Transformative Learning Through Creative Life Writing by Hunt Celia;

Author:Hunt, Celia; [Hunt, Celia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2022-05-31T00:00:00+00:00

Loosening psychic control and expanding the psyche

The loosening of psychic control and the opening-up of the psyche to inner space and movement, which happens for all the Group 2 students to varying degrees, is quite challenging, as I have shown, with repressed emotions and unintegrated parts of the personality becoming freed up and differentiated. Whilst, as I said in Chapter 6, small changes in the leading edge of the psyche can lead to quick and significant changes across the whole dynamic system, it takes time for the different parts of the personality to move towards integration and for bodily-based regulation of the whole dynamic system to develop. Recall that the other side of openness and stability is (relative) chaos (Siegel, 1999), and not a few students report being significantly at sea at the end of their first year of study (see Chapter 11). The tendency might simply be to close down again, which was certainly the case for Claudia during the latter part of the MA.

In some instances new, holistic mental models can be seen to emerge spontaneously, often at the implicit rather than the explicit level, which indicates a move towards better regulation of the psyche. Simon's metaphor for his sense of self as author — the rancher comfortably surveying the unruly prairie of the imagination — is an example of this, as is Maria's storyteller-self who contains the space of storytelling for her family's history. In both these instances there is also evidence of dialogue rather than conflict between the expansive side of the personality and the managing side. Simon's distinction between his expansive ‘writer’ self and his managing ‘author’ self is an apt conceptualisation of the different parts of the psyche involved in writing: ‘author’ is a social self-concept associated with having produced a piece of writing for an audience, whilst ‘writer’ implies the embodied process of writing. For other students a more benevolent parental part of the psyche emerges whose role it is to manage the unruly childish part rather than control it. Susanna's experience demonstrates this, as does Claire's, Ruth's, and Harriet's. Lucy is keen to find a self-concept that feels more fitting for her as a single childless woman in her 40s. This is not just a quest for another defence, rather, as she is ‘happier to embrace contradictions as to who I am’, it is a desire to find an identity in the world that resonates with an important dimension of herself.

Tershakovec suggests that ‘mental models only make a good way of thinking if we already have, and can consciously revise, a sound master model of the self and of the world, a model of the self-in-the-world’ (2007: 123). That students are beginning to develop new and more flexible mental models of the self-in-the-world, as illustrated above, provides strong evidence that there has been a shift away from the less flexible mental models with which they began their studies and the beginnings of the development of, or a return to, a ‘sound master model’ informed by the reality-evaluating core self.

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