The Virgin With Child
Last quarter of the 13th Century
Pyli, Orikala, Porta-Panagia Church
A wonderful book on identity is Coming Home to Myself by Marion Woodman and Jill Mellick. It's a collection of short, easy-to-read chapters for women about "loving their femininity, themselves and each other" and for men "who are coming to grips with the lost feminine in themselves."
I know that Jung's concept of men's "feminine side" has been spoofed and denigrated into the ground. However, if we can get past what popular culture has made of it, a joke, the concept of anima and animus might open to us a new awareness about the nature of creativity. Jung's idea was that we all possess elements of the opposite sex and that coming to terms with that opposite leads us to insight, even individuation.
In Woodman and Mellick's book is a chapter on creativity. This is some of what they say:
"Some people think of creativity as something that artists possess. It might be more helpful to think of it as Jung did, as an instinct. We can bring creativity to almost every life activity. Moreover, we can use certain imaginative forms of creative expression through the arts to explore personal, spiritual, and psychological development."
Jung believed in the mysterious possibilities of life, in a spiritual life, and in the importance of art in expressing not only our pain but also our joy. I find Jung's philosophy to be much to my liking.
Woodman and Mellick also write:
"Creativity is divine:
the virgin soul opens to spirit
and conceives the divine child.
We cannot live without it.
It is the meaning of life,
this creative fire."
Rationality is but one function of the human mind. Moreover, in my view, true rationality involves a great deal of creativity. Otherwise, we are talking about dogma, not logic.
Woodman and Mellick touch on something I mentioned in an earlier entry about "doing" and "being." I mentioned that my recent Ohio River Journey had given me a shortcut to "being." This is what Woodman and Mellick say:
"When doing is all we know,
being is just another word
for ceasing to exist.
When being begins to flow
through dance and paint and song,
joy is no longer luxury
but absolute need."
I think I enjoy art so much because it puts me in a state of being. Our creation is our own "Divine Child."
6 comments:
"Everybody thinks that I stand by the scientific character of my work and that my principal scope lies in curing mental maladies. This is a terrible error...I am a scientist by neccesity, and not by vocation. I am really an artist by nature."
Sigmund Freud
"...[W]hat Jung called 'the moral obligation' to live out and to express what one has learned in the descent or ascent to the wild Self. This moral obligation he speaks of means to live what we perceive, be it found in the psychic Elysian fields, the isles of the dead, the bone deserts of the psyche, the face of the mountain, the rock of the sea, the lush underworld - anyplace where La Que Sabe breathes upon us, changing us. Our work is to show we have been breathed upon - to show it, give it out, sing it out, to live out in the topside world what we have received through our sudden knowings, from body, from dreams and journeys of all sorts." (p.31)
Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Freud's commitment to plumbing the depths of the unconscious and dreams is not necessarily antithetical to the artist's goal. It is often a shared pursuit.
ggw07@aol.com
What an odd thing for Freud to say! Says Linda Hutcheon:
Freud saw art as a path linking fantasy and reality (16:375-77). But this made art into a kind of alternative to neurosis rather than unrepressed, unconscious sexual drives; the artist "can transform his phantasies into artistic creations instead of into symptoms" (11:50) and by this linking path of art regain contact with reality. Art is social and public; neurosis is asocial and private. Linda Hutcheon
This is a fascinating entry, Theresa. The writers are correct in their assertion that
"the artist 'can transform his phantasies into artistic creations instead of into symptoms' ". However, Freud was speaking philosophically when he spoke of rational thought as the end-state of human evolution. In the real world in which we live, he wrote of sublimation as the sole defensive posture without neurotic implication.
I also strongly support Jung`s notion of Animus-Anima and your discussion of being and doing. Good stuff!
Have you ever read Martin Buber? More good stuff!
V
Vince, please tell me more about sublimation and Freud.
"...joy is no longer luxury
but absolute need."
I have never consider joy as a luxury or a need but as a privledge of experience. Certainately joy is only flavored by the other darker emotions we feel.
Great post.
yes. judi
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