psyche. While the more common presenting symptoms of anxiety and depression can be extremely painful and dangerous, we bear those feelings more easily and with less threat to ourselves than we can bear our feelings of guilt, felt as indisputable evidence that we are bad, that we have somehow sinned. Guilt and self-esteem cannot compatibly share the same house at the same time.

In this workshop, participants will learn to distinguish the psychological from the religious definition of sin and guilt, and will learn ways to detect guilt's presence, understand its meaning, and assuage its pain.

Lawrence H. Staples is a Jungian analyst and licensed psychoanalyst in private practice in Washington, DC. He has a Ph.D. in psychology, and is a member of NAAP, the American Boards for Accreditation and Certification, IAAP, AGAP, and the Jungian Analysts' Association of the Greater Washington Metropolitan Area. His special areas of interest are the problems of midlife, creativity and guilt. Lawrence's publications include Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Way and The Creative Soul: Art and the Quest for Wholeness.

Available from your local bookstore and from a host of online booksellers:
The Creative Soul ISBN 978-0-9810344-4-7
Guilt with a Twist ISBN 978-0-9776076-4-8
Order your copy right from this blog or at www.fisherkingpress.com
or call +1-831-238-7799.

Creative Work & Mirroring: Reclaiming the Shattered and Ragtag Pieces

by Lawrence H. Staples

author of Guilt with a Twist
and The Creative Soul

If we can by various means obtain sufficient mirroring, we can become more comfortable with the guidance that our feelings and interests can provide. We can overcome or, at least, ameliorate our fear of intimacy. And we can further the process of self-building by engaging our creative work at increasingly deeper levels. To complete the building of our self, however, we must also sin and bear guilt. What is needed to complete the building always lies in the forbidden territory, outside the fence in the shadow. Truly creative work takes us to this forbidden zone in our thoughts and feelings, if not in our behavior. Prometheus entered the forbidden territory to steal the fire humanity needed. Hercules stole the apples of the Hesperides. Rosa Parks broke the laws of her community. We must go to the pile of rejected stones and bring them back if we are to create our selves. This bringing together of all our stones into a single, unified structure is the end of a process of at-one-ment. As indicated previously, the underlying meaning of atonement, when broken down, is “at-one-ment”, a yearned-for feeling that fuels development. The idea of gathering together all of the scattered pieces we need to put our selves together is captured in the following poem written by a patient who had fallen apart at midlife.

Shattered Bottles and Ragtag Pieces
of Broken Hearts and People

Sometimes I feel like a bottle
That some angry drunk has hurled against a barroom wall
And smashed to smithereens.
And all those once related pieces scatter in a mess of shards
Whose chaos mocks a former wholeness,
Which vanished when it burst and fell.
Some things are, perhaps, worth pasting back together,
Some things, perhaps, are not.
Is it worth it?
That’s hard to answer in the absolute.
It depends on the pair of shoes you’re standing in
Or the pair of eyes you’re looking through.
It depends, quite frankly, on whether you’re the bottle or the shard,
Whether you’re the angry drunk or some sensitive aesthete
Who looked with horror
As exquisite shape and form were suddenly reduced to artless rubble.
Through the bottle’s eyes, yet another ox is gored.
It’s no abstract question of shape or form.
It is something closer still.
It’s a question of being a bottle or of being something else.
Shape or form or beauty mean nothing
When to be or not to be is the crucial question.

And shards, perhaps, would have a different stance.
For a shard, it’s nothing special being connected to a nearby shard.
They’re content to lie in desultory piles
In haughty isolation

That feels no need to touch or clasp adjacent things
To gain some sense of who they are.
A shard’s a shard. And that is that.

And now,
Through Love’s warm eyes appears another view
That has no special ax to grind with drunks or bottles or shards.
Love is love,
An ever-centripetal tendency that will not rest
Till shattered bottles and ragtag pieces of broken hearts and people
Are drawn once again and gathered in the place
Where first they started
And, at last, must dwell again.
Love is a completer of circles.
And with its caring hands picks from the barren f1oor
Each sharp but scraggly splinter,
And searches insistently for the neighboring pieces,
Which it patiently fits and joins till the puzzle is once again complete,
Even if it take to eternity.

This is a poem of at-one-ment, of atonement, of reunification. While love, as pointed out in the poem, is a beautiful tendency that brings at-one-ment, we cannot forget that there would be no opportunity for love to do its work if angry, hateful shattering had not preceded it, just as there would have been no world to create if chaos had not preceded it. Creativity requires both.

Available from your local bookstore and from a host of online booksellers:
The Creative Soul ISBN 978-0-9810344-4-7
Guilt with a Twist ISBN 978-0-9776076-4-8
Order your copy right from this blog or at www.fisherkingpress.com
or call +1-831-238-7799.

Beauty Least Expected

by Lawrence H. Staples
author of The Creative Soul
and Guilt with a Twist

Only in retrospect can we experience “sins” and flaws as something of real value. It is like finding something beautiful among the detritus of the psychic attic. It is like finding a Picasso and thinking initially that it was just a piece of old canvas. It is hard to dispute that there actually is a way of looking at flaws and sins that could make us grateful for them. Seeing that our flaws and sins are valuable is actually a fortunate insight and a numinous moment. It is an insight that comes from a prismatic view that reveals the full spectrum of our being in all of its varied colorations, both light and dark.

We cannot become whole until we perceive the value in the unacceptable opposites sufficiently to take them in our sinful embrace. Creativity helps us accomplish this embrace, as it demands some kind of intercourse of the archetypally masculine and feminine opposites. The opposites are always aspects of a single, deeper unity.

In this life we are never free of the conflict of opposites and the inner tension generated by attraction and repulsion. The conflict of opposites is the biggest problem we confront. We can diminish the natural conflict between the opposites, but we cannot eliminate it. In fact, to be entirely liberated from this conflict is to be dead; it is the dynamic tension between the opposites that generates consciousness and the inner electrical energy that we call life. This tension brings life and its difficulties at the same time. The tension that brings us life, which we want, also brings us stress, which we do not want. As in most things human, to repeat Freud’s oft-used phrase, we wish to have our cake and eat it, too. We wish to surrender our life’s difficulties without surrendering our life. And as if it were not enough to know that we must suffer if we are to live, we eventually learn that increased consciousness also brings increased tension. The more aware we become of previously unconscious opposites, the more tension we must bear.

The safest place is a point between the opposites. There lies a sanctuary, a temporary place of refuge. Creative production helps us find that place because the process of creating leads us to the place where creativity dwells. Drugs and alcohol, money, power and other external stimulants are poor substitutes for finding that place. The advantage of creative production is that we need not go elsewhere. We do not need to leave the house to find a church or a sacred place or a drink or a fix. Our safe haven lies between our ears and within our hearts, in our own creativity.

Also available from your local bookstore and from a host of online booksellers:
The Creative Soul ISBN 978-0-9810344-4-7
Guilt with a Twist ISBN 978-0-9776076-4-8
Order your copy right from this blog or at www.fisherkingpress.com
or call +1-831-238-7799.

Guilt: Revised

by Joey Madia

It’s always easy to like a book with which you instantly agree. We embrace the familiar, the similar, the types of things made of the same prima materia with which we’ve built our beliefs. But so much the better when an idea, a thesis, a text that we at first reject wins us over through a mix of solid research, real-life examples, and strong writing. Such is the case with my experience of Guilt with a Twist.

In the Overview, Dr. Staples states: “We have to sin and incur guilt, if we are to grow and reach our full potential” (xv). Being a “lapsed” Catholic who had often experienced guilt as a weapon and thought the concept of “Original Sin” or having to confess your sins to an intermediary was nothing but power-clenching propaganda on the part of the Church, I found myself inching toward dismissing the book entirely, a feeling that persisted as I continued through the first section.

The idea here is that there is “Good Guilt,” as demonstrated by such historical luminaries as Socrates, Rosa Parks, Susan B. Anthony, and Galileo (and the mythical Prometheus). In other words, we do things that break the rules of the times or are considered “sins” to perpetrate a greater good, to achieve a higher purpose.

After reading about Parks, I made some notes in the margin, as follows:

“She did not sin, nor was she wracked with guilt. Society was wrong.”

“Sin is too subjective to standardize guilt and shame as he’s done so far.”

Oddly enough, on the day I started Guilt with a Twist I read an interview with artist/art dealer Tony Shafrazi who, to protest the Vietnam War, spray-painted “Kill Lies All” across Picasso’s Guernica mural (itself a protest piece). He had no guilt about it because his objectives were clear, just like Rosa’s must have been.

The moralizing of guilt is, of course, a thorny problem, as there is a world of possibility in making determinations about what is “good,” what is a “sin,” and just what might be a “greater good” or “higher purpose.” After all, the notion of Nietzsche’s Übermensch, explored in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra and in the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky, or the phrase “the end justifies the means” open a can of clawed and fanged wyrms ready to rip to shreds the fabric of society.

Lucky for us, Dr. Staples has taken the time to formulate his thesis and elaborate thoroughly upon it in Guilt with a Twist. He draws on many sources and techniques, first and foremost the work of Carl Jung. (Staples is a Jungian analyst who trained in Switzerland after making a mid-life career-switch at the age of 50).

He says: “the urge to sin may be identical with the urge to individuate, a Jungian term for the psychological process by which we become the unique person we are meant to be” (xix). This brought to mind the Nietzschean notion of slaying the dragon of “Thou Shalt.” As Jung said, “the shadow, where we hide our sins in secret, is 90% pure gold” (34), which that nasty dragon hordes.

Mapping out the terrain of guilt, Dr. Staples lists three types of authorities: parental, secular, and divine, all of which define “sin” in subtly different but mostly overlapping ways. The expectations put upon us by this triumvirate—from which we must stray in pursuit of our true selves—spark our guilt, leading us to suppress and deny our shadow selves and live what Thoreau called “lives of quiet desperation.”

In chapter 4, Dr. Staples outlines several sources of guilt: sex, abandonment, divorce, negative feelings for parents, anger, negativity, gender roles, selfishness, different sexual orientation, falling short of ideals, truth and lies, renunciation of religious beliefs, alcohol, and feelings.

Of the fourteen sections in chapter 4, I have had direct experience of twelve.

This certainly got my attention.

Anticipating the exploration of opposites in chapter 5, Staples writes: “the sacred and the profane are but two sides of a single underlying reality” (33). Then, in chapter 5 came the key sentence that furthered the connection with my own experiences: “[G]uilt’s purpose is not the maintenance of morals; it is the maintenance of the opposites and psychic wholeness” (98).

This is an idea I certainly understand, being a person who juggles many roles (writer, director, editor, father, husband, actor, musician, etc.) and has often felt abundant guilt that the “jack of all trades, master of none” phenomenon was coupling with not giving loved ones enough time and attention and spawning the child Mediocrity.

The pull of opposites is also something I know well, having struggled most of my life with the dynamic of pleasing others versus pleasing myself, and of course, the more I thought about it, the more the role of guilt became clear.

The often contradictory words of my grandmother, a quintessential Italian-American matriarch who recently passed away at 91, also echo in my head. She would say, alternately: “You work too hard! You need to take care of yourself and rest!” and “You’ve got to make hay while the sun shines!”

Chapter 5 discusses in vibrant detail the play of opposites, how they attract and move apart and how they produce, through the mechanism of guilt, homeostasis and creative output.

For those readers interested in the nexus between quantum physics and spirituality, Dr. Staples speaks about the movement of opposites in terms of the cosmic dance as I’ve seen it described by authors like Michael Talbot and Fritjof Capra.

As Dr. Staples says, “We keep moving from pole to pole until the ego becomes strong enough to bear the tension of co-existing opposites” (109). Recalling my own 20-plus- year journey on this path and the experiences of Carl Jung as related in his Memories, Dreams, Reflections, it is clear that the guilt must be borne if the ego is to achieve its required strength, and the process is never easy but ever required.

Chapter 6, entitled “The Role of Guilt in Creativity and Psychological Development,” at 76 pages, is the longest and most appealing chapter in the book to me, given the correlations between the material in chapter 5 and my own life. Dr. Staples extends the notion of dynamic opposites to the masculine/feminine coupling necessary in any creative endeavor. The case studies and historical examples from which Dr. Staples draws are a mini-course in the psychological aspects of creativity and this chapter could be read on its own by any artist seeking to better understand the process. (See also The Creative Soul by Lawrence H. Staples, Ph.D. (2009, Fisher King Press, www.fisherkingpress.com)

Approaching the end of chapter 6 and reading a section entitled “Sin, Guilt, and Self-Development,” I came upon a timely article on AOL about the Vatican’s concern that Catholics are going to confession less and less. There was a poll attached to the article in which 79% of the population still believes in the concept of sin. It’s a given that these online polls are far from scientific, but the number is high enough to suggest that a considerable portion of people believe that sin exists, therefore guilt must as well.

Part II of the book, which comprises a single chapter and the Conclusions, is called “Assuaging Guilt,” covering both spiritual and psychological approaches (what I have found in my own experience to be a highly useful and well-rounded dual approach to just about any endeavor). Chapter 7 ends with the analysis of five dreams with orientations around guilt. Dr. Staples offers some practical insights in working with dreams in creative and healing ways.

Life is complicated—in these troubled financial and political times more than ever—and it seems most people are struggling with the guilt of limited time, opportunity, and resources. The fields of the twenty-first century are seeded with myriad guilt, choking the good gardens of our progress as individuals and as a race. Guilt with a Twist is a kind of “gardener’s guide” to pulling the weeds of “bad guilt” and bringing forth a healthier harvest.

This review of Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Way was written by Joey Madia of New Mystics. New Mystics is an online Arts community founded in 2002 by Joey Madia to promote the work of a group of cutting edge writers and artists. To learn more about New Mystics, Joey Madia, and his most recent publication Jester-Knight visit www.newmystics.com.