Solitude_A Return to the Self

by Anthony Storr

  Among all my patients in the second half of life – that is to say, over thirty-five – there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life … This of course has nothing whatever to do with a particular creed or membership of a church.11

  Because Freud dismissed religion as an illusion, Freudian analysts have tended to regard such statements as evidence of Jung’s unregenerate obscurantism. However, as the Freudian analyst Charles Rycroft has pointed out,

  there would seem to be no necessary incompatibility between psychoanalysis and those religious formulations which locate God within the self. One could, indeed, argue that Freud’s Id (and even more Groddeck’s It), the impersonal force within winch is both the core of oneself and yet not oneself, and from which in illness one becomes alienated, is a secular formulation of the insight which makes religious people believe in an immanent God.12

  Jung came to specialize in the treatment of middle-aged individuals.

  The clinical material at my disposal is of a peculiar composition: new cases are decidedly in the minority. Most of them already have some form of psychotherapeutic treatment behind them, with partial or negative results. About a third of my cases are not suffering from any clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and aimlessness of their lives. I should not object if this were called the general neurosis of our age. Fully two thirds of my patients are in the second half of life. This peculiar material sets up a special resistance to rational methods of treatment, probably because most of my patients are socially well-adapted individuals, often of outstanding ability, to whom normalization means nothing.13

  The path of self-development upon which such individuals embarked under Jung’s guidance was named by him ‘the process of individuation’. This process tends toward a goal called ‘wholeness’ or ‘integration’: a condition in which the different elements of the psyche, both conscious and unconscious, become welded together in a new unity. Wordsworth describes just such a process in the lines from The Prelude which form the epigraph to this chapter. The person who approaches this goal, which can never be entirely or once and for all time achieved, possesses what Jung called

  an attitude that is beyond the reach of emotional entanglements and violent shocks – a consciousness detached from the world.14

  This new integration is essentially an internal matter; a change in attitude taking place within the psyche of the individual, promoted by the analyst, but not primarily occurring because of the patient’s changing relation with the analyst in the way described earlier when psychotherapy based upon ‘object-relations’ theory was discussed. Indeed, when Jung’s more advanced patients were embarked upon the individuation process, he would encourage them to pursue their quest alone, as he himself had done, only bringing the material of their dreams and visions to him when his especial comment was needed, or when the material appeared particularly obscure.

  Jung encouraged his patients to set aside part of the day for what came to be known as ‘active imagination’. This is a state of reverie, in which judgement is suspended, but consciousness is preserved. The subject is required to note what phantasies occur to him, and then to let these phantasies pursue their own path without conscious intervention. In this way, the subject may be able to rediscover hidden parts of himself as well portray the psychological journey on which he is embarking.

  When I was a psychotherapist in practice, I sometimes adopted an approach derived from this technique with middle-aged patients suffering from depression. Such patients are often people who, because of the demands of their careers and families, have neglected or abandoned pursuits and interests which, at an earlier point in time, gave life zest and meaning. If the patient is encouraged to recall what made life meaningful to him in adolescence, he will begin to rediscover neglected sides of himself, and perhaps turn once again to music, or to painting, or to some other cultural or intellectual pursuit which once enthralled him, but which the pressure of life’s business had made him abandon.

  Persistence with active imagination not only leads to the rediscovery of aspects of the personality which have been neglected, but to a change of attitude in which the subject comes to realize that his own ego or will is no longer paramount, but that he must acknowledge dependence upon an integrating factor which is not of his own making. Jung wrote:

  If the unconscious can be recognized as a co-determining factor along with consciousness, and if we can live in such a way that conscious and unconscious demands are taken into account as far as possible, then the centre of gravity of the total personality shifts its position. It is then no longer in the ego, which is merely the centre of consciousness, but in the hypothetical point between conscious and unconscious. This new centre might be called the Self.15

  Jung describes reaching this point as achieving peace of mind after what may have been long and fruitless struggles. He wrote:

  If you sum up what people tell you about their experiences, you can formulate it this way: They came to themselves, they could accept themselves, they were able to become reconciled to themselves, and thus were reconciled to adverse circumstances and events. This is almost like what used to be expressed by saying: He has made his peace with God, he has sacrificed his own will, he has submitted himself to the will of God.16

  This is not healing through insight, nor through making a new and better relationship with another person, nor even through solving particular problems, but healing by means of an inner change of attitude.

  Jung quotes a letter from a former patient which illustrates the change to which he is referring.

  Out of evil, much good has come to me. By keeping quiet, repressing nothing, remaining attentive, and by accepting reality – taking things as they are, and not as I wanted them to be – by doing all this, unusual knowledge has come to me, and unusual powers as well, such as I could never have imagined before. I always thought that when we accepted things they overpowered us in some way or other. This turns out not to be true at all, and it is only by accepting them that one can assume an attitude towards them. So now I intend to play the game of life, being receptive to whatever comes to me, good and bad, sun and shadow forever alternating, and, in this way, also accepting my own nature with its positive and negative sides. Thus everything becomes more alive to me. What a fool I was! How I tried to force everything to go according to the way I thought it ought to!17

  Something very similar is described by William James:

  The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry, to equanimity, receptivity, and peace, is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of the personal centre of energy, which I have analyzed so often; and the chief wonder of it is that it so often comes about, not by doing, but by simply relaxing and throwing the burden down.18

  The state of mind which these three writers are describing is clearly more than constructive resignation, although it is not identical with the intensity of ecstatic states which are suddenly triggered and usually brief. William James wrote:

  Mystical states cannot be sustained for long. Except in rare instances, half an hour, or at most an hour or two, seems to be the limit beyond which they fade into the light of common day. Often, when faded, their quality can but imperfectly be reproduced in memory; but when they recur it is recognized; and from one recurrence to another it is susceptible of continuous development in what is felt as inner richness and importance.19

  The end-point of individuation shares with ecstatic states the experience of a new unity within, described by Jung as being a new reciprocity between conscious and unconscious. The sense of peace, of reconciliation with Life, of being part of a greater whole, is closely similar. Jung’s concept of the subject accepting dependence upon an integrating factor which is within, but which is not the ego, is paralleled by the more passive attitude of’ waiting upon God’ so often found in the accounts given by the religious mystics.

  In hi
s chapter ‘The Divided Self, William James considers the process of unification.

  It may come gradually, or it may occur abruptly; it may come through altered feelings, or through altered powers of action; or it may come through new intellectual insights, or through experiences which we shall later have to designate as ‘mystical’. However it comes, it brings a characteristic sort of relief; and never such extreme relief as when it is cast into the religious mould … But to find religion is only one out of many ways of reaching unity; and the process of remedying inner incompleteness and reducing inner discord is a general psychological process, which may take place with any sort of mental material, and need not necessarily assume the religious form.20

  Whether or not these experiences of unification occur suddenly or gradually, they are so impressive that they generally seem to leave permanent effects within the mind. However, it would be naive to suppose that people who reach this state of peace maintain it uninterruptedly or for ever. We noted, in Chapter 3, the association of ecstatic states of mind with death. If life is to continue, one cannot linger for ever in a state of oceanic tranquillity. One of the major themes of this book has been that man’s adaptation to the world is the result, paradoxically, of not being perfectly adjusted to the environment, of not being in a state of psychological equilibrium. The ecstatic sense of wholeness is bound to be transient because it has no part in the total pattern of ‘adaptation through maladaptation’ which is characteristic of our species. Boeotian bliss is not conducive to invention: the hunger of imagination, the desire and pursuit of the whole, take origin from the realization that something is missing, from awareness of incompleteness.

  Jung’s concept of integration is not in fact that of a static mental condition, although it is sometimes misinterpreted as being so. In Jung’s view, the development of the personality toward integration and mental health is an ideal which is never entirely reached or, if temporarily attained, is bound to be later superseded. Jung thought that the achievement of optimum development of the personality was a lifetime’s task which was never completed; a journey upon which one sets out hopefully toward a destination at which one never arrives.

  The new attitude gained in the course of analysis tends sooner or later to become inadequate in one way or another, and necessarily so, because the flow of life again and again demands fresh adaptation. Adaptation is never achieved once and for all … In the last resort it is highly improbable that there could ever be a therapy which got rid of all difficulties. Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health. What concerns us here is only an excessive amount of them.21

  The path of individuation and the changes of attitude which take place can be closely matched with accounts of the creative process given by men and women of genius. First, the mental state during which new ideas arise or inspiration occurs is exactly that which Jung recommended to his patients and which he called ‘active imagination’. Although, occasionally, the germ of a new composition or hypothesis occurs in a dream, by far the greater number of new ideas occur during a state of reverie, intermediate between waking and sleeping. Poets, like Yeats and Wordsworth, sometimes describe this state as being both asleep and awake. It is a state of mind in which ideas and images are allowed to appear and take their course spontaneously; but one in which the subject is sufficiently awake and conscious enough to observe and note their progress. Both the patient engaging in ‘active imagination’ and the creator seeking inspiration need to be able to be passive, to let things happen within the mind.

  Many writers have described how characters which they have invented seem to take on an independent life of their own, or of how their pens seem sometimes to be guided by some directing agency other than by their own volition. For example, Thackeray recorded:

  I have been surprised at the observations made by some of my characters. It seems as if an occult Power was moving the pen. The personage does or says something, and I ask, how the dickens did he come to think of that?22

  George Eliot told J. W. Cross

  that, in all she considered her best writing, there was a ‘not herself which took possession of her, and that she felt her own personality to be merely the instrument through which this spirit, as it were, was acting.23

  Nietzsche wrote of his Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

  Has anyone at the end of the nineteenth century a distinct conception of what poets of strong ages called inspiration? If not, I will describe it now. – If one had the slightest residue of superstition left in one, one would hardly be able to set aside the idea that one is merely incarnation, merely mouthpiece, merely medium of overwhelming forces.24

  Second, creativity usually consists of forming new links between formerly disparate entities, the union between opposites described by Jung. This linking process is obvious in scientific creativity, in which a new hypothesis reconciles or supersedes ideas which were previously thought to be incompatible. Kepler had been able to describe the motions of the planets round the sun; Galileo had described the motions of bodies upon the earth. Until Newton, the sets of laws governing these two types of motion had been regarded as quite separate. But Newton’s idea that gravity could operate at vast distances enabled him to combine the discoveries of Kepler and Galileo in such a way that the motions of bodies in the heavens and bodies upon the earth could be seen to obey the same universal laws.

  Combining opposites can also be demonstrated in the visual arts and in music. The aesthetic impact of a painting usually depends upon the skill with which the painter has balanced and combined opposing forms and colours. Sonata form in music usually consists of an exposition stating two distinct themes, the first and second subjects, which are then juxtaposed and combined in various ways in the development section. Our delight in this kind of music is related to the skill with which the composer creates a new unity out of themes which at first appeared quite separate.

  Third, the creative process continues throughout life. No creator is ever satisfied with what he has done. New problems constantly occur which compel him to seek new solutions. Completed works are but halts on the way; staging posts on a journey which, as in Jung’s picture of the development of personality, is never completed. Indeed, the works of an artist are the outward and visible signs of his inner development as a person. We have already discussed some of the changes which tend to occur as creative people become older.

  Fourth, the creative process and the process of individuation are both phenomena taking place largely in solitude. Although Jung’s account of the individuation process derived from what he observed in patients undergoing analysis, who were therefore under his scrutiny and in some sort of relation with him, he regarded individuation as a natural path of psychological development which took place independently of the analyst’s influence. Indeed, as I wrote earlier, Jung was at pains to make his ‘more advanced’ patients as independent of him as possible, and encouraged them to pursue their own path of psychological discovery by themselves, only intervening when the material produced was particularly obscure.

  The human mind seems to be so constructed that the discovery, or perception, of order or unity in the external world is mirrored, transferred, and experienced as if it were a discovery of a new order and balance in the inner world of the psyche. This may seem an improbable hypothesis, but aesthetic appreciation, as well as the creation of works of art, depend upon it. The quotation given earlier, from C. P. Snow, beautifully illustrates how a new scientific discovery, a new truth ‘outside’, becomes something with which the scientist identifies himself, and which is therefore also felt as being ‘inside’. Outer happenings and inner experience interact with one another; which is why seeing the perfect balance of colours and masses in a painting, or hearing the integration of opposing themes in a piece of music gives the observer or the listener the marvellous experience of a new unity as if it were within his own psyche. Similarly, the process of reducing inner discord and reaching a degree of unification within the psyche has a posit
ive effect upon the subject’s perception of, and relation with, the external world.

  Apart from Jung, the only psychologist to pay very much attention to experiences of unity or to their healing effects is Abraham Maslow, who has written extensively about what he calls ‘peak experiences’. In his view, the ability to have such experiences is a sign of psychic health; an attribute of the ‘self-actualizing” person.

  My feeling is that the concept of creativeness and the concept of the healthy, self-actualizing, fully human person seem to be coming closer and closer together and may perhaps turn out to be the same thing.25

  Maslow continues his investigation of the creative attitude by observing that

  the creative person, in the inspirational phase of the creative furor, loses his past and his future and lives only in the moment. He is all there, totally immersed, fascinated and absorbed in the present, in the current situation, in the here-now, with the matter-in-hand … This ability to become ‘lost in the present’ seems to be a sine qua non for creativeness of any kind. But also certain prerequisites of creativeness – in whatever realm – somehow have something to do with this ability to become timeless, selfless, outside of space, of society, of history. It has begun to appear strongly that this phenomenon is a diluted, more secular, more frequent version of the mystical experience that has been described so often as to have become what Huxley called The Perennial Philosophy.26

  Moreover, Maslow realizes that the creative attitude and the ability to have peak experiences depends upon being free of other people; free, especially, from neurotic involvements, from ‘historical hangovers from childhood’, but also free of obligations, duties, fears and hopes.