The whole truth

In broad terms, everything a writer or any other creative artist needs to know about the psyche can be stated in a pair of linked propositions:

  1. Your psyche – your entire inner world of thoughts, memories, emotions, drives, etc. – is comprised of two major levels, the conscious and unconscious minds, each of which plays its own discrete and proper role in the creative act.
  2. Your best gambit is to regard the unconscious mind as a separate presence, a personified entity with which you work in collaboration.

And that’s it. That’s the whole truth in a bullet-pointed nutshell. What follows is just elaboration.

The ghost in the attic

Through a dozen years of writing for publication and pursuing another major artistic tangent (music) on the side, I’ve learned that a working knowledge of the psyche – how it’s composed, how it operates – is indispensable to creative success.

Obviously, I’m not alone in this. Every successful creator knows something about basic psychological reality. But not all of this knowledge is equal. Some know it only intuitively. Others know it consciously. Some of the greatest writers and artists in history have let the deep psychology of their creative activity remain perpetually vague. This is perfectly fine; there’s something to be said for deliberately embracing an attitude of mystery when it comes to such subtle and profound matters. Consider, for example, Lewis Thomas’s fine words in his essay about the virtues of abandoning psychotherapy in favor of voluntarily repressing our psychic contents:

It has been one of the great errors of our time that to think that by thinking about thinking, and then talking about it, we could possibly straighten out and tidy up our minds. There is no delusion more damaging than to get the idea in your head that you understand the functioning of your own brain. Once you acquire such a notion, you run the danger of moving in to take charge, guiding your thoughts, shepherding your mind from place to place, controlling it, making lists of regulations. The human mind is not meant to be governed, certainly not by any book of rules yet written; it is supposed to run itself, and we are obliged to follow it along, trying to keep up with it as best we can. It is all very well to be aware of your awareness, even proud of it, but never try to operate it. You are not up to the job.

. . . . We might, by this way [i.e., by deliberately hiding from ourselves a portion of our psyches], regain the kind of spontaneity and zest for ideas, things popping into the mind, uncontrollable and ungovernable thoughts, the feel that this notion is somehow connected unaccountably with that one.

– Lewis Thomas, “The Attic of the Brain,” in Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony (1983)

But notwithstanding Thomas’s penetrating and welcome point, for my money a conscious understanding of creative psychology is the most reliable way to grow your ability to negotiate between your two minds and thus achieve maximum vitality in your art.

And then there’s the fact that in this matter, unlike in most others, you can have your cake and eat it, too. You don’t have to worry that a conscious knowledge of your psychological makeup will destroy the mystery that tantalizes and drives you on, because the second of the two major points stated at the beginning of this essay plunges such knowledge back into mystery. The trick of personifying your unconscious self, of regarding it as your muse, daimon, or personal genius — see “A Brief History of the Daimon (and the Genius)” for clarification here — accomplishes the signal feat of combining knowledge with mystery. By means of it one can understand the psyche and still gain the inestimable benefits of the inner vitality and spontaneity of thought that Lewis rightly cherishes. This fruitful paradox is built into the very concept of the “demon muse” under whose shadow and moniker we are gathered here.

Ray Bradbury, who in addition to being a bona fide living legend is one of the most openly and passionately muse-based writers around, spoke directly of this potent fusion of knowledge and mystery in a 2004 interview he granted to Fox News:

Foxnews.com: How did you come up with the images of Mars and Martians that are so vivid in “The Martian Chronicles” and your other works?

Bradbury: Well, you either have an imaginative mind or you don’t. All of my writing is God-given. I don’t write my stories — they write themselves. So out of my imagination, I create these wonderful things, and I look at them and say, My God, did I write that?

Foxnews.com: So they all just came to you? You can’t explain it?

Bradbury: Everything comes to me. Everything is my demon muse. I have a muse which whispers in my ear and says, “Do this, do that,” but it’s my demon who provokes me.

– “An Interview with Sci-Fi Legend Ray Bradbury,” November 23, 2004

Conscious and unconscious: “you” and your inner alien

Enough with the preamble. What exactly do we mean by “conscious” and “unconscious”? It behooves us to avoid a smug certainty that we already know what we’re talking about here. The epochal influence of Freudian psychology in the early 20th century made psychoanalytical terminology a regular part of common public discourse even as the popular meanings of such terms were watered down, sometimes to the point of rendering them virtually meaningless. A reflexive certainty that we already know what’s entailed by “conscious” and “unconscious” can stand in the way of learning something useful. As Alexander Pope remarked, “Some people will never learn anything, for this reason, because they understand everything too soon.”

So, to begin with a definition:

The conscious mind, in the simplest possible terms, is what you mean when you say “I.” The psychoanalytic term for it, which also happens to be the term adopted by various nondual spiritual teachers (e.g., Eckhart Tolle), which is also the term I’ll regularly use here, is the ego. The ego or “I” is your wakefulness, your awareness, your subjectivity, the mental space in which you’re aware of your own thoughts and emotions and the external world around you. When you engage in rational thought, that’s the conscious mind. When you perceive the sights and sounds around you, that’s the conscious mind. When you recall a memory, you do so in the conscious mind. When you feel an emotion, you feel it in the conscious mind.

To call the conscious mind the ego or “I”-self is to express a crucial truth about it, namely, that we’re apparently hardwired to feel that the boundary of our conscious mind is the boundary of who and what we are. In the course of growing up you learn to make the distinction between “in here” — the space of your conscious mind — and “out there” — the world you perceive as external. (Tangentially, you might note the interesting fact that your physical body occupies the second category.) From then on, you conceive and perceive yourself as a subjective presence in an external environment that is “not you,” an environment that acts upon you, and upon which you can act. This is all common knowledge.

What’s less readily acknowledged by many of us, even in our supposedly hip and intellectually enlightened age, is that the boundary that has been erected between “me” and “not me” by the time each of us achieves a recognizable personality in childhood also extends into the mind itself. The ego self that you sense as your sole identity is confronted by something that it perceives as other, as “not me,” not only externally but internally — from behind, so to speak — in the form of the unconscious mind.

This can’t be stressed too strongly. We all “know,” as a matter of pop psychological wisdom, that we have an unconscious mind. It’s the stuff of TV sitcoms and self-help books. But the penetrating reality of it is something much more profound, because in a very real sense it’s just as true to say that your unconscious mind has you. A major portion of your full identity lies outside your conscious grasp. “You” don’t stop at the boundary of your conscious sense of self.

Your unconscious is “mind stuff,” a portion of your mental self or psyche, that has been walled off from who you feel yourself to be, and that now feels rather like an alien presence.

Forget the quaint amusements of Freudian slips and all that. This is a revolutionary revelation on a deep life level. Your unconscious is “mind stuff,” a portion of your mental self or psyche, that has been walled off from who you feel yourself to be, and that now feels rather like an alien presence. Only its alienness is far more singular and uncanny than that of the external world, for it is an inner alienness, a sense of otherness within your very self. How many presences are looking out from behind your eyes right now? Answer: at least two.

The more you dwell on it, the more bizarre and unsettling it seems. And yet it’s a foundational fact of human selfhood: yours, mine, everybody’s.

Compounded weirdness

To add weirdness to bizarrity, and to extend the whole thing into realms dwarfing and encompassing the issue of artistic creativity, consider the words of Patrick Harpur, author of the the piercingly brilliant book Daimonic Reality, as he explains the reference in the book’s title to the redoubtable Dr. Snake in a 1999 interview:

[Daimonic reality is] an intermediate world, or reality, between what we think of as the material world and what we have traditionally called the spiritual world. Daimonic reality is like the unconscious, but daimonic reality came before the unconscious. The unconscious is a recent model of daimonic reality, which we’ve placed inside us. But, in fact, it is not inside us, any more than it is outside us.

. . . . It was this in-between realm which C.G. Jung re-discovered and called the Collective Unconscious. At first he located it solely inside us but was later forced to recognise that it lay outside us as well. Reality, in other words, is always psychic, lying between us and the world, partly inside, partly outside; partly personal, partly impersonal; partly material, partly immaterial; and so on — a reality which is as ambiguous as the daimons who personify it.

. . . . There’s an inescapable psychological law formulated by Freud that whatever is repressed returns in another guise. This is as true of the daimons in the Soul of the World as it is of our unconscious complexes — those independent fragments of the psyche that Jung called “the little people”! The daimons always come back. There must be a reciprocal relationship between us and them for the health of our souls because, finally, our souls, our psyches, are themselves partly alien. And the aliens, part of us.

– “The author of Daimonic Reality talks aliens, fairies, UFOs and ghosts,” August  17, 1999 (reprinted online February 12, 2010)

Which is all to say that if you begin to dig down and study creativity as a muse-based, daimon-esque phenomenon in which you really, organically experience your unconscious mind as an objective presence accompanying your conscious self, you’ll do well to keep your expectations open and your assumptions soft. Here be dragons.

CONTINUED IN PART 2: Daimonic Creator, Egoic Editor

Image credits:
Spiral staircase: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hinkelstone/ / CC BY 2.0
Iceberg: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pere/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

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  1. A Writer’s Guide to the Psyche, Part 2: Daimonic Creator, Egoic Editor
  2. Getting to Know Your Creative Demon, Part 2
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