REL407 Guiding Questions for Readings

Ann Ulanov, Creativity and Madness

Ann Ulanov is a Jungian psychotherapist in the school of Analytical Psychology (Freud: Psychanalysis; Jung: Analytical Psychology)

Creativity and Madness places the individual within a larger worldview of madness, especially of the madness of society
This work is also Ann Ulanov's guide to Jung's Red Book, which is a chronicle of Jung's own descent into madness in a world that was going mad. Jung chronicled his inner journey from 1913-1916 in the Red Book, a time when the world descended into World War I; he drafted the original book from 1914 to 1917 but continued to work on it until 1930.
Ann Ulanov expresses her understanding in ordinary language, avoiding complex terminology.
Creativity and Madness is divided into two parts. Part I (Chapters 1 & 2) describes the character of and descent into personal and collective madness. Part II (Chapters 3 & 4) describes the creative path out of madness, each on her or his own, but also inextricably addressing the larger social and cultural conditions.

Chapter 1: Personal Madness

Ulanov defines "personal madness" as the experience of dislocation: physical, emotional, & intellectual; body, heart, & mind.
Madness is a descent into an experience in which one has lost or does not have access to a framework large enough to hold one's experience. It is the loss of world, narrative, and ruling principle. Ego-consciousness seeks a basic idea or principle - whether that is God, philosophical Truth, or belief in 'oneself,' but in the experience of madness, what had formerly seemed reliable, rational, and orderly disintegrates; one "loses one's mind."

Guiding Question: What is the relation between reason, emotion, and the body in the experience of personal madness?

Chapter 2: Collective Madness

Adaptation: Forms of psychotherapy that emphasize treatment of symptoms, such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, seek primarily to lead the client to re-adapt to the existing way of thinking and doing. What if one's view of the way things ought to be, begins to break up?
Adaptation: What happens when our story, narrative, or ruling principle concerning society starts to disintegrate, so that it becomes apparent "our ruling principles are not ulimate truth but at best our constructions of truth?" (20).
Following Jung, Ulanov suggests that one must not dissociate from external events that seem senseless but rather somehow incorporate them into our inner lives meaningfully, personally (22-24). She gives the example of recognizing one's consumerism as a door into our own dark side of greed (29).
Owning evil: Jung has a vision of eating a young girl's liver. He is the agent of this evil act. He must own his collusion in this evil, atone for his transgression, and reconnect with her, his soul, the anima (32-34). In order to do this, the ruling principle of reason and his vision of himself as the hero must be sacrificed, and in this, he is assisted by evil, the vision of his transgression, its recognition, leading him not to a new rational principle, but to loss of reason, opening to mystery, awareness of body and emotion (32-36). This leads not to the victory of good over evil, but rather the letting go of the need for a final "Good" (37-38).

Guiding Question: What is the relation between personal madness and collective madness? Must the experience of personal madness always be seen in light of collective madness? What is the significance of time in relation to the process of recognizing and becoming aware of how collective madness relates to one's own situation? Is it a linear process? Is it a "time" that can be defined within a rational framework?

Chapter 3: Compelling Complex

The fundamental psychological complex is the 'ego complex' of vulnerability, anger, inferiority, and meaninglessness' (42-46).
The path of individuation is not to get rid of or solve the complex but to relate to it appropriately, creatively. It is a relational pathway (44).
Ancestor, repetition compulsion, and gap: Complexes invite one to revisit one's history, the ancestors to one's present condition. 'Ancestor' can be seen as both literal and symbolic. The complex has the power to pull us back in repeatedly, as though one is 'revisiting the scene of the crime.' This opens up a gap in one's psyche, a gap that opens out on to the unknown, the abyss, mystery, and filled with power (numious, numinosum)(47-51).
Gap becomes 'space.' The gap of the gaping abyss can transform into the space of inner exploration and discovery (55-57).
This space allows for the disintegration of the ruling principle of ego-consciousness, the recognition of the darkness of the shadow, of the dark side, and the transformation effected through the constellating power of the unconscious channeled through consciousness. Ulanov gives an example of a woman undergoing this process (59-63).

Guiding Question: How can the experience of losing one's mind be positive, creative? How is this related to social, collective madness, and how does the creative transformation of consciousness and psyche occur?

Chapter 4: Creative Return

Creative Return to a healing, integrating consciousness can be likened to possessing a child-like openness, curiosity, and relatedness without abandoning adult discernment, reflection, and ability. This is the realm of the divine-child, of God-in-human and the human-in-God (73-77),
Ritual vs Repetition. The repetitive compulsion to revisit the complex becomes transformed into a ritual practice that allows one to actively reimagine one's world/psyche and transcend/transform the tyranny of the complex and rigid ego-consciousness (80).
When ego-consciousness begins to relate to its own Shadow, dark side, the complexes residing within, and the ego as the fundamental complex, consciousness starts opening to the abyss within, begins to see the space of creative inner awareness and relating. Instead of merely revisiting the scene of the crime, one begins to find ritual practices that relate and integrate consciousness and the collective unconscious, the realm of the Inner Divine. Open to chaos and mystery, facilitating the reconciliation of opposites, consciousness becomes the co-creator of the inner cosmos with the collective unconscious, and this also becomes related to the transformation of the outer world, of society and nature. This is the unleashing of one's God-making capacity (85-86). This is the process of individuation, of becoming a unique individual, of finding one's voice and identity, and of become whole as ego-Self, consciousness-Unconscious.

Guiding Question: Find an example of this process in Chapter 4. How might this be related to what we have seen of Buddhist practice?