The Unconscious and Creativity

In the creative state a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences and out of the mixture he makes a work of art. (E. M. Forster)

The library of your unconsciousness, and its connection to group consciousness, is a labyrinth.

Rather than consider the neuroscience and/or psychology of the personal and collective unconscious in an academic way, think of your unconscious mind as containing all that you have perceived in your life. If you had to be aware (conscious) in every moment of every bit of information that you take in through your senses and process in your mind, you would be overwhelmed, so much of what you see, hear, feel (physically and emotionally), smell, think and experience is stored in your unconscious mind.¹

In every moment of your life, you are adding to your individual, unique library, which is your unconsciousness.

Subconscious is a synonym for unconscious, and the latter is perhaps the more correct term to use because what is in our unconscious is simply that of which we are not aware of (or conscious of). As I said above, if we were completely aware of every bit of information we were storing in our unconsciousness (never mind analysing, categorising and interrogating all those bits of information), we would be so preoccupied with that task that we would be paralysed, incapable of acting, of living.

What is unconscious can be brought to your awareness by triggers, such as when a sound or scent vividly brings to your consciousness a childhood scene that you have no awareness of experiencing or have forgotten. There is thus a rich store of impressions and connections in your unconscious that you can access through dreams and creative practices. It is through dreams, creative practices, creative exercises, meditation, and so on, that we access that library in which every moment of our lives is stored.

Of course, your unconscious is also where your personal impressions and connections create phobias, neurosis and automatic behaviours/responses. However, for the purpose of discovering and developing your personal creativity, however, consider your unconscious thoughts and memories and feelings as inspiration rather than material to be analysed. When you go into the library of your unconsciousness, you are simply looking for information. What you do with that information is a conscious choice, a choice of free will.

Have you had that ‘aha moment’ when you have grappling with a problem without finding a solution, so you put it aside and ‘sleep on it’ or busy yourself with something else and a solution suddenly comes to you? The solution comes from your unconscious mind and the process is called incubation. You consciously input all the information and consider all different aspects of the problem and then when you put it aside, your unconscious mind continues to search for and work out a solution. You use creative practices and exercises to go into the library of your unconsciousness and look for information.

In terms of the unconscious mind and creativity, intuition (that ‘gut’ feeling) is the thought processes that happen unconsciously. When we know something intuitively then we are drawing on information and connections in our unconscious memories and thoughts. In other words, you automatically go into that library of unconsciousness and look for information. Creative exercises and practices will help you do this.

Jung coined the term collective unconscious,² which he described as containing universal memories in the form of archetypes and symbols. In other words, there are experiences that we all share that do not come from our personal experience but from collective memory that is present in our minds at birth, and is augmented by every experience we have with the world outside ourselves. This is why archetypical themes and characters are so often used in stories and paintings – we can all relate to them. Archetypes thus represent patterns of behaviour or a type of characteristic that we all recognise, such as the ‘quest’, the ‘good mother’ figure or an ‘innocent child’ or the ‘hero’. This is the big library, beyond your personal library, and through creative practices and exercises, you can find a way to access the information in this library.

http://morguefile.com/archive

1  In The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Collected Works, Volume 8, page 185 (as quoted in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, page 420) Jung says: ‘Everything of which I know, but of which I am not at the moment thinking; everything of which I was once conscious but have now forgotten; everything perceived by my senses, but not noted in my conscious mind; everything which, involuntarily and without paying attention to it, I feel, I think, remember, want, and do; all the future things that are taking shape in me and will sometime come to consciousness: all this is the content of the unconscious.’

2  ‘… we also find in the unconscious qualities that are not individually acquired but are inherited, e.g., instincts as impulses to carry out actions from necessity, without conscious motivation. In this ‘deeper’ stratum we also find the … archetypes … The instincts and archetypes together form the collective unconscious. I call it ‘collective’ because, unlike the personal unconscious, it is not made up of individual and more or less unique contents but of those which are universal and of regular occurrence.’ (The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Collected Works, Volume 8, page 133, as quoted in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, page 420)

© SD Vahl, 2012

SD Vahl hereby asserts her right to be identified as the author of this work.

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