Confessions of a Split Mind

“There’s also a transpersonal dimension to the expressive-creative arts and illness connection –polymorphous conditions generally unleashed intense periods of self-absorption, self-reflection, and creative writing. Creative illnesses transcend sociopolitical and religious frontiers and are actually quite common across cultures and epochs. These phenomena seem to be especially prevalent among shamans, philosophers, and writers (Ellenberger, 1970). After an unusual neurosis that lasted between 1894 and 1900, Sigmund Freud emerged into the intellectual and scientific world with an inspired perspective on unconscious life, enabling him to write his celebrated The Interpretation of Dreams (Ellenberger, 1970). Similarly, Carl Jung underwent a creative illness between 1913 and 1919 which motivated esoteric works like the Red Book, the Black Book, and the Seven Sermons to the Dead and laid the humus for the sprouting of theories surrounding archetypes, the collective unconscious, and the actualized Self (Ellenberger, 1970). I, too, have spent a great deal of time deeply preoccupied with the mysteries of the human soul, and have emerged from my ordeals in an exhilarated state. The first of these culminated with a three-week period of incessant writing where I transcribed my screaming Shadow onto paper. Most of the poems written during my own “creative illness” were published in Fifty Confessions (2009), probably my most personal poetic collection to date. More recently, a very subtle depreciation in the quality of my memory [increased forgetfulness] generated a prodigious Precambrian mental explosion, a kind that mimicked the mythical emergence of the laughter-loving Aphrodite from the frothy Cyprian sea and generated all the illustrations and dialogues in this book. Looking back on the nexus of these experiences, it has occurred to me that the waxing of creative activity is directly correlated to the frenetic and ebullient emotions. When somebody writes, they are consciously exerting control over a phenomenal process and sublimating irritability, fear, rage, and other negative emotions into something more manageable and tolerable (Forgeard, Mecklenburg, Lacasse, & Jayawickreme, 2014). Requiring concentration and focal attention, the task distracts the individual passive rumination and burgeons positive emotion (Forgeard et al., 2014). Writing may also be construed as an opportunity to find meaning in disquieting events, a chance to make sense out of nonsense. Every individual has their own way of accomplishing this feat. I, for instance, do it by mythologizing and even exaggerating my pathos; in many of my writings these emotionally salient life events are described in the context of the Jungian Great Mother and son lover archetypal pairing, or exalted through Gnostic notions of a soul-spark rediscovering its divine origins through the trials and tribulations of a life-threatening ailment. In writing about the illness I endured, the most traumatic event in my life, I concluded that physicians, neurologists, immunologists, and psychiatrists couldn’t shed any light upon it because it was supernatural in origin, imposed by a higher order of spiritual beings as a way of instigating inner transformation and placing me on a hitherto unknown spiritual path. To overcome and gain mastery over any condition one must be able to shift perspectives and restructure cognitions into meaningful narratives in ways that are personally salient, cogent, and illuminate the self in the best possible light. Going through this “basic, adaptive psychological process which is also observed in artistic and scientific creativity” (Williams, 2012, p. 113) allows the ailing individual to transcend their existential impasse by moving through the paradigm-shifting phase of illumination [the interjection of novel ideas and solutions into conscious awareness] and continue navigating through the world. That’s the secret of posttraumatic growth, that’s what heals.”