OUR UNIQUE IDENTITY

by Lawrence H. Staples
author of Guilt with a Twist

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.

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, 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.

Lawrence Staples is the author of the recently published
Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Way

SOME PREREQUISITES OF THE CREATIVE PROCESS

by Lawrence H. Staples

author of The Creative Soul
and Guilt with a Twist

There are a number of prerequisites for the creative process to begin. One is a gap, a void or empty space, which myth tells us preceded the creation of the world. The womb is an empty space. So is a blank page or canvas. Another is an impregnating seed. The impregnating seed can be provided by intention or conscious will. This seed can be an opening sentence, as in Dinesen’s case, or it may be a single word or a color or brush mark suggested by imagination or by a dream, or fantasy. At the moment of conception, the artist’s unconscious is the womb, the creative matrix, into which the impregnating seed has fallen.

Receptivity to the seed is a feminine principle found in all writers and artists. The principle by no means demands a specific sexual orientation; but without question it involves a psychological orientation. Erich Neumann, the great second-generation Jungian analyst and writer, explains this in his book, Art and the Creative Unconscious. He noted that “In the creative man, this feminine principle [of receptivity], which in the.. adult man becomes discernible as an anima, is usually associated with the image of the maternal.” The importance of the mother archetype to the creative man leads to an enormous tension with the world of the fathers. In the artist, this tension can only be relieved by creative production. In his work, he must “slay the father, dethrone the conventional world of the traditional Canon” and find a new synthesis. It requires an integration of his shadow and ego. In opposition to the demands of patriarchal dogma, the creative man honors his wholeness by bearing the tension of the opposites until “a third can be born which transcends… the opposites and so combines parts of both positions into an unknown, new creation. The result takes the form of a new symbol, which contains the opposites and yet is neither.”

Psychic tension is at its highest just at the moment preceding creation, just as we experience at the moment of orgasm. That is the point at which the old forms and structures have been let go and the new are about to be grasped. It occurs in this gap between the old synthesis and the new one. As mentioned before, creation occurs at what students of creativity call a turning point, the moment of creation in which something old dies and something new is born.

As Neumann points out, it is the unbearable tension between the opposites that creativity discharges. It is this tension of opposites that the artist’s creative production relieves. But the conflict returns again and again and he must produce again and again to find temporary relief and retain his sanity. In creative people, the failure to do creative work will lead to suicidal fantasies. The fantasies represent the wish to escape the unbearable tension that persists.

Still, artists sometimes fail to see the truth that the tension can be relieved only by their own work, instead of addictive behaviors. It never works. If the creative urge is ignored or if it is relieved by substitutes, it will destroy them.

If America reaches the point where it needs profound, fundamental change, it will come from creative people who can bring feminine/maternal values and perspectives to bear and that will combine with the masculine/paternal to bring a new vision, just as outsiders like Galileo, Copernicus, Darwin, and others did.

Lawrence Staples is the author of the recently published
Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Way