Reflecting on certain theoretical precepts last night as I went to sleep has proven fruitful.
Let us just say, that my new insight is based on Anton Ehrenzweig's model of the creative personality -- being one who is capable of willful but temporary developmental regression to an earlier stage of consciousness, to make all things new, as it were. He uses a model that is developed within a certain stream of psychoanalysis, but definitely, he does not use it to define pathology, but creativity.*
But, back to Ehrenzweig. I am interested in his notion that creative types are able to willfully and deliberately move between a stages of consciousness (which were also originally developmental stages) called "paranoid-schizoid" and "depressive".
First: a word of caution. These are highly specialist terms, and do not mean what they may seem to mean. Indeed, they seem to derive from the psychoanalytic tradition of denigrating general humanity. Lacan, for instance, considered nobody at all to be free from pathology: you were either neurotic, psychotic or perverse. Those are the only categories for being in his system of thought.
Although much in psychoanalysis seems very negative, once one has become accustomed to the negativity of its systems, one can look beyond that to find some value in its way of conceptualizing some of the dynamic processes of thought. The state of consciousness that is paranoid-schizoid is only pathological when taken to the extreme, for instance. When it is a mode of thought and being that is used by artistic and creative (including intellectually creative) folks, it involves relating to the world on the basis that one does not really know how it actually is, but only how it seems to be.
This reveals a very fundamental point about how genuinely original thought develops. When I was writing my thesis, I constantly had it in my mind that there were certain ways that things SEEMED TO BE -- which was also perhaps not actually how things actually were.
Actually, I could not let myself state how things were, with any certainty, without working through how things merely "seemed to be". Thesis writing involves a process of working through selective issues with a mode of consciousness that psychoanalysis calls "paranoid-schizoid" (wherein everything seems unsteady, somewhat confusing, and uncertain), up to a point whereby one gains enough certainty in one's views to say, "This is how things are!" (No longer, merely, "this is how they seem to be").
So, the movement from a "paranoid-schizoid" mode of consciousness to one that is "depressive" is, as Anton Ehrenzweig correctly intuited, the means by which new perspectives come into being. (The more mature stage is probably "depressive" because in this state of mind one accepts reality as solid and resistant to change. Of course, this perspective on reality is only a partial truth, but it is the acquiescent state of mind of an adult who realizes that certain practical adjustments must be made, rather than expecting the world to accommodate itself to his ideas.)
The last stage of this consciousness is the sense of the world having been created, of everything finished and completed -- along with a sense that one's perspectives, having been fully expressed and fully formulated, have taken on a certain rigid quality that can't easily be changed. This is the stage of "depressive" consciousness -- which is driven by the need to come to terms with the world (including that "reality" that is the product of one's own inventiveness) on its own terms. One is in the "objective" world of unchangeable 'thinginess" again -- and no longer moving in the workshop of subjective consciousness, wherein everything one touched seemed to be relatively mutable and fluid.
2
There is a rough parallel between writing my thesis, and inventing my life. As my memoir signifies, I have had to work for a long time in a realm of consciousness whereby I was terribly uncertain whether things were actually as they "seemed to be". In relation to my culture, I do not have this sense of uncertainty. I am not divided as how things seem is actually how they are in fundamental ways. In terms of Western culture, that has rarely been the case. Rather, I have nearly always doubted that how things seemed to me were how they were. I've learned to doubt myself through a series of cultural misjudgments.
Of late, my opinions about Western culture have firmed. I am no longer in the paranoid-schizoid realm of uncertainty about it. It now is clear to me that much of the negativity I saw in Western culture was not merely an imaginative derivative of my mind and its processes. Rather, it has become clear that the economic system that has historically developed is abusive to the majority. That is why Westerners often seemed to me to have a very harsh edge to their personalities. From my present vantage position, I can say with certainty that some things not only have the capacity to "seem" a certain way but this is actually how they are.
--
* Jungian personality types are actually based on studying extremist types -- which, by virtue of being extreme are also pathological -- but then conjecturing the psychological dynamics that run in various types of more normal people on this basis.
Let us just say, that my new insight is based on Anton Ehrenzweig's model of the creative personality -- being one who is capable of willful but temporary developmental regression to an earlier stage of consciousness, to make all things new, as it were. He uses a model that is developed within a certain stream of psychoanalysis, but definitely, he does not use it to define pathology, but creativity.*
But, back to Ehrenzweig. I am interested in his notion that creative types are able to willfully and deliberately move between a stages of consciousness (which were also originally developmental stages) called "paranoid-schizoid" and "depressive".
First: a word of caution. These are highly specialist terms, and do not mean what they may seem to mean. Indeed, they seem to derive from the psychoanalytic tradition of denigrating general humanity. Lacan, for instance, considered nobody at all to be free from pathology: you were either neurotic, psychotic or perverse. Those are the only categories for being in his system of thought.
Although much in psychoanalysis seems very negative, once one has become accustomed to the negativity of its systems, one can look beyond that to find some value in its way of conceptualizing some of the dynamic processes of thought. The state of consciousness that is paranoid-schizoid is only pathological when taken to the extreme, for instance. When it is a mode of thought and being that is used by artistic and creative (including intellectually creative) folks, it involves relating to the world on the basis that one does not really know how it actually is, but only how it seems to be.
This reveals a very fundamental point about how genuinely original thought develops. When I was writing my thesis, I constantly had it in my mind that there were certain ways that things SEEMED TO BE -- which was also perhaps not actually how things actually were.
Actually, I could not let myself state how things were, with any certainty, without working through how things merely "seemed to be". Thesis writing involves a process of working through selective issues with a mode of consciousness that psychoanalysis calls "paranoid-schizoid" (wherein everything seems unsteady, somewhat confusing, and uncertain), up to a point whereby one gains enough certainty in one's views to say, "This is how things are!" (No longer, merely, "this is how they seem to be").
So, the movement from a "paranoid-schizoid" mode of consciousness to one that is "depressive" is, as Anton Ehrenzweig correctly intuited, the means by which new perspectives come into being. (The more mature stage is probably "depressive" because in this state of mind one accepts reality as solid and resistant to change. Of course, this perspective on reality is only a partial truth, but it is the acquiescent state of mind of an adult who realizes that certain practical adjustments must be made, rather than expecting the world to accommodate itself to his ideas.)
The last stage of this consciousness is the sense of the world having been created, of everything finished and completed -- along with a sense that one's perspectives, having been fully expressed and fully formulated, have taken on a certain rigid quality that can't easily be changed. This is the stage of "depressive" consciousness -- which is driven by the need to come to terms with the world (including that "reality" that is the product of one's own inventiveness) on its own terms. One is in the "objective" world of unchangeable 'thinginess" again -- and no longer moving in the workshop of subjective consciousness, wherein everything one touched seemed to be relatively mutable and fluid.
2
There is a rough parallel between writing my thesis, and inventing my life. As my memoir signifies, I have had to work for a long time in a realm of consciousness whereby I was terribly uncertain whether things were actually as they "seemed to be". In relation to my culture, I do not have this sense of uncertainty. I am not divided as how things seem is actually how they are in fundamental ways. In terms of Western culture, that has rarely been the case. Rather, I have nearly always doubted that how things seemed to me were how they were. I've learned to doubt myself through a series of cultural misjudgments.
Of late, my opinions about Western culture have firmed. I am no longer in the paranoid-schizoid realm of uncertainty about it. It now is clear to me that much of the negativity I saw in Western culture was not merely an imaginative derivative of my mind and its processes. Rather, it has become clear that the economic system that has historically developed is abusive to the majority. That is why Westerners often seemed to me to have a very harsh edge to their personalities. From my present vantage position, I can say with certainty that some things not only have the capacity to "seem" a certain way but this is actually how they are.
--
* Jungian personality types are actually based on studying extremist types -- which, by virtue of being extreme are also pathological -- but then conjecturing the psychological dynamics that run in various types of more normal people on this basis.
No comments:
Post a Comment