Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein was compelled to depict cruelty in his films. Sergei grew up as an abused child, so cruelty was no stranger to him, and such a painful childhood must have produced a lot of repression. Is his depiction of cruelty in films another example of Freudian creativity then? Not quite, because his films often end in transformative, uplifting, positive emotions. What caused the change?
During childhood Eisenstein watched a French movie that influenced his vision and moved him into a new direction. In the film, a sergeant in the army who had become a prisoner forced to work on a farm was branded on the shoulder as punishment for making love to the farmer ’s wife. A strange transformation took place in the way Eisenstein looked at cruelty: He was no longer sure who was being cruel to whom.
In my childhood it [the film] gave me nightmares. … Sometimes I became the sergeant, sometimes the branding iron. I would grab hold of his shoulder. Sometimes it seemed to be my own shoulder. At other times it was someone else’s. I no longer knew who was branding whom.2
This is the thing—in the quantum modality evil is not something separate from us. When we realize this intuitively, then evil can be transformed. The integrative insight that took place in Eisenstein’s own psyche eventually enabled him to use the ugliness of cruelty to achieve great beauty in his films. If you’ve ever watched Battleship Potemkin you know what I mean. English professor and author John Briggs has given a name to this ability to transform the poison of negative emotions into the nectar of the positive: “omnivalence.”3 In another time the poet John Keats called it “negative capability.”
Shakespeare knew about this transformative aspect of creativity when he wrote The Tempest. Creativity can metamorphose the horrible stuff of a cadaver into “something rich and strange,” he wrote. But our rational ego must yield to the alchemy of our quantum mode. Full fathom five thy father lies Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes; Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea change Into something rich and strange; Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell; Hark, I hear them; Ding-Dong Bell. The impact of such a transformative journey is enormous, as it serves the evolutionary movement of consciousness that opens all humanity to the energies of love.
Motivation from the Collective Unconscious
Carl Jung recognized that the sublimation of libido is only a partial criterion for creativity, not a sufficient one. Jung viewed the unconscious not only as personal, but also as collective—a repository of collectively suppressed memory available for all humanity, that transcends the boundaries of time, space, and culture. In this way Jung identified additional motivation for creativity in the drive fromthe collective unconscious. He found that creative ideas often emerge in the garb of universal symbols (such as the hero) that have become known as Jungian archetypes.4 Said Jung: “The creative process, so far as we are able to follow it at all, consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal image, and in elaborating and shaping this image into the finished work.”
Thus for Jung, creativity is a result of an unconscious drive, yes, but not only one from the personal, repressed unconscious of Freudian vintage but also one that evokes archetypal images from the collective unconscious.
Consider the chemist Friedrich August Kekule’s discovery of the structure of the benzene molecule. At that time all known bonding occurred in open, linear arrangements. Within this context the solution to the benzene problem eluded everyone. Kekule’s famous breakthrough came to him during a reverie state in which he saw a snake biting its own tail, and realized the bonding in this case must be circular. According to Jung, the dream image that triggered Kekule’s insight is a prime example of an archetypal image from the collective unconscious—in this case the uroboros symbol.
Curiosity comes from the drive to make manifest what is previously unconscious and unmanifest. Initially our curiosity is mild and restricted to areas of conflict. The archetypes are calling us, but we are not hearing their sound as more than a whisper. Realizing that we have an obstruction, we clean it up by making the conflict conscious: creativity, Freudian style. Next we begin to discover transformation. We have dreams involving Jungian archetypes, and become more curious and more motivated to explore them: creativity, Jung style.
The totality of consciousness seeks to know itself through this purposeful drive of the unconscious, so its movements are often intricate, even bizarre—so much so that we can see them as mere coincidences or chance events. Close scrutiny reveals otherwise. Carl Jung called seemingly meaningful coincidences—one in the outer arena and one in the inner arena of experience —“synchronicities,” and he saw an important role for synchronicity in creativity.5 Jung speculated that these coincidences had a common cause, which we now know to be downward causation. The qualities of this cause, and its criteria for creative expression, are elaborated in the next chapter. Care to take a fantasy tour? See yourself approaching a forest dense and dark. What’s down there? An underground house, Dark and mysterious, evoking childish Memories of witches scary. What is your tendency? Take risk, go down, explore? Or stay in the filtered light of safety?