A Jungian Approach to Engaging Our Creative Nature

Imagining the Source of Our Creativity

Robert Sandford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429590047
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychische Gesundheit in der Psychologie

Embracing our creative nature as the heritage of all, this book seeks to foster the creative imagination by nurturing a fertile relationship with its source. Robert Sandford offers an alternative approach, taking up Jungian theory as arising from and embodying this sort of relationship. In the middle ground of imagination, we can engage creativity's source on its own terms in image, metaphor, symbol, myth and dream.

This book demonstrates how Jungian and archetypal psychologies, by treating image and imagination as central, can foster our creativity and bridge the gap between a Jungian understanding of art and creative processes. Created works incarnate the engaged, relational, imaginal acts that birthed them. This approach also yields invaluable insights for art therapy. Sandford seeks to heal the collective ailments that alienate us from our creative nature, such as the hegemony of literalism and our relationship with things, the body, the archetypal feminine, nature and cosmos. Uniquely, he brings together theory and practice by taking theorizing as a creative practice and, rather than offering procedures, opens an imaginal landscape where the creative impulse can arise and we can respond. Emphasizing the relational value of ideas, he draws from Jung and Hillman in a way that spans the work of both.

This unique and innovatively interdisciplinary book will be essential reading for academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, creativity, expressive arts, embodied transformation, archetypal studies and arts therapies. It will be of immense interest to Jungian psychotherapists, analytical psychologist, Jungian art therapists and sandplay practitioners.

1

CLEARING THE WAY

Literal and metaphorical

Buried in the common distinction between literal and metaphorical is a set of biases that makes relating to the unconscious as the creative source difficult. Literal and metaphorical gather two interdependent styles of consciousness that map distinct imaginal landscapes. Broadly, literalizing is an ego activity, while metaphor is closer to how the unconscious operates. Both are needed for the creative process. The literal style and landscape maintains its dominance in the collective imagination by taking itself literally. This compromises our creativity by repressing the imaginal and polarizing literal and metaphorical, ego and unconscious. To heal the split and reclaim our creative heritage, we move to the middle ground of imagination and recover literalizing as an imaginal act.

Recovering literalizing as an imaginal act

‘Literal’ is from the Latin litterā;lis, meaning of or belonging to letters or writing. This connects literalizing to the objectification of thought through the printed word; ideas are imagined as things existing separate from a thinking subject. That image of separation is convincing because ideas have a life of their own, but ideas never live apart from thinking subjects and never as literal things. ‘Literal’ generally implies a consensus as to what is true and real independent of subjects. As such, ‘literal’ is a category of value—a specific narrowing of significance for pragmatic reasons—putting it in the province of the ego. (Note here the refusal to take ‘literal’ at its word—that is, to take it literally.)

When we literalize a metaphor, “we confuse predication, seeing in terms of, with identity, seeing that” (Slavin, 2018, p. 3). Mistaking ‘as’ for ‘is’ is far more than a semantic slippage. It is an epistemological shift rooted in a literalized imaginal landscape—an as that has also been made into an is. We are immersed and held forgetful in that landscape. Immersed, the shift becomes invisible. Held, it carries the conviction of Truth. This landscape and the images that generate and sustain it compromise our relationship to the source of our creativity. Taking ideas literally, for example, seems to separate them from their unconscious creative source; that is, it forgets their metaphorical nature, and imagines thinking as strictly an ego activity—that is, as a unilateral, singular, deliberate, focused, linear and systematic effort. This separation, a leaning away from the unconscious’ generativity to the ego’s utility, narrows the significance of ideas to singular, clear specificities. Meanwhile, forgotten yet active, the roots of ideas in the individual and collective unconscious (in metaphor) remain operative and waiting to be rediscovered. The heart-rhythm of creativity cycles between a systolic contraction of significance in the literal and a diastolic expansion through attention to metaphor.

Gathered in the term ‘literal’ is the factual, the actual, what is free from subjective bias and without inaccuracy or exaggeration. This gathering carries with it a judgment of imagination as fanciful, not grounded in reality and full of subjective bias, inaccuracies and exaggerations. Since numbers are imagined as existing independent of subjects and as free from the distortions of imagination¹ and subjective bias, math is the premier language, and quantification the premier praxis for the literal. (And yet statisticians know that numbers are flexible enough to tell a range of stories.) The word ‘free’ belongs to the narrative of scientific progress and the heroic ego struggling to liberate us all from irrational distortions that obscure the truth. Carried in the term ‘literal’ is our adoption of Descartes’ search through radical doubt for a sure ground for knowledge. The literal is persuasive because it is pragmatic, effective and necessary; but exclusive, unyielding allegiance to it comes at a high price.

The collective overvaluation of the literal constellates oppositions that devalue imagination: fact versus fiction, actual versus imagined, truth versus myth, objective versus subjective and so on. Fiction, an act of imaginative engagement, is judged as inferior to fact (as false), and we forget that taking the literal as more real is itself an (albeit restricted) imaginative fiction.² A fiction is true (faithful and trustworthy) to the degree with which we can discover through it our humanity and our world. The literal mindset, in taking true and false as absolute categories demarcating universal principles, leaves behind (makes unconscious) true and false as a matter of fidelity. The measure of truth as fidelity opens the question: to what or whom are we being faithful? The fiction of the literal, forgetfully forged in the mythic space of the heroic ego, remains faithful to its mythic source. It honors our desire for mastery through simplification, systemization and standardization of truths that bear the stamp of collective consent. The literal has great utility but restricts imagination. Imagination and imaginative engagement are devalued and marginalized when we place the actual over the imaginal.

Literalizing co-opts imagination to serve the ego. Without this redirection, the psyche naturally condenses a multiplicity of meaning into singular cohering images—a move that expresses simply the complexities that live as the depth of the image. We will later consider that this honors the whole of psyche, the ego in its desire for simplicity and singularity and the unconscious in its desire for complexity and connection. Creative expression, like the processes by which the image arises, moves from possibility to concrete coherent specificity while preserving in the artifact the multiplicities of an image. Literalizing is the ego’s appropriation of this process with one difference: the ego, favoring simplicity for the sake of facility and social commerce, constricts complexity to a singularity of meaning. This is a constriction of the psyche’s desire for rich, concrete symbolic expression.

Misunderstanding myth as errant causal explanation is the product of a related contemporary bias. Explaining everything, including myth, by way of linear (aka ‘efficient’) causality is an ego methodology, while myth as a multivalent expression of lived truths is closer to the ‘methodology’ or ‘language’ of the unconscious. Opposing objective truth to subjective experience becomes untenable when seeking to understand the psyche. Jung’s approach of taking subjective experiences as objective phenomena is a gesture of respect toward the substantiality of experience and a viable way to undercut this dichotomy. Another approach is to recover the poiesis of the objective stance: “Objectivity is itself a poetic genre” (Hillman, 1981/2004, p. 15).

‘Literal’ also means without exaggeration. The unconscious, in compensatory dreams, uses exaggeration to counterbalance an exaggerated ego attitude, stretching it in the opposite direction. In light of this, a bias against exaggeration is a bias against the rhetorical tendencies and influence of the unconscious. Playful exaggeration engages imagination, and so can be used as a means to discover the limits and essential characteristics of the creative matter at hand. Exaggeration is a way to identify what is distinctive, as in caricatures, which exaggerate the facial features to distinguish one face from the ‘average face.’ Exaggeration can loosen up thinking where it is stuck by uncovering and releasing limiting biases and opening new ways of thinking.

Unmaking the hegemony of the literal: the play of literal and metaphorical

The hegemony of the literal over the imaginal atrophies experiential awareness and attenuates creativity, as when a child’s art is evaluated by the degree to which it corresponds to the literal (looks photographically accurate) rather than the degree to which it expresses their experience of the world. This judgment of accuracy turns art into an ego activity that is scrutinized for objectively verifiable skill. Opposing and prioritizing literal truth over lived experience leads to alienation, a Cartesian nightmare of an estranged subject living in an impersonal world. The question remains as to what can bring healing to the ‘disease of literalism.’ Photography is an intriguing point of entry. At the very least, the notion of photos as literal account is utterly undone by powerful digital retouching tools. Those tools, however, do more than ‘distort the real.’ They, assuming artistic intent, serve a meaning-driven purpose that begins before the shutter is opened. We tend to imagine photos as objective records of the real, actual and factual. Artistically minded photographers operate under different assumptions. They seek through their art to incarnate acts of imaginative seeing, inviting the viewer to participate in those acts—to see the world through their eyes. (Retouching refines the seeing and the invitation.) Not to be taken literally, seeing here is a metaphor for what far exceeds literal optical sight. It is seeing as existential engagement. A photographer with an artistic vision creates a body of work that has a recognizable integrity that coheres as a way of experiencing the world.³

Time imagined literally is incarnate in the clock. Expanding the image, clock time is metered, demanding, unrelenting, holding us accountable and a quantity laid out on an invariant universal timeline, removed from subjective influence out of distrust. Dispassionate and imposed from without, it turns the beat of a living heart to a cold countdown. How hard it is to be creative with a deadline! Living time strictly as clock time shuts down creativity. Creative states are characterized by a temporality closer to that of dream and myth. As the poet Walt Whitman put it, “Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems” (Whitman, 1998, III.2). This is the temporality of what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls flow, a creative state akin to play (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). In flow, we are in the moment, in the zone, time flies and the music writes itself. For time to fly it must have wings to free it from its earthly bonds, the gravity of practical concerns. As the body immersed in activity fades from awareness in favor of engagement with the world, so ‘I’ fades from awareness in flow. Flow is ekstasis, meaning ‘standing outside oneself.’ Awareness of self and the clock fades in favor of immersion in creative activity. In these timeless moments we participate in something larger than ourselves, something transcendent and even eternal.

And yet clock time, like the boundaries of a canvas, circumscribes the creative state, giving it a practical context, marking it by contrast. To remain creative, the gravity of practicalities must counterbalance the flight of imagination. Then the clock and the deadline become symbols for the creative imperative, binding inspiration to execution, the timeless to the temporal. Creativity needs possibilities and choices, and choosing means letting go of, and perhaps mourning, what is discarded. The deadline means the inevitable end of possibility. How hard it is to be creative without a deadline! Without such a container, creativity wanders as the puer aeternus, the eternal child, in aimless delight. The unconscious tends toward diastolic expansiveness, the timeless and the infinite. The ego tends toward systolic bounds, forging limits to manage the boundless infinite. Creativity needs both. As a seeker on a pilgrimage, fatigued by the long journey, discards the extraneous to reach the goal and so discovers what is truly essential, being creative we must pare away possibilities to discover the essential and complete the work. At the end comes another loss and letting go as the process ends and the work stands on its own. Just as the puer aeternus remains aimless, never knowing death or loss, creativity that refuses loss never completes the work.

Surrealism sought to tap the creative potential of the unconscious mind, and surrealistic painters challenged the supposed boundaries between the real and the imaginal by painting realistic dreamscapes. Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory symbolizes dream time as melting clocks. We tend to imagine memory as the passive sequential recording of events along a timeline. The melting clock reunites memory and imagination. Memories persist and cohere insofar as they engage the imagination. Honoring the unconscious, the creative source, and being creative means stopping or melting away time imagined as rigid, unyielding and full of deadlines and scrutinized productivity and living it instead as fluid, malleable, vulnerable to the elements and with ample room for imagination, reverie and play.

The hegemony of the literal shows in history imagined as an objective account recalling ‘actual’ past events. Computer memory is the incarnation of literal memory as perfect, unadulterated recall of inhuman bits stored in absolutely clear on/off states. As such, it is a persistent metaphor by we which we imagine memory, and so is held up as an ideal of what memory should be. Yet history is always told from a perspective that situates writer, reader and events in a narrative in which and through which we can locate ourselves existentially. This is closer to the sense of myth, not as falsehood, but as an account in ‘images’ (the term taken as a visual metaphor) of what we continue to live. Myth, art and even technology are an invitation to imagine and experience.⁴

The idea of the literal as symbol

The distinction between literal and metaphorical dissolves when we consider the images that root and perpetuate a literal style of consciousness. What we take literally functions unconsciously as an image. Psyche seeks concrete expression and yet such expressions, while ‘literally existing,’ derive their greater substantiality and sustainability from their ongoing existence as living symbols. The idea of the literal itself is a living symbol holding the reductive, constrictive and codifying tendencies of the psyche. Consider that the move to assign the status of literal truth can be a metaphorical expression of the substantiality of a lived truth: ‘that is literally the best thing that has ever happened to me.’ The ego-driven, value-laden qualities of the literal are inevitably taken up psychologically—that is, metaphorically. What is material, substantial, objectively verifiable, and so collectively accepted as ‘real’ and ‘true’ serves as a metaphor for, and collective confirmation of, the ‘legitimacy’ and substantiality of one’s experiences.

The tendency to literalize the metaphorical is a redirection of the psyche’s drive to live the metaphorical concretely; to real-ize it and engage it as substantial while remembering that the metaphor bears and reveals meanings of something beyond itself. Given the poetic basis of mind, ‘the literal’ is a metaphor—an as-if that constellates meaning and gathers a world. In its extreme form the literal gathers a world of dead things with singular quantifiable significance collectively assented to by subjects who, to be trustworthy, have learned to be detached and dispassionate. What a strange place to live, that creative desert.

“Metaphors are . . . ways of perceiving, feeling and existing” (Hillman, 1975, p. 156) and we must add, of thinking, for the imaginal lends certainty to intellectual convictions⁵, including the conviction of the primacy of the literal. Taken psychologically, the literal and the metaphorical amount to two ways of perceiving—that of the ego and the unconscious, respectively.

Metaphor as model for creative work

Let’s imagine an experience of finding a good working metaphor. Wrestling with something relatively opaque and perhaps unyielding, yet that beckons to us and, open to imagination as a way of knowing and a passage through, we move to contemplation, wonder or reverie. If we can’t say what our opaque something is maybe we can say what it is like; as in metaphor being like a passage through the haze, a lens through which we can see, a sound...