Psychology and Creativity
A crisis may bring about inner growth, enabling one to acquire a more objective perspective on life’s difficulties and to engage more effectively with the problem at hand. This is a personal journey.
Together with the therapist one undertakes this search for inner truth and connectedness. The journey of self-discovery gradually opens up the pattern of one’s deeper life. The connection to this deeper life grows slowly, like a tree, for only swamp plants shoot up overnight.
Creativity and the Inner Other
Jungian depth psychology takes special note of dreams and their messages and aims at restoring the connection to one’s deep symbolical life. Another way of assisting dream work and of entering the dusk space of dreams and understanding one’s own symbolical language, is to develop a conscious relationship to creative work.
Creative work can be an indispensable tool in the process of individuation, assisting the therapeutic relationship.
The creative process, the act of creative expression, starts with creative play and fantasy, our imagination. My approach is based on my own experience with creative play and the unfolding of the creative process in my own life. Jung’s work on active imagination resonates with my own work.
Creativity is the life-force itself, and the whole process of individuation is aimed at the restoration of the relationship to that central creative force at the core of one’s being.
The work that we do in the analytical relationship aims at freeing trapped energy. Developing a conscious relationship to one’s creative work does not mean analysing it intellectually, but learning to relate to the world of images in a meaningful way. A conscious relationship with creative work has the ability to nourish, support and contain the personality.
Jung says in Memories, Dreams, Reflections p 340:
The need for mythic statements is satisfied when we frame a view of the world which adequately explains the meaning of human existence in the cosmos, a view which springs from our psychic wholeness, from the co-operation between conscious and unconscious. Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable – perhaps everything.
