Lawrence H. Staples - Unplugged

Treating Guilt for less than 10 Bucks!

noreply@blogger.com (Mel Mathews) — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 02:28:00 +0000

Late in his life, Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, had a stunning insight about the nature of guilt. His insight reaches deep into humanity’s collective psychic experience, and reveals a mystery that challenges our conventional views. In Jung’s last book, Mysterium Coniunctionis, which he finished seven years before his death in 1961, he wrote, “that the opposites are the ineradicable and indispensable precondition of all psychic life, so much so that life itself is guilt.” C.G. Jung, Collected Works, Volume 14, par. 206.

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SamSara: a Homeopathic Cure

noreply@blogger.com (Mel Mathews) — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 06:43:00 +0000

From Pennington and Staples' The Guilt Cure:

Early Wounds, Guilt and Repeating Patterns

All of us carry psychic wounds that were inflicted in childhood. In order to be safe and to be loved, we cut off and repressed thoughts, feelings and behaviors that were unacceptable to our parents. It is this “cut” that wounds us. None of us escapes these wounds because there are no parents to whom all thoughts, feelings and behaviors are acceptable. No parent gets it right. We are prone to think that the parent who neglects us is more wounding than the one who is over-solicitous and attentive. Both wound us. The wounds are different but they both hurt.These wounds become our developmental deficiencies. Our life long challenge is to recover the rejected qualities in order to become whole and live fuller lives.

Guilt lies behind these wounds. We avoid the unacceptable qualities in order to escape the painful guilt we are wired to experience when we violate parental values and wishes. And the behaviors we adopt early in life to avoid guilt, punishment and loss of love, continue throughout our lives as repeating patterns of behavior. If guilt is a necessity in life, then psychic wounds are also necessities. These necessary wounds determine the developmental path we must follow if we are to recover those cut off qualities and heal our wounds. We have to bear painful guilt if we are to become whole, just as we have to bear painful hunger if we are to lose weight.

It is the urge to develop and become whole that lies behind our repeating patterns. One pattern that most people experience is the tendency to keep choosing a partner that has the same difficult qualities as the previous one. Usually we are attracted to someone opposite, someone who carries qualities that we ourselves can’t express. The persons we are attracted to may superficially seem different, but psychologically be much the same. For example, we may always be attracted to someone who is relatively unavailable. We then repeat the childhood experience we had with one or both of our parents.

The way of dealing with the unavailability may differ from child to child. One sibling may react by clinging, by expressing its neediness, by clamoring for attention or complaining when it is insufficient. Another sibling may react just the opposite. He/she may resolve to become self-sufficient and demand little from the parent. This sibling may take care of the parent and learn that safety lies in being the good boy or girl who never creates a burden for the parent. The other demands to be taken care of and is a real burden to the parent.

Later in life, these two are attracted to each other. One needs to be taken care of. The other needs to take care of someone. As it turns out, they are both needy. But both are unconscious of it and deny it. It’s the basis for the widespread phenomenon of co-dependency. It’s a secret collusion. On the surface, one feels angry and rejected if his every need isn’t being anticipated and met. But deep inside, he feels guilty because he feels unworthy of care and attention. Meanwhile, the other feels just the opposite. Consciously, she feels guilty if she isn’t anticipating and taking care of every need of the loved one. And underneath she may be filled with anger and resentment when her caretaking is not deemed satisfactory or is not appreciated. Her sense of self worth depends on proper acknowledgement of her efforts.

The displeasure and dissatisfaction that arise actually give us a hint about how to break this pattern. After many painful experiences, we eventually discover that healing takes place when we can treat the partner as we have been treated. The healing element is almost always homeopathic. Rather than trying to get the partner to behave differently, we have to take on some of the very traits we thought we wanted them to change. We have to develop traits that we have spent a lifetime trying to avoid or deny. The always available person becomes less available. The always unavailable person become more attentive.

In order to behave homeopathically, we have to do inner work in the shadow where our opposite qualities have been stored. We have to become very conscious of our own feelings. For example, a caretaker cannot become unavailable without experiencing guilt and anxiety. If we become conscious of our guilt and anxiety as it arrives, we can name it and bear it. If we resolve to bear those feelings, they will not last long. The same thing happens in dieting. If we are not watching our feelingscarefully, the hunger comes and we grab a cookie without reflection. If we feel and name the hunger just as it comes and resolve to bear it, the hunger will not last long.

In Mel Mathews’ novel SamSara, we see that the hero, Malcolm Clay, is caught in a repeating pattern. He is always strongly attracted to women who are unavailable. He meets this beautiful woman named Kelli. Kelli is focused on her own work projects and is not readily available to others. Malcolm falls for her. Her behavior is random and intermittent. He never can reliably count on her showing up for a date or returning a call. Sometimes she will; sometimes she won’t. Her behavior drives Malcolm crazy as he chases her around the world. Eventually, he ends up in Ireland where she lives and he is repeatedly let down by this incredibly attractive woman.

After much hurt and pain, Malcolm is finally able to let go. He does it with a homeopathic treatment. He gives her a dose of her own medicine. She invites him to meet for a drink at one of the local hangouts. When he sees her coming this time, he slips out the back door, gets on a train and heads for the airport. She arrives at the café and soon begins to call Malcolm trying to find out where he is. His phone rings just as the train approaches the air terminal, and he notices a young boy crying in his mother’s arms. “Hey kid, you’ve got a call,” he says, handing the whining boy the phone before stepping off the train.

It is likely that Malcolm had to bear much anxiety and guilt in order to stand Kelli up. Malcolm values reliability, dependability and keeping his word. It makes him angry when others don’t behave the same way. But, in this moment, he had to save himself by finding in his unconscious a quality that had been put there long ago in order to safely traverse childhood. He had to become unavailable. Malcolm also had to suffer through much painful yearning, just as an alcoholic does when he gives up something that once made him feel good but later made him feel bad. And like an alcoholic who gives up alcohol, he has to spot the yearning the moment it begins, acknowledge it, name it and suffer it momentarily, perhaps several times until the yearning passes.

About the Authors of The Guilt Cure

Nancy Carter Pennington received her MSW from The University of Maryland. For more than 30 years, Nancy has had the privilege of working with clients on a range of issues: phobias, OCD, grief, depression, obsessive thinking, guilt, and relationships.

Lawrence H. Staples is a Jungian analyst in private practice in Washington, DC. Dr. Staples has an MBA from Harvard, and a Ph.D. in psychology; his special areas of interest are the problems of midlife, guilt, and creativity. He is the author of Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Way and The Creative Soul: Art and the Quest for Wholeness.

Product Details

Hardcover, Paperback & eBook editions: 150 pages

Publisher: Fisher King Press; 1st edition (Sept 21, 2011)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 1926715535

ISBN-13: 978-1926715537

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The Creative Soul Revealed

noreply@blogger.com (Mel Mathews) — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 23:55:00 +0000

Review of The Creative Soul, by Lawrence H. Staples, Ph.D.
(2009, Fisher King Press, www.fisherkingpress.com,
ISBN 978-0-9810344-4-7)

Reviewed by Joey Madia

Eighteen months ago, I reviewed Dr. Staples’s Guilt with a Twist, a book with which I had some reservations. In the case of The Creative Soul (subtitled “Art and the Quest for Wholeness”), a relatively short book (91 pages including the Index), he has expanded on my favorite section of Guilt, dealing with the process of creativity as it applies to mental health and the integration of the Shadow, a core idea in the work and writings of Carl Jung (Staples is a Jungian analyst who trained in Switzerland after making a mid-life career-switch at the age of 50).  

Inherent in the process of integrating one’s Shadow is the first step of acknowledging that it exists and exploring the push and pull of opposites at play within us all. It is this dynamic tension between good and evil, light and dark, loyalty to other and loyalty to self that feeds and fuels our creative impulses. For those whose denial of the Shadow is so deep as to cause a psychic wound, the creative act can also be the healing act.

The Creative Soul employs a successful mix of scholarship, anecdote, and writings created by Dr. Staples patients (a formula he also uses in Guilt).

At the start of it all is the alchemical process—the manipulation of the prima materia, the first spark, the subconsciously implanted seed. In line with St. Thomas, if you bring what’s in you forth, it will save you; if you do not, it will kill you—or at the very least, it will result in the endless depression and suicidal thoughts that bring many people to therapy in the first place.

Any time you are talking about opposites, you must also talk about balance, and Dr. Staples spends a good deal of time sharing anecdotes about the button-down type whose true passion is painting, on the one hand, and the artist with no sense of stability at all. Both lifestyles are unsustainable and ultimately lead to similar ends. It is “the contrast between the opposites, not merely one of the individual opposites itself, that produce(s) the consciousness of the good feeling” (p. 39).

One technique discussed in the book is the use of dream material to fuel our creative endeavors. Dr. Staples mentions Mel Mathews, whose trilogy about the character Malcolm Clay I reviewed five years ago (also from Fisher King Press) and another book I have reviewed that readers might find of interest is Jon Lipsky’s Dreaming Together: Explore Your Dreams by Acting Them Out (Larson Publications).

Another area of interest is the cyclical nature of the creative process, and its different phases—for writers, there is the brainstorming and writing (the free creative act) and the editing and revision process (the technical work). Mix these up, and you get “writer’s block.” The pure creative act and the technical work are another set of opposites that are each severely limited in isolation.

Other areas covered in The Creative Soul are Art as Therapy and the true risk we take as artists when we put the deepest, darkest pieces of ourselves out into the world for criticism.

This book is highly recommended for anyone who works in the creative arts, especially teachers and therapists seeking to better express to students and analysands the joys and challenges of the creative process and the great value for healing, expression, and communication it has in our lives.

Joey Madia is the author of Jester-Knight, a playwright, and the founding editor of www.newmystics.com.

Gender & Guilt

noreply@blogger.com (Mel Mathews) — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 23:41:00 +0000

by Lawrence H. Staples

Women have an unconscious masculine side and men have an unconscious feminine side. Jungians use the term animus to personify the masculine side of a woman. They use the term anima for the feminine side of the man. Guilt is a formidable obstacle to the development of the contra-sexual sides of our selves. Women who were taught by parents to behave in ways that the parents defined as feminine felt guilty whenever they deviated from such behavior. When they dared to express masculine(1) behaviors, they were made to feel that they were “bad.” Men face a similar problem in developing their feminine(2) side. Fathers can be as appalled by a son’s interest in ballet or art as he can by his tears or his inability to focus and think clearly. To develop our “other” side, we must jump the fence, violate the parental definitions of what is good, enter the shadow, sin, and incur guilt in varying degrees. It is hard and sometimes distasteful work. It’s much easier to manifest contra-sexual qualities today than it was a hundred years ago. But there is still a powerful residual resistance to the development of our contra-sexual selves.

A woman needs access to her inner masculine qualities if she is to protect and defend herself against those masculine qualities that have been turned against her. For a woman the cure for being a victim of those masculine qualities is homeopathic, with respect to the man; that is, she gives him a dose of his own medicine. Actually, if a woman does not actively seek to develop her inner masculine, it turns negative and becomes an inner critic and sabotages much that she does. Sometimes, he behaves on the inside like a terrorist, who appears in her nightmares as a dangerous intruder.

An example of how masculine development can take place in a woman is shown in the case of Ruth, a woman I worked with in analysis. Ruth was a caring, giving, and generous woman. Her New England Yankee father had been cheap, cold, remote, and uncaring. She had rejected her father and his stingy, cold, and remote qualities. Paradoxically, however, she was attracted to men who were like her father. She had never married, but had lived with several men of that type before I met her. These men took advantage of and exploited her caring, giving nature. Until she could accept and redeem the rejected qualities of her father she could not save herself. To defend herself, she had, on occasion, to let go of the “good” qualities that lay on the inside of her ego’s fence, and embrace the “bad” qualities of her father. Until she could embrace the “bad” qualities she was vulnerable to being used by exploitative men. One important rejected quality that eventually enabled her to access and use these “bad” qualities was anger. It empowered her. The anger was a quality she had rejected earlier in life, when she had been the victim of her father’s anger. Her rejection of those “bad” qualities, however, made her vulnerable to villainous exploiters.

Ruth’s behavior was compulsive. She had to be generous because she was afraid she would be taken over by “bad” qualities, that she would “sin” if she dared open her psychic door to them. Paradoxically, experience shows just the opposite. If we do not let these qualities in at all, if we do not give them a vote in our life, then they eventually will storm the gates. If we voluntarily give them a vote rather than reject them, the qualities can be used for us rather than against us. These qualities become our friends, because they are accepted, seen, and acknowledged. They get a vote to participate in our behavior.

When Ruth gave those opposite, father qualities a vote, she became freer, happier, and more powerful. I encouraged Ruth to read fairy tales like The Frog Prince, especially the version where she throws the frog against the wall. I also encouraged her to pay close attention to her dreams and to record them. She had many dreams, but one seemed especially important to her:

I asked Ruth what it meant to her to be in the same boat with Susan B. Anthony. We talked about Susan’s anger at the unjust exploitation of women by men. We talked about some of the qualities Susan had found in herself that helped women get what they needed. Susan had come to see that the fish represented masculine qualities, which if used in women’s behalf could become food that would nurture them. Ruth grasped that these qualities were out of sight, under the surface of the water, which represented the unconscious. Ruth also sensed that there was a Susan B. Anthony in her own psyche that knew where to go to catch the particular fish she needed.

She eventually became able to practice warm generosity and cold ruthlessness with less resistance. To find the cure for her problems with certain kinds of men, she had to embrace the opposites of her conscious being. The cure was in the ugly, “bad,” father qualities that lay in her unconscious. Living those qualities certainly brought her guilt, but the discovery of the value of these “bad” opposites eventually also brought her joy.

Integrating these “bad” father qualities that lay outside the ego’s fence also led her to discover a process that underlies growth and development. Because Ruth perceived her father’s qualities as “bad,” she was forced to “sin” to embrace them. She had to stray outside the fence, where those bad qualities had been. To use those qualities to save herself from those men who took advantage of her good nature, she had to bear guilt. She experienced guilt when she expressed her anger or behaved uncaringly, but surprisingly to her, she also experienced a rush when she expressed her anger forcefully. She found the rest of her life characterized by a cycle of sin, guilt, and expiation. After using these qualities to protect herself, she would feel terribly guilty. She would then retreat back inside until a situation in her life demanded that she stray once again. She experienced what Jung said we would experience. Each step outside the fence incurs guilt and must be followed by further expiation.

Ruth was a changed person. Those new, previously forbidden qualities made her personality bigger. The previously forbidden “bad” qualities did not take over the territory, but they became accessible to her so that she is now free to move between the “good” and “bad” qualities.

Just as there can be a one-sided development of the feminine in women, there can be a one-sided development of the masculine in men. Such men also get cut off from qualities they need to nourish them. Joe, a 50-year-old businessman, worked 60 to 80 hours per week, and was very successful. However, as a result, his relationship with his wife and children was poor. This was his second marriage. Work took priority in all aspects of his life. Sex was infrequent and unsatisfactory. Actually, the things that made him successful at work made him less successful at family relationships. Relationships were important to him only if they helped his business. His son was interested in music and theater. He played the guitar beautifully and wrote songs. When pushed by his father to work on math or science or languages so that he could get into a good school and have a more practical profession, the son took refuge by simply saying he did not like those things. This enraged Joe, who would ask his son what “liking” has to do with anything, and then would point out that his son would never be able even to make a living, let alone support a family, with music or theater. Once he said to his son, “it’s hard for me to believe you are my son.”

Although successful, Joe had for years experienced periodic bouts of depression. It did not disable him, but it did slow him down, and he suffered many a blue day. A longer-than-usual period of depression, combined with undisguised suicidal threats by his son led Joe to therapy. He was afraid the depression would make him fail in his work, and that his son might take his own life. His personal goal for the therapy was to get rid of the depression so that he could return to his old ways and work harder. Living better was not an idea yet on his radar.

Soon after we began our work Joe had the following dream. “My cats get sick and begin to die one by one. I feel very anxious and upset.” Asked if he had ever had cats, he replied, “No.” I asked him what he thought about cats. He replied, “I don’t like them.” His sister had had cats, and he explained, “They are like women. They just do what they feel like.” He added that the phrase “like herding cats” has something to do with feeling types. Cats are an ancient symbol of the feline feminine, and they often appear in dreams of men or women whose masculine is one-sidedly developed. For men, it personifies the anima. The anima symbolizes the unconscious feeling, relating side of a man. Without conscious connection to the anima, there is little value placed upon feelings, spontaneity, or relationships.

When Joe was depressed, he was severely cut off from his feelings. The feelings that Joe needed to heal lay outside the fence, where he had pushed them. In a sense when feelings are rejected, the feelings get revenge in the form of a depression. When the anima’s animation is present there cannot be depression. Rejected feelings eventually revolt.
Because of Joe’s extremely negative attitude, it was difficult to help him access his feelings. Dreams were an important part of the work because they would often reflect his unconscious feelings as in the cat dream above. During his first visit, I had asked him to keep a dream journal beside his bed. He did so despite his feeling that dreams are a bit “new agey” and fantastic. Soon after the first cat dream he had another one in which a cat kept turning into a bat and menacing him. He associated bats with “bats in the belfry”, being crazy. That’s not too far from what Joe thought about feelings. When they run your life, you’re an airhead: unreliable, crazy and dangerous.

Nevertheless, because he was so desperate for relief, he eventually began to keep a “feelings journal” where he would record daily his main feelings. I also encouraged him to meditate and try some yoga. He learned the transcendental meditation technique and took a weekly yoga class. He meditated twice a day for twenty minutes. He felt very guilty using his time so “unproductively”. He was guilty asking his secretary not to interrupt him for anything during his twenty-minute meditation. Joe also felt guilty about spending the time and money on analysis. It made him feel he was weak, that he should not rely on someone else to solve his problems. Nevertheless, he persevered and began to feel better. His feelings of depression and anxiety diminished. He had stopped working on weekends and found the company didn’t go under and he didn’t lose his job. He even had sex one morning before going to work and was late for a meeting. He felt guilty about that but discovered there was little consequence. For her birthday, he booked a suite in a great hotel and treated his wife to a delicious time. The guilt he felt about this new way of life never entirely disappeared. There were certainly compensatory rewards. He was less critical of his son and began to attend concerts and plays.

At one point, he had a powerful dream: “ I am in Africa in tall grass lying on the ground. A gorgeous leopard sneaks up and lies down beside me. We begin to hug and kiss. I have never in my life felt such ecstasy.” This is a very different cat from the dead ones in his earlier dream. This one was alive and powerful. The anima had come and he felt fabulous. The anima appearing as a leopard, however, suggests just how far psychologically this energy had to travel to reach the conscious mind of this civilized man. When he woke up the following poem was in his mind and he wrote it in his journal:

   The Porsche

   Hands on the wheel
   Feet on the floor.
   Kristin often has the feel
   That life could be much more.

   Daily rounds of duty,
   Work at home all day,
   If she had some booty
   Fun might come her way

   Something new is needed
   In that life of hers.
   Let it all be superseded,
   Jewels and pearls and furs.

   These were most exciting,
   But everything gets old.
   The new is so inviting
   To the naughty and the bold.

   Something special caught her eye,
   Flashing red on wheels,
   Sleeker than a handsome guy,
   Wonder how it feels.

   Slipped into the driver’s seat,
   Took it for a spin.
   Nothing ever felt so good.
   Surely it’s a sin.

   She’s now in love with something new.
   A Porsche will really go.
   It’s a day he came to rue,
   Lose his girl or lose his dough.

   Life confronts us with this choice
   Each time we set a goal.
   Compelling is the female voice
   That wells up from our soul.

   Who’s to say it leads astray,
   Or where we ought to be.
   It’s a struggle every day,
   The fisher and the sea.

   Like a nymph she calls to u
   From depths we’ve never known.
   It’s her nature not to fuss,
   But just to lure us on.

   Lure she does beyond all measure,
   Guides us through the darkest ocean
   To the deepest, richest treasure,
   Highest object of devotion.

   Often it is hard to see
   How fun and play unite
   The half we really wish to be
   With that we wish to fight.

We can see in Joe’s experience how powerful the anima is. She reached him despite his sturdy resistance to feelings and despite the ambivalence and fear these feelings trigger when they approach from their lair in the unconscious. The poem actually felt redemptive, bringing him both insight and relief. He shared this poem with his son who was inspired to write a song with similar lyrics.

This article is an excerpt from Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Way by Lawrence H. Staples. Dr. Staples has a Ph.D. in psychology; his special areas of interest are the problems of midlife, guilt, and creativity. He is a diplomate of the C.G. Jung Institute, Zurich, Switzerland, and also holds AB and MBA degrees from Harvard. In addition to Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Way, Lawrence is author of the popular book The Creative Soul: Art and the Quest for Wholeness.

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(1) Qualities that Jungians define as primarily masculine include analytical thinking, order, aggressiveness, ruthlessness, goal orientation, punctuality, capacity to focus intensely, practicality, dutifulness, and selfishness, the tendency to think of one’s self first rather than of others. The quality of selfishness is often the one that comes to a woman’s mind first when she thinks of men. No woman, of course, is entirely devoid of these qualities that we define as masculine; it is merely that some are more developed in some women than in others. A woman may be a first-rate thinker, perhaps better than most men, but be unable to aggressively use those qualities to get what she wants or needs. The mix of qualities and their level of development depend on each individual woman’s particular biography.

(2) Qualities Jungians define as feminine include: consciousness of and high valuation of feelings; choosing people and things in their life on the basis of what they like, rather than on the basis of what may be dutiful or practical; high valuation of relationships, such as the capacity for connectedness and attachment to others as well as things; and the tendency to be process-oriented rather than goal-oriented, where the journey is as important and enjoyable as arriving at the destination. The feminine encompasses the sensual and instinctual facets of human experience. Feminine people may be less focused and more able to change direction or to veer from a goal, when something more interesting or more important comes along. This often means that the person is not punctual, and is often late.

Copyright © 2011 Lawrence Staples / Fisher King Press
Permission to reprint/repost is Granted, with a link back to www.fisherkingreview.com.

A Creative Life - The Seed

noreply@blogger.com (Mel Mathews) — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 04:40:00 +0000

by Lawrence Staples,
author of The Creative Soul: Art and the Quest and Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Way

Active imagination is a technique developed by C.G. Jung to help amplify, interpret, and integrate the contents of our dreams. When approached by way of writing, active imagination is like writing a play. One takes, for example, a figure that has appeared in one’s dreams. Usually, these figures express a viewpoint quite the opposite of one’s normal conscious view. Sometimes it is a male or female, shadow figure. At other times, it may be a feminine, anima, or maternal figure.

One starts to converse with the figure in writing. One challenges the dream figure and lets him/her challenge the dreamer. The dreamer asks the figure why he appeared in the dream. He asks the figure what it wants from him. Then, the ego, like a playwright, puts himself as best he can into the figure’s shoes and tries to express it and defend its viewpoint. There ensues a dialogue between the writer and the opposite figure in his dream or piece of writing. With practice one can become accomplished at expressing both viewpoints, just as a playwright does. One gets better at this the more one does it.

The technique of active imagination tends to detach the qualities and traits that are first seen in a dream or in a story as belonging to external persons, and coming to see them as belonging to one’s self. Active imagination, then, helps the writer become conscious of his opposite qualities by forcing him to give voice to figures, like shadow figures, that carry qualities opposite those of his ego. These qualities personify the rejected opposites that are present in the unconscious. This technique helps recover them and make them available to the ego and consciousness without necessarily having to act them out.

Following is an impressive and rich example of the power of this technique to affect and even shape our lives. It’s an active imagination done by Mel Mathews when he was in his late thirties. He was an extremely successful salesman who was, nevertheless, unhappy with his work and life. Despite his high income, work had lost its meaning for him. He had entered Jungian analysis in order to help him out of his suffocating existence and find a new and different way. He had a powerful dream that he took to his analyst. His analyst suggested he do active imagination with one of the figures in the dream. His is a beautiful example of active imagination that led to much more than a dialogue. It became the seed of a creative life that grew and flourished into a wholly new career. Out of his active imagination came a novel, LeRoi - Book 1 of The Chronicles of a Wandering Soul series, which was then followed by several other novels, including Menopause Man and SamSara.

The power of the active imagination is seen in the fact that it unearthed in Mel some deep hidden spring of creativity that suddenly gushed forth. Apparently, he had been living a life of suspended animation that lay there until some psychic prince awoke it. He had the following dream:

A woman was sitting in a diner, in a booth smoking. “Excuse me, I wonder if you could put your cigarette out?” I asked. She ignored me. A few minutes later she lit up again. I stood up, walked around to her booth, grabbed her pack of smokes and the ashtray and walked out the front door. I dumped the ashtray and stepped on her lit smoke; then, I dropped her pack and stomped them as well. I walked back inside, slammed the empty ashtray down on the coffee counter and sat down. A petite pony-tailed brunette walked up with the iced tea pitcher to refill my glass. “Can I have some more ice please?” “Sure,” she answered, “I’m sure (Flo) the boss-lady will be out in a minute,” the brunette said, as she turned around with my ice. “What does she want?” “You’ll have to ask her yourself.”

Mel discussed the dream with his analyst who suggested a dialogue with the boss-lady.

Following is his active imagination with Flo, the name of the boss-lady. This brief dialogue is to his novel what an acorn is to an oak tree. This brief dialogue apparently contained all the genetic codes necessary to make a novel just as an acorn has the genetic codes that lead to an oak tree.

Flo: Howdy.

Mel: Hi.

Flo: Purdy hot day, huh?

Mel: I can stand the heat. It’s the stray cigarette smoke that sets me off.

Flo: So that gives you the right to run off one of my regulars.

Mel: I asked her to put it out.

Flo: Did you ask her or did you beat around the bush with some rude indirect comment?

Mel: Lady, I don’t know who you are or what’s on your mind, but I really don’t need any more crap today.

Flo: Well kid right now you’re in my diner and you’re runnin’ off my patrons.

Mel: Oh great.

Flo: I’ve dealt with your kind for years so let’s just cut to the quick.

Mel: Look, lady, I’m sorry if I offended anybody here, but I’ve got some problems. My MG is broken down across the street.

Flo: So what?

Mel: Things just aren’t falling into place today.

Flo: Would you like some chocolate milk little boy, or how about your ass wiped? In this café, the world doesn’t revolve around you.

While the creative process is different for each individual, one can sometimes discern similarities. The seed that unleashed Mel’s creative process was a dream and a few sentences associated with the dream. His process bears some resemblance to the process by which Isak Dineson created her work.

Mel Mathews' development as a person and a writer is a wonderful testimony to the power of creativity to shape our lives and connect us to our souls. His dream and the dialogue that flowed from it to create LeRoi is an incredibly rich and impressive example of active imagination, as I understand it. His experience of active imagination is one of the most powerful examples I have ever witnessed. His dialogue with Flo seemed to unearth for him a huge reservoir of suspended animation that poured forth into the world and continues to flow. Actually, "Flo" and "flow" do seem somehow related. Mel's experience is enough to encourage therapists not only to use active imagination with their clients but also with themselves."

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The Guilt Cure

noreply@blogger.com (Mel Mathews) — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 05:00:00 +0000

(Masaccio Fresco image from the
Cappella Brancacci, Santa Maria
del Carmine, Firenze, Italia,
provided via Wikimedia Commons
[Public domain].)

Assuaging the Wounds of Guilt
article by Lawrence H. Staples

Suffering: The Price Guilt Exacts

(Masaccio Fresco image from the Cappella Brancacci, Santa Maria del Carmine, Firenze, Italia, provided via Wikimedia Commons [Public domain].)

Guilt can cause prolonged suffering. We suffer regardless of whether the guilt serves essential human needs or not, whether it has outlived its usefulness or not, whether it is deserved or not, whether it is meaningful or not, and whether it was incurred intentionally or not. Nor does it matter whether we have a religious background or not, and if we have a religious background, it does not matter which religion. Even if our parents were atheists or agnostics, we are subject to guilt. They often had dogmatic and rigid beliefs of their own. With the possible exception of sociopaths, all of us suffer from guilt, to some degree. The point is that all guilt, regardless of its origin or meaning, brings pain that we need to treat and relieve.

Fortunately, the psyche has a self-regulatory function that helps soften the pain of guilt it inflicts. It appears to function somewhat like the sympathetic and parasympathetic operation of the physical body’s autonomic nervous system that protects us with its opposite tendencies. In the physical body’s system, one part may dilate the pupil and the other contract it. One part may inhibit the heartbeat while the other stimulates it.

The mechanism of guilt formation gives us a clue as to how protective opposition works similarly in the psyche. The mechanism of guilt formation is complex. Much of it takes place out of our awareness. What begins as conscious guilt that is palpably felt, is often displaced by other thoughts and feelings. That is, the initially conscious guilt tends to become unconscious. The ego is protected with a variety of “autonomic” defenses, like rationalization, displacement, and projection. We “sin” and then we experience guilt. Then, in retrospect, we rework the experience and with the aid of ego defenses come to a new formulation that dresses our guilt in new meaning. For example, we may come to blame others for our transgressions. Or our sexual instincts may overwhelm us. After enough transgressions, and enough processing of our guilt, we often can come to feel that sex is okay. At that point the guilt experienced drops into the unconscious and is replaced by justifications. This reworking of our guilt gives us temporary relief. The defenses that render our guilt unconscious and less painful operate involuntarily.

Part of the paradoxical beauty of the psyche is its capacity to create one thing and its opposite. It can create pain and it can soothe the very pain it creates. Like the body, however, the psyche can be assaulted by disorders that overwhelm its natural defenses and require intervention. In the case of guilt, the feeling, after it has been treated by our natural defenses, is buried in the unconscious. While the guilt may for long periods in our life not cause intolerable pain, it can fester, become toxic, and behave as a kind of saboteur. Then, later it may overwhelm the old defenses and storm back into conscious awareness. At that time, we face the pain again and have to assuage it.

Our earliest experience of guilt in childhood is like a kind of psychic slap that disturbs our youthful innocence. Guilt shatters the psychic wholeness with which we are born. Unfortunately, some of the split off parts are not intrinsically bad. They are needed to complete our development.

No matter how we incurred the guilt, we eventually need to seek relief from its pain. The means of expiating guilt is as important to optimal human development as guilt itself. Without the means of relief, guilt induced suicide might become a greater threat to human existence than disease. Part of the healing process involves becoming conscious of the nature and origin of the many types of guilt we experience. The following sections outline some of the spiritual, psychological, and educational steps we can take to assuage its wounds.

Giving Back: The Promethean Way to Assuage our Guilt

Because guilt is important in the formation and maintenance of the opposites and, thus, consciousness, and because it also serves the self-regulatory functions of the psyche, it appears to be a necessity for human life, just as food is. While food is a necessity, its waste products, nevertheless, have to be discharged after the food has performed its essential function of providing nutrients. Otherwise, the waste becomes toxic and makes us ill. It makes no difference whether the food we originally ingested was “good” or “bad,” nutritious or unhealthy. Similarly, it makes little difference whether the guilt was good for us or not so good, it has to be discharged or it will make us sick. With food the waste product itself becomes valuable when it is converted into fertilizer. When unassimilated guilt is discharged in the form of giving back to society, the otherwise toxic portion of guilt is converted into something valuable. This is the Promethean Way to discharge guilt. It is an especially effective way to relieve guilt that has overwhelmed our self-regulatory protective functions. It is precisely because guilt is a necessity that we must find ways to discharge its residual toxicity.

We have to give value back to the community if we are to discharge the guilt we incur for transgressing collective mores. Psychologically and spiritually it satisfies a deep human need. Our mythology reflects the ancient wisdom that this is so.

In Part I of Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Way, I touched briefly on the lives of many famous figures that “sinned” but gave much back. Joan of Arc, Mahatma Gandhi, Socrates, Copernicus, Galileo, Martin Luther King, Alfred Kinsey, Rosa Parks, Betty Friedan, Darwin, Solzhenitsyn, Susan B. Anthony, Nelson Mandela and many other audacious people pushed themselves far outside the conventional fences that had been built around them. They also contributed much to the very societies whose rules they broke. Life is clearly full of examples of “bad” people giving something good to society. This could also include the so-called Robber Barons such as the Vanderbilts and Andrew Carnegie. The guilt-ridden Carnegie gave us magnificent libraries. All of these famous individuals were “sinners,” violators of the mores and existing standards of the communities in which they lived.

Individuation is an enlargement of personality. We become whole. We become bigger and more complete. The most important thing we can return to society is a fuller self. This fuller self might be expressed in music or painting or poetry or dance. It might be expressed in science or medicine. It might be expressed as a political or military revolutionary. It might be expressed as a tutor or a teacher, as a minister or a therapist, or as a community volunteer in countless ways. Or it may be expressed simply as a caring person, who gives helpful time and energy to family and friends. One does not have to be so grand as Mother Theresa or Albert Schweitzer or Mahatma Gandhi to return real value to the world. The giving of our complete selves to the collective is a ransom we pay for being an individual in a collective society. A more complete self is the currency we pay as expiation for the achievement of individuality.

There are many who quietly and inconspicuously follow the Promethean way without wide recognition. One example of someone going outside the fence, into the shadow, and finding there something that eventually served her own growth and contributed to the community is a woman patient who in the spring of her senior year in high school, when 17 years old, received a scholarship to a prestigious college. From a poor family, a scholarship was the only way she could get an education and escape poverty and abuse. About the same time she got the scholarship, however, she also got pregnant. While teen pregnancy is not easy even today, it then carried almost unbearable guilt and untold complications. Abortion was not an option for her; she was both Catholic and poor. The church and her devout parents were opposed to her giving the baby up. After much agonizing she decided to offer her baby for adoption so that she could accept the scholarship. She carried and wrestled with a heavy load of guilt for most of her adult life. The burden she carried stemmed not only from her sexual conduct but also from her feeling of selfishness that was unavoidable when she gave priority to her educational opportunity. The guilt eroded her sense of self-esteem and self-worth and she searched for ways to find peace.

Despite the burden of this experience, she became a highly respected researcher in the area of children’s health. She made contributions that were of substantial benefit to her special discipline. She came to feel that her work and contributions were driven by her need to expiate her guilt, regain some of her lost sense of worth, and find some modicum of peace. We could speculate that the very nature of her “sins” led her to the particular field she chose and uniquely qualified her for that work. Who is to say what the “right” decision would have been? The scholarship was the only way she saw to develop her enormous gifts. We never know the road not taken but we do know that her way led her to contribute more, perhaps, to children than the raising of a single child. While we can’t be sure of this latter point, we do know for a fact that she did much good. In high school, she had jumped outside the fence and violated all her conventional and religious upbringing. Her work as an adult helped her come back inside the fence and bring with her useful, new knowledge and some relief from her profound feelings of guilt.

Another example is a patient I’ll call Ellis. Both the blessing and the curse of alcoholism can be seen in the story of this recovered alcoholic. Ellis started off in a blaze, fizzled badly, and then later reignited to lead a wonderfully useful life. He graduated with high honors from college, started as a reporter, married, and had a nice family. He was not long out of college, however, before he became a serious drinker. The booze did not seem to interfere with his life at first. He was an incredibly good investigative reporter, and his abilities were recognized. Over the years, however, his drinking steadily increased and he began to miss assignments and deadlines. The owner and editors put up with it because he was so good. Even when they knew he was drinking on the job, he could write better when he was half drunk than most people could sober. Things finally reached the point when the publisher and owner confronted him. His slurred response was that his personal business was none of the publisher’s business and the publisher could kiss his ass. Not surprisingly, he was fired. Not only did he lose his job, but also his wife divorced him, and his children refused to speak to him.

Luckily, he found AA. He got sober, and back into newspaper work. It was not easy because his reputation had preceded him, but his talents blossomed again and in a few years he was a managing editor. He attended AA meetings several times a week and began to lead a quiet, helpful life. He found that his spiritual practices and helping other alcoholics relieved a lot of the burden of the guilt he carried. During the rest of his life, he helped hundreds of alcoholics recover.

Ray was one of the alcoholics Ellis helped. When he was drinking, Ray was bad, and he ended up on a chain gang. Ellis led AA meetings at prisons, where he met Ray. Ellis could see that Ray was bright and curious, even though he had not finished high school. When Ray was released, Ellis offered him a menial job at the newspaper. Soon, Ellis was teaching him how to write, and it quickly became clear that Ray had real gifts, and soon became a feature editor.

After leaving newspaper work, Ray wrote several novels, and also taught writing at local colleges. For the remainder of his life Ray helped hundreds of other alcoholics recover. Whether helping other alcoholics or contributing to the community in other ways, many recovered alcoholics give much back to society. It is an important way for them to deal with their guilt. Much of the giving back they do is invisible and unrecognized, because it is done anonymously, in line with the principles of AA.

Like most people, alcoholics usually start life inside the barbed wire fence that surrounds their egos, but most then venture far outside the fence. Some then move back inside the fence, where they contribute in ways usually not widely seen or noted. They bring back knowledge and experience gained, painfully, outside the fence. The knowledge and experience they gain outside the fence actually turn out to be gifts that uniquely equip them to help other alcoholics. No one can help alcoholics as effectively as recovered alcoholics, who have paid a huge price to gain this particular helping gift. If an alcoholic comes to me while he is still drinking, I encourage him to go to AA. I tell him that I cannot help him until he gets sober. Practicing alcoholics have a hard time telling the truth. Active alcoholics going to therapists are like someone going to an internist with another person’s urine sample. The therapist would be working with false data and cannot be of much help. On the other hand, alcoholics who are sober and who have done the AA spiritual work are among the most honest people I know.

Alcoholics generally experience enormous guilt. They need much help to heal deep wounds. Most recovered alcoholics find giving back to be a powerful salve for those wounds.

Because guilt is a necessity that causes us to suffer, and because giving back relieves our suffering, it is enlightened self-interest to do it.

Other Spiritual Approaches

It is as if from the beginning we have been “wired” to sin, to incur guilt, and then to seek some way to atone for it. It is the pervasive experience of guilt, and humanity’s need for relief from it, that led most healers, in various cultures and societies, to devise ways to help people deal with guilt.

For example, Yom Kippur is an important Jewish holiday, called the Day of Atonement, a ritual that helps them deal with the experience of guilt. The other great religions also have rituals that serve this purpose. In the Christian community, baptism is a widely practiced ritual whose purpose, among others, is the washing away of guilt and the forgiveness of sin. Confession, a ritual practiced in differing ways, tends to ease the pain and the burden of guilt.

In years past, most people who suffered guilt went to their priest or minister or rabbi for help. However, some of those who turned to religion for relief were acting like alcoholics who turned to drink for relief, to the “hair of the dog that bit them.” Most religions, however, do have spiritual tools that can help assuage their guilt.

Today, many people turn to therapists and analysts for relief rather than to religion. Therapists and analysts would be wise to borrow some of the spiritual tools that have long been sources of comfort for guilt. On the other hand, if the spiritual tools and religious practices had been sufficient, the practice of psychotherapy probably would not have expanded to where it is today. Many people today simply feel that religion is closer to the problem than to the solution. It is probably also true that many patients do not suspect that guilt is the real culprit behind their pain and suffering. They think their suffering is caused by something that therapists are more qualified to deal with, like depression and anxiety. They may not know that guilt often lurks behind and can be a significant cause of anxiety and depression.

Because therapists are secular and because many of the traditional answers from faith-based sources fail to provide relief, they must develop clinical methods to treat guilt. While therapists of many different persuasions can be helpful in this work, so can gifted religious professionals, friends, and spiritual groups, like twelve-step groups, if they assist without judging the sins or the sinners.

Psychological Approaches . . . Copyright © 2010 Fisher King Press. Permission to Re-Print this article is granted.

This article is an excerpt from Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Way by Lawrence H. Staples. Dr. Staples has a Ph.D. in psychology; his special areas of interest are the problems of midlife, guilt, and creativity. He is a diplomate of the C.G. Jung Institute, Zurich, Switzerland, and also holds AB and MBA degrees from Harvard. In addition to Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Way, Lawrence is author of the popular book The Creative Soul: Art and the Quest for Wholeness.

Order Guilt with a Twist and The Creative Soul from the following booksellers:

Creativity Analyzed: Psychology of the Artist on the Huffington Post

noreply@blogger.com (Mel Mathews) — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 07:32:00 +0000

READ THE ARTICLE: Creativity Analyzed: Psychology of the Artist, Lawrence Staples Interviewed by Pythia Peay of the Huffington Post . . .

Now Available from Kindle and the Apple iBookstore

noreply@blogger.com (Mel Mathews) — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 22:10:00 +0000

Read The Creative Soul and Guilt with a Twist from your Kindle or iPad!
Guilt with a Twist and The Creative Soul

Order Guilt with a Twist and The Creative Soul from the following booksellers:

Opposites, the Creative Instinct, and Our Unique Identity

noreply@blogger.com (Mel Mathews) — Sat, 15 May 2010 21:54:00 +0000

an article by Lawrence H. Staples

the problem of the opposites

Jung recognized that the problem of the opposites is one of the most formidable obstacles to psychic integration. Even when we are able to integrate opposites there remains substantial tension between them. If the integration is so complete that the opposites literally merge, consciousness, as we know it, disappears. Consciousness of life depends upon the tension of opposites. So the problem is to bring them close together without a total merger in which one or the other of the opposites would lose its identity. This is indeed a challenging task.

To complicate, but also clarify, the problem of the opposites, I would like to share with you a quote from Jung that contains what for me is his most profound insight on the subject of guilt and its relationship to human existence. Jung said, “The one-after-another is a bearable prelude to the deepest knowledge of the side-by-side, for this is an incomparably more difficult problem. Again, the view that good and evil are spiritual forces outside us, and that man is caught in the conflict between them, is more bearable by far than the insight that the opposites are the ineradicable and indispensable precondition of all psychic life, so much so that life itself is guilt.”(1) It is important here to note that “side-by-side” for Jung does not mean a merger, mutual absorption, or synthesis of opposites.

The idea that life itself is guilt is based upon conceptions of how human consciousness works. As noted earlier, consciousness itself depends on the existence of polar opposites. Guilt, therefore, which attempts to keep us from our “evil other,” is closely related to the formation of the opposites in our psychic anatomy.

the creative instinct

Fortunately, there is a powerful tool that can help us resolve the problem of the opposites. This tool is creative work. Creative production in art, as in life, depends upon bringing two opposites, the masculine and the feminine, into close enough proximity to produce a “child”(i.e., a book, a symphony, a painting, etc.) without losing the identity of the opposites that created the “child.” When we begin to do creative work, we connect to the deepest forces that govern all creation. It connects us to God, to the self within, to put it in Jungian terms. Reflected in our language is the Judaeo/Christian idea and belief that God and the creator and sustainer of all existence are one. The words God and Creator are in fact interchangeable in English as well as in other Western languages, such as French and German. The ultimate product of this process of psychological, inner creation is a stronger ego that increasingly approximates a reflected image of the Archetypal Self, which is whole and contains all of the opposites.

The Archetypal Self, or God, represents the totality; no stone is left out, all the stones are included in this totality. But a colossal lie stands in the way of achieving this totality. This is not about the existence or non-existence of the opposites, the dark and the light. We know they exist. The lie is in labeling one side exclusively good and the other side exclusively bad, as we tend to do. We know that creation is enabled by the existence of, masculine and feminine opposites. If we make one side good and the other side bad, we reject one of the essential players in the creative drama.

There is an instinct deep within us, although difficult to access consciously, that tells us that embracing the one-sided formulas for salvation, including the Christian advocacy of the exclusive primacy of love, will actually keep us from the totality of our selves. It is an instinct that actually is our salvation. It emanates from our duality. It tells us that we must love and hate everything at the same time. We must love the dark and the light and we must hate the dark and the light. Wired as we are, light has no meaning without the dark and dark has no meaning without the light. Each of these depends on the other for its existence. Without the one, there can be no consciousness of the other, and nothing exists for an individual if he is not conscious of it. If we are unable to maintain simultaneously in consciousness both our hate and love feelings, we cannot protect ourselves if we are abused—physically, psychologically, or sexually—by those whom we deeply love and those whom we need to trust.

It is our duality that causes us to be drawn inexorably to movies (e.g., Crash, Lawrence of Arabia, or A Civil Action) or to great art, literature, or music (e.g., the opera Tosca or the play Hamlet).(2) In Tosca,(3) we see Scarpia, on his knees, praying in church, while leering lustfully at Tosca. In the movie, Crash,(4) a policeman saves the life of a black woman whom just days before he had humiliated and mistreated. We see Hamlet indecisive and cowardly one day, and the next brave and sure. In Lawrence of Arabia,(5) Lawrence risks his life to save a man who he deliberately kills shortly thereafter. In A Civil Action,(6) a greedy, money-driven, ambulance-chasing lawyer finds a cause for which he is willing to sacrifice his career and fortune. And then there is Peter loving Christ one moment and denying him the next. There is a Jekyll and Hyde in all of us, in all people. We are drawn, as if against our wills, to these conflicting portraits. We are drawn to them and have feeling for them because we see ourselves in them, whether we know it or not. We are drawn to images that reflect ourselves, but protect us from the direct experience. To know that we have the same base feelings in us as Scarpia, right along side all of our goodness, is difficult to bear. We are drawn, nevertheless, to these characters and images because nature seems to have planted deep within us a developmental process that, through the agency of feeling, attracts us irresistibly closer and closer to our opposites. It attracts us to our opposites so that we can come together with them, side by side, in an embrace of creativity that leads us eventually to wholeness. As we experience in literature, art, and life, we are ineluctably attracted to realness, to three dimensionality, to wholeness.

Life might be easier, simpler, and less painful if our one-sidedness could be a sustainable reality instead of a wish. But, there are always two sides, regardless of whether we are conscious of them. The solution to this dilemma involves finding a way to honor both sides of ourselves in consciousness. This is the answer, but it is not easy to hold on to it. It involves a creative solution to one of life’s most difficult problems. The answer lies in a creation that depends upon intimate contact of two opposites without either being lost or subsumed by the other.

our unique identity

Each of us also has a unique signature. But, we must pay attention to our selves and do our own work in depth, if we are to recognize our own signature. We must do this for the same reason we must study artists to know their works. Thus, an important part of the work of discovering our selves is creative production and in-depth analysis. With time and effort we can come to know and recognize our own special signatures. Our physical identity is more readily visible and accessible than our psychic identity. There is always something unique in our physical identity; for example, the parents and siblings of identical twins can usually tell them apart. We have mirrors and can see our physical selves.

It is far more difficult to “see” our psychic selves. There are no psychic mirrors readily available to us, unless we had exceptional parents who could fully, without harsh judgment, reflect our selves back to us. We may still be able to see our psychic selves if we find a therapist who will do for us what our parents could not.

Creative work can also help us see our selves. Creative work is a mirror that can reflect our selves back to us if we pay enough attention. Therapists can help us in this regard, by helping us interpret our creative work.

In his book, The Restoration of the Self,(7) Heinz Kohut wrote at length about psychically wounded people and the therapeutic methods he used to help them. He found none more effective, or so essential, as creative work. He found, importantly, that it made no difference whether the creative work was deemed good or artistic by any standards. The simple process of doing creative work helped restore the self. It is as if nature plants within us a built-in remedy for our worst affliction, the affliction of being separated from large parts of ourselves. We experience this separation as a kind of inner civil war that divides us internally. It produces the pain and suffering inherent in any civil war, whether in our internal world or outside. It seems that the human urge to do creative work, to use all our stones to heal and restore our wholeness, is a compensatory impulse and blessing that arises from the psychic civil war that wounded us. In my own work as a psychoanalyst, I have witnessed the truth of Kohut’s findings. I have watched patients grow in wholeness as they began to work creatively in a variety of media that helped them recover and restore cut off parts of themselves.

Creative work actually serves as a kind of inner parent that compensates for the flawed parenting we may have had as children. Creative work mirrors us in a way we were often not mirrored by our parents. Creative work mirrors us for the simple reason that we can see projected in it, if we look and interpret carefully, our own psychological and spiritual selves. Mirrors in all their manifold guises help restore the wounded self.

1    Jung, C.G., Collected Works 14, par. 206
2    Shakespeare, William, Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Grosset & Dunlap, New York.
3    Puccini, G., Tosca.
4    Crash Paul Haggis (director/writer/producer), Lion’s Gate Films (2005).
5    Lawrence of Arabia, David Lean (director), Robert A. Harris and Sam Spiegel (producers), Columbia Pictures (1962).
6    A Civil Action, Steven Zaillian (director), Walt Disney Studios (1999).
7    Kohut, Heinz (1983), The Restoration of the Self, New York, International Universities Press, especially pp. 53-54, 10, 17-18, 40, 158 and 289.

This article by Lawrence Staples is an excerpt from Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Way.

Lawrence H. Staples, Ph.D. is the author of the popular Guilt with a Twist and
The Creative Soul: Art and the Quest for Wholeness.

Order Guilt with a Twist and The Creative Soul from the following booksellers:

On Creativity and Healing

noreply@blogger.com (Mel Mathews) — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 22:09:00 +0000

by Lawrence H. Staples

author of Guilt with a Twist
and The Creative Soul: Art and the Quest for Wholeness
The Creative Soul:Art and the Quest for Wholeness

In his book, The Restoration of the Self, Heinz Kohut wrote at length about psychically wounded people and the therapeutic methods he used to help them. He found none more effective, or so essential, as creative work. He found, importantly, that it made no difference whether the creative work was deemed good or artistic by any standards. The simple process of doing creative work helped restore the self. It is as if nature plants within us a built-in remedy for our worst affliction, the affliction of being separated from large parts of ourselves. We experience this separation as a kind of inner civil war that divides us internally. It produces the pain and suffering inherent in any civil war, whether in our internal world or outside. It seems that the human urge to do creative work is a compensatory impulse and blessing that arises from the psychic civil war that wounded us. In my own work as a psychoanalyst, I have witnessed the truth of Kohut’s findings. I have watched patients grow in wholeness as they began to work creatively in a variety of media that helped them recover and restore lost aspects of themselves.

Creative work mirrors us in a way we were often not mirrored by our parents. It mirrors us for the simple reason that we can see projected in it, if we look and interpret carefully, our own psychological and spiritual selves. Mirrors in all their manifold forms and guises help restore the wounded self.

Humans simply cannot see themselves without a mirror. Some mirrors, however, are better than others. Some are flawed or distorted so that we see ourselves, but only partially or inaccurately. From early on in life, we depend upon other humans to reflect us back to ourselves. But later in life, if we are lucky, we find that creative work and dreams mirror us more faithfully. We discover that human judgment taints and/or limits what is reflected back. Once we discover that we can mirror ourselves through creative work, we gain a modicum of self-sufficiency. We are no longer entirely dependent upon others to see us.

We may wonder why it is that humans cannot see themselves directly, why it is we can only see ourselves indirectly, as an image reflected by mirrors of various types. As we know any reflective surface, other humans, dreams, and our creative production can serve as mirrors to help us see ourselves as an indirect experience. The secret behind our need for reflective mirrors to see ourselves may be found in ancient wisdom, which informs us that to look into the face of God is to die. This wisdom says that to see the totality, to observe the Tremendum directly, is dangerous. We could infer from this wisdom that to see our own totality, our self, would be equally dangerous. It may explain why Perseus, powerful as he was, could not look at Medusa directly. He could only safely see her in the mirror provided by his shield. At the bottom of the unconscious, represented by the Labyrinth, he would find his own dark side, and could not look at it head on. It doesn’t take too much imagination to suspect that seeing the darkest side of God, or our self, could be a shattering experience. That may be why we hide our darkest side as assiduously as we can in the shadow, necessarily protected from our seeing it until a reflective mirror appears to reveal it to us safely.

As Kohut has observed, we do not have to be professional, creative artists to do creative work that helps us integrate and restore lost parts of ourselves. The integration of opposites takes place through the mirroring effect of the work and its symbols and images, regardless of whether or not our output is deemed by others to be artistic or good. It is the creative process that integrates opposites. It helps make us whole. It helps make us whole because it brings back to us the missing opposites that we early in life cut off from our psychic bodies.

An example of the attempt to integrate the opposites, and to make one’s self whole through art and its mirroring power, is provided by the life of Frida Kahlo, a Mexican artist, whom I am sure most of you know.

Frida was raised by parents who could not have been more opposite. Her mother was Mexican, rigidly Catholic, cool and puritanical. Her mother had grown up in an age when Mexican women were not allowed to say the word buttocks; rather they would say “that which I sit on.” Nor could they say the word legs; rather “that which I stand on.” And, as in the movie Like Water for Chocolate, they were not allowed to look at their bodies. They were taught to feel guilt and shame about their bodies and themselves. Much of what we would call normal life today was cut off from them. Frida’s mother was severe and frowned on much of what Frida did and who she was.

Frida’s father was a Jew who had immigrated from Germany. He had a completely different cultural and religious experience from her mother. Many accounts report him to have been overly solicitous of and close with Frida, especially after she hurt her foot when she was nine years old. All the children in her family were girls and she became her father’s favorite, and tried to be the boy for him that he never had, but yearned for. She was torn by the wholly different views and values of her parents but behaved in ways that were more acceptable to her father. She was every bit the tomboy, but she was also a lively and mischievous young girl. In her life, she was very unconventional when compared to traditional Mexican women at the time. She drank, she smoked, she was bisexual, had several abortions, was assertive, and was successful in a chosen career in which she distinguished herself.

At the age of 16, Frida nearly died in a terrible accident, breaking her leg and foot, her vertebra in three places, and her shoulder and ribs. She was left partly crippled.

After she recovered, she began to paint. It was as if her paintings were a collage on which she was pasting herself back together. Her paintings were mostly self-portraits. She could literally see herself in her paintings, her mirrors. She was fascinated with her body, which her mother had disallowed. While she was recuperating, she had had a mirror installed over her bed. Some instinct led her to sense the deep need for mirroring that she had not received as a child. Raised in such rigidity, conflicting worldviews, and values, she was cut off from parts of herself, and her painting was an attempt to create her own mirror so that she could restore herself. Her accident when she was sixteen profoundly affected her life and her ability to live it fully. Her painting was essentially her autobiography and a healing endeavor.

Lawrence H. Staples, Ph.D. is the author of the popular Guilt with a Twist and the recently published
The Creative Soul: Art and the Quest for Wholeness

Order Guilt with a Twist and The Creative Soul from the following booksellers:

Creative Work & Mirroring: Reclaiming the Shattered and Ragtag Pieces

noreply@blogger.com (Guilt with a Twist) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 05:02:00 +0000

by Lawrence H. Staples

author of Guilt with a Twist
and The Creative Soul

If we can by various means obtain sufficient mirroring, we can become more comfortable with the guidance that our feelings and interests can provide. We can overcome or, at least, ameliorate our fear of intimacy. And we can further the process of self-building by engaging our creative work at increasingly deeper levels. To complete the building of our self, however, we must also sin and bear guilt. What is needed to complete the building always lies in the forbidden territory, outside the fence in the shadow. Truly creative work takes us to this forbidden zone in our thoughts and feelings, if not in our behavior. Prometheus entered the forbidden territory to steal the fire humanity needed. Hercules stole the apples of the Hesperides. Rosa Parks broke the laws of her community. We must go to the pile of rejected stones and bring them back if we are to create our selves. This bringing together of all our stones into a single, unified structure is the end of a process of at-one-ment. As indicated previously, the underlying meaning of atonement, when broken down, is “at-one-ment”, a yearned-for feeling that fuels development. The idea of gathering together all of the scattered pieces we need to put our selves together is captured in the following poem written by a patient who had fallen apart at midlife.

This is a poem of at-one-ment, of atonement, of reunification. While love, as pointed out in the poem, is a beautiful tendency that brings at-one-ment, we cannot forget that there would be no opportunity for love to do its work if angry, hateful shattering had not preceded it, just as there would have been no world to create if chaos had not preceded it. Creativity requires both.

Available from your local bookstore and from a host of online booksellers:
The Creative Soul ISBN 978-0-9810344-4-7
Guilt with a Twist ISBN 978-0-9776076-4-8
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Beauty Least Expected

noreply@blogger.com (Guilt with a Twist) — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 07:00:00 +0000

by Lawrence H. Staples
author of The Creative Soul
and Guilt with a Twist

Only in retrospect can we experience “sins” and flaws as something of real value. It is like finding something beautiful among the detritus of the psychic attic. It is like finding a Picasso and thinking initially that it was just a piece of old canvas. It is hard to dispute that there actually is a way of looking at flaws and sins that could make us grateful for them. Seeing that our flaws and sins are valuable is actually a fortunate insight and a numinous moment. It is an insight that comes from a prismatic view that reveals the full spectrum of our being in all of its varied colorations, both light and dark.

We cannot become whole until we perceive the value in the unacceptable opposites sufficiently to take them in our sinful embrace. Creativity helps us accomplish this embrace, as it demands some kind of intercourse of the archetypally masculine and feminine opposites. The opposites are always aspects of a single, deeper unity.

In this life we are never free of the conflict of opposites and the inner tension generated by attraction and repulsion. The conflict of opposites is the biggest problem we confront. We can diminish the natural conflict between the opposites, but we cannot eliminate it. In fact, to be entirely liberated from this conflict is to be dead; it is the dynamic tension between the opposites that generates consciousness and the inner electrical energy that we call life. This tension brings life and its difficulties at the same time. The tension that brings us life, which we want, also brings us stress, which we do not want. As in most things human, to repeat Freud’s oft-used phrase, we wish to have our cake and eat it, too. We wish to surrender our life’s difficulties without surrendering our life. And as if it were not enough to know that we must suffer if we are to live, we eventually learn that increased consciousness also brings increased tension. The more aware we become of previously unconscious opposites, the more tension we must bear.

The safest place is a point between the opposites. There lies a sanctuary, a temporary place of refuge. Creative production helps us find that place because the process of creating leads us to the place where creativity dwells. Drugs and alcohol, money, power and other external stimulants are poor substitutes for finding that place. The advantage of creative production is that we need not go elsewhere. We do not need to leave the house to find a church or a sacred place or a drink or a fix. Our safe haven lies between our ears and within our hearts, in our own creativity.

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Guilt: Revised

noreply@blogger.com (Mel Mathews) — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 23:27:00 +0000

by Joey Madia

It’s always easy to like a book with which you instantly agree. We embrace the familiar, the similar, the types of things made of the same prima materia with which we’ve built our beliefs. But so much the better when an idea, a thesis, a text that we at first reject wins us over through a mix of solid research, real-life examples, and strong writing. Such is the case with my experience of Guilt with a Twist.

In the Overview, Dr. Staples states: “We have to sin and incur guilt, if we are to grow and reach our full potential” (xv). Being a “lapsed” Catholic who had often experienced guilt as a weapon and thought the concept of “Original Sin” or having to confess your sins to an intermediary was nothing but power-clenching propaganda on the part of the Church, I found myself inching toward dismissing the book entirely, a feeling that persisted as I continued through the first section.

The idea here is that there is “Good Guilt,” as demonstrated by such historical luminaries as Socrates, Rosa Parks, Susan B. Anthony, and Galileo (and the mythical Prometheus). In other words, we do things that break the rules of the times or are considered “sins” to perpetrate a greater good, to achieve a higher purpose.

After reading about Parks, I made some notes in the margin, as follows:

Oddly enough, on the day I started Guilt with a Twist I read an interview with artist/art dealer Tony Shafrazi who, to protest the Vietnam War, spray-painted “Kill Lies All” across Picasso’s Guernica mural (itself a protest piece). He had no guilt about it because his objectives were clear, just like Rosa’s must have been.

The moralizing of guilt is, of course, a thorny problem, as there is a world of possibility in making determinations about what is “good,” what is a “sin,” and just what might be a “greater good” or “higher purpose.” After all, the notion of Nietzsche’s Übermensch, explored in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra and in the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky, or the phrase “the end justifies the means” open a can of clawed and fanged wyrms ready to rip to shreds the fabric of society.

Lucky for us, Dr. Staples has taken the time to formulate his thesis and elaborate thoroughly upon it in Guilt with a Twist. He draws on many sources and techniques, first and foremost the work of Carl Jung. (Staples is a Jungian analyst who trained in Switzerland after making a mid-life career-switch at the age of 50).

He says: “the urge to sin may be identical with the urge to individuate, a Jungian term for the psychological process by which we become the unique person we are meant to be” (xix). This brought to mind the Nietzschean notion of slaying the dragon of “Thou Shalt.” As Jung said, “the shadow, where we hide our sins in secret, is 90% pure gold” (34), which that nasty dragon hordes.

Mapping out the terrain of guilt, Dr. Staples lists three types of authorities: parental, secular, and divine, all of which define “sin” in subtly different but mostly overlapping ways. The expectations put upon us by this triumvirate—from which we must stray in pursuit of our true selves—spark our guilt, leading us to suppress and deny our shadow selves and live what Thoreau called “lives of quiet desperation.”

In chapter 4, Dr. Staples outlines several sources of guilt: sex, abandonment, divorce, negative feelings for parents, anger, negativity, gender roles, selfishness, different sexual orientation, falling short of ideals, truth and lies, renunciation of religious beliefs, alcohol, and feelings.

Of the fourteen sections in chapter 4, I have had direct experience of twelve.

This certainly got my attention.

Anticipating the exploration of opposites in chapter 5, Staples writes: “the sacred and the profane are but two sides of a single underlying reality” (33). Then, in chapter 5 came the key sentence that furthered the connection with my own experiences: “[G]uilt’s purpose is not the maintenance of morals; it is the maintenance of the opposites and psychic wholeness” (98).

This is an idea I certainly understand, being a person who juggles many roles (writer, director, editor, father, husband, actor, musician, etc.) and has often felt abundant guilt that the “jack of all trades, master of none” phenomenon was coupling with not giving loved ones enough time and attention and spawning the child Mediocrity.

The pull of opposites is also something I know well, having struggled most of my life with the dynamic of pleasing others versus pleasing myself, and of course, the more I thought about it, the more the role of guilt became clear.

The often contradictory words of my grandmother, a quintessential Italian-American matriarch who recently passed away at 91, also echo in my head. She would say, alternately: “You work too hard! You need to take care of yourself and rest!” and “You’ve got to make hay while the sun shines!”

Chapter 5 discusses in vibrant detail the play of opposites, how they attract and move apart and how they produce, through the mechanism of guilt, homeostasis and creative output.

For those readers interested in the nexus between quantum physics and spirituality, Dr. Staples speaks about the movement of opposites in terms of the cosmic dance as I’ve seen it described by authors like Michael Talbot and Fritjof Capra.

As Dr. Staples says, “We keep moving from pole to pole until the ego becomes strong enough to bear the tension of co-existing opposites” (109). Recalling my own 20-plus- year journey on this path and the experiences of Carl Jung as related in his Memories, Dreams, Reflections, it is clear that the guilt must be borne if the ego is to achieve its required strength, and the process is never easy but ever required.

Chapter 6, entitled “The Role of Guilt in Creativity and Psychological Development,” at 76 pages, is the longest and most appealing chapter in the book to me, given the correlations between the material in chapter 5 and my own life. Dr. Staples extends the notion of dynamic opposites to the masculine/feminine coupling necessary in any creative endeavor. The case studies and historical examples from which Dr. Staples draws are a mini-course in the psychological aspects of creativity and this chapter could be read on its own by any artist seeking to better understand the process. (See also The Creative Soul by Lawrence H. Staples, Ph.D. (2009, Fisher King Press, www.fisherkingpress.com)

Approaching the end of chapter 6 and reading a section entitled “Sin, Guilt, and Self-Development,” I came upon a timely article on AOL about the Vatican’s concern that Catholics are going to confession less and less. There was a poll attached to the article in which 79% of the population still believes in the concept of sin. It’s a given that these online polls are far from scientific, but the number is high enough to suggest that a considerable portion of people believe that sin exists, therefore guilt must as well.

Part II of the book, which comprises a single chapter and the Conclusions, is called “Assuaging Guilt,” covering both spiritual and psychological approaches (what I have found in my own experience to be a highly useful and well-rounded dual approach to just about any endeavor). Chapter 7 ends with the analysis of five dreams with orientations around guilt. Dr. Staples offers some practical insights in working with dreams in creative and healing ways.

Life is complicated—in these troubled financial and political times more than ever—and it seems most people are struggling with the guilt of limited time, opportunity, and resources. The fields of the twenty-first century are seeded with myriad guilt, choking the good gardens of our progress as individuals and as a race. Guilt with a Twist is a kind of “gardener’s guide” to pulling the weeds of “bad guilt” and bringing forth a healthier harvest.

This review of Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Way was written by Joey Madia of New Mystics. New Mystics is an online Arts community founded in 2002 by Joey Madia to promote the work of a group of cutting edge writers and artists. To learn more about New Mystics, Joey Madia, and his most recent publication Jester-Knight visit www.newmystics.com.

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Love, Intimacy, Creativity

noreply@blogger.com (Mel Mathews) — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 10:02:00 +0000

Hot off the Press

The Creative Soul: Art and the Quest for Wholeness
by Lawrence H. Staples

Who we most deeply are is mirrored in our artistic work. Our need for mirroring simultaneously attracts us to and repels us from our creative callings and relationships. It is one of life’s great dilemmas.

Artist’s block and lover’s block flow from the same pool. Often, we fear deeply the very thing needed to create original art, to experience intimate relationships and to live authentic lives: we are frightened by the impulse to be fully revealed to ourselves, and to others, as this most often entails exposing the unacceptable shadowy aspects of our humanity and risking rejection.

Mirrors in all their manifold guises permit us to safely see and experience ourselves in reflection and become better acquainted with the rejected, ostracized aspects of our personalities. Creative work is one of the few places where we can truly express and witness lost aspects of our authentic selves.

Within us a treasure beckons. This is what we spend our lives pursuing. What slows and distracts us is not the object we long for, but where we search. To find this precious gem, we must eventually return to our own creative spirits.

Available from your local bookstore, from a host of online booksellers, and directly from Fisher King Press: The Creative Soul: Art and the Quest for Wholeness by Lawrence H. Staples / ISBN 13: 978-0-9810344-4-7 / Publication Date: Feb 14, 2009 / Order your copy by calling toll free in Canada and the US 1-800-228-9316, international +1-831-238-7799.

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Feelings as Guide to Self

noreply@blogger.com (Guilt with a Twist) — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 06:01:00 +0000

by Lawrence H. Staples
author of Guilt with a Twist and The Creative Soul

Our own feelings, not the feelings of others, are our best and fastest guide to the self. These feelings lie inside us because they are ours, not someone else’s. Feelings are also the guide to our art and our relationships. The quality of our art and of our relationships depends on the quality of our intimacy. In turn, the quality of our intimacy (i.e., our capacity to reveal our selves fully) depends on feelings. We cannot reveal our selves without first finding and knowing our selves. Ultimately, it is feelings that lead us increasingly to self-knowledge. But, as we have seen that is difficult. We must bear much tension to sort out and differentiate our feelings from our emotions, and from the feelings of others. Bearing that tension may eventually lead us to our own feelings and our own compass. Until we find our star we may be led by stars that take us a longer way around to our self. If we do find our own feelings, we will undoubtedly pass through many “right,” “ideal,” and “suitable” people, art forms, and other things before we reach “The One” that we are really looking for, our self.

For the masculine-dominated mind, it is the fear of feelings that separates him from his art, his relationships, and, ultimately, his self. Thinking is not the problem; the masculine mind has this in spades. That is why women often say of a thinking man “he is just in his head.” It is a head-trip that leads a man in his search for a woman to establish ideal criteria. We see this all the time in personal ads. Such thinking also leads us to establish criteria for our selves to determine what is an acceptable outlet for our creative drives. If we listen to our feelings, we are attracted more often to someone that does not meet these criteria. We may be attracted more instinctively by their smell rather than their interest in museums, if our ego standards don’t interfere. We often feel about our relationships the same way we feel about our art. We want to run away and at the same time we are almost hopelessly drawn to them.

Lawrence Staples is the author of the recently published

The Creative Soul

and the popular book

Guilt with a Twist

The Creative Soul

noreply@blogger.com (Mel Mathews) — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 15:17:00 +0000

January 28th, 2009

With Great Pleasure, Fisher King Press announced:

Available February 14th, 2009

The Creative Soul:
Art and the Quest for Wholeness
by Lawrence H. Staples

Who we most deeply are is mirrored in our artistic work. Our need for mirroring simultaneously attracts us to and repels us from our creative callings and relationships. It is one of life’s great dilemmas.

Artist’s block and lover’s block flow from the same pool. Often, we fear deeply the very thing needed to create original art, to experience intimate relationships and to live authentic lives: we are frightened by the impulse to be fully revealed to ourselves, and to others, as this most often entails exposing the unacceptable shadowy aspects of our humanity and risking rejection.

Mirrors in all their manifold guises permit us to safely see and experience ourselves in reflection and become better acquainted with the rejected, ostracized aspects of our personalities. Creative work is one of the few places where we can truly express and witness lost aspects of our authentic selves.

Within us a treasure beckons. This is what we spend our lives pursuing. What slows and distracts us is not the object we long for, but where we search. To find this precious gem, we must eventually return to our own creative spirits.

Topics explored in THE CREATIVE SOUL include:

OPPOSITES AND CREATIVITY
THE CREATIVE INSTINCT
OUR UNIQUE IDENTITY
SOME ELEMENTS OF CREATIVITY
SOME PREREQUISITES OF THE CREATIVE PROCESS
LA PETITE MORT
GIVING VOICE TO THE MANY LIVES WITHIN
DREAMS AND ACTIVE IMAGINATION AS TRIGGERS TO CREATIVITY
CREATIVITY AS AN INNER PARENT
CREATIVITY WITHIN BOUNDS
THE CREATIVE GAP
THE POWER OF SMALL
CREATIVITY AND INDEPENDENCE
ART AND THE QUEST FOR WHOLENESS
THERAPY AS ART
FEAR OF SELF-REVELATION BLOCKS CREATIVITY
INTIMACY AND CREATIVITY
THE IMPORTANCE OF MIRRORING
CREATIVITY, GUILT, AND SELF-DEVELOPMENT
CREATIVITY AND LONELINESS
LIFE AND THE TENSION OF OPPOSITES

Available from your local bookstore, from a host of online booksellers, and directly from Fisher King Press: The Creative Soul: Art and the Quest for Wholeness by Lawrence H. Staples / ISBN 13: 978-0-9810344-4-7 / Publication Date: Feb-2009 / Order your copy call +1-831-238-7799.

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The Importance of Mirroring

noreply@blogger.com (Guilt with a Twist) — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 05:25:00 +0000

by Lawrence H. Staples
author of Guilt with a Twist

It takes prolonged mirroring of the forbidden feelings by an accepting and tolerant therapist, minister, or friend to undo what our parents and God hath wrought. Mirroring is an indirect experience that permits us to safely see and experience our selves.

It is our need for mirroring that simultaneously attracts us to and repels us from therapy, creative work, and relationships. We are drawn to creative work for the same reason that Frida Kahlo was—it is one of the few places that we can truly see and express our selves. But the fear of being seen also sets up a fearful resistance. Our deep need to be truly seen draws us to anything that will reflect our selves back to us, whether it is art, therapy, or relationships. But our deep need to avoid the pain of rejection causes us to resist those things that will reflect our true selves. It is one of the great dilemmas of life. Fortunately, there is within us a psychic entity that keeps growing into greater fullness as we become increasingly conscious. It is our self, a reflected image of God, the archetypal Self. That is actually what we spend our lives looking for. What slows and distracts us in our search is not the object of the search, but the direction we turn in order to find it. The self is found inside us. That is the precious treasure we seek. And, if we are to find it, we eventually must look where it is. The creative act of self-development results in the development of our unique identity, who we most deeply are. It is our particular manifestation of our self. As I have pointed out, we all, every one of us, have a unique identity. We just are not conscious of our unique identity until we have done a lot of inner work.

The work we do looking on the outside is not a waste. Rather, it is an off-Broadway performance of the real drama to come, merely a warm-up or a tune-up for the main event. There is nothing wrong with off-Broadway; it is merely a detour that may help us get where we are going. The longer we spend looking outside, however, the longer it takes to get where we wish and need to go.

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Intimacy, Fear, Creativity

noreply@blogger.com (Guilt with a Twist) — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 06:42:00 +0000

by Lawrence H. Staples
author of Guilt with a Twist

The resistance a patient experiences in painting on this canvas that lies between him and the analyst, or in attempting otherwise to paint or write while in analysis, is similar to what artists experience when they encounter a block. They have touched and activated some thought or feeling that scared them. They will remain blocked until the unconscious thought or feeling is made conscious and dealt with. What scared them often turns out to be a fear that is appropriate to and belongs to childhood, but that continues unconsciously. What scares artists and causes them to block is often the fear of revealing in their art a secret about themselves. It is a fear of self-revelation, a fear of revealing something that was dangerously unacceptable to their parents. They are not conscious of what is frightening them because the fearful thing might seem silly or frivolous. Dealing with this issue is the job of analysis. Analysis tries to depotentiate these fears, allowing the individual to see them for what they are, often just a spook.

I have worked with a number of creative people who entered analysis because they were blocked. Something had frightened them or hurt them or made them feel so vulnerable that they could no longer risk going outside the fence, where the opposites they needed for their creative work were. Their need for safety was keeping them in the safe zone. Thus, they were separated from the stones they needed to finish the work they had started. Usually, with sufficient encouragement and mirroring, their comfort level with the opposites returned and they were able to go back outside, where lay the stones needed to complete their job.

A letter from a former patient, a multi-talented artist who had finished his work with me, helped make me more conscious of and understand more fully the etiology of the resistance to and the blocking of our creative work, whether in analysis or in other art forms. This former patient shared with me the profound insight that what blocks us in our art is essentially what blocks us in our relationships.

He was struggling with his painting when he wrote to me: “Our talks about the fear of intimacy in relationships come to mind when I find myself frustrated in my creative work and begin to think to myself, ‘Yeah, it is just getting difficult and you want to bail out on something that you actually have feelings for and are afraid of going deeper.’” He had perceived a connection between creative work and relationships that is far from obvious. Reflecting on his comments, I realized how rich his insight was.

Reflecting on his comments, I realized how rich his insight was. He was right; it is fear of intimacy that blocks our commitment to and deep engagement to both art and relationships. Intimacy means fully revealing and expressing our selves to others. It is intimacy, deep self-revelation that renders both art and relationships authentic. We resist intimacy and the authenticity it produces because we fear fully revealing our selves to others. We are afraid we will be unacceptable, criticized, and rejected. And we fear revealing ourselves to our self.

Because our art is a reflected image of our selves, the potential rejection of our art is as terrifying as the potential rejection of our selves in a relationship. Rejection is a threat of annihilation in both. No wonder we are tempted to hide our selves or to run away or, as my patient remarked, “bail out” of both. No wonder we are tempted to keep our paintings, our writing, or other artistic output safely ensconced out of sight in a drawer or cupboard. No wonder it keeps us from submitting our art for exhibition or our writing to a publisher. Even worse, it is often what separates us from our paintbrushes, word processors, or other tools of the trade.

Instead of doing creative work and exposing it to the world we go drinking, fishing, or screwing. Such diversions, if they replace our creative artistic work, eventually result in thoughts of suicide. There is only one way to relieve or expunge those thoughts—creative production. If we are lucky, we eventually will be able to engage in both authentic art and authentic relationships before we die.

The idea of revealing our selves to others is like parading naked before others, and both are scary. It makes no difference whether this revealing of ourselves is represented in a physical, mental, spiritual, or symbolic form. We fear the guilt and shame that will ensue if any representation is judged to be bad. It is a feared attack on our self-worth, on the very foundations of our being. It is the ultimate block to our creativity or activity, or at least, that is how it seems. This fear is one reason why it is often easier to be successful in conventional terms—in business, law, or medicine—than to be successful in art or relationships. Being successful in conventional areas often depends upon concealing large parts of one’s self, while success in art most often involves revealing large parts of one’s self. Thus, the very thing that makes bad art and bad relationships may make good business.

My patient’s note crystallized for me the important connection between art and relationships. The more I thought about what he said the more I could see that they have much in common. Both good art and good relationships depend on and result from a creative activity that flows from our deepest realm. They are, in fact, identical from the standpoint of the underlying creative principles and processes that give them life. They are similarly conceived, formed, and developed. It follows, then, that good art and good relationships depend on the same things, and they both require creative effort of the highest order, effort that may be intense and may need a prolonged gestation period. And they both require profound intimacy, both with one’s self and others, if they are to be really good.

We create great relationships only when we fully reveal our selves; we create great art only when we truly reveal our selves. Art and relationships require the same nutrients to grow. If we want our art and our relationships to be strong and beautiful, we must feed them intimacy, which is what makes both of them thrive. Thus, the quality of our art and the quality of our relationships depend on the degree to which we accomplish this feat of intimate self-revelation. The more that they reflect our selves the better they are.

This is why we simultaneously both fear and fall in love with our relationships and our art. We see our selves in both of them. Christ’s command that we love our neighbors as our selves would be a meaningless and empty phrase if we could not first love our selves. We cannot love our selves if we cannot know our selves. Both relationships and art help us know our selves by mirroring and reflecting back to us who we are.

As we have noted, however, life presents us with a great paradox. We fear deeply the very thing that we need if we are to create good art and good relationships. Artist’s block and lover’s block flow from the same pool and result from the same dynamics. For reasons described throughout my book we are frightened by the impulse to reveal our selves fully, because it always means revealing the unacceptable parts of our selves. To find and reveal our selves fully, we must breach the fence with which convention surrounds us, and incur guilt. Doing this requires great courage and a high tolerance for pain.

It is painful because to do so is to expose parts of our selves that got us into trouble with or caused us to be rejected. There was trouble when we expressed unacceptable feelings, like: “I am afraid” or “I need you” or “I miss you” or “Please leave the lights on” or “Please don’t leave me alone” or “I hate you” or “Go to hell.” There is a huge range of negative feelings that were disallowed and we are afraid to expose them because we do not want to be rejected by touching the same hot stove that burned us when we were kids. We want people to love our art and us, but we fear that they will reject both if we truly reveal who we are and what we feel. How could we feel otherwise? That was a burn that still hurts.

Parents were our first image of God, and we harbor well into adulthood, mostly unconsciously, the thought that they are God. For this reason, we viscerally experience the acknowledgment, acceptance, or expression of the forbidden feelings and values as a transgression of God’s will. It is easy to understand why it is so difficult to undo the early damage that parents inflicted and that interfere with our deep need for intimacy. Even the parents themselves were unaware of what was going on.

Relevant is a dream of an analysand several years ago. In the dream, he went into the bathroom at night, in the dark, and stepped on glass that his mother had broken, but not swept up. He cut his feet badly. It cut him and wounded him in an important place: his standpoint. Insecure and domineering parents often cannot tolerate their children subscribing to or expressing a standpoint different from theirs; they demand orthodoxy of feelings, values, and viewpoints. They thus cut the child off from large areas of himself. The cut, as seen in the dream, must heal if the child is to find and know himself fully, develop his own individual standpoint, and express himself intimately in both art and relationships. Whether a cut or a burn, the sensitive wound does not want to be reopened and the fear of pain keeps us at a distance from important parts of our selves.

Thus, to avoid the frightful intimacy that involves fully revealing our selves, we kid our selves into thinking that our art and our relationships depend on finding the “right” person or the “right” art form. We believe that both the problem and its solution lie “out there” instead of “in here,” in our selves. Our capacity for intimacy depends on our capacity to find and accept within our selves the forbidden feelings that we rejected. We simply cannot intimately reveal to others feelings that we our selves do not accept. Finding and accepting those forbidden feelings involves a long process of introspection that is not for the faint of heart.

Order Guilt with a Twist and The Creative Soul from the following booksellers:

Therapy as Art

noreply@blogger.com (Guilt with a Twist) — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 03:30:00 +0000

by Lawrence H. Staples
author of Guilt with a Twist

Therapists often work with creative people who are painting or sculpting or potting or writing. Therapists often envy the creative gifts of the people with whom they work. It is as if they are like the Rabbi of Krakow, who traveled around endlessly looking for the very treasure that was lying right under his church. Some therapists are sitting on a treasure and do not know it; they have not been able to give their own work the name they give to the creative work their patients do. They have been unable to say “Rumplestiltskin,” to name and become conscious of the creative treasure they themselves have.

Therapy is a kind of art in which we help broken and shattered patients do for themselves what Frida did. We help them put back together a life that has been broken and has fallen, apart. We provide a mirror that helps them see themselves and enables them to bring back the lost pieces, and then to paint them onto the canvas of their life. In this case I do not mean, necessarily, literally “painting” with a brush, although it often involves that, but painting as a metaphor for the psychological reconstruction of self. Such “painting” produces a portrait that includes what they knew themselves consciously to be as well as that of which they were unconscious. The canvas starts blank, and then begins to fill up with colors and hues of their lives that get stronger and stronger and that evolve and change as the mirroring continues. The portrait a patient “paints” of himself early in therapy is very different from and much less complete than the portraits he later paints, just as Frida’s self-portraits evolved and became fuller and richer as more and more of herself emerged onto her life’s canvas.

The therapist sees the portrait of the mirrored patient change and grow, but also sees his own portrait change and grow. It is as if two portraits are simultaneously being painted and formed and shaped by the reflected images of unconscious material coming out of both the patient and therapist. A mathematical concept provides examples of this dynamic, in which the change in one part of a relationship results in a corresponding change in another part. If we take the relationship x = y, any change in x or y makes a corresponding change in the other member of the relationship. Or take the formula for calculating distance traveled: D = ST (distance equals speed multiplied by time). Let us say: the distance = 100 miles, the speed = 50 miles per hour, and the time = 2 hours. We cannot change any of these three numbers without changing the others. Similarly, in analysis, a change in one member (i.e., the patient) causes a corresponding change in the other (i.e., the therapist). This description is somewhat oversimplified, but is fairly accurate. The change that occurs during analysis leads me to express to my patients gratitude for the opportunity that they have given me to accompany them on a portion of their journey.

For a long time, I had vague feelings about therapy as creative art. It was not until I saw the PBS documentary about Frida Kahlo that I became truly conscious of this idea. As I listened to various artists talk about Frida and her art, I realized that they speak the same language and have much the same way of talking about and expressing things, as do therapists. I asked myself why and the answer that came was: We talk about and express things the same way because we are doing the same kind of work. We just did not know it or call it that.

The creative work of the therapist is the psychological picture that slowly emerges from long mirroring of their patients and, especially, from the creative work that the patients themselves are encouraged to undertake. Patients often resist creative work initially, and it may be a long time before patients feel safe doing it. There may be many reasons for their resistance, but one source is their early experience of sharing creative work with a parent only to be deeply wounded by criticism or ridicule. The resistance stems from the fear of the opposites, opposites that burned them early in life. It is the fear of revealing something unacceptable. They hide what is unacceptable in order to avoid being hurt. Resistance to therapy and resistance to creative work come from the same source. We block, we freeze like a deer in the headlights, because we are afraid of something. We block to protect ourselves from the fearful thing.

Therapists must go about encouraging creative work gently, without leaning against the patient’s fears. As with many medications, one must start with small doses, which may not taste or feel great at first, but which may be willingly taken later as the patient feels the relief and comfort of its healing action. Unfortunately, I sometimes encounter a patient who was so badly “burned” by his early experience of parental reactions to his attempts at creative work that he simply cannot take the medicine, even in the smallest doses.

In analysis, creation takes place in the same gap where all creation occurs. It takes place in those few feet that separate the chairs of the analyst and the patient. This gap between the chairs is the “canvas” on which they both “paint.” Most Jungian Analysts do their work in more or less facing chairs spaced a few feet apart.

I am indebted to my friend and colleague Dr. Enrico Buratti for a beautiful historical image of this process. In 17th-century Italy there were troupes of actors called Commedia dell’Arte who had enormous influence on the future shape of theater. They did their work through improvisation, which took place within a generally established framework of relationships and parts that they called a “canvas.” They verbally painted their plays, and were to acting what jazz is to music. A note or word is played or spoken and there is then a spontaneous response. The result is a musical or theatrical composition that is spontaneously created on the “canvas,” in the gap that lies between them. Its resemblance to what occurs in analysis became apparent to me once Dr. Buratti shared his insight.

Associative mechanisms, like those noticed and investigated by Jung and Freud, facilitate much of the work of analysis. The mechanism attaches and coheres thoughts and feelings that arise and belong together. A word spoken either by the analyst or the patient sparks an associative response. The word spoken and the associative word or words that respond join together and give birth to a third entity that becomes part of the self-portrait that is “painted” on the canvas that lies between the analyst and the patient. This back-and-forth process is a kind of verbal intercourse. It makes no difference who speaks the first word. The word, like a sperm, enters the gap between them. It combines with the responding word or words and causes a pregnancy that creates a “third.” This “third” is added to and becomes part of the self-portrait that is emerging. What is produced in each iteration of a spoken word and a response may not be earth shaking, but it usually does lead to new insights, new perceptions, and new understandings that produce a larger and clearer portrait that contains the psychological input of both.

You have just read an excerpt of Lawrence Staples'
Guilt with a Twist.

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Hang on to your Belief Systems

noreply@blogger.com (Guilt with a Twist) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 20:07:00 +0000

Hang on to your Belief Systems. They are about to be Challenged! —By Grady Harp

Now and then along comes a book that opens our eyes to viewing the world from a completely new perspective, and after reading such a book, the way we react to events in our lives is altered—for the better. Such is the experience that happens to the reader fortunate enough to encounter GUILT WITH A TWIST: THE PROMETHEAN WAY by Dr. Lawrence H. Staples, a Jungian psychoanalyst who just happens to write very well indeed!

In Dr. Staples’ words: "We have to sin and incur guilt if we are to grow and reach our full potential." He goes on to explain that the message of this book "is inspired and informed by the myth of Prometheus. Myth tells us Prometheus stole fire from the gods and made it available for use by humans. He suffered for his sin. Zeus had him chained to a rock where an eagle pecked and tore daily at his liver. But human society would have suffered if he had not committed it. Thus, the life of Prometheus portrays a mythological model for guilt that is different from the conventional view. The Promethean model of guilt suggests the importance of sinning and incurring guilt in order to obtain needed—but forbidden things."

Staples explains how our conventional view of guilt keeps us 'good', providing a safe fence behind which we can function without the fear of doing bad things. But he quickly dismantles that belief by citing examples from not only mythical but also historical figures whose 'sins' resulted in changes that benefited society as a whole. His theory is that if we cannot sin and suffer guilt, we cannot fully develop our potential as human beings. Often, by taking the risk of sinning against conventional norms and incurring guilt we can become unique givers to the whole of society and potentially be the catalyst of great change, as in the case of Prometheus.

Though Dr. Staples' thoughts and ideas at first appear to be challenging, acceptance of thinking outside the box results in recognizing the potential that is in each of us: sin > guilt > change. As Staples summarizes it: "Life inevitably confronts us with the Promethean dilemma: Do we live our lives without fire and the heat and light it provides or do we sin, and subsequently incur guilt, in order to obtain for ourselves and for society those important changes and developments that we need?" While the content of this book demands the reader's full attention, the possibilities for changing not only ourselves, but also society, seem endless. —Grady Harp, April 08

In addition to the USA Today, WNBC, and BloggingAuthors.com, Grady Harp's reviews appear on Barnes & Noble, Soapadoo, Powells Books, and he is an Amazon.com Top Ten reviewer!!

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THE CREATIVE GAP

noreply@blogger.com (Guilt with a Twist) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 04:00:00 +0000

by Lawrence H. Staples
author of Guilt with a Twist

The energy that observes the boundaries, and the energy that attempts to break through them, are equally limited. We never reach perfection, but we get closer by the creative transformation that occurs in the tiny gap between acquisition and expression, between expression and editing, and between editing back again to acquisition. Creation occurs not in perfection, but in the gap between perfection and imperfection. Perfection is the enemy of creation. If reached, it would stop creation, because creation would become irrelevant. Creation actually depends on an inability to reach perfection. Maybe God does not want a perfect world, or a definite plan or purpose, because he knows that would put an end to his creating. This would be in agreement with the belief of evolutionists that there is not an intelligent design because all the mistakes found in nature argue against it. Maybe God just likes to create and does not want to stop doing something he likes. Perhaps, God imposes limits upon himself so that he, as the Creator, will not work himself out of a job. It is a strange paradox. If I may be bold enough to speculate and withstand its blasphemy, perhaps God is not perfect. Perhaps, God is an evolutionary creative process just as life and nature appear to be. Creation seems to be a permanent condition. Perhaps, that is what Aristotle meant, when he said that the only thing permanent is change.

In writing, the Creator appears by deduction to lie in the gap between the last word and the next word. In music, the Creator lies in the gap between the last note and the next note. In art, the Creator lies between the last brush stroke and the next. We do not see the Creator but we know he is there, implied in the words and images that are produced, unless we think we are it. In that case, we are in danger. It is in this gap, where creation occurs, that we find the Creator, if we are lucky. It is in this gap where the duality of existence comes close enough together to constellate the Creator who sparks our creative production. In this gap is the present moment when all creation occurs. If we are away from the present moment, we are separated from the precise time when the gift of creation is given to us.

Sometimes we have physical conditions that provide us with a direct experience of this creative process. When this happens, the creative process is no longer a theory. We know it directly. This can be seen in a condition known as atrial fibrillation, which is an irregular heart rhythm experienced by many. When a person is in atrial fibrillation, he will usually experience a return to normal heart rhythm. Doctors use the word conversion to describe this phenomenon, which often mysteriously happens of its own accord. When it does not happen medication or shock bring about the conversion. Often, but not always, that works.

I personally have atrial fibrillation. Twice during an atrial fibrillation episode my heart stopped for several seconds and started up again of its own accord, returning, also of its own accord, to normal rhythm. In this tiny gap of a few seconds, I went from life to death to life. There was a transformation in which two opposites occurred in proximity and resulted in the creation of another state. After the last episode, my cardiologist implanted a pacemaker to prevent a recurrence of the stoppage, the “pause,” as they refer to it. Immediately after both episodes I had the subjective feeling of being saved. There was a conversion in my heart rhythm, which resulted in a numinous experience for me that seems similar to what people describe in religious experiences. It seems strange indeed that medicine would choose a word for physical transformation that is identical to the religious word for it. When I had this experience, I could not ignore the subjective feeling that I had witnessed the process of creation in that gap between opposites. This physical process of transformation and creation feels subjectively similar to what happens in the gap between the last word written and the next word, between the last note composed and the next. Masculine and feminine somehow merge in that gap and create the next new thing. The next new thing for me was a renewed heartbeat and a return to life.

There is a mathematical concept that also suggests that creation occurs in a tiny gap. It is in this gap that zero converts to infinity and infinity converts to zero. It is as if the creative mystery---with whatever name we wish to give it--- hides somewhere in this gap, out of sight. We know that something is created in the gap because something that is not seen in the gap emerges from the other side of it.

We know that if we divide 1 by successively smaller numbers that can approach but cannot reach 0, the result of that division approaches, but does not reach infinity. The idea is that nothing goes into something an infinite number of times. We also know that while we can posit 0 and infinity as the limit of dividing 1 by successively larger or smaller numbers, we cannot actually calculate either 0 or infinity. For example, we can divide 1 by 1, then by ½, then by ¼, and, ultimately, by one-billionth or one-quadrillionth, and so on. As the fraction approaches 0, it approaches that precise point where 0 would produce an answer of infinity, if we could in fact finish the calculation. It is the point where the smallest becomes the biggest.* This point, just before something converts to its opposite, is the outer limit where one of the pairs of opposites—East for example—changes into its other pair—West, just as the tiniest number converts to the largest when 0 is reached. We cannot actually calculate or reach that point. We can assume it, but we cannot reach it. If we could in fact see this point of transformation rather than assume it, we might see the face of God, the Creator himself. Ancient wisdom, however, tells us that it is a point of such terrifying power that the human ego could be blown away by the experience. It is too small to see physically, like subatomic particles that themselves contain terrifying power.

Thus, we might speculate that the Creator, for our own protection, himself is tiny and hides out of sight in this creative gap. Perhaps, although we have not yet found the means of knowing, the Creator may be tinier than the smallest atom. That idea may be behind the Biblical admonition that urges us to become humble, small, like little children, or small enough to pass through the eye of a needle, if we are to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Creation occurs at the limit where the smallest converts to the largest. It is at the point of enantiodromia, just before zero converts to its opposite that we may find that the opposites are two aspects of a deeper unity, a mystery that is not manifest in the visible dual reality where we live and work. Approaching that gap may be the point where we get just close enough to God to pick up the reflections of his rays of creativity without being burned by them.

* A real mathematician would likely be horrified at these oversimplified explanations of the concepts of 0 and infinity. Entire books are written on the subject. Although I have no worthy credentials in this discipline, it appears that infinity and 0 remain mysteries because they represent concepts that are not capable of being calculated, known, reached, or seen. The mysterious qualities of these concepts are shared with whatever we want to think of as God.

About the Author:
Lawrence Staples is a 76 year-old psychoanalyst, still actively practicing in Washington, DC. After receiving AB and MBA degrees from Harvard, Lawrence spent the next 22 years with a Fortune 500 company, where he became an officer and a corporate vice president. When he was 50, he made a midlife career change and entered the C.G. Jung Institute, Zurich, Switzerland, where he spent nine years in training to become a psychoanalyst. Lawrence has a Ph.D. in psychology and a Diploma in Analytical Psychology from the Zurich Institute. Learn more about Lawrence Staples and his recently published books Guilt with a Twist and The Creative Soul at GoodGuilt.com

'Guilt with a Twist' Highly Recommended by Midwest Book Review

noreply@blogger.com (Guilt with a Twist) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 23:35:00 +0000

Guilt can be a bad thing at times, as it stands to prevent people from doing what needs to be done, June 15, 2008 —By Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - Rated 5.0 out of 5 stars

“Is guilt nature's way of making mankind not wrong one another, even more so than the laws and customs of civilized society? That's what "Guilt With a Twist", the many years' work of a clinical psychoanalyst and Ph.D holder Lawrence H. Staples, claims. Staples argues that guilt can be a bad thing at times, when it prevents people from doing what needs to be done - such as cutting off an abusive family member, or encouraging people to help themselves. A comprehensive look at guilt, "Guilt with a Twist" is highly recommended for community library psychology collections and for anyone who wants a better understanding of humanity's natural moral alarm.”—Midwest Book Review

Guilt with a Twist by Lawrence H. Staples —ISBN 097760764X

Lawrence Staples is a 76 year-old psychoanalyst, still actively practicing in Washington, DC. After receiving AB and MBA degrees from Harvard, Lawrence spent the next 22 years with a Fortune 500 company, where he became an officer and a corporate vice president. When he was 50, he made a midlife career change and entered the C.G. Jung Institute, Zurich, Switzerland, where he spent nine years in training to become a psychoanalyst. Lawrence has a Ph.D. in psychology and a Diploma in Analytical Psychology from the Zurich Institute.

Order Guilt with a Twist and The Creative Soul from the following booksellers:

The Anatomy of a Novel: Active Imagination

noreply@blogger.com (Guilt with a Twist) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 04:00:00 +0000

by Lawrence H. Staples
author of Guilt with a Twist

Active Imagination: What it is:

Active imagination is a technique developed by Jung to help amplify, interpret, and integrate the contents of dreams and creative works of art. When approached by way of writing, active imagination is like writing a play. One takes, for example, a figure that has appeared in one's dreams or creative writings. Usually, these figures express a viewpoint quite the opposite of one's normal conscious view. Sometimes it is a male, shadow figure. At other times, it may be a feminine, anima, or maternal figure. One starts to converse with the figure in writing. One challenges the dream figure and lets him/her challenge the dreamer. The dreamer asks the figure why he appeared in the dream. He asks the figure what it wants from him. Then, the ego, like a playwright, puts himself as best he can into the figure's shoes and tries to express it and defend its viewpoint. There ensues an iterative dialogue between the writer and the opposite figure in his dream or piece of writing. With practice one can become accomplished at expressing both viewpoints, just as a playwright does. One gets better at this the more one does it, just as the playwright does. The technique of active imagination tends to detach the qualities and traits that are first seen in a dream or in a story as belonging to external persons, and coming to see them as belonging to one's self. Active imagination, then, helps the writer become conscious of his opposite qualities by forcing him to give voice to figures, like shadow figures, that carry qualities opposite those of his ego. These qualities personify the rejected opposites that are present in the unconscious. This technique helps recover these rejected opposites and make them available to the ego and consciousness without necessarily having to act them out.

Example of Active Imagination:

Following is an impressive and rich example of the power of this technique to affect and even shape our lives. It's an active imagination done by a man in his late thirties. He was an extremely successful salesman who was, nevertheless, unhappy with his work and life. Despite his high income, work had lost its meaning for him. He had entered Jungian analysis in order to help him out of his suffocating existence and find a new and different way. He had a powerful dream that he took to his analyst. His analyst suggested he do active imagination with one of the figures in the dream. His is a beautiful example of active imagination that led to much more than a dialogue. It became the seed of a creative life that grew and flourished into a wholly new career. Out of his active imagination came a novel, LeRoi, which was then followed by two other novels, SamSara and Menopause Man. All have been published as the Malcolm Clay Trilogy and he is living today as a successful writer. He has written still more books that are waiting in the wings to be published. His name is Mel Mathews. The power of the active imagination is seen in the fact that it unearthed in him some deep hidden spring of creativity that suddenly gushed forth. Apparently, he had been living a life of suspended animation that lay there until some psychic prince awoke it.

The Dream:

Mel's book, LeRoi, was literally born from a dream and the active imagination he did with the dream. He had the following dream: A woman was sitting in a diner, in a booth smoking. " Excuse me, I wonder if you could put your cigarette out?" I asked. She ignored me. A few minutes later she lit up again. I stood up, walked around to her booth, grabbed her pack of smokes and the ashtray and walked out the front door. I dumped the ashtray and stepped on her lit smoke; then, I dropped her pack and stomped them as well. I walked back inside, slammed the empty ashtray down on the coffee counter and sat down. A petite pony-tailed brunette walked up with the iced tea pitcher to refill my glass. "Can I have some more ice please?" " Sure", she answered, " I'm sure (Flo) the boss-lady will be out in a minute", the brunette said, as she turned around with my ice. "What does she want?" " You'll have to ask her yourself."

Mel discussed the dream with his analyst who suggested a dialogue with the boss-lady.

Dialogue with the Boss-Lady:

Here is his active imagination with Flo, the name of the boss-lady. This brief dialogue is to his novel what an acorn is to an oak tree. This brief dialogue apparently contained all the genetic codes necessary to make a novel just as an acorn has the genetic codes that lead to an oak tree.

Flo: Howdy

Mel: Hi

Flo: Purdy hot day, huh?

Mel: I can stand the heat. It's the stray cigarette smoke that sets me off.

Flo: So that gives you the right to run off one of my regulars.

Mel: I asked her to put it out.

Flo: Did you ask her or did you beat around the bush with some rude indirect comment?

Mel: Lady, I don't know who you are or what's on your mind, but I really don't need any more crap today.

Flo: Well kid right now you're in my diner and you're runnin' off my patrons.

Mel: Oh great.

Flo: I've dealt with your kind for years so let's just cut to the quick.

Mel: Look, lady, I'm sorry if I offended anybody here, but I've got some problems. My MG is broken down across the street.

Flo: So what?

Mel: Things just aren't falling into place today.

Flo: Would you like some chocolate milk little boy, or how about your ass wiped? In this café, the world doesn't revolve around you. . .

The Creative Seed

While the creative process is different for each individual, one can sometimes discern similarities. The seed that unleashed Mel's creative process was a dream and a few sentences associated with the dream. His process bears some resemblance to the process by which Isak Dineson created her work.

Isak Dineson, a Danish novelist, had quite a reputation as a storyteller, and following dinner her guests usually asked her to tell a story. She complied, but stipulated that her guests must supply her with the opening sentence. Using this sentence as her starting point, she would then spin tales that were hours long.

She had a way of forming and telling stories that is, perhaps, a microcosmic example of the macrocosmic processes of all creation. I could see that, like a verdant and luxurious garden, all creation must first be seeded before it can produce a crop. In Dineson's case, the opening sentence given by the guest was the impregnating seed that she took into her imagination to create the story, like an acorn taken into the earth creates a tree. She began with a word (her acorn) that unfolded from itself a string of words connected to each other by some associative bond that produced a coherent creation. It is as if the opening sentence contained all the genetic codes that knew from the beginning where they were going and how they would get there. The mother is not conscious of the code; it operates invisibly and unconsciously once the seed is fertilized. The mystery is that such a simple, tiny seed can produce such a large and complicated product. It is as if the story develops in accordance with its own processes once the seed is planted in fertile soil. The tale was the crop that grew out of the seed. A mundane analogy to this process is the unwinding of a spool of yarn. The key is to find the tiny end, and then with that small piece in our hand we pull and find that attached to it is a long string that yields the totality of the yarn. We often refer to tales and stories as yarns.

Psychologists are familiar with these processes that are triggered by a single word, suggestion, or thought and that can appear in the verbal outpourings of their patients. They notice that words that belong together are part of an unconscious chain or string that is formed by a process that they called "association". Jung's work on his Association Experiments demonstrates the power of a word to stimulate the unconscious to produce other words that are meaningfully connected by association. Freud pioneered the use of "free association" to bring to consciousness a patient's unconscious complexes. In "free association" all the words that belong together in that string are revealed just as all the yarn is revealed when the spool is spun and then unrolled.

A book like Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury is written in the style of free association, where words with an associative connection appear as if they were spilled upon the page. Some people read it and see it as meaningless or, at best, as loosely connected gibberish. Others experience it as great literature. The Nobel Prize Committee apparently agreed with the latter. James Joyce's Ulysses and many other books have had similar mixed receptions. Some point to Jackson Pollock's process of painting as equivalent to Faulkner's writing, but in the case of Pollock it is drops of paint rather than words that are spilled. The works of both artists contain thousands of fragments (words or specks of paint) that have an associative coherence. In a sense, a novel is a big yarn, a long string that contains the bits and pieces that through association are attached to and belong with each other. If we think about it, we may suspect that there is some kind of "unconscious knowingness" behind this creative process. We can also suspect there is some kind of word (or note, or color or form) magnet in our psyche that draws to itself and coheres words, notes and colors that previously existed in isolation but, eventually, belong together.

About the Author:
Lawrence Staples is a 76 year-old psychoanalyst, still actively practicing in Washington, DC. After receiving AB and MBA degrees from Harvard, Lawrence spent the next 22 years with a Fortune 500 company, where he became an officer and a corporate vice president. When he was 50, he made a midlife career change and entered the C.G. Jung Institute, Zurich, Switzerland, where he spent nine years in training to become a psychoanalyst. Lawrence has a Ph.D. in psychology and a Diploma in Analytical Psychology from the Zurich Institute.

Order Guilt with a Twist and The Creative Soul from the following booksellers:

Obama, McClellan, and Guilt the Promethean Way

noreply@blogger.com (Guilt with a Twist) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 04:55:00 +0000

This article by Lawrence H. Staples was
recently published in the Chicago Sun Times

In the conventional view, guilt is important because it helps us remain "good." It helps protect society's boundaries. While the conventional view of guilt is part of the truth, it is not the whole truth. The meaning of guilt is far more complicated.

While guilt does play an important role in the maintenance of society's stability, it also creates an enormous problem. It can deter us from being "bad" when that is exactly what is needed. Increasingly, during my years of work as a psychoanalyst, it became clear to me that if individuals could not sin, and then suffer the subsequent guilt, they could not fully develop themselves and their gifts. If individuals could not develop fully, neither could society, as society is a sum of the individuals that comprise it. I began to wonder what human development would look like, if all of us could actually live innocently behind the barbed wire fence of guilt that convention erects to separate us from forbidden territory, and its forbidden fruit. I was curious as to what kind of fruit might come from trees that grow only on conventionally sanctioned ground. Would we have had a Socrates, or a Galileo, or a Solzhenitsyn or a Rushdie?

My suspicions about the exclusive value of a life of innocence led me to an idea I call "Good Guilt". The idea was born from the commonplace observation that there are times in our lives when the experience of guilt actually was a signal of having done something good, even essential to nurture us. While the guilt probably did not feel like "Good Guilt" at the time of transgression, the "sin" that caused the guilt is sometimes viewed in retrospect as having brought something valuable to our lives. Examples might include divorces, separations from partners and friends, giving up family-approved or family-dictated careers, or even marriages that are opposed by one's family on the grounds of race, religion, gender, or social status. It might also include the expression of qualities previously rejected as unacceptable, like anger and selfishness. Later in life we may look at guilt thus incurred in a different light.

There are many examples of "Good Guilt." Two recent examples are Barack Obama and Scott McClellan. No doubt they suffered guilt as a result of their decisions to sever relations with beloved church in the case of Barack Obama, and beloved leader and current political regime in the case of Scott McClellan. It is "Good Guilt" because what they did needed to be done for the country, their own interests, and their souls. In these cases, guilt, which is inevitable, should nevertheless be incurred and borne.

In the struggle between the conflicting human tendencies to be both "good" and "bad," there is a problem, if we try to be exclusively good. We may, by staying inside the fence, avoid being castigated by society. We may also avoid castigating ourselves with self-punishing guilt. In the process, however, we also avoid large parts of our self. In so doing, we may please parents and society, but sin against our self.

Reflections on the well-known myth of Prometheus reinforced my unconventional line of thought concerning guilt. This myth tells us Prometheus stole fire from the gods and made it available for use by humans. He suffered for his sin. Zeus had him chained to a rock where an eagle pecked and tore daily at his liver. But human society would have suffered if he had not committed it. Thus, the life of Prometheus portrays a mythological model for guilt that is different from the conventional view. The Promethean model of guilt suggests the importance of sinning and incurring guilt in order to obtain needed—but forbidden things. This is the conclusion I reach in my recently published book, Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Way, except that I state the case a bit stronger. I assert that we must sin and incur guilt, if we are to grow and reach our full potential.

"Life inevitably confronts us with the Promethean dilemma: Do we live our lives without fire and the heat and light it provides, or do we sin and incur guilt to achieve the important developments we need? The contribution virtue can make to society must be acknowledged. There indeed are sins that are destructive; there also are sins that benefit."

I have also concluded that we miss the point, if we think guilt has only a moral function. Guilt is in many ways morally neutral. We can feel guilty if we work too hard or too little. We can feel guilty if we are too assertive or not assertive enough. A woman feels guilty if she has a career and she feels guilty if she doesn't have one. We might feel guilty, if we refuse to steal, while we watch our children die of starvation. We can feel guilty at either of the opposite poles. An important purpose of guilt, in my view, is to compensate, to help keep one side of the opposites from hijacking the psyche and driving the other side out. Here, guilt's purpose is not the maintenance of morals; it is the maintenance of the opposites and psychic wholeness. It follows, then, that guilt is an important instrument in the psyche's system of self-regulation. Just as our physical body has a mechanism of homeostasis, where, for example, we sweat automatically to cool ourselves when we get overheated, so our psyche has a similar mechanism.

"Despite its contribution to psychic stability, guilt disturbs our emotional and mental tranquility. Like Prometheus, we suffer the pain of guilt, even if it was incurred for something beneficial. Promethean Guilt contains the seeds of its own atonement. What is "sinfully" and "guiltily" acquired is given back to the community as an expiation."

An important lesson we need to learn is simply this: If we are feeling guilty, we should not be too quick to conclude or interpret that those feelings of guilt necessarily mean that we are doing something "bad". We may actually be doing something "good" for our own growth as well as society's. The guilt feelings always need to be acknowledged and always, and I emphasize always, need to be examined and evaluated on their merits and in accordance with one's conscience. But it is important to note that the meaning of guilt is probably far more complicated than we have ever been taught.

About the Author:
Lawrence Staples is a 76 year-old psychoanalyst, still actively practicing in Washington, DC. After receiving AB and MBA degrees from Harvard, Lawrence spent the next 22 years with a Fortune 500 company, where he became an officer and a corporate vice president. When he was 50, he made a midlife career change and entered the C.G. Jung Institute, Zurich, Switzerland, where he spent nine years in training to become a psychoanalyst. Lawrence has a Ph.D. in psychology and a Diploma in Analytical Psychology from the Zurich Institute.

Order Guilt with a Twist and The Creative Soul from the following booksellers:

OUR UNIQUE IDENTITY

noreply@blogger.com (Guilt with a Twist) — Thu, 15 May 2008 04:06:00 +0000

by Lawrence H. Staples
author of Guilt with a Twist
and The Creative Soul

Ultimately, the creative act of self-development results in the formation of our unique identity. It is the most particular manifestation of our self. We all have a unique identity, not just Picasso or Einstein or Beethoven or Frank Lloyd Wright. We are not conscious of our unique identity until we have done a lot of work on our selves. People who study art, music, literature, or architecture can identify the painter’s, composer’s, author’s, or architect’s work without seeing a signature. They know that the painting was by Caravaggio or Manet, or that a piece of music was written by Stravinsky or Wagner, or a book by Hemingway, or that a building was designed by Louis Kahn or Frank Lloyd Wright. The creative product of the artist is his signature, and we recognize it because we have studied his work.

Each of us also has a unique signature. But, we must pay attention to our selves and do our own work in depth, if we are to recognize our own signature. We must do this for the same reason we must study artists to know their works. Thus, an important part of the work of discovering our selves is creative production and in-depth analysis. With time and effort we can come to know and recognize our own special signatures. Our physical identity is more readily visible and accessible than our psychic identity. There is always something unique in our physical identity; for example, the parents and siblings of identical twins can usually tell them apart. We have mirrors and can see our physical selves.

It is far more difficult to “see” our psychic selves. There are no psychic mirrors readily available to us, unless we had exceptional parents who could fully, without harsh judgment, reflect our selves back to us. We may still be able to see our psychic selves if we find a therapist who will do for us what our parents could not.

Creative work can also help us see our selves. Creative work is a mirror that can reflect our selves back to us if we pay enough attention.

In his book, The Restoration of the Self, Heinz Kohut wrote at length about psychically wounded people and the therapeutic methods he used to help them. He found none more effective, or so essential, as creative work. He found, importantly, that it made no difference whether the creative work was deemed good or artistic by any standards. The simple process of doing creative work helped restore the self. It is as if nature plants within us a built-in remedy for our worst affliction, the affliction of being separated from large parts of ourselves. We experience this separation as a kind of inner civil war that divides us internally. It produces the pain and suffering inherent in any civil war, whether in our internal world or outside. It seems that the human urge to do creative work, to heal and restore our wholeness, is a compensatory impulse and blessing that arises from the psychic civil war that wounded us. In my own work as a psychoanalyst, I have witnessed the truth of Kohut’s findings. I have watched patients grow in wholeness as they began to work creatively in a variety of media that helped them recover and restore cut off parts of themselves.

Creative work actually serves as a kind of inner parent that compensates for the flawed parenting we may have had as children. Creative work mirrors us in a way we were often not mirrored by our parents. Creative work mirrors us for the simple reason that we can see projected in it, if we look and interpret carefully, our own psychological and spiritual selves. Mirrors in all their manifold guises help restore the wounded self.

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