Creativity and Healing:

Some Jungian and Shamanic Perspectives

C. Michael Smith, Ph.D. © 2015

 

“Art is the proper task of life.”

-Friedrich Nietzche

 

 

     If you live from the heart, you will continually dip into the immensely creative Dreaming Field, and from it live an inspired and creative life, one that contributes depth of beauty to your own soul, and to the world. Walking the heart-path not only puts you in touch with your creativity, it also progressively releases you from those forces that imprison your creative-mind, your spontaneous impulses to move and express your vision, your body, your truth and how it all is for you in just this moment or situation.

 

     The views to be expressed are a patch-work sewn together lossely in this Blog from a strong resonance I have long felt between the shamanic heart-path, and the Jungian “process of individuation.” In my opinion the shamanic language and artistry gives more color to the rather abstract but crucial term “individuation.” In my book, Jung and Shamanism in Dialogue, I stated that Jung saw the shaman as the prototypal individuator in human cultural evolution. He called shamanism an “archaic individuation process.” Whatever language we use, there is an immense creativity driving our aliveness and healing work.

 

     The study of “creativity” suggests a very large, multidisciplinary field of inquiry. I shall only be delimiting aspects of that field relevant to shamanism, psychotherapy, healing processes, and the heart-path, taking my clue from the word “create,” which simply means “to make.” The concept of “co-creativity” is always implied in my use of the word creativity because we live in an interconnected universe, nothing is absolutely disconnected or isolated from others.

 

     Even the artist must take in the moods and colors, the atmospheres, the people, the landscapes, the waiting empty canvas, the Muses and inspiring ideas and images that come from them. The artist doesn’t create all that so much as respond to them as given, and manifest them in some variety of media or concrete form of expression, usually with a personal, individual spin. The assembly of all that is typically guided by some vision (or intuitive flash) of how to weave those strands together into a novel unity. In this sense of “weaving together,” I see that the individual’s creative acts and works are always co-creative.

 

     Alfred North Whitehead, weaving together quantum physics, mathematics, and the evolutionary philosophy of organism, suggested that the primordial Divine Imagination is responding to the processes of the world, and beckoning forth its’ creative evolution by offering it back seasonally relevant forms of possibility, and as lures to each creature’s own process of becoming. The Divine, here, is the ultimate Muse, the Dream Maker, The Great Spirit, the Higher Self, the Tao, sketching out possibilities for us on the heart-path, one step at a time. We receive the lucky idea, the inspiring image, the sudden insight as a gift, and Invitation to respond in some concrete way; to express it, and give it some form of embodiment in our living. Whitehead’s concept of co-creativity included the Earth as a living organism in which we are a part, and all Her creatures as well, and who we must live in concert with Her, as well as with the Cosmos and its multiple dimensional depths. All this is connected and enters into the processes of creative inspiration. Each creature, each event of becoming is co-creative, being influenced, in some sense, by the whole of reality.

 

     I live in a forest at Crows Nest, with miles of hiking trails now cleared. I often walk for hours in the woods anytime I wish, and I think I know them well. But each walk is different for the paths continually change. Creativity is abundant in nature, everywhere. New life is constantly shooting up, branches fall, spider webs form, rains come carve out unexpected holes and curves. So each time I walk a path, it is at least slightly different, and the whole of me must adjust my steps and gait, creatively responding to changing circumstances in a world in process. If I do attentively adjust my steps the new situation, I may stumble, fall, and injure myself. Walking these paths requires attention, flexibility, fluidity, and willingness to deal with novel and unforeseen turns.

 

     If I should stumble, fall and break my leg, many aspects of my situation now significantly change. I won’t be able to take walks in the woods for some time. Certain activities suddenly become problematic and challenging. I will have to tap my personal creativity as bodily healing of bones, ligaments and other tissues takes place over considerable time. The necessary and routine activities of eating, washing dishes, sitting in a chair and working must continue in some modified form. So I must invent new ways to compensate for my limitations so as to do these things while my body creatively engages in the self-healing process. Healing of any kind, is a creative process. Every single body, (cells, tissues and organs) is different, and every injury is unique. The surgeon will have to adapt his well-acquired background of experience and medical skill-sets to the peculiarities of my wound, and respond with some measure of creativity. The very tissues of my body will also have to respond to the odd and specific nature of my injury, and plot an effective self-healing strategy. Healing, be it physical, emotional, or spiritual requires problem-solving creativity, as does any life process.

 

The Creativity in Therapeutics

     Jungian psychotherapeutics and shamanic therapeutics are also highly creative enterprises, calling on the embodiment of creativity in healer and the patient, in the psychotherapist and the client. C.G. Jung placed creativity at the root of healing, and of the individuation process. This is no small statement. Wholeness-making is creative, as is expressing uniqueness of individuality. Jung saw the libido as more than Freudian sexual energy, but as a creative power that can spawn and engender, and empower the full flowering of a life into its irreplaceably unique wholeness. He mentioned the “creative instinct” as a sui generis, fundamental reality, irreducible to anything else (including sex, but is expressive in sex). Creativity is a dynamis, an engine of the psyche that brings us alive, the quickens psychological life, and that deepens and extends soul (see James Hillman’s concept “soul-making.”). The “archetypal Self,” Jung’s notion of the divine core and center of the person, as well as the psychic totality, conscious and unconscious, is inherently creative in luring forth the individuation of the human person. But then Jung sees this creative task as going on everywhere in nature, to some degree for “everything living dreams of individuation, for everything strives towards its own wholeness” [Letter 1949] Jung saw the task of psychotherapy as activating the creative powers latent in the patient:

 

     “What the doctor does is less a question of treatment than of developing the   creative possibilities latent in the patient himself.”   [CW 16, par 82]

 

     Jung had a variety of methods for developing these latent creative potentials in the client. His standard therapeutic method was of course working with dreams, after acquiring a thorough understanding of the patient’s autobiographical story and their complaints. This background on the patient supplied a context for understanding what the enormously creative “Dream Maker” might be up to, in the sleep dreams, but also in the symptoms and suffering of his patients. In general Jung instructed his patients that dreams tended to compensate a too limited or one-sided point of view, offering counter-figures and scenarios to expand consciousness, and promote greater wholeness. But for clients Jung deemed advanced enough and ready, he introduced them into a method that has considerable parallels with the shamanic journey method. Jung developed the method after his painful break with Freud, a period of creative illness in which he directly engaged figures from the personal and collective unconscious. Jung came to call this technique “active imagination.” He wrote, “As a result of my experiment I learned how helpful it can be, from the therapeutic point of view, to find particular images which lie behind emotions.” [MDR 177/171].

 

     Jung saw active imagination as a method of deepening the work with dreams, and as a kind of active dreaming; of actively engaging the dreaming psyche. The method involved a conscious and intentional submergence in the unconscious, whose contents, typically appearing as images are then observed, pictured in some form, and entered into dialogue with. The results could be painted, modeled, danced or recorded in one’s journal as a conversation. Jung often had his own colorful visionary paintings displayed, in the consulting room, from his own active imaginations. This must have had a catalyzing and motivating effect on some of his patients. The material emerging from the patient’s unconscious, during active imagination, not only increases the patient’s consciousness, it transforms as a result of the active relationship.

     In my book Jung and Shamanism in Dialogue, I compared and contrasted the shamanic journey method with active imagination. There I said that the crucial distinction, despite the similarities, is that the shamanic journey is safer because it has built in safety protocols, and that the shaman has guardians or protectors, and magical procedures of protection. While Jung drew a parallel between the collective unconscious and the spirit world of shamanism, he knew some contents of the unconscious could be dangerous without proper relationship. He had no safety protocol for a Guardian, in contacting unconscious contents with the method of active imagination. Jung responded to the possible dangers of psychic possession or inflation by insisting that the patient should hold each emergent figure to ethical account. This ethical attitude required a true mutual relationship with the inner figure, and not a naive acting out, or worse, a psychotic identification with the figure. The result of such a dialogic process was to introduce more consciousness, more centeredness, which often freed trapped energy from its repression or paralysis. Thus the creative procedure could have a healing effect, and encourage the patient to rely less on the doctor for inner inspiration and guidance as they themselves grew more skilled at the procedure.

 

The Destructive Aspect of Creativity

     Aside from the potential dangers of autonomous unconscious contents, Jung was well aware there could be no creation without destruction. But this was a different matter. Jung’s concept of psychological and psychotherapeutic creativity embraces the necessity for destruction, the alchemical dissolution, the ego-death and the rebirth that follows. It is as if old confining structures must be let go of. One thinks of shamanic initiatory dismemberments, of skeletization, and other forms of mystical death/rebirth. There is no new creation, without some destruction as its condition. Even the seed must burst open, the ground must rip asunder, for the new green shoot to sprout up and reach the necessary sunlight. It must also in some sense eat and eliminate. It is because of this necessary relationship between creation and destruction, getting and letting go, that shamans and deep psychotherapists alike must create safe containers, employ ritual process structures and wisdom to contain, like the alchemical “vas” the powerful creative/destructive energies released in the healing or therapeutic ceremonies.

 

Psychological Creativity in Jung, Rank, and Grof

     Jung’s creative psychology has parallels with another renegade psychoanalyst, Otto Rank, who described three types of personality. The first type, the Conformist, is tied to a conventional life in consensus reality. Such people have strong motivation to be a part, to fit in at any cost, and not disturb the peace in sharing their own creative ideas or differences. They do not question the order and they are living for security and acceptance, at the price of their creative aliveness. The second kind of person is the Neurotic, meaning a person who feels a strong creative impulse, but who is mentally and emotionally tied to fitting in the conventional social order. The conflict amounts to a block in the creativity that is trying to break through the defenses and attachments to normalcy. The third type is the Artist, a creative individual who has used negativity and social opposition as a force to push against, differentiate from, and who has affirmed the creative self in spite of the social pressure to conform, and criticism for not conforming. Jung essentially saw each patient, as did Rank, a latent artist. Jung’s conception of a psychotherapy aiming at individuation could be viewed in terms of an awakening and activating the artistry latent in the individual, while dissolving the complexes, those limit structures which keep that artistry from coming through. Hence and death of the old limit structures and birth to sources of newness and creative expressivity is necessary.

 

     Many of Jung’s own clients were evidently caught in the Neurotic personality type and were unconsciously (or consciously in some cases) seeking liberation from the limit structures (complexes) binding their creativity. But Jung also saw beyond neurosis, that even extreme states of psychosis and severe depression could be driven by a fundamental creative instinct seeking to break-through self-encapsulating limit structures. For this reason he was very interested in the inner story of each patient, as no matter what the defensive structures, there could be a greater, more complete and authentic Self trying to breakthrough. Stanislav Grof, the transpersonal psychiatrist and theorist, expanded this Jungian understanding. He coined the term ‘holotropic’ to mean that highly creative force within the person that seeks to move them towards wholeness and healing. Grof also saw that the “emergence” of the spiritual or transpersonal in an individual could become an “emergency,” and becoming a psychosis, or mislabeled as such if it was not understood and supportively responded to by the therapist. In shamanic cultures around the world, such individuals are often seen as undergoing a call to the shamanic life, and there are well-defined initiatory ritual processes for helping them through that kind of ordeal.

 

The Fertility of the Unconscious Background of Experience

     Joseph Zinker, a gestalt psychologist has written considerably about creativity in relation to the practice of gestalt therapy, including the therapeutic use of the healer’s creativity, and the activation of creativity in the patient. In his view the patient comes into therapy with a problem, and a creative solution is to be sought. The therapist’s job is to respond sensitively and creatively to the client and catalyze the client’s own creativity in resolving the problem. But Zinker says there are many blocks to creativity. He lists many things such as fear of chaos and the unknown, rejection of playfulness, myopia before the resources, resistance to letting go, subjection to customs, fear of freedom, fear of the unknown, and we might add, fear of self-expression. As much as anything it is what is called “unfinished gestalts,” in the background of experience that leads stereotyped living. The unfinished gestaltungen are processes seeking closure, but have not been permitted or given opportunity to close naturally because circustances or the necessary consciousness has not been available. If there are a great many unclosed gestalts, creativity and aliveness and life-energy for living in the now are greatly reduced, a condition analogous to some descriptions of shamanic “soul loss.” The unclosed “gestaltungen” are the analogue of Jung’s pathological complexes. These little devils drain you of energy, and typically traumatic origins, or origins in social conditioning (learned repression and suppression). So again the therapeutic issue becomes how to activate the patient’s creative aliveness, and reduce the limit structures that are blocking it.

 

     Gestalt therapy also suggests that it is good to enrich the background experience, out of which lively figures emerge. Gestalt therapists avoid using the language of the “unconscious” or “subconscious” or “superconscious,” but I use it here in building a bridge. The more enrichment to this “subconscious background,” the more fertile it is in being resourceful in new and unexpected circumstances life brings. The more seasoned a shamanic healer is by variety life-experiences, by shamanic work, the more learning and skill sets acquired, the more his or her heart openness can give rise to seasonally relevant creative responses to whatever problematic situation arises in the present moment. If one’s subconscious background contains kindness, intuitive experience, imaginative expansion, knowledge of art, music, skiing, rock climbing, parenting, cooking and so on, it will be more easy to call these forth spontaneously when needed in a specific therapeutic situation.

 

     If we are to inspire or engender creativity latent in our clients, we must do it, first of all by being creative personalities ourselves. We nourish that creativity by feeding the subconscious background of our experience with lots of diverse experiences, from as many arenas of life as possible. A creative therapist or healer continues to enrich this background of creativity by adding experiences that nourish and catalyze on going creative expression in living. This resonates highly with a couple of things Jung said long before gestalt therapy emerged, about the actual living experience of the analyst or psychotherapist, and the limitations of the doctor’s education, professional authority, or book learning:

  

“As he has a responsibility towards his patients, he cannot afford to withdraw to an island of undisturbed scientific work, but must constantly descend into the arena of the world events, in order to join in the battle of conflicting passions and opinions. Were he to remain aloof from the tumult, the calamity of his time would reach him only from afar, and his patient’s suffering would find neither ear nor understanding. He would be at a loss of how to talk to him and help him out of his isolation. For this reason the psychologist cannot avoid coming to grips with contemporary history ”

[CW vol 10, p. 177]

 

Then elsewhere he adds:

 

“Therefore anyone who wants to know the human psyche would be better advised to bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart through the world. There, in the horrors of prisons, in lunatic assylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling hells, in the salons of the elegant, the stock exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate and through the experience of passion in every form in his own body he would reap richer stores of knowledge than textbooks a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with real knowledge of the human soul.”

[CW vol 7 par 409]

 

     While creativity is the birthright of every human, and every creature to some degree, significant therapeutic creativity requires the that the therapist or healer acquire a great accumulation of diverse life-experiences of every kind possible, building massiveness, flexibility, and depth of creative responsiveness. It is not enough to have a wild and free imagination, it must be attuned and seasonally relevant to any specific person and situation just now arising. Depth of creativity and its seasonal relevance in the “doctor of soul” (whether psychotherapist or shaman) is intentionally cultivated, nourished, grown. Finally, what is good for the doctor, is good for the patient. ++

 

To Be Continued

 

 

 

References

Stanislav and Christina Grof. Spiritual Emergencies

C.G. Jung CW, vols 16, 10, and 7.

C.G. Jung. Memories, Dreams, & Reflections

James Hillman. The Myth of Analysis

Otto Rank. Art and the Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development

C. Michael Smith. Jung and Shamanism in Dialogue.