The Creative Soul

Opposites, the Creative Instinct, and Our Unique Identity

noreply@blogger.com (Fisher King) — 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 recently published
The Creative Soul: Art and the Quest for Wholeness

on sale now for $17.95 ea or $30.00 for the pair!

in the US call 1-800-228-9316
International call +1-831-238-7799
or visit
www.fisherkingpress.com

Lecture by Lawrence H. Staples in Washington, DC

noreply@blogger.com (Fisher King) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:30:00 +0000

The Jung Society of Washington will be hosting a lecture by Lawrence H. Staples

Friday, December 4, 2009

Event Title: THE CREATIVE SOUL: Art and the Quest for Wholeness

Where: Memorial Hall, 5200 Cathedral Ave., NW, Washington, DC

Friday, December 4, 2009

Time: 7:30 PM - 9:00 PM EST

Import this event into your Outlook calendar

What: Lecture
Who: Larry Staples, Ph.D.
When: Friday
Fees: $15:00, members in advance; $20.00, general; $10.00 sen/stu
Register for this event at www.jung.org

This lecture is about art in all its myriad forms-painting writing, sculpting, composing, etc., and how it serves our quest for wholeness and helps restore parts of us that were lost in the process of socialization.

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 compensa-tory impulse and blessing, which 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.

The lecture will draw upon paintings by Frida Kahlo to demonstrate the contribution of art to the restoration of self and the attainment of wholeness. This lecture is also for people specifically interested in creative processes---writers, artists, composers, teachers, thinkers. Staples will share his insights based upon years of observing his clients, their art, and the creative processes that produced it. He discusses psychological factors that both block and trigger creative production. He also suggests techniques for unleashing creative work as well as unblocking it.

CEUs will be offered for this program.

Larry Staples, Ph.D., is a Jungian Analyst in private practice in Washington D.C. He is a diplomate of the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich and holds a Ph.D. in psychology. He is a member of the International Association for Analytical psychology (I.A.A.P.), Association of Graduate Analytical Psychologists (A.G.A.P.), Jungian Analysts of Washington Association (J.A.W.A.) and National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis and the American Boards for Accreditation and Certification (N.A.A.P.). Larry is the author of two books, Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Way and The Creative Soul: Art and the Quest for Wholeness. A third book about guilt's role in depression, anxiety, and paranoia is due to be published in late fall. He has also written a number of articles about the psychological problems of midlife. Special areas of interest include creativity, guilt, and midlife. He holds AB and MBA degrees from Harvard.

On Creativity and Healing

noreply@blogger.com (Fisher King) — 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

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

on sale now for $17.95 ea or $30.00 for the pair!

in the US call 1-800-228-9316
International call +1-831-238-7799
or visit
www.fisherkingpress.com

Dealing with Guilt's Contradictions: a lecture and workshop

noreply@blogger.com (Fisher King) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 03:34:00 +0000

“Dealing With Guilt's Contradictions”
by LAWRENCE STAPLES, MBA, Ph.D.

LECTURE:
Friday, April 24, 2009 7:00 - 9:30 P.M.
First Congregational Church UCC, St. Louis, MO
Fee: Friends - $15 Others - $20
Full-time Students - $10 2 CEUs

This lecture presents an unconventional view of the role of sin and guilt in our lives. In common parlance, the words “good” and “guilt” do not belong together. Personal and clinical experience, however, have repeatedly confirmed for Dr. Staples the useful role that sin and guilt can play in our psychological development. Examples might include divorces, giving up family-approved careers, or expressing qualities previously rejected as unacceptable, such as selfishness or the contra-sexual side of ourselves. Dr Staples concludes we MUST eat forbidden fruit and bear guilt if we are to grow and reach our full potential.

WORKSHOP:
Saturday, April 25, 2009 9:00 A.M. - 1:00 P.M.,
First Congregational Church UCC, St. Louis, MO
Fee: Friends - $55 Others - $65 (lunch included)
Full-time Students - $33 (no lunch) 3.5 CEUs

Guilt is a major cause of depression, anxiety, paranoia and suicide. This view is not widely held among medical and mental health professionals. Long before the advent of the DSM, Lady Macbeth's guilt-induced decline into mental disorder and suicide dramatically and accurately portrayed the psychological damage that guilt can inflict on the human psyche. While the more common presenting symptoms of anxiety and depression can be extremely painful and dangerous, we bear those feelings more easily and with less threat to ourselves than we can bear our feelings of guilt, felt as indisputable evidence that we are bad, that we have somehow sinned. Guilt and self-esteem cannot compatibly share the same house at the same time.

In this workshop, participants will learn to distinguish the psychological from the religious definition of sin and guilt, and will learn ways to detect guilt's presence, understand its meaning, and assuage its pain.

Lawrence H. Staples is a Jungian analyst and licensed psychoanalyst in private practice in Washington, DC. He has a Ph.D. in psychology, and is a member of NAAP, the American Boards for Accreditation and Certification, IAAP, AGAP, and the Jungian Analysts' Association of the Greater Washington Metropolitan Area. His special areas of interest are the problems of midlife, creativity and guilt. Lawrence's publications include Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Way and The Creative Soul: Art and the Quest for Wholeness.

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
Order your copy right from this blog or at www.fisherkingpress.com
or call +1-831-238-7799.

Amazon.com Widgets

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.

Shattered Bottles and Ragtag Pieces
of Broken Hearts and People

Sometimes I feel like a bottle
That some angry drunk has hurled against a barroom wall
And smashed to smithereens.
And all those once related pieces scatter in a mess of shards
Whose chaos mocks a former wholeness,
Which vanished when it burst and fell.
Some things are, perhaps, worth pasting back together,
Some things, perhaps, are not.
Is it worth it?
That’s hard to answer in the absolute.
It depends on the pair of shoes you’re standing in
Or the pair of eyes you’re looking through.
It depends, quite frankly, on whether you’re the bottle or the shard,
Whether you’re the angry drunk or some sensitive aesthete
Who looked with horror
As exquisite shape and form were suddenly reduced to artless rubble.
Through the bottle’s eyes, yet another ox is gored.
It’s no abstract question of shape or form.
It is something closer still.
It’s a question of being a bottle or of being something else.
Shape or form or beauty mean nothing
When to be or not to be is the crucial question.

And shards, perhaps, would have a different stance.
For a shard, it’s nothing special being connected to a nearby shard.
They’re content to lie in desultory piles
In haughty isolation

That feels no need to touch or clasp adjacent things
To gain some sense of who they are.
A shard’s a shard. And that is that.

And now,
Through Love’s warm eyes appears another view
That has no special ax to grind with drunks or bottles or shards.
Love is love,
An ever-centripetal tendency that will not rest
Till shattered bottles and ragtag pieces of broken hearts and people
Are drawn once again and gathered in the place
Where first they started
And, at last, must dwell again.
Love is a completer of circles.
And with its caring hands picks from the barren f1oor
Each sharp but scraggly splinter,
And searches insistently for the neighboring pieces,
Which it patiently fits and joins till the puzzle is once again complete,
Even if it take to eternity.

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
Order your copy right from this blog or at www.fisherkingpress.com
or call +1-831-238-7799.

Amazon.com Widgets

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.

Also 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
Order your copy right from this blog or at www.fisherkingpress.com
or call +1-831-238-7799.

Amazon.com Widgets

Guilt: Revised

noreply@blogger.com (Fisher King) — 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:

“She did not sin, nor was she wracked with guilt. Society was wrong.”

“Sin is too subjective to standardize guilt and shame as he’s done so far.”

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 (Fisher King) — 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 at www.fisherkingpress.com or call +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 (Fisher King) — 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 at www.fisherkingpress.com or 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.

Lawrence Staples is the author of the recently published

Guilt with a Twist

Click this button to order your copy!

Lecture & Workshop on 'Guilt' St. Louis, MO

noreply@blogger.com (Fisher King) — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 02:29:00 +0000

by LAWRENCE STAPLES, MBA, Ph.D.
“Guilt With a Twist: The Promethean Way”

LECTURE:
Friday, April 24, 2009 7:00 - 9:30 P.M.
First Congregational Church UCC, St. Louis, MO
Fee: Friends - $15 Others - $20
Full-time Students - $10 2 CEUs

This lecture presents an unconventional view of the role of sin and guilt in our lives. In common parlance, the words “good” and “guilt” do not belong together. Personal and clinical experience, however, have repeatedly confirmed for Dr. Staples the useful role that sin and guilt can play in our psychological development. Examples might include divorces, giving up family-approved careers, or expressing qualities previously rejected as unacceptable, such as selfishness or the contra-sexual side of ourselves. Dr Staples concludes we MUST eat forbidden fruit and bear guilt if we are to grow and reach our full potential.

“Dealing With Guilt's Contradictions”
WORKSHOP:
Saturday, April 25, 2009 9:00 A.M. - 1:00 P.M.,
First Congregational Church UCC, St. Louis, MO
Fee: Friends - $55 Others - $65 (lunch included)
Full-time Students - $33 (no lunch) 3.5 CEUs

Guilt is a major cause of depression, anxiety, paranoia and suicide. This view is not widely held among medical and mental health professionals. Long before the advent of the DSM, Lady Macbeth's guilt-induced decline into mental disorder and suicide dramatically and accurately portrayed the psychological damage that guilt can inflict on the human psyche. While the more common presenting symptoms of anxiety and depression can be extremely painful and dangerous, we bear those feelings more easily and with less threat to ourselves than we can bear our feelings of guilt, felt as indisputable evidence that we are bad, that we have somehow sinned. Guilt and self-esteem cannot compatibly share the same house at the same time.

In this workshop, participants will learn to distinguish the psychological from the religious definition of sin and guilt, and will learn ways to detect guilt's presence, understand its meaning, and assuage its pain.

Lawrence H. Staples is a Jungian analyst and licensed psychoanalyst in private practice in Washington, DC. He has a Ph.D. in psychology, and is a member of NAAP, the American Boards for Accreditation and Certification, IAAP, AGAP, and the Jungian Analysts' Association of the Greater Washington Metropolitan Area. His special areas of interest are the problems of midlife, creativity and guilt. Lawrence's publications include Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Way and The Creative Soul: Art and the Quest for Wholeness.

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
Order your copy right from this blog or at www.fisherkingpress.com
or call +1-831-238-7799.

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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.

Lawrence Staples is the author of the recently published

Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Way

Click this button to order your copy!

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.

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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!!

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

Learn more about Lawrence Staples and his recently published book Guilt with a Twist at GoodGuilt.com. Fisher King books are available directly from Fisher King Press.

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 book Guilt with a Twist 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. Learn more about Lawrence Staples and his recently published book Guilt with a Twist at GoodGuilt.com

Fisher King books are available directly from Fisher King Press.

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

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. Learn more about Lawrence Staples and his recently published book Guilt with a Twist at GoodGuilt.com

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. Learn more about Lawrence Staples and his recently published book Guilt with a Twist at GoodGuilt.com

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

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.

Lawrence Staples is the author of the recently published
Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Way

SOME PREREQUISITES OF THE CREATIVE PROCESS

noreply@blogger.com (Guilt with a Twist) — Fri, 09 May 2008 22:51:00 +0000

by Lawrence H. Staples

author of The Creative Soul
and Guilt with a Twist

There are a number of prerequisites for the creative process to begin. One is a gap, a void or empty space, which myth tells us preceded the creation of the world. The womb is an empty space. So is a blank page or canvas. Another is an impregnating seed. The impregnating seed can be provided by intention or conscious will. This seed can be an opening sentence, as in Dinesen’s case, or it may be a single word or a color or brush mark suggested by imagination or by a dream, or fantasy. At the moment of conception, the artist’s unconscious is the womb, the creative matrix, into which the impregnating seed has fallen.

Receptivity to the seed is a feminine principle found in all writers and artists. The principle by no means demands a specific sexual orientation; but without question it involves a psychological orientation. Erich Neumann, the great second-generation Jungian analyst and writer, explains this in his book, Art and the Creative Unconscious. He noted that “In the creative man, this feminine principle [of receptivity], which in the.. adult man becomes discernible as an anima, is usually associated with the image of the maternal.” The importance of the mother archetype to the creative man leads to an enormous tension with the world of the fathers. In the artist, this tension can only be relieved by creative production. In his work, he must “slay the father, dethrone the conventional world of the traditional Canon” and find a new synthesis. It requires an integration of his shadow and ego. In opposition to the demands of patriarchal dogma, the creative man honors his wholeness by bearing the tension of the opposites until “a third can be born which transcends… the opposites and so combines parts of both positions into an unknown, new creation. The result takes the form of a new symbol, which contains the opposites and yet is neither.”

Psychic tension is at its highest just at the moment preceding creation, just as we experience at the moment of orgasm. That is the point at which the old forms and structures have been let go and the new are about to be grasped. It occurs in this gap between the old synthesis and the new one. As mentioned before, creation occurs at what students of creativity call a turning point, the moment of creation in which something old dies and something new is born.

As Neumann points out, it is the unbearable tension between the opposites that creativity discharges. It is this tension of opposites that the artist’s creative production relieves. But the conflict returns again and again and he must produce again and again to find temporary relief and retain his sanity. In creative people, the failure to do creative work will lead to suicidal fantasies. The fantasies represent the wish to escape the unbearable tension that persists.

Still, artists sometimes fail to see the truth that the tension can be relieved only by their own work, instead of addictive behaviors. It never works. If the creative urge is ignored or if it is relieved by substitutes, it will destroy them.

If America reaches the point where it needs profound, fundamental change, it will come from creative people who can bring feminine/maternal values and perspectives to bear and that will combine with the masculine/paternal to bring a new vision, just as outsiders like Galileo, Copernicus, Darwin, and others did.

Lawrence Staples is the author of the recently published
Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Way

Creativity, Guilt, & Psychological Development

noreply@blogger.com (Guilt with a Twist) — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 05:02:00 +0000

by Lawrence H. Staples
author of Guilt with a Twist

There is a creative urge within us that is even deeper than the urge to create a baby or a book or a symphony. It is the urge to create and build our personality until we become who we most deeply are, who we are supposed to be. It is the urge toward wholeness.

Completing the building of our personality requires us to integrate into our conscious personality contents that for half a lifetime may have been anathema to us. It means embracing contents that are the opposite of what is conventionally acceptable to society, our parents, and ourselves.

THE PROBLEM OF THE OPPOSITES

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.” 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. Consciousness itself depends on the existence of polar opposites. These are basic to the architecture and anatomy of the psyche. The flow of psychic energy is similar to the flow of electricity. It is based on the same principle. The flow is between polar opposites, negative and positive. If psychic energy does not flow, we are “brain dead”. Our body may be alive but we do not know it. Guilt causes us to divide our psychic world into pairs of opposites based upon their imputed values of relative goodness or badness. Because guilt is behind the formation of the opposites, guilt is also behind the formation of consciousness. Guilt, therefore, is a price we pay for our consciousness. The relationship between guilt and consciousness is embedded in the Biblical story of the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve, tempted by the serpent, eat of the tree of knowledge and become capable of distinguishing between good and evil. Consciousness is this capacity to differentiate. The eating of the forbidden fruit is the mythical basis for this consciousness. We lose our paradisiacal innocence when we become aware of the 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. We suffer for this capacity.

THE CREATIVE INSTINCT

Fortunately, there is a powerful tool that can help us integrate these unacceptable 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; nothing is left out. But a colossal lie stands in the way of achieving this totality. The lie 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). In Tosca, we see Scarpia, on his knees, praying in church, while leering lustfully at Tosca. In the movie, Crash, 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, Lawrence risks his life to save a man who he deliberately kills shortly thereafter. In A Civil Action, 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.

Lawrence Staples is the author of the recently published
Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Way

ABOUT GUILT WITH A TWIST: THE PROMETHEAN WAY

noreply@blogger.com (Guilt with a Twist) — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 03:02:00 +0000

by Lawrence H. Staples

We have to sin and incur guilt if we are to grow and reach our full potential. That’s the central message of this book. It is a message that 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.

The conventional view of guilt is that it helps us remain “good”. Guilt keeps us within boundaries deemed acceptable. It helps us resist doing things that would disturb or harm our individual and collective interests. It can remind us of the apology we should make to help repair a harm we may have done. This conventional view of guilt has an important role in the maintenance of conventional life.

The conventional view, important as it is, also creates an enormous problem. It can deter us from being “bad” when that is exactly what is needed. While the conventional view is part of the truth, it is not the whole truth. The meaning of sin and guilt is far more complicated.

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. If, however, individuals could sin and not suffer painful guilt for their sins, they might well just be selfish beings that refuse to share their gifts with the community. They might keep the fire for themselves.

In order to understand and appreciate fully the potential effect of guilt on the development of our lives, we have to examine guilt as a psychological experience, which touches us much more broadly than the ecclesiastical or legal experience of guilt. Guilt is the only feeling that is palpably experienced by us as indisputable evidence that we have done something “bad”, that we have somehow sinned. However, we can feel guilty about a wide range of behaviors that do not fit what is commonly defined as sin. Although some may try to define sin as breaking only those rules prescribed by religion, our experience in life asserts that that is not so. Intellectually, we may make a distinction between ecclesiastical and secular rules and laws, but emotionally we experience them as the same. That is, our visceral feeling of guilt when breaking a religious rule can be just like our feeling of guilt from breaking a secular rule. We feel we have done something bad after violating either one. At some deep level, it appears the psyche links violations of any authority—divine, secular or parental—to the feeling of guilt. This is probably because parents in our infancy are the first authority figures we encounter. They are also our first image of God. We are challenged to distinguish between “sins” against parents and sins against God.

We are led, therefore, to a psychological definition of sin that cuts a much broader swath than the conventional one. In my book, “sin” and the guilt that goes with it refers to anything that makes us feel we are worthless or bad. This goes far beyond the violation of canonical rules, admonitions of the church, or even secular laws.

When we look at sin and guilt (or shame) in this broader way, the way we actually experience them psychologically, we can see how they can be such a powerful deterrent to human development. Much that is needed to live life fully is forbidden. Collectively shared beliefs of what is right and wrong, as well as widely varying individual beliefs of parents and other authority figures, present us with an enormous moral minefield that must be traversed. It is a field that is fraught with the potential to wound us, sometimes grievously, at every step. There is no single touchstone of orthodoxy that we can all embrace. The meaning of sin 100 years ago is considerably different from the meaning of sin today. People today often claim to be more liberated, but it is likely that their liberation is illusory. While the specific items in their list of sins may be different from 100 years ago, the list is still huge.

As the myth of Prometheus demonstrates, there can be an upside to the sins and the consequent guilt we suffer when we violate conventional boundaries. I began to notice this in the lives of many “sinners” whom we now call great. They are luminous models for the idea that some guilt may actually be Good Guilt. Their “sins” produced a lot of good for the societies in which they lived and, sometimes, for the entire world. A short list would include Joan of Arc, Mahatma Gandhi, Socrates, Copernicus, Galileo, Martin Luther King, Alfred Kinsey, Betty Friedan, Darwin, Solzhenitsyn, Susan B.Anthony, and other audacious people who pushed themselves far outside conventional fences. Life is clearly full of examples of “bad” people giving something good to society. But they suffered terribly for their “sins”. So did many lesser lights whose individual contributions to society were less dramatic but whose good may be quite extraordinary. Whether we are poets or cobblers, we will contribute the most to society if we commit the sins and bear the guilt necessary to develop ourselves as fully as we can.

The contribution virtue can make to society must be acknowledged. There indeed are sins that are destructive; there also are sins that benefit. There are many books about the need to remain upright; Guilt with a Twist is about the need to sin. One reason for writing this book is to comfort us in the “sins” we inevitably need to commit in pursuit of personal growth.

A real life human example of good guilt is Rosa Parks. An editorial in the Washington Post printed a tribute to Rosa Parks, stating, “She had no army behind her. The law was against her. Only a few people knew her name. But Rosa Parks’ individual act of courage and determination on December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, ultimately changed a way of life.” On that day she was on a bus and was asked to yield her seat to a white man. With unsurpassed dignity she replied simply and eloquently: “I’m a lady and I would like to remain in my seat, please.” These words were a shot heard round the world for the civil rights movement.

Initially, “A Montgomery court found her guilty. Local and state leaders in Alabama … moved heaven and earth to keep segregation laws on the books. Mrs. Parks was rewarded with telephoned death threats and fire bombings of her supporters’ houses. She and her husband lost their jobs.” In the end her defiance of the community’s mores helped bring great changes, but at a high price, as the dominant powers of the community deemed her “bad.” From these contributions alone, we could conclude that “sin” can be accompanied by positive value. Rosa Parks gave us grounds for hope that we too can act in the face of overwhelming odds. By honoring her feelings and needs she helped fulfill the collective needs of millions.

Published by and available directly from Fisher King Press ISBN 13: 978-0-9776076-4-8 / ISBN 10: 0-9776076-4-X, Publication Date: Spring–2008, Price: $25.00. To order your copy click the link below or call 1-800-228-9316. International orders call: 00-1-831-238-7799

Click the following link to order Lawrence Staples' recently published
Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Way

Good Guilt. . . WHAT IS GOOD GUILT?

noreply@blogger.com (Guilt with a Twist) — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 02:59:00 +0000

by Lawrence H. Staples

Good Guilt is the guilt we incur for the sins we need to commit, if we are to grow and fulfill ourselves. This paradoxical “twist” to the conventional meaning of guilt is the seminal idea behind my soon to be published book, Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Way.

In common parlance, the words “good” and “guilt” don’t belong together. They appear to be contradictory. Personal and clinical experience, however, has repeatedly confirmed for me the useful role of sin and guilt in personal and psychological development. I began to notice 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 life. 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 selfishness or the contra-sexual sides of ourselves. Later in life we may look at guilt thus incurred in a different light.

Published by and available directly from Fisher King Press ISBN 13: 978-0-9776076-4-8 / ISBN 10: 0-9776076-4-X, Publication Date: Spring–2008, Price: $25.00. To order your copy click on the 'Add to Cart' button below or call 1-800-228-9316. International orders call: 00-1-831-238-7799

Click the button below to order : Guilt with a Twist

Fisher King Press to publish "Guilt with a Twist" by Lawrence H. Staples

noreply@blogger.com (Guilt with a Twist) — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 02:17:00 +0000

We don’t have to read books to learn a great deal about guilt. It seeps in through our pores, our eyes and our ears. Not a word has to be spoken. We can remember 'that look' we got from our elders and the shock waves of humiliation and pain that suffused our minds and bodies. It would have been easier and less painful if we could have learned it all by just reading. The reading comes later when we are trying to understand and comfort the pain.

A refreshingly unconventional look at the role of sin and guilt in our lives, Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Way is the result of more than twenty years of thought and writing. It is also the result of many years of clinical work by a 76 year-old psychoanalyst who is still practicing. Lawrence Staples concludes that we must eat forbidden fruit and bear guilt if we are to grow and achieve our full potential. His unorthodox view has the potential not only to change the way we look at guilt but also to soften its effects and heal us.

The conventional view of guilt is that it helps us remain “good.” It helps us resist doing things that would disturb or harm our individual and collective interests. This view of guilt has an important role in the maintenance of conventional life. Yet, the conventional view, important as it is, also creates an enormous problem. It can deter us from being “bad” when that is exactly what is needed. The contribution virtue can make to society must be acknowledged. There indeed are sins that are destructive; there also are sins that benefit. While the conventional view is part of the truth, it is not the whole truth. The meaning of sin and guilt is far more complicated.

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. He is now a licensed psychoanalyst (Jungian) in private practice in Washington, DC. Lawrence has a Ph.D. in psychology; his special areas of interest are the problems of mid-life, guilt, and creativity.

Published by and available f directly from Fisher King Press ISBN 13: 978-0-9776076-4-8 / ISBN 10: 0-9776076-4-X, Publication Date: Spring–2008, Price: $25.00. To order your copy in advance click on the 'Add to Cart' button below or call 1-800-228-9316. International orders call: 00-1-831-238-7799

Click the button below to order : Guilt with a Twist