Madness and Creativity by Rosen David H. Ulanov Ann Belford

Author:Rosen, David H., Ulanov, Ann Belford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Published: 2013-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

Creative Return

The fourth legacy of our repeating complex is so surprising that it needs its own chapter. What is this rebirth like? What gets born? What is living in the space transformed from the gap our complex opened up in us? We know that the repetition of our complex is the psyche’s attempt to widen the space between our ego and the complex’s reiterations, to push into ego consciousness this bundle of archetypal image, affect, behavior, so we can respond to it and moderate it, get its energies into our living. The repetition is not just madness that bedevils and rends a gap into which we plunge; it also aims to expand consciousness. This happens not through conceptualization but through affective experience. Our complex intensifies in behavior, in emotion, and in dreams to cross over into consciousness. Meeting up with something powerful, both other than us yet belonging to us, imbues a sense of purpose that feels meaningful. Our flailing about in craziness yields to perception that something creative is emerging, albeit with our ambivalence. This hint of meaning rescues us from despair at being caught, held fast like a prisoner in lunacy. The madness of once again suffering the chaos of unraveling that the complex inflicts gets rescued into emerging meaning.

Rebirth

Repetition transforms into return, not a recurrent cycle always back to the same beginning again, nor a linear progression leaving the beginning behind, but a circling around at different altitudes, so to speak, perceiving from different perspectives. We trace again, for example, the original event of wounding in personal experience; in another circuit we see more clearly where a parent, confined by cultural norms, could not differentiate from such norms and hence handed them down like tablets of law. Our injury exists, but each time we compass it, come around it, return to it, while suffering its effects, we stand outside it, hence not denying it but no longer confined in it. We find and create that space.1

The archetype cannot be apprehended directly, but only in its effects. The young woman whose complex manifested itself in being “on the train” that brought bulimia and stealing, then, later, in getting flung off the train through a bad car accident, also began space-making to trace what started this train-going: namely, lack of any notice taken of her small girl self, no feeding her with guiding truth. Hence she gobbled signs of success she discerned as her father’s fantasies and her culture’s norms. Addiction to these cost her many teeth.2 Circling around this injury through omission, discerning what was not there, a sort of shadow of nonbeing in both her parents, she strove to achieve badges of being through various culturally sanctioned accomplishments. I heard myself say, “Thank God for your bulimia,” which shocked me, as it had brought great suffering to her. But her complex also spoke of soul hunger, food for soul, stolen, eaten in secret, thrown up again to ruin of teeth and wreckage of this false route. In this gap dots of light gave evidence of another path where her truth could be found.

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