Creativity and Depression

We will begin with the psychosynthesis egg diagram and talk about blissful and/or terrifying experiences of Self, and the integration via will of basic unconscious and superconscious into personality. I will talk about Assagioli's concept of repression of the sublime in relation to depression and mania.

Since the time of the ancient Greeks humans have posited a connection between creativity and madness, and especially between depression with mania and creativity. I will speculate about the evolutionary role of depression and mania and the overlap with creativity. 

"When a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce," wrote psychologist William James as the twentieth century began, "we have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries. Such men do not remain mere critics and understanders with their intellect. Their ideas posses them, they inflict them, for better or worse, upon their companions of their age"

This kind of view can romanticize mental illness and even more dangerously be used to create a rationale for resisting treatment resulting in some of the naïve excesses of RD Laing and others in the 1960s and 70s. In the immortal words of Tom Waits “If I exorcise my devils well my angels may leave too.“

However James also stressed the debilitating extremes of psychiatric illness. This moderate view, underscoring the need for balance in an effectively creative person, has since characterized much thinking on the subject of creativity and mental disturbance. As Sylvia Plath later said, "When you are insane, you are busy being insane - all the time... When I was crazy, that's all I was." 

However there seems to be at least some psychological research which points to a connection between creativity and depression especially to bi-polar disorder and this has implications for our attitudes to clients and to treatments.

Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor in psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University and herself someone who experiences manic-depression, has written an evocative memoir An Unquiet Mind but more recently an examination of Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament called Touched with Fire. I’ll discuss some of the research she sites that has been conducted posthumously on artists, poets and musicians and their volatile emotional lives. Other forms of research have investigated contemporary artists and their close relatives to see if there is any overlap between creative achievement and mania-depression.

University of Iowa psychiatry resident Nancy C. Andreason, found an extraordinarily high rate off affective illness among writers participating in the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, and among their families. Andreasen, a Ph.D in English literature, obtained interviews with 30 faculty members at the prestigious workshop and matched them with control subjects in non-artistic professions. She found that 80 percent of the participating writers revealed they had suffered either depression or manic-depression (an emotional disorder characterized by extreme, sometimes debilitating mood swings) compared with 30 percent of the control subjects. Two of the writers eventually took their own lives.

Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine who has talked openly about her own manic depressive emotional instability, approached a group of 47 eminent Britons while on sabbatical at Oxford and asked them to complete exhaustive questionnaires about mood swings and creativity. Jamison's sample of cultural heavy hitters included members of the Royal Academy and contributors to the 'Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse. Jamison found 38% of these artists had been treated for affective illness including depression and bipolar disorder and 28% had gone beyond talk therapy to psychotropic medication or electroconvulsive therapy. This level of psychic distress far surpasses that in the general population, where rates of bipolar illness are about 1% and major depression are 5-15%

Creative inspiration - particularly artistic inspiration -- has often been thought to require the sampling of dark "depths" of irrationality while maintaining at least some connection to everyday reality. This dive into underground forces "reminds one of a skin-diver with a breathing tube" wrote Arthur Koestler in his influential book, The Act of Creation. According to Koestler, "the creative act always involves a regression to earlier, more primitive levels on the mental hierarchy, while other processes continue simultaneously on the rational surface."

People recognized for their creative genius often depict moments of inspiration as an electrifying convergence of rational and irrational thought. If creativity is to be found between the rational and the irrational; between the known and the unknown; between the conventional and the innovative, then the creative mind continually runs the risk of going "too far." As Koestler has put it, "skin-divers are prone to fall victim to "the rapture of the deep" and tear their breathing tubes off"

In a nutshell Koestler shows how in some instances “two and two can make five.” That is, by bringing together two phenomena not previously linked, a new whole emerges that is greater than the sum of its parts. This process of conjunction he termed "bisociation.

Koestler’s thoughts seem to have some parallels with the recent brain research of Oxfords Timothy Crowe. Crowe has developed a linguistic-evolutionary model that hypothesizes that speech is the origin of self-consciousness, and self-consciousness the origin of mental illness. He says the difference between humans and other primates is that our brains are asymmetrical and this asymmetry is crucial to language processing-left-brian expression or processing of right-brain concepts and perceptions. He proposes that all mental illness is the consequence of disruption of normal interaction between two halves of the brain.

A neuro-scientist Richard Davidson from University of Wisconsin has studied what happens in neural and chemical activity in our brains when we look at erotic photos or hear scary noises. Some people when exposed to a gruesome photo will have a reaction that dies down fast, others will have the same chemical rush but it will take a long time to come back down. Davidson believes people with slow recovery time are much more vulnerable to depression. Some people experience more highly activated right prefrontal cortexes than others in the population. They tend to experience more negative emotion and are more likely to experience depressed immunity and have higher levels of cortisol, the stress hormone. Davidson’s research then takes an interesting twist as he incorporates thinking about toddlers making their first one word utterances and pointing at the same time. He sees use of language as pleasurable. People who are depressed loose interest in talking, people who are manic talk incessantly. Across cultures the most consistent mood enhancer is speech. Dwelling on negative events is painful but talking about current pain alleviates it.

Simply talking about it activates left brain underperformance and helps free us from the grip of depression. Thus the evolutionary thrust that morphed us into talking primates, also predisposes us to depression, and gives us a means to escape it.

I learned about Crowe and Davidson’s research through the incredibly comprehensive “The Noon Day Demon: an anatomy of depression” by Andrew Soloman himself a survivor of intense and debilitating attacks of depression. Soloman, Jamison and others argue that depressed people have a more accurate view of the world and better judgment than do non-depressed people. The maintenance of positive self-enhancing illusions seems to be a key to being able to manage the vagaries of earthly existence or as T.S. Eliot said "Human kind cannot bear very much reality." Too much illusion leads to foolish risk taking and lack of empathy for others, too little leads a sense of futility, lack of motivation and a world emptied of meaning.

People who have been through a depression and have stabilized often have a heightened awareness of of the joyfulness of everyday existence. The long pause that a depression forces often causes people to do their soul-work, look deeper and change their lives in useful ways.

For those of us who work in the helping professions the generation of hope in the face of humbling pain and despair, the maintenace of loving regard towards those who are trapped in the isolation of a withdrawn and depleted self, challenges us to work through our own emotional difficulties, to find ways to value ourselves and participate with fullness in life and to be present to ourselves, our needs and to others and their needs, to open to our potential and our goodness as well as staying mindful of the strengths and potential of those we work with.

psychology with soul workshop in Wellington

A Wellington based seminar that will provide you with:
 A mindfulness practice for your own self–awareness and spiritual alignment
 Psychosynthesis models that can easily be integrated into your way of working
 The skill to see with heart as well as mind
 The ability to be more embodied and work with the embodiment of clients
 The capacity to use your intuition and imagination as tools

THERE WILL BE opportunities to experience imaginal process, experiential exploration, individual
and group refl ection, and to practice in pairs, as well as a chance listen to new ideas.
Psychosynthesis was formulated early last century by the Italian psychiatrist, Roberto Assagioli.
He explored the overlap of spirituality and psychology and became fascinated by the role of will in the
integration of what he called superconscious qualities such as our compassion and our love. Assagioli
believed that we repress the sublime as well as trauma and shadow. Therefore we can give attention
to what is calling to us from our heights as well as what may be driving us from our depths. If we can
identify and align with our values then we make choices that respect our needs but also acknowledge
our potential and help step that down into the present. You can read more about psychosynthesis at:
www.psychosynthesis.co.nz

Who should attend: This seminar is particularly relevant for counselors (generic, grief,
school), psychotherapists, mental health workers, and those in pastoral care who wish to refresh their
spirits and deepen their practice.

For more information on Lynne Holdem click this link

When: Friday, October 23, 6 p.m. — 9 p.m., and Saturday, October 24, 10 a.m. – 4.30 p.m.
Where: Wellington Friends Centre, 8 Moncrieff Street, Mount Victoria, Wellington
Cost: $120
Registration is by email: m.ackerman@paradise.net.nz or phone (04) 905.1008. Places are
limited to 20. Registration and full payment by September 24th.

“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space.
He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of
optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our
personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves
from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole
of nature in its beauty.” – Albert Einstein

Dreams and working with your dreams

Freud considered dreams "the royal road to the unconscious". I'll begin this week's talk with a brief flirtation with Freud's seminal work The Interpretation of Dreams, first published in 1899. In Freud's view, dreams are all forms of 'wish-fulfillment' — attempts by the unconscious to resolve a conflict of some sort, whether something recent or something from the recessess of the past. Although Freud's view of dreams as the'logic of the unconscious' was debunked by twentieth century researchers into REM sleep there have been some recent brain research that rather supports his view of dreams as connected with unconscious wishes.

 

Then we will quickly visit the theories of his student Carl Jung. At first Jung seemed the heir apparent to Freud's new kingdom of Psychoanalysis but after a six year close collaboration the relationship between Jung and Freud disintegrated into animosity, in a rather bizarre enactment of Freud's oedipus complex perhaps. Jung went on to develop his own psychology calling it Analytic Psychology. One of his main points of difference from the Freudian view of dreams  was that Freud's concept of the unconscious was incomplete and overly negative. Jung also proposed the existence of a second, far deeper form of the unconscious underlying the personal one. This was the collective unconscious, where the archetypes themselves resided, represented in mythology by a lake or other body of water. For Jung the unconsious was not just about sex and aggressive drives. He believed humans are driven by their need to achieve individuation, wholeness or full knowledge of the self.

 

Finally I would like to discuss the ideas of the post-Jungian, James Hillman and his creation Archetypal Psychology which he set out in his book Re:visioning Psychology

 

Because archetypal psychology is concerned with fantasy, myth, and image, it is not surprising that dreams are considered to be significant in relation to soul and soul-making. Hillman does not believe that dreams are simply random residue or flotsam from waking life (as advanced by physiologists), but neither does he believe that dreams are compensatory for the struggles of waking life, or are invested with “secret” meanings of how one should live, as did Jung. Rather, “dreams tell us where we are, not what to do” (1979). Therefore, Hillman is against the traditional interpretive methods of dream analysis. Hillman’s approach is phenomenological rather than analytic (which breaks the dream down into its constituent parts) and interpretive/hermeneutic (which may make a dream image “something other” than what it appears to be in the dream). His famous dictum with regard to dream content and process is “Stick with the image.”

In the spirit of Hillman I will then describe and perhaps illustrate a process by which we can befriend dream images and allow deeper understanding of them rather than reduce them or analyse them inservice to the ego.

Narcissism: Cinderella in 2009

Watching television and dvds with my daughters lately I've been really taken with how many contemporary girls' movies replay this theme of transformation by the fairy godmother beauty industry and social redemption through the love of a rich man. It's also played out in our fascination with house and garden make-overs and the fantasy of a perfect and beautiful life that they seem to promise. 

There's nothing very 2009 about this image of Cinderella but I selected it from the thousands of images available because it shows Cinderella before her moment of transformation, in the ashes of her grief and humiliation. Images of her splendid triumph abound. We are fonder of these, perhaps they cater to our own narcissism. The birds in the picture above are helping Cinderella sort out lentils from the ashes so her step-mother will let her go to the ball. Like a lot of fairy tales it illustrates the psychological function of splitting: the "good fairy god-mother" and the "wicked step-mother and sisters." 

This has got me thinking about the different versions of Cinderella and their symbols. I want to talk in particular of the  Brothers Grimm version and speak about my associations to Narcissism in their story. We will explore loss of the good mother, envy, as well as projection and splitting through the story of Cinderella.  I will refer to the theories of the origins and treatment of Narcissism in the opposing theories of Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg and also the recent writings by the psychoanalyst Neville Symmington who lives in Sydney and has published many very readable books. I've included a couple of  my favorites. "Becoming a Person" includes two of his papers on Narcissism.

Can Love Last: romantic and maturing love

Can Love Last? – Romantic and Maturing Love

This week we ask ourselves this big question and I wonder how we might possibly reach an answer in one lunch hour when poets and philosophers have been attempting to understand this mysterious and unpredictable human impulse since we humans first learned to talk.

The Greeks cleverly distinguished four different types of Love: sex, erotic, philia or friendship and agape or caritas which can roughly be translated as care. In Love and Will Rollo May advocates an integration of sex with these other aspects to deepen intimacy. Written in the 60s this book describes the poverty that results from flying to the sensation of sex innorder to avoid the commitment of genuine love.

The British Object Relations thinkers of the Independent group became interested in feelings and how important it was to have access to the whole spectrum of feelings in order to be oneself and to relate to whole objects. I want to look briefly at the way Winnicott values aggression as an aspect of mature sexual functioning and at Bion’s thinking about the first emotional impulses: to love, to hate and the urge to know.

We have already learned a little about the operation of the limbic brain and attachment theory and so we know that creating the conditions that allow love to last is vital for our happiness and security and that alienation or separation from those we love causes us to suffer. But perhaps I am failing here to differentiate attachment and love and perhaps they are not at all the same thing. 

Lewis, Amini and Lannon in their ground-breaking work A General Theory of Love distinguish between being in love and loving. “In a dazzling vote of confidence for form over substance, our culture fawns over the fleetingness of being in love while discounting the importance of loving”.  These wise men suggest that adult love asks us to come to know the other whereas in love demands only the brief acquaintance necessary to recognise emotional patterns of parents which release an intoxicating feeling “that the other fits in a way that no other will, the desire for skin to skin proximity and delirious urge to disregard all else.”

The Relational Psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell has written a small book on this very subject and I will present some of his ideas about what constitutes romantic love and what causes the difficulties in maturing our loving beyond the initial pair bond.

Through his work we encounter the themes of safety and adventure, idealization and denigration, fantasy and reality, aggression and danger of desire, control and surrender and how these play out in our sexuality and intimacy.

Please bring along your own ideas about love and loving, perhaps a poem or a story to end our session.  

Anxiety and Feeling

In this week’s dialogue I’ll present some ideas about the causes and treatment of anxiety.

I want to start as usual with Freud and but talk particularly of the further development of his ideas by the British Object Relations psychoanalysts Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott and also visit with the more contemporary ideas of relational psychoanalyst, Stephen Mitchell and some insights from neuroscience about the reptilian brain and the limbic system. Hopefully we will start to build a picture not just of what anxiety is and it’s relationship to sensing and feeling, but also of the different types of anxiety and what that means for the treatment needs of people who suffer from anxiety.

In a way we continue last week’s theme of attuning to the person who we work with and how they organise their experience of themselves, of others and of relating itself. All of us, of course, experience anxiety from time to time. To be alive is to experience uncertainty, separation and threat. The question then becomes how to live life with awareness of danger and also awareness of pleasure and possibility.