unconscious – Page 2 – Hélène Smit

Neurosis and creativity

Someone was talking to me yesterday about creative inspiration and how it can be blocked and this person paid me an important compliment. She said that the one thing she has noticed about me is that I never seem to struggle with blocked creativity. I had never noticed this about myself, but when I thought about it, I was delighted to realise that she was right. Of course, not everything that flows from my mouth or my keyboard (as a teacher and writer my creativity spills forth through those channels) has value for others, but it nevertheless seems to keep coming in an endless stream. For that I am extremely grateful.

However, I have been thinking about why that is. Why am I so fortunate? And some of the following thoughts came to mind. I have recently stumbled in my research across the work of a man named Otto Rank. He was a close associate of Freud until he developed a ground breaking theory that challenged Freud’s thought leadership. He suggested that the trauma of birth is as (if not more) important than the Oedipal complex. I am not enough of an expert to pursue the detail of that here, but I would like to focus on one of Otto Rank’s other ideas. He proposed that neurosis (or mental dis-ease) is caused by creativity that cannot be expressed.

Now, as most of my friends know, I have some profound neurotic tendencies. I suffer from massive anxiety about many things. I will spare you the details, but these days it is a source of much humour for my family. But, I have been privileged (and stubborn enough) to spend 15 years in therapy trying to figure out why I became so anxious. This process has meant that I have more answers than I started with and my anxiety is far more manageable than it used to be and that has been very useful. However, in some ways, a much more important consequence of all those years of self-analysis is that it resulted in the lifting of the flood gates of my creativity.

I often have as many as five epic dreams a night, and new thoughts spill forth continuously. I cannot consciously make it happen, it just happens. And I think it is because the years of therapy allowed me to build the most important friendship of my life – the friendship with the part of me that houses and drives my unconscious mind. So, when that part speaks (as it does continuously through body symptoms, dreams, wayward thoughts, slips of the tongue, strange urges and impulses) all I have to do is listen.

The evolution of childrearing

I am doing research for my book on the unconscious and in considering the work of John Bowlby on attachment theory, I stumbled across a perspective that has horrified me.

The research about Bowlby indicated what a breakthrough his thinking provided. He emphasised the idea that children form an important bond or attachment to their mother or primary caregiver and that a disruption of this bond, in terms of sudden and/or prolonged separation, is detrimental to the child. He also talked about the idea that the effects of disruption in this important relationship transmit themselves over generations. These are ideas that I now take for granted. One of the personal facts about Bowlby is that he grew up in an upper class British home, where he only saw his mother for an hour a day. It was apparently felt that any more time with the mother could spoil the child. So Bowlby’s history explains his work. But, somehow it woke me up to the idea that my current perceptions and assumptions about children and childrearing are very different to those which have prevailed over the ages in many cultures.

The idea that children are precious and should be protected and nurtured is a fairly new one in many cultures. In many instances, what is now seen as child abuse was standard and accepted practice. I left Bowlby behind temporarily to investigate the history of childrearing. Google it. The information is terrifying. I will spare you the details. Suffice to say that it disturbed me greatly. But also, when seen in context, extremely hopeful.

Yes, we still neglect and abuse our fellow humans, particularly our children, in a multitude of ways all over the world today. However, gradually, over the ages, parents have tried to do less harm than their own parents, and have in many instances, succeeded. Many parents who suffered abuse and neglect at the hands of their own parents, have, like Bowlby, tried to and have done better, and even more, tried to teach the world about the destructive effects of the beliefs that prevailed at the time. As a result of Bowlby’s work, hospitals reconsidered their policies regarding the access of parents to their sick children. And as a result of all the other work done by parents and practitioners over the ages, my children and I live in a far more humane society than my ancestors did.

The cobbler has a hole in her soul

I am good at helping other people solve their interpersonal problems. I am even quite good at solving my own problems as long as they are not in the realm of significant intimacy. I have spent years teaching others (and myself in the process) how to be more assertive, spend time more wisely, manage emotions, make presentations, facilitate, mentor, coach, counsel, manage teams and groups and do inner work, which means getting to know the contents of the unconscious part of the psyche. I think that along the way I have made a difference to some people and I am pleased about that.

Many of the people who have allowed me to work with them have asked me why I do this kind of work. Over the years my answer has become more honest, or rather more accurate, as I have become more conscious about the truth. In trying to help and heal others, there is of course a part of me that I am trying to heal, and my way of doing that has involved (amongst many other strategies) an intense and relentless research project aimed at understanding the psyche and its functioning. Somewhere inside me, driving me mercilessly, is a childlike belief that if I could just understand how the whole thing works, then maybe, just maybe, I can rewrite my personal history, and so prevent the unthinkable from having happened. Except of course it did happen, and even though to this day I am still not really sure what happened, I have all the symptoms of a survivor of the unthinkable and unbearable. I have painstakingly reconstructed most of my history out of many fragments discovered over the years, but a crucial hole remains, and so do the essential symptoms. Real intimacy remains a continual struggle. And so the research continues. I will keep us posted.

10 reasons for doing depth work on the self

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1. The unconscious is fascinating. When you start doing active deep reflection the unconscious will respond generously with dreams. I get about 5 free movies every night.

2. If you know your own stuff, you do not keep laying it on unsuspecting others, and then avoiding them, or having conflict with them.

3. If you do not actively engage with your unconscious, it eventually actively engages with you through body symptoms, unexplained moods, irrational impulses, obsessions, phobias, addictions, or just general dis-ease.

4. Old unexamined experiences and the feelings connected to them lock up energy and drain your resources, and when life does throw you a curve ball (as it does occasionally), you have fewer emotional, physical and mental resources with which to manage.

5. The more you know your depths, the more congruent you will be in the world, and the less you will encounter unpleasant surprises in yourself, or subject others to them.

6. The more you get to know your unconscious, the less lonely you are. Eventually you have a whole cast of characters inside you, each with a point of view.

7. The deeper your work on yourself, the more you access the full range of your archetypal potential and the more agile you become in occupying the different roles in your life.

8. If you do the deep work on yourself, you can break destructive ancestral patterns, and thereby free your children from the cycles of repetition.

9. As you develop and assimilate previously disallowed parts of yourself, you occasionally come into contact with the numinous or what is more commonly known as magical experiences.

10. Doing depth work can mean transformation – for the individual, the family, the group, the community, and maybe even the planet.

Thoughts on addiction

There is a lot written about this subject, so it seems quite cheeky to imagine that I can add much. However, it is on my mind today because I have been doing some research for the layout of Beneath (the book about the individual unconscious) and looking through photographs and rereading excerpts from books that have helped me. I came across some writing on the essential aloneness of being human in a book by James Hollis called Swamplands of the Soul. Hollis puts it as follows: “The two greatest fantasies we are obliged to relinquish in the second half of life are that we are immortal exceptions to the human condition, and that out there somewhere is some “magical Other” that will rescue us from existential isolation”. If we believe Hollis and we agree with him that that we do indeed suffer from existential isolation, then of course we are going to try anything that momentarily takes us away from what is at best uncomfortable and lonely and at worst, unbearable.

And so, we will reach for any activity, thing or person that makes us feel better for a while (even though we feel worse afterwards) – any resource that provides the illusion that we are not essentially alone, and that we have some control over our existential state. We drink, we smoke, we work longer than necessary, we indulge in a surfeit of social networking or surfing the internet, we eat more than we need for healthy living, we watch TV when there are other more important things to do, we buy things we do not need, we gamble, we compulsively seek romantic or sexual partners, we exercise obsessively, we adopt dogmas and try to convince others of our “rightness”, we take prescription and non-prescription drugs, we plan, we rush and we fill our minds with worry and magical thinking. And it is hard to stop ourselves. Of course, these distractions also seem to help with the fact that in addition to our essential aloneness, we suffer a range of other assaults on our well-being – we suffer losses large and small, we struggle practically and financially, we come up against the needs of others that differ from our needs and so we have conflict, and our daily living sometimes drains us of the energy required to manage these challenges.

However, there are times where living feels ok or even really good, even without the distractions. Hollis is somewhat more optimistic a page later in his book when he says that “Nature has not brought us here unequipped for the journey”. We have the potential for a set of inner resources that can contain us while we suffer. The difficulty is that we need caregivers who can help us to develop those inner resources so that when we face our aloneness, we can feel supported from within. Scott Peck, in his well known book The Road Less Travelled, made a comment that struck me as important when I reread it some months ago. He said that one of the most important things parents can do for their children is to help them learn how to suffer. In other words, the parent must help the child to learn to bear the discomfort of life challenges, without trying to remove those challenges or protect the child from the life process. Of course, there are limits to what is appropriate at different ages, and parents cannot control everything that happens to their children, and sometimes life throws unbearable suffering at someone who is not equipped to manage it.

Fortunately, learning how to manage suffering can happen later on in life too. I am still learning how to suffer, rather than distracting myself. I am learning that the ordinary love of friends expressed in quiet companionship helps a great deal, and that, if suffering is allowed, and supported, it passes. I am learning that witnessing the cycles of life in the natural environment around me helps. Finally, it seems that spending time developing my inner resources by closely attending to the communication from my unconscious self, as cryptic as it is sometimes, helps most of all.