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Divine Inspiration and the Unconscious

The concept of the subconscious arouses many different and mostly emotionally charged reactions. While many of us would like to think that we are completely in control of our own thoughts and actions, it would be hard to explain away those inevitable 'Freudian slips' and self defeating addictions or irrational actions that we all fall prey to from time to time. What the 'subconscious' looks like, is a matter of conjuring opinion, and the approach that, to me, seems to shed the most light on the role of the subconscious in creative life, belongs to the Jungian school of thought.

Carl Jung's model of the psyche differs from many other psychological models and includes transformation (creativity) and the striving towards wholeness and individuation as a basic premise of the human condition. I find most other psychological approaches too steeped in the pathology of the diseased or mutilated psyche to be of much use in my attempts to understand the functioning of the creative soul.

The Mandala

An ancient shape in many cultures and recurring in every childhood, is the shape of the mandala. Symbolising completeness, it encompasses the maze of experience and all the cycles of life and death that we are subject to.

In the complete mandala of the psyche, our immediate consciousness sheds a narrow beam of focus on the material that we are busy with now. On the periphery, we are also conscious of the background noises, the weather and the approximate time. We have let some knowledge slip from our consciousness and the conversation we have just had with a colleague can be recollected if needed. Some information from that same conversation have already been lost and cannot consciously be recalled. Sometimes, some of the things that we cannot bring to the surface by demand, do surface of their own accord, and here we deal with the start of the personal subconscious.

There are things in everybody's personal history that they have never been able to remember, or things that the consciousness have no desire to remember. Most individuals would never become aware (conscious) of this content and therefore we are not talking about a merely subconscious, but personal unconscious content.

The personal unconscious is steeped in cultural unconscious content. Jung proposes that our minds and mind structures have evolved as much as our bodies have, and that we have archaic remnants in our language and symbolic structures that are as old as humankind itself. Beyond the personal cultural unconscious, we move into the collective unconscious - an area so deep and vast and always in flux, that it becomes a matrix of the Unknown within. We become aware of it in the emergence of Archetypes that seem to embody a universal truth within a certain epoch, and then fade from consciousness and shift form as if designed by some all-knowing, omnipotent power.

The ego, or manifest conscious self, constitutes only a small part of the personal psyche. For every conscious element of personality, Jung proposes an equal unconscious part that functions as a balancing act to the consciously striving aspect of the psyche.

The ego meets its match in the shadow (a same sex configuration with all the opposite suppressed or denied qualities of the ego), the persona, or projected social personality meets its mate in the opposite sex configuration that holds the key to the personality's creative drive. This configuration is called the Anima (in men) and the Animus (in women). As the name implies, this aspect of the unconscious is closely linked to the instinctive, animal side of our make-up and the psychic life force gets inhibited or activated by the interplay and tension between these conscious and unconscious elements.

This rings a bell. Remember the creative personality's "high tolerance for ambiguity / thinking in opposites"? Nick Bantock author and illustrator of the Griffin and Sabine Trilogy, describes his methodology as 'breathing in and breathing out'. Order and Chaos. Making something beautiful and destroying it a little. An interplay between control and letting go. If either gets the upper hand, the result is lifeless. Many artists struggle not with the process of creating, but with knowing when to stop. The Griffin and Sabine trilogy is a beautiful personification of an artist's relationship with his muse or anima.

These names that Jung have given the aspects of the psyche are intimately linked to dreams and such manifestations of the unconscious. We have looked at the link between dreams and creative modes of thinking in the passage on Gelernter's' theory, and we do not have to look far to find reference to dreams in the processes of many artists, writers and creative people.

Dreams are the most accessible aspect of our own unconscious, and if we are to develop at all as individuals towards being aware of and driven by an 'inner motivation', it is by getting to know our own innermost world as it unfolds itself to our consciousness.

But, as we all know, dreams are hard to understand and even harder to remember, so we tend to sublimate and suppress that which seem too hard to do. As a culture, we value the things we can measure. If we can count, create a statistic and put a price to something, it has value. Everything else becomes vague and uncomfortable to deal with, and we suppress it into that vast underworld of the collective unconscious. From where it is bound to arise. Expect a New Age swing of the pendulum that will make all our children bow to divine guru of insubstantialism, the spiritual nature of things will become the next IT, and the couple of human beings that have been struggling with that specific bit of unconscious content will be hailed as visionary and CREATIVE. Ahead of their time.

So how do we engage the unknown? We cannot make the unconscious visible. We can only translate its encoded messages. And the code it speaks, is one of symbols. We communicate in symbols. A symbol stands for something else beyond itself. It alludes to unspoken meaning and complex emotional hues that cannot be precisely described.

Princess Diana is a symbol. After her death she became an archetypal image of our time universally known and understood - but if you tried to describe the complete meaning of that symbol to everyone, you would be writing for a very very long time.

The mythological Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love is also a symbol. Most educated westerners would appreciate the meaning of the name in some suitable context, but it would hardly elicit any emotion at all, much less a feeling of being in the conceptual presence of the divine. Aphrodite is not the embodiment of Love in the 21st century. The archetype has moved on and is swelling another form with its power. Love, and its connection to divinity, however, is very much alive and well in the collective human psyche.

Archetypes deal with universal human truths. According to analytical psychologist Dr Erich Neumann (a pupil of Jung's), the archetypes of the collective unconscious are intrinsically formless psychic components that assume form in art. The mediums of expression through which they pass, the time and place in which they occur, and above all the psychology of the individual in whom they appear mould their varying forms. The work of art, and art itself are not ends in themselves, but rather instruments and expressions of the artist's inner situation.

According to Jung the individual psyche strives towards completeness. This wholeness implies an integration of unconscious content that can only be achieved through sustained and arduous engagement with the dark side, and because of its compensatory nature, the unconscious transforms as it transforms consciousness. This never ending task is beautifully described in the quest of the alchemist for gold. Many cycles of growth and destruction, separation and union leads the individual to the discovery of the "philosopher's stone" and the attainment of the highest order.

Posted 04 August 2006, www.annisnyman.co.za, author: Anni Snyman

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