I sacrificed myself! Recently, I had an awful realisation…

Two years ago I started a business with great enthusiasm. All my plans looked great on paper, but the business took on a life of its own. I had started to feel like I was a part of the machine. With horror, I realised that one huge component was missing… my writing. And ultimately it was too late to work it in. If you are a writer, like me who identifies with sacrificing yourself for work or life, please subscribe and help me realign to my true purpose, writing.

(Image: Edvard Munch (1863-1944), The Scream, 1895. Courtesy: The British Museum; photograph: Thomas Widerberg)

So today, I analyse my own journey, this time through the lens of psychoanalysis with a little help from Freud, Jung, Winnicott, and Munch, as he explains the horror of my realisation better than I can.

Throughout the ages, philosophers, poets and academics have written on the advice of the Delphic oracle: 'Know thyself'.  It was in cartesian philosophy that the idea of the mind originated.  By 1900 four functions of the unconscious had been described.  Ellenberger, in his book The Discovery of the Unconscious, states that these functions were conservative, dissolutive, mythopoetic, and creative.  Conservative was where the unconscious stores memories, often inaccessible to voluntary recall.  Dissolutive, here the unconscious contains habits, once voluntary, now automatised, and dissociated elements of the personality, which may lead to a ‘parasitic existence’.  Mythopoetic was when the unconscious constructs narratives and fantasies that appear mythic or religious in nature.  And creative, where the unconscious serves as the matrix of new ideas.  Modern psychology views the mind as having many compartments that work both independently and holistically. 

(Image: Edvard Munch (1863-1944), Golgotha, 1900. Courtesy: Munchmuseet, Oslo.)

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) saw humans as pleasure-seekers who blindly seek gratification. This is similar to the ideas of Thomas Hobbes, a 17th-century philosopher, who saw humans as savage beasts, living in a state of nature, where the natural impulses are to murder, rape and pillage – in ‘a war of all against all’.  In his book Leviathan (1651) Hobbes wrote that a social contract had to be created to keep people obedient within the terms of law.  Freud, the grandfather of psychoanalysis, thought that the mind has its own laws and is structured in order to repress drives and basic instincts that are unacceptable to the rational mind.  Freud was among the first to put together a coherent construction of the unconscious.  Following his mentor, Josef Breuer (1842-1925), Freud posits that the way you look at the world is an unconscious process.  He questioned us knowing our own mind because we are so full of internal conflict and contradictions.  Freud was an adherent of the ‘psychiker’ – the pathology of belief in mental disorders. This means that symptoms of neurosis and other mental health conditions were psychogenic for Freud - the results of psychological rather than biological causes.  Freud labelled our internal drives as the id, ego and superego.  The focus on sex and aggressive impulses (Eros and Thanatos) - that your anger or sex drive could take over you - is a Freudian idea.  For this reason, Freud believed that we were never really in control of our body and mind.   Therefore: ‘I am not entirely myself.’

Freuds used a topographical model of an iceberg to show the structure and function of the mind.  This model uses three levels to display that a large amount of our experience lies deep within the unconscious.  We are only conscious of a small percentage of our thoughts, experiences, memories, and emotions.  The conscious mind facilitates our thoughts and awareness of the present moment and those of the very recent past.  This level of consciousness is easily accessible to us.  Freud signified this as the tip of the iceberg that lies above water level in the iceberg model.  Just under water level is our preconscious where thoughts remain until they 'succeed in attracting the eye of the conscious'.  These elements of knowing may not be immediately available but are there when they need to be recalled.  As some areas of memory are stronger than others, the preconscious holds the names of people we knew as children or maths equations that we do not use on a regular basis but know, for example.   Underneath the preconscious mind is the largest area of the topographical model: the unconscious.  For Freud, the unconscious mind is the primary source of human behaviour.  The unconscious mind is where our drives for survival (id), instinct and all of our deepest repressed memories are held.  Everything that we have ever seen, heard or experienced is taken in and filed into our unconscious mind.  However, we do not have free and easy access to the unconscious mind, yet it influences human judgement, instincts and behaviour.  For this reason, Freud believed that we do not have free will, nor shall we ever fully know ourselves. 

(Image:Edvard Munch (1863-1944), Towards the Forest II,1897/1915. Courtesy: Munchmuseet, Oslo)

In 1912 Carl G. Jung (1875 - 1961) replaced Freud’s concept of sex and aggression impulses with a much broader concept of undifferentiated psychic energy.  While Freud believed that talk could cure, for Jung the purpose of life was ‘individuation’.  Individuation involves pursuing one’s own vision of the truth.  Jung used the word Psyche (the total personality) when referring to the mind.  The Psyche comprises of 3 main realms: consciousness, personal unconscious and the collective unconscious.  Jung was more positive in his approach than Freud, believing that you heal because of who you are more than what you know or what you’ve been thought.  Jung (1944) said ‘the self is not only the centre, but also the whole circumference which embraces both consciousness and unconsciousness; it is the centre of the totality, just as the ego is the centre of the conscious mind’.

Analytic depth psychology as initially developed by Carl Jung refers to the human psychic as a self-regulating system in which symbols are considered products of the unconscious. Symbols are a bridge linking our conscious mind with the unconscious. Taking time to investigate the inherent symbolic meaning leads to healthier psychological integration and regulation. Jung believed in the importance of individual creative expression. He developed a method of working with patients using their paintings as well as dreams in helping them to release their own kind of creative potential into their lives at the same time increasing his own insights. Jung goes further to say that it is possible to access the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious contains all living memory among all human beings for all of time. Instincts and ideas inherited from our ancestors are also held within the collective unconscious. Jung felt that human communication through symbols and stories that contain metaphor is the collective unconscious at work. Jung formulated this concept into his theory of archetypes. Comparative mythology, pioneered by Joseph Campbell, looks at the mythology of cultures. In cultures where the mythological is symbolised in stories and art that are similar, even where there was no previous interaction, are a product of the collective unconscious.

The unconscious can provide us with not only insights into our personal unconscious but into the psychic DNA of humanity. Jung explained:

‘From the unconscious there emanate determining influences... which, independently of tradition, guarantee in every single individual a similarity and even a sameness of experience, and also of the way it is represented imaginatively.’

Thomas T. Lawson, Carl Jung, Darwin of the Mind, (2018)

‘For the sake of mental stability and even physiological health, the unconscious and the conscious must be integrally connected and thus move on parallel lines. If they are split apart or “dissociated”, psychological disturbance follows,’ Jung states in 1964. Since the natural gradient of the psyche is towards wholeness, the self will attempt to push the neglected part forward for recognition. ‘One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious,’ Jung posited. This process of the psyche's ability to selfheal appears to be able to bypass consciousness and be delivered as creative expression. Many people whilst creating have said that they see things as a whole.

Coleridge’s famous poem Kubla Khan supposedly came to him in its entirety as a prolonged visual image.  The unconscious mind can be accessed through meditative, dream-like states.  Relaxed and calm creativity or play allows for unconscious symbols and thoughts to bubble up from deep within the mind.  Intuition and instinct are important in trusting and allowing the integration of the unconscious.  Jung worked on his own creativity through art and play.  His work was based on emotional processes as he could never understand why making art would be pushed like a classical study in academia.   Since the enlightenment, it is often believed that any ’proper’ work must be born in seriousness.  But ‘the debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable’, Jung stressed, as without playing with fantasy, no creative work is born. 

Albert Einstein said he rarely thought in words, rather, he worked on his ideas in terms of ‘more or less clear images which can’t be ‘voluntarily’ reproduced and combined…'. 

Einstein in a letter to fellow mathematician Jacques Hadamard.

Creativity, play and fantasy are necessary for bringing the darkness to light, thus forth individuation is also referred to as authenticity or true self.  Following in Jung’s footsteps Donald Winnicott (1896 – 1971) also believed that creativity and play are necessary for the emotional and psychological promotion of a true self.  Winnicott tells us that ‘poets, philosophers and seers have always concerned themselves with the idea of a true self, and the betrayal of the self has been a typical example of the unacceptable.’ Winnicott is referring to the repression of creative exploration that leads to the true self in adulthood.  For Winnicott, the true self is the source of one’s spontaneous and creative energies, the sort of which are abundant in children at play.  The reason for this is that when people engage in hobbies, humour and creative play or genuine discovery - they feel real, spontaneous and alive.  He states: ‘only the True Self can be creative and the True Self can feel real.’

This True Self needs encouragement and development from the earliest onset as a child all the way up and through what Winnicott referred to as: ‘the abstractions of politics and economics and philosophy and culture...this 'third area', that of cultural experience which is a derivative of play.’

Although it is now believed through discoveries in neurocognitive psychology that the mind stores memories and experiences outside of automatic recall for the purpose of efficiency rather than repression.  Memory is held in the body on a cellular level and in our DNA.  This means that Jung was correct in believing that we are influenced not only by our culture but also by the vast web of human experience through all epochs.  When an emotionally charged memory becomes ‘stuck’ in the body, symptoms may appear as biological.  However, with the separation of body, heart and mind, in medical terms, the illness is treated as biological. 

In psychoanalysis, including Analytical Depth Psychology as initiated by Jung, illness is treated as a symptom of the personal unconscious or perhaps even influenced by the collective unconscious. The body has a natural ability to heal, and it should be done holistically, considering both body and mind. Creativity and play are not mere fantasies but a need for human growth, development and regulation throughout one’s lifetime. Artists often speak about creative flow. This occurs when one’s heart and mind are coherent, working together as a whole unit. It is possible to achieve creative flow when there is a heightened interest in the activity they are undertaking. Calm and somewhat focused preoccupation in even everyday tasks can allow for random thoughts to spring up from the unconscious and be released through the activity. This doesn't have to be a complicated procedure, but can be achieved through hobbies, conversation, art, music, play etc. There is no need to be consciously aware of the process, as we are self-regulating and constantly integrating new states of energy and being.

Life is for living - in the present.  It is by being fully in the present that creative flow can be accomplished.  Where psychoanalysis can assist people is in providing a safe space to another human in order to properly access and process painful and difficult memories that have become blocked or trapped in the body.   It is up to an experienced psychoanalyst to decide if Freudian talk therapy or creative processes work best for the individual client.  As every human is different, unfortunately, there is no one size fits all.  The only prescription that can be given is the encouragement to explore one's own path, it's never too late. 

(Image: Edvard Munch (1863-1944), The Sun 1910-1911 (The Oslo University Mural))

If life has no time for play, imagination, or creativity, it becomes dull and stale, leading to disease of body and mind. We may never be entirely ourselves, as we are under incredible influence in society to be this and buy that. We are surrounded by media and events that use psychology to entice our unconscious drives into action. In this writing, we have reviewed the development of theories of the unconscious from its modern beginnings in Breuer and Freud. How Jung expanded and developed these theories to include the collective unconscious and the archetypes were discussed. Also, Winnicott's emphasis on play and spontaneous creative energies in developing our True Self, another word for individuation. In order for us to develop and grow we essentially need to partake in creativity, imagination, and play on a regular basis, perhaps even finding a space to allow the renewal of this energy daily.