What Became of Our Fierce Flowering?

April 10, 2013 - Just published by il piccolo editions

The Faust Woman Poems
by Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

What became of our fierce flowering?

In the 1960s and '70s the long forgotten and forbidden Great Goddess roused herself from millennia of slumber and took possession of young women’s imaginations. That cast out She offered a Faustian bargain—She would rip you out of your narrow domesticated self image, thrust you into the wilds of sex, power and creativity, initiate you into the mysteries of Earth and Starry Heaven, but you would owe Her your soul. A generation of women followed Her. Some knew her as Feminism, some knew her as the Deep Feminine, many as both.

The Faust Woman Poems trace one woman’s Faustian adventures through that time. Most of a lifetime later the Great Goddess returns to the poet.  As oceans rise and species die She demands Her due.

About the Author:
Naomi Ruth Lowinsky lives at the confluence of the River Psyche and the Deep River of poetry. The Sister from Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way tells stories of her pushy muse. She is the co-editor, with Patricia Damery, of the new collection Marked by Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way. In addition to the Faust Woman Poems, Naomi is also the author of three books of poetry, including the recently published Adagio & Lamentation. Her poetry has been widely published and she is the winner of the Obama Millennium Award. She is a member of the San Francisco Institute and has for years led a writing circle there, called Deep River.

Cover image Papilla Estelar is a painting by Remedios Varo, used with permission from the Varo Estate, © 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VEGAP, Madrid.

Product Details
The Faust Woman Poems
Paperback: 90 pages
Publisher: il piccolo editions; 1st edition (April 10, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN: 978-1926715971

Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including 

Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting-Edge Fiction, Poetry, 

and a growing list of alternative titles. 

www.fisherkingpress.com

The Devil's Music . . . perhaps its Soul?

A Commentary on Mark Winborn’s Deep Blues: Human Soundscapes for the Archetypal Journey by Deborah Bryon

Originally published in Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, Summer 2012, Vol. 6, Num. 3, pp. 96-97 (www.ucpressjournals.com/journal.php?j=jung)

I was surprised and delighted to encounter the colorful and poeticstyle in Mark Winborn’s Deep Blues: Human Soundscapes for the Archetypal Journey. Through his writing, he reminds us that blues music- like visual imagery - can be a rich, metaphoric language with the capacity to hold archetypal experience as a living entity. As a Jungian analyst pulling from his own background as a musician, Winborn creates a compelling space for the deep spiritual expression of blues experience as it surfaces on the pages of this book, giving it a voice of its own.

Winborn starts by tracing blues history back to its original roots, paralleling it with Greek tragedy and the perils of Orpheus and Odysseus. By asking the question, “What is the blues?” Winborn explores the music as both an internal psychological state and an attitude–a philosophy and way of being in the world. Similar to working with a dream, he circumambulates around symbolic themes found in blues material – first, in a historical context using amplification, and then by describing the blues as a vehicle for psychological healing and transformation. Winborn successfully moves back and forth from being in the actual experience of relating to the blues into expressing it through verbal language that is both imaginative and easily accessible to the reader.

Next, Winborn travels into universal themes encrypted in the lyrics of blues songs. The shared emotional state between the performer and the audience, arising from the human experience of daily living, becomes poetically transformed through musical metaphor. The blues is a language of the senses and a language of spirit. The human experience of love and heartbreak, the early mother-child bond, addictions, and sexual frustrations, for example, are remembered, and once again come alive.

In addition to considering the blues within the context of a personal frame of reference, blues is a collective energetic experience. Winborn explores the trance-like nature of the blues that is capable of bringing the listener, as well as the performer, into a field of unitary reality. Through the creative process of being touched by sound we become one with the experience. Besides offering a means for human emotional expression, the sounds of the blues penetrate the body in a way that brings visceral experience of sensual embodiment, and with this redemption and new awareness. Opposites are transcended through the immediacy of being in relationship with life that takes place in ontological time.

Winborn examines the cultural myths of the blues as “devil’s music.” The blues originated as a reaction to the oppression of slavery, manifesting in archetypal shadow figures of the “bad man,” the trickster, and other potentially self-destructive archetypal characters associated with possession by the death instinct. Yet the blues can also be regenerative–bringing the capacity for growth and new life. Jung stated that energy contained in our personal shadow is life force. Blues music is also about the ecstasy of initiation and being in the twilight of the crossroads of liminal spaces, between darkness and light–the places where magic happens and shamans cross bridges between ordinary and non-ordinary reality.

Winborn goes on to suggest that healing which takes place in hearing blues music is a shamanic rather than analytic process. Creating a contagion through the music is the elixir. The constantly changing lyrics provide context and meaning as the singer’s personality, feelings, and state of mind shines through with shifts and fluctuations of subjective experience in any given moment. If a feeling response is evoked by the performer, that brings the listener into the enchantment of the projection created by the music, then the song is effective. The blues narrative is one of the ways we can face and synthesize the unprocessed and repressed aspects of the shadow in our own journey, as well as the collective cultural psyche as a whole. The blues musician functions as a channel with access to the energy of the collective experience of pain by humanizing it and making it more tolerable.

Sparked by reading Deep Blues I found myself drifting into my own reverie, wondering if the powerful archetypal charge constellated in blues symbols is a reflection of the separation that is a bi-product of living in modern culture? Do the blues provide us with the needed cathartic experience that we have lost the ability to generate as easily on our own? Winborn reminds us of the personification and humor in first-person stories conveyed by blues singers, making us remember the feeling of being human, and with this, the capacity for relatedness.

I thoroughly enjoyed Deep Blues, and would highly recommend the book. In his writing, Winborn artfully moves the reader into an archetypal Dionysian experience residing in the body, and prompts us to remember that blues music makes us feel alive. He follows blues experience into the alchemical realm of the prima material – instinct in its most raw and vital form--by using the metaphor of color to describe how blues music can resonate in our psyches. In reading Deep Blues, I wished for an expanded discussion of the alchemical healing that a blues melody has on the psyche. Shadow material can emerge not only in the words but in the energy generated from the relationship between the notes of the blues scales bending on guitar strings. This phenomenon might add additional fodder for exploring archetypal expression–but perhaps this will be a topic Winborn will explore in greater length in a future book.

To quote Winborn, citing Chicago blues disc jockey Purvis Spann, “If you don’t like blues, you’ve got a hole in your soul.” Anyone who has listened to a captivating blues melody knows that these sounds come from the heart and the soul, from deep inside. As Winborn has describes, the listener cannot resist the inward pull of the melody, just as it is impossible to refrain from tapping to the beat. when we are captured in the spell of listening to the blues.

Deborah Bryon, PhD, is an analyst with the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts and practices in the Denver, Colorado area. She is the author of a book on shamanic experiences, Lessons of the Inca Shamans: Piercing the Veil, released by Pine Winds Press in August 2012 (http://lessonsoftheincashamans.com/)

Read more reviews of Deep Blues and listen to an audio interview with Dr. Winborn at www.deepblues.org.

Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting-Edge Fiction, Poetry, and a growing list of alternative titles. 

www.fisherkingpress.com

From Archetypes of the Zodiac to Beyond the Mask

Now shipping

Beyond the Mask: The Rising Sign
Parts 1 & 2 (combined edition)

by Katheen Burt

"Beyond the Mask will speak deeply to many--to astrologers and lovers of astrology at every level, archetypally minded people, depth psychologists and seekers from many walks of life."
--Monika Wikman Ph.D., Jungian Analyst and author of Pregnant Darkness: Alchemy and the Rebirth of Consciousness

Well known and respected internationally for her ground breaking work in Archetypes of the Zodiac, Kathleen Burt now offers us a phenomenal distillation of her life work in: Beyond the Mask: The Rising Sign - Part 1 & Part 2.  Midlife urgings bring forth cycles of death and rebirth. Antiquated identities and roles must die, old 'masks' must be pealed away before we can discover a new path in life. Kathleen Burt addresses specifically how the twelve rising sign patterns guide us into new life and fresh experiences. With the keen eye of an astrologer examining the biography of creative writers and inspired people, Kathleen Burt brings a depth of understanding to the Rising Sign. This unique volume of wisdom offers decades of scholarly study and practical experience in esoteric astrology, psychology, mythology, and biography and examines the underlying archetypal patterns inherent in our lives.

An astrologer in private practice for 30 years, Kathleen Burt is the author of Archetypes of the Zodiac, a book about Sun Signs from the perspectives of mythology, psychology, and esoteric astrology, and the phenomenal distillation of her life work, Beyond the Mask: The Rising Sign. A Fulbright scholar to India, Kathleen completed her graduate work in South Asian history at the University of Chicago. She has taught at Roosevelt University, Chicago and Mira Costa College in CA. Patterns in Health, a two-year program on archetypes, dreams, ritual and Active Imagination led by Jungian analysts has influenced her life and client work. She currently teaches Viniyoga classes (sequencing and breathwork) in the tradition of T.K.V. Desikachar.

Beyond the Mask: The Rising Sign
Volumes I & 2 - Combined Edition
Paperback: 394 pages
Large Page format - 9.25" x 7.5"
Publisher: Genoa House (July 27, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1926975081
ISBN-13: 978-1926975085

Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including 

Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting-Edge Fiction, Poetry, 

and a growing list of alternative titles. 

www.fisherkingpress.com

News Release - Riting Myth, Mythic Writing

May 22, 2012

Just Published by Fisher King Press

Riting Myth, Mythic Writing

Plotting Your Personal Story

By Dennis Patrick Slattery

Here's the foreword by Michael Conforti

Imagine sitting in an Irish pub, drinking ale and listening to the bard weave stories about so many different things, or perhaps captivated by the glow of an outdoor fire while listening to an elder telling stories about history, traditions, and ways to navigate the different life portals that each and every one of us will have to enter at some time. And then—there are stories about destiny, that illusive, mercurial something that catches hold of us at the beginning of life and never seems to want to let go. La forza di destino!! These are the experiences one has in knowing and working with Dr. Dennis Slattery. Whether sharing a pizza and beer or having the luxury of attending one of his lectures or classes, one is privileged to experience an authentic “elder” who, in the tradition of all those wise ones who came before him, has the gift of bringing the world of myth and imagination to life and showing us that indeed these are as real as anything we can touch and hold in our hands.

Dr. Slattery reminds us that myths teach us about all aspects of life, from birth to death, and through the weavings of these eternal stories not only help us recognize the presence of these universal and archetypal patterns but also shows us ways to approach the transcendent.

With more than thirty years of teaching and working with myth, Slattery’s newest work, entitled Riting Myth, Mythic Writing, is a bold adventure in that it asks the reader to actively engage in the mythic tradition, who is asked to take on the role of bard and allow the soul to tell its story. While he opens the book in reminding us of the perennial wisdom contained in myth, he extends this work by inviting the reader to speak with Self and soul and, in a mythopoetic way, engage psyche as experienced in one’s own symptoms, fears, hopes, and joys.

Unless one understands inherent profundity contained and revealed in  myths and legends, it may be difficult to grasp the challenge inherent in Dr. Slattery’s latest work. He wants his readers not only to know these perennial stories but to assume a certain authorship in the mythic process. His hope is that through this process of “Mythic Writing,” the individual will cultivate a meaningful relationship with those transpersonal forces which guide the life process.

The Red Book and a Word from the Sister

Marked By Fire

Stories of the Jungian Way

"This life is the way, the long sought after way to the unfathomable which we call divine"

—C.G. Jung, The Red Book

Marked by Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way is a soulful collection of essays that illuminate the inner life.

When Soul appeared to C.G. Jung and demanded he change his life, he opened himself to the powerful forces of the unconscious. He recorded his inner journey, his conversations with figures that appeared to him in vision and in dream in The Red Book. Although it would be years before The Red Book was published, much of what we now know as Jungian psychology began in those pages, when Jung allowed the irrational to assault him. That was a century ago.

How do those of us who dedicate ourselves to Jung’s psychology as analysts, teachers, writers respond to Soul’s demands in our own lives? If we believe, with Jung, in “the reality of the psyche,” how does that shape us? The articles in Marked By Fire portray direct experiences of the unconscious; they tell life stories about the fiery process of becoming ourselves.

A Word from the Sister

The publication of “Marked by Fire” is exciting. I want to share a portion of Naomi's essay in the collection, especially the part where I show up and play a pivotal role. I hope you’ll want to read more....

Drunk with Fire
How The Red Book Transformed My Jung

Support me for I stagger, drunk with fire. . . . I climbed down through the centuries and plunged into the sun far at the bottom. And I rose up drunk from the sun . . . The Red Book

There has been a breach between C. G. Jung and me. How could that happen? I had no idea who I was until I met Jung, nor had I had a decent conversation with my soul. Jungian analysis showed me my way into the world, and into my inner life—it opened the door to the poet I'd left behind in my childhood. But when I encountered Jung's suspicious attitude toward artists—so like a Swiss burgher—the poet in me was offended.

Enter The Red Book. When I sat down with that enormous tome on my lap and leafed through its gloriously illuminated pages, its visionary poetry, its astounding paintings and mandalas, my heart opened to my illustrious ancestor—all was forgiven. I felt vindicated. Jung, as I'd always suspected, was a closeted poet.

What is this Red Book? During a difficult time in his life, after his break with Freud, Jung was deluged with powerful images and visions. He wrote them down and painted them. He created a strange and beautiful book—bound in red leather—to hold them. It looks like a medieval illuminated manuscript. The Red Book was not published, even after his death, because of concerns that its wild, prophetic tone would cause people to dismiss Jung as a mystic or a madman. When it finally came out in 2009, it surprised the Jungian world by creating a media sensation and selling out its first printing

With the publication of The Red Book my Jung has been transformed. He is "outed" as a poet and a painter. He writes directly out of his vulnerability, working out his relationship with his soul in the depths of the mythopoetic imagination, just as I do. In The Red Book Jung reclaims his soul—or rather she reclaims him. She appears to him and becomes his guide. She is an inner figure with a mind of her own. This honoring of the voice from within, which Jung would later call active imagination, is one of his greatest gifts to me. Instead of ignoring or dismissing voices that speak to me from within, Jung taught me to listen and to engage in dialogue with them. When "The Sister from Below" began speaking to me, telling me she was my muse, my soul, my writing life took off....


When Jung implores, "Support me for I stagger drunk with fire," I feel a tug and am deeply moved. Why is this? They are wildly poetic words—in the Dionysian mode. They take me down to that primal level of religious feeling—worship of the sun, our source. I know the states he describes. To be drunk with fire tells it all—the creative ecstasy—at once wildly enlivening and demonic—fire as Dionysus, fire as Shiva, fire as Pele. Certainly being a poet can mean being drunk with the sun from the bottom of time. One finds oneself climbing "down through the centuries" pursuing a word, an image, a phrase of goat song.

It has been essential for me to write directly out of the experience of being in other realities, rather than describing such states from a safe distance. In The Red Book Jung contains his intense and overwhelming experiences by writing them down, by painting them. I recognize that urge. I have shelves and shelves of journals in which I've worked to contain my own fire, to follow inner figures, to work with poems and with dreams, to dive below the surface of the times to what is moving in the depths. And I always feel better, more grounded, more real to myself after I do.

Enter, the Sister from Below. She's got an idea:

Why don't you take your own advice? Do an active imagination with Jung, now that you feel this warm glow of kinships libido for him? Imagine you two are sitting by the primordial fire, as he puts it in The Red Book:

An old secret fire burns between us. . . . The words uttered at the fire are ambiguous and deep and show life the right way. . . .
[We] will respect the holy fire again, as well as the shades sitting at the hearth, and the words that encircle the flames.

This makes me nervous. Jung is the master of active imagination. Is it hubris to invoke him? But I have learned to listen to the Sister. So I sit down, with my notebook. Jung, I discover, is reluctant. He is not at all sure he wants to engage in this exercise...


Marked By Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way
Volume 1 - Inaugural Edition, Edited by Patricia Damery and Naomi Ruth Lowinsky. Available Spring 2012

Contributors to Marked by Fire: Jerome Bernstein, Claire Douglas, Gilda Frantz, Jacqueline Gerson, Jean Kirsch, Chie Lee, Karlyn Ward, Henry Abramovitch, Sharon Heath, Dennis Patrick Slattery, Robert Romanyshyn, Patricia Damery, and Naomi Ruth Lowinsky.

Paperback & eBook editions - Advance Orders Welcomed

Product Details
Paperback & eBook editions: 150 pages (estimate)
Large Page Size Format 9.25" x 7.5"
Publisher: Fisher King Press; 1st edition (April 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1-926715-68-3
ISBN-13: 978-1-926715-68-1

Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including 

Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting-Edge Fiction, Poetry, 

and a growing list of alternative titles. 

www.fisherkingpress.com

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: The Promethean Way, The Creative Soul: Art and the Quest for Wholeness, The Guilt Cure,  and Our Creative Fingerprint.

Love, Intimacy, Creativity

With Great Pleasure, Fisher King Press introduces:

The Creative Soul:
Art and the Quest for Wholeness
by Lawrence H. Staples

Who we most deeply are is mirrored in our artistic work. Our need for mirroring simultaneously attracts us to and repels us from our creative callings and relationships. It is one of life’s great dilemmas.

Artist’s block and lover’s block flow from the same pool. Often, we fear deeply the very thing needed to create original art, to experience intimate relationships and to live authentic lives: we are frightened by the impulse to be fully revealed to ourselves, and to others, as this most often entails exposing the unacceptable shadowy aspects of our humanity and risking rejection.

Mirrors in all their manifold guises permit us to safely see and experience ourselves in reflection and become better acquainted with the rejected, ostracized aspects of our personalities. Creative work is one of the few places where we can truly express and witness lost aspects of our authentic selves.

Within us a treasure beckons. This is what we spend our lives pursuing. What slows and distracts us is not the object we long for, but where we search. To find this precious gem, we must eventually return to our own creative spirits.

Topics explored in THE CREATIVE SOUL include:

• OPPOSITES AND CREATIVITY
• THE CREATIVE INSTINCT
• OUR UNIQUE IDENTITY
• SOME ELEMENTS OF CREATIVITY
• SOME PREREQUISITES OF THE CREATIVE PROCESS
• LA PETITE MORT
• GIVING VOICE TO THE MANY LIVES WITHIN
• DREAMS AND ACTIVE IMAGINATION AS TRIGGERS TO CREATIVITY
• CREATIVITY AS AN INNER PARENT
• CREATIVITY WITHIN BOUNDS
• THE CREATIVE GAP
• THE POWER OF SMALL
• CREATIVITY AND INDEPENDENCE
• ART AND THE QUEST FOR WHOLENESS
• THERAPY AS ART
• FEAR OF SELF-REVELATION BLOCKS CREATIVITY
• INTIMACY AND CREATIVITY
• THE IMPORTANCE OF MIRRORING
• CREATIVITY, GUILT, AND SELF-DEVELOPMENT
• CREATIVITY AND LONELINESS
• LIFE AND THE TENSION OF OPPOSITES

Available from your local bookstore, from a host of online booksellers, and directly from Fisher King Press: The Creative Soul: Art and the Quest for Wholeness by Lawrence H. Staples / ISBN 978-0-9810344-4-7 / Publication Date: Feb-2009 / Order your copy at by calling +1-831-238-7799

Press Release: The Creative Soul

With Great Pleasure, Fisher King Press announced:

Available February 14th, 2009

The Creative Soul: Art and the Quest for Wholeness
by Lawrence H. Staples

Who we most deeply are is mirrored in our artistic work. Our need for mirroring simultaneously attracts us to and repels us from our creative callings and relationships. It is one of life’s great dilemmas.

Artist’s block and lover’s block flow from the same pool. Often, we fear deeply the very thing needed to create original art, to experience intimate relationships and to live authentic lives: we are frightened by the impulse to be fully revealed to ourselves, and to others, as this most often entails exposing the unacceptable shadowy aspects of our humanity and risking rejection.

Mirrors in all their manifold guises permit us to safely see and experience ourselves in reflection and become better acquainted with the rejected, ostracized aspects of our personalities. Creative work is one of the few places where we can truly express and witness lost aspects of our authentic selves.

Within us a treasure beckons. This is what we spend our lives pursuing. What slows and distracts us is not the object we long for, but where we search. To find this precious gem, we must eventually return to our own creative spirits.

Topics explored in THE CREATIVE SOUL include:

• OPPOSITES AND CREATIVITY
• THE CREATIVE INSTINCT
• OUR UNIQUE IDENTITY
• SOME ELEMENTS OF CREATIVITY
• SOME PREREQUISITES OF THE CREATIVE PROCESS
• LA PETITE MORT
• GIVING VOICE TO THE MANY LIVES WITHIN
• DREAMS AND ACTIVE IMAGINATION AS TRIGGERS TO CREATIVITY
• CREATIVITY AS AN INNER PARENT
• CREATIVITY WITHIN BOUNDS
• THE CREATIVE GAP
• THE POWER OF SMALL
• CREATIVITY AND INDEPENDENCE
• ART AND THE QUEST FOR WHOLENESS
• THERAPY AS ART
• FEAR OF SELF-REVELATION BLOCKS CREATIVITY
• INTIMACY AND CREATIVITY
• THE IMPORTANCE OF MIRRORING
• CREATIVITY, GUILT, AND SELF-DEVELOPMENT
• CREATIVITY AND LONELINESS
• LIFE AND THE TENSION OF OPPOSITES

Available from your local bookstore, from a host of online booksellers, and directly from Fisher King Press: The Creative Soul: Art and the Quest for Wholeness by Lawrence H. Staples / ISBN 13: 978-0-9810344-4-7 / Publication Date: Feb-2009 / Order your copy by calling  +1-831-238-7799.

Intimacy, Fear, and Creativity

by Lawrence H. Staples
author of Guilt with a Twist

The resistance a patient experiences in painting on this canvas that lies between him and the analyst, or in attempting otherwise to paint or write while in analysis, is similar to what artists experience when they encounter a block. They have touched and activated some thought or feeling that scared them. They will remain blocked until the unconscious thought or feeling is made conscious and dealt with. What scared them often turns out to be a fear that is appropriate to and belongs to childhood, but that continues unconsciously. What scares artists and causes them to block is often the fear of revealing in their art a secret about themselves. It is a fear of self-revelation, a fear of revealing something that was dangerously unacceptable to their parents. They are not conscious of what is frightening them because the fearful thing might seem silly or frivolous. Dealing with this issue is the job of analysis. Analysis tries to depotentiate these fears, allowing the individual to see them for what they are, often just a spook.

I have worked with a number of creative people who entered analysis because they were blocked. Something had frightened them or hurt them or made them feel so vulnerable that they could no longer risk going outside the fence, where the opposites they needed for their creative work were. Their need for safety was keeping them in the safe zone. Thus, they were separated from the stones they needed to finish the work they had started. Usually, with sufficient encouragement and mirroring, their comfort level with the opposites returned and they were able to go back outside, where lay the stones needed to complete their job.

A letter from a former patient, a multi-talented artist who had finished his work with me, helped make me more conscious of and understand more fully the etiology of the resistance to and the blocking of our creative work, whether in analysis or in other art forms. This former patient shared with me the profound insight that what blocks us in our art is essentially what blocks us in our relationships.

He was struggling with his painting when he wrote to me: “Our talks about the fear of intimacy in relationships come to mind when I find myself frustrated in my creative work and begin to think to myself, ‘Yeah, it is just getting difficult and you want to bail out on something that you actually have feelings for and are afraid of going deeper.’” He had perceived a connection between creative work and relationships that is far from obvious. Reflecting on his comments, I realized how rich his insight was.

Reflecting on his comments, I realized how rich his insight was. He was right; it is fear of intimacy that blocks our commitment to and deep engagement to both art and relationships. Intimacy means fully revealing and expressing our selves to others. It is intimacy, deep self-revelation that renders both art and relationships authentic. We resist intimacy and the authenticity it produces because we fear fully revealing our selves to others. We are afraid we will be unacceptable, criticized, and rejected. And we fear revealing ourselves to our self.

Because our art is a reflected image of our selves, the potential rejection of our art is as terrifying as the potential rejection of our selves in a relationship. Rejection is a threat of annihilation in both. No wonder we are tempted to hide our selves or to run away or, as my patient remarked, “bail out” of both. No wonder we are tempted to keep our paintings, our writing, or other artistic output safely ensconced out of sight in a drawer or cupboard. No wonder it keeps us from submitting our art for exhibition or our writing to a publisher. Even worse, it is often what separates us from our paintbrushes, word processors, or other tools of the trade.

Instead of doing creative work and exposing it to the world we go drinking, fishing, or screwing. Such diversions, if they replace our creative artistic work, eventually result in thoughts of suicide. There is only one way to relieve or expunge those thoughts—creative production. If we are lucky, we eventually will be able to engage in both authentic art and authentic relationships before we die.

The idea of revealing our selves to others is like parading naked before others, and both are scary. It makes no difference whether this revealing of ourselves is represented in a physical, mental, spiritual, or symbolic form. We fear the guilt and shame that will ensue if any representation is judged to be bad. It is a feared attack on our self-worth, on the very foundations of our being. It is the ultimate block to our creativity or activity, or at least, that is how it seems. This fear is one reason why it is often easier to be successful in conventional terms—in business, law, or medicine—than to be successful in art or relationships. Being successful in conventional areas often depends upon concealing large parts of one’s self, while success in art most often involves revealing large parts of one’s self. Thus, the very thing that makes bad art and bad relationships may make good business.

My patient’s note crystallized for me the important connection between art and relationships. The more I thought about what he said the more I could see that they have much in common. Both good art and good relationships depend on and result from a creative activity that flows from our deepest realm. They are, in fact, identical from the standpoint of the underlying creative principles and processes that give them life. They are similarly conceived, formed, and developed. It follows, then, that good art and good relationships depend on the same things, and they both require creative effort of the highest order, effort that may be intense and may need a prolonged gestation period. And they both require profound intimacy, both with one’s self and others, if they are to be really good.

We create great relationships only when we fully reveal our selves; we create great art only when we truly reveal our selves. Art and relationships require the same nutrients to grow. If we want our art and our relationships to be strong and beautiful, we must feed them intimacy, which is what makes both of them thrive. Thus, the quality of our art and the quality of our relationships depend on the degree to which we accomplish this feat of intimate self-revelation. The more that they reflect our selves the better they are.

This is why we simultaneously both fear and fall in love with our relationships and our art. We see our selves in both of them. Christ’s command that we love our neighbors as our selves would be a meaningless and empty phrase if we could not first love our selves. We cannot love our selves if we cannot know our selves. Both relationships and art help us know our selves by mirroring and reflecting back to us who we are.

As we have noted, however, life presents us with a great paradox. We fear deeply the very thing that we need if we are to create good art and good relationships. Artist’s block and lover’s block flow from the same pool and result from the same dynamics. For reasons described throughout my book we are frightened by the impulse to reveal our selves fully, because it always means revealing the unacceptable parts of our selves. To find and reveal our selves fully, we must breach the fence with which convention surrounds us, and incur guilt. Doing this requires great courage and a high tolerance for pain.

It is painful because to do so is to expose parts of our selves that got us into trouble with or caused us to be rejected. There was trouble when we expressed unacceptable feelings, like: “I am afraid” or “I need you” or “I miss you” or “Please leave the lights on” or “Please don’t leave me alone” or “I hate you” or “Go to hell.” There is a huge range of negative feelings that were disallowed and we are afraid to expose them because we do not want to be rejected by touching the same hot stove that burned us when we were kids. We want people to love our art and us, but we fear that they will reject both if we truly reveal who we are and what we feel. How could we feel otherwise? That was a burn that still hurts.

Parents were our first image of God, and we harbor well into adulthood, mostly unconsciously, the thought that they are God. For this reason, we viscerally experience the acknowledgment, acceptance, or expression of the forbidden feelings and values as a transgression of God’s will. It is easy to understand why it is so difficult to undo the early damage that parents inflicted and that interfere with our deep need for intimacy. Even the parents themselves were unaware of what was going on.

Thus, to avoid the frightful intimacy that involves fully revealing our selves, we kid our selves into thinking that our art and our relationships depend on finding the “right” person or the “right” art form. We believe that both the problem and its solution lie “out there” instead of “in here,” in our selves. Our capacity for intimacy depends on our capacity to find and accept within our selves the forbidden feelings that we rejected. We simply cannot intimately reveal to others feelings that we our selves do not accept. Finding and accepting those forbidden feelings involves a long process of introspection that is not for the faint of heart.

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.