This Jungian Life Episode 18 – Creative Depression Transcript

Welcome to This Jungian Life, three good friends and Jungian analysts, Lisa Marchiano, Deborah Stewart and Joseph Lee, invite you to join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings a psychological perspective to important issues of the day.

Lisa: I’m Lisa Marchiano and I’m a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia.

Joseph: I’m Joseph Lee and I’m a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

Deb: I’m Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst on Cape Cod

Joseph: And today the three of us are going to talk about creative depressions.

Lisa: That sounds so uplifting.

Deb: That sounds like a contradiction in terms.

Joseph: It is a contradiction in terms. When I’ve introduced it to clients over the years it has been met with relief, sometimes confusion and curiosity, but I think overall people are often very hopeful to think that their suffering could be leaning toward something beautiful or constructive. I think that’s a wonderful idea; the psychoanalytic community is unique in their approach to it.

Lisa: Right. Because I mean, just to frame it before we even define it, I mean obviously the way our culture feels about depression is that it’s bad and you have to get rid of it as quickly as possible and there is this idea in in depth psychology that it could be necessary and could be leading somewhere important.

Deb: There’s a purpose to it. The energy is going somewhere. It’s in the unconscious. This is per Jung. It’s in the unconscious so we don’t know. We can’t see it. It’s inaccessible. But with an attitude of interest in and curiosity, at least there can be interest that it is there and it is doing something.

Joseph: I moved to return back to Jung’s model of the psyche and then to specifics. I like to think about the psyche as a landscape and be curious about how images and energy or libido are interacting. If we think about the ego, the image of ourselves, on the landscape of the psyche and we imagine life force flowing very easily around the ego, around the conscious life, we feel energetic. Our mood is good. We feel like we’ve got energy to do a lot of things that are familiar to us. As the energy moves into images that aligned with our various goals and projects, we feel like keeping all of that afloat, vibrant, dynamic. In a creative depression it’s as if a fissure has opened up in the landscape and life force, flowing like water, has begun to flow down a fissure into a subterranean area. The subterranean part of the psyche is full of latent seed images. What they are or how they got there is mysterious. As the life force descends and enlivens a new image in the psyche, on the surface, it feels like a loss. It feels like fatigue. It feels like all of the symbols and signs of depression are there. But something is gestating deep in the psyche and when that emerges something extraordinary can happen.

Lisa: Yeah, that’s a, that’s a great image of it. I mean, I think Jung says something like, I think he calls it something like a regression of the libido that the life force starts to flow in and down and uh, you know, I think evolutionary biologists have wondered about the sort of purpose of depression and they’ve posited, you know, maybe it’s a way of the organism recognizing that they have to sort of detach life energy from a given project. You know, okay, that, that strategy, whatever I’ve been doing hasn’t been working. And so now I have to reclaim that energy that I was putting toward that end. And, and, and it’s a painful process that sort of withdrawing of energy.

Joseph: And is that happening on an unconscious level? Yes. It’s not a decision now.

Lisa: No. In fact, it feels like it’s happening against your will. You don’t want to do it.

Joseph: So for instance, maybe a job that you’ve always loved becomes lifeless.

Lisa:Yes.

Deb: Or the famous midlife crisis which is so very Jungian. At the first stage of life is the outward bound going, doing, learning, experiencing, and then at midlife the energy does start to go inward. Children have been largely raised and the career of maybe both people is whatever it is. But sort of the die is cast and now what about the external world? A goal orientation of the first half of life comes to an end. It doesn’t have the juice in it anymore.

Lisa: And you can sort of feel your energy withdraw from that thing and then Joseph, like you were imaging for us, it may awaken something new that initially we don’t have a conscious relationship with and adjust can feel awful, you know, just really dead and lifeless. But if we, if we pay attention, we may sense the stirrings of something surprising.

Deb: Before going to all those nice images of something gestating down there underneath the earth. I think what is hard about it and necessary is that it does feel like nothing good is happening. And it is a small, dark, swampy place. And how do we, how does a person live with that? This is a hard time. There’s a lot of loss. Nothing new is happening at the time that it’s going on. It doesn’t feel creative. If you look back at it, you know, 10 years later or five years later you say, oh, well, but in the meantime, that’s hindsight. When you’re going through it, it’s not creative. Doesn’t feel creative.

Lisa: Yeah. So when you have someone say that you’re working with who, I mean, first of all, when you’re working with someone and they become depressed, let’s say, how do you know if it’s a creative depression or just a really awful, you know, deadening depression that isn’t going anywhere good. And then the second question is how do you work with that?

Joseph: I want to circle back to answer that based on what Deb had brought up around a midlife crisis. I think a midlife crisis can give us a few hints which we see in the dreams, where other forms of creative depression can be a little bit more mysterious. In order for me to be comforted and clarified around that, I look to typology. Jung lets us know that in midlife the inferior functions of the personality are gaining steam. The more surface talents of the personality are being truncated the way your good eye as a kid would be patched so that your lazy eye would be forced to work harder. For instance, in my own life, I’m a feeling type, so that suggests my thinking function is less active. In Midlife I find in my dream life, I almost always have a scientific attitude no matter what I’m dreaming about. Even in a frightening or horrifying inner environment I feel like a detective. I’m putting on this little psychological cap and thinking through what’s happening in the dream. My dream maker is orchestrating this in a way in which my thinking function, in my dream life, is more dynamic than my waking life. Energy is moving in that direction. I find in my outer personality that I am much more stoic, more reserved on a feeling level. In the last five years, Libido is shifting in that direction. If we can acknowledge that in Midlife, I think it can be less traumatic or less depressing; that it’s meaningful. I think that’s what makes the difference.

Lisa: Well in some ways, depression, I mean, I think you can think about it this way, depression is, is maybe the Self wresting the rest of the personality away from some desired end to point it in a different direction and it feels awful. It’s like you’re being dragged somewhere against your will. That that can be one way of thinking about depression.

Joseph: I think that if we’re not co-participating in the change, it feels like we’re dragged along. This is perhaps the value of analysis: If we can get a hint of where the psyche is nudging us, then we can grab on and decide our experiences are meaningful. That relieves a lot of pain; we can move through it more swiftly and more elegantly because we’re co-participating.

Deb: I think that’s exactly it, that maybe that’s the place where analysis or a depth psychological process can really help, is that there can be hints of meaning in it of purposefulness.

Lisa: But, but I want to go back to where you took us a minute ago, which is well, well, well let’s not rush too quickly to, “We can make this less painful and we can participate and it’ll be beautiful and meaningful.” Because the truth is, as you pointed out, when you’re in the midst of it, it feels awful and you don’t always know that it’s going somewhere meaningful. I mean, I’m thinking about my own life and I’m also thinking about what I’ve sat with, with people who have sat through is, you know, dropping into this really dark place and me as the analyst on the other side of the room going, I don’t know where this is going. You know, and at times feeling anxious because it sometimes it looked like it wasn’t going in a good place. You know, part of me was always hoping it was going to wind up moving in a positive direction.

Deb: And that can be a big part of making something a little less dismal, a little less dark about depression is being companioned on the way through it that someone else is there with you and not knowing either, but you’re not alone. That person is not alone in it. And that the analyst is holding the place of, Oh, where is the meaning in it? What is psyche doing? Where is there a purposeful direction? As hard as it is, as sad as it is, where is it going?

Lisa: And I think that when I’m, when I’m sitting with someone going through this though, I may not even say that. I may just say, and this feels awful.

Deb: Yes, it’s not. I agree that it’s not something to be said because I think it just doesn’t feel credible that there’s, you know, some sort of silver lining here or a light at the end of the tunnel. No, it feels awful. And psyche is going somewhere.

Lisa: Yes. And how do we have, what is a creative depression? Have we even sort of really defined that?

Joseph: Libido leaving a familiar area, going someplace mysterious and gestating a new image, a new guiding attitude, is one way of thinking about it.

Lisa: And so, what would some examples of that be?

Joseph: I’m thinking about a client who has a vibrant, successful military career and began to feel a tremendous amount of discontent, a lack of energy, frustration, anger about what is required in the current setting. A certain amount of time floating in tremendous discomfort and suffering seemed to help him dis-identify with his current role.

Lisa: That’s the withdrawal of the libido.

Joseph: They were willing to give up their image of themselves as a military person in that role. That freed up an opportunity to see themselves as a creative artist.

Lisa: Wow!

Joseph: He began to make steps to pursue that and move into transition. But it has been agonizing for the ego to divest itself of who it thinks it is then be willing to redefine itself. It was so for that person.

Lisa: That’s a great example.

Deb: So it has something to do with ego yielding its primacy of place in the personality that and how we define ourselves. I’m, I’m a parent, I’m a homeowner. I’m a military person. I have thus and such a rank. All of those things that have to do with ego and my sense of identity and divesting of that. What if I’m not a military officer? What if my children are grown? Uh, what if all kinds of things, then where is my grounding?

Lisa: Painful to let go of this version of yourself or your life that you’ve

been holding onto.

Joseph: It’s so painful to watch people who don’t want to let go. They continue to grasp. Their agony accentuates the process. That’s where I think an analyst can be helpful, to hold, if not verbalize, that this is moving in a direction that is authentic.

Deb: And so that’s the creative part, is if we can recognize as you do with your client and your client presumably did — that his or her identity is not in all these roles, titles, ranks, accomplishments. That the creative part is the unconscious, and the second center of the personality. A sense of being led and grounded by something deeper that is not just ego. What I do, how much I can earn, what my status is, what’s the next external world goal? That’s something else will come to meet the person. It doesn’t have to be that that person will become an artist, but we’ll have a new awakening.

Lisa: Yeah, I mean sometimes I think what has to be sacrificed might be something other than just a kind of ego superficial persona goal. Sometimes it is deeper and it still has to be sacrificed so that, as you’re saying, something new can come forward and meet the person. You know, it’s like the Self. We would say that Jung’s concept of the Self with a capital “S” that that sort of center of the personality sort of knows, you know, if we can impute knowing to the Self that something new needs to happen in this psyche’s unfolding and kind of orchestrates that and it is like being pulled down, pulled under against your will so that a larger version of your life can unfold.

Joseph: I think that’s the idea of telos; the psyche generally wants to move in a direction. There is a sense of wholeness at the base of the personality that is informing a direction. I thought we might take a moment just for our listeners to contrast this with some other forms of depression. A creative depression is often suggested in the dream life; there are images of what is trying to emerge, even if it’s conflictual or difficult to relate to. There are interests which are legitimately known by the ego, by the person’s conscious life, but they’re having a hard time claiming. They want to be companioned or supported in claiming what they know to be the next step but they can’t quite find their way to. Other forms of depression that are not so creative might be triggered by grief. The kind of depression that people have in the midst of an enormous loss is not stimulated by the psyche pulling libido down to another level. Grief based depression claims an enormous amount of energy to adjust to a change of life circumstance. It takes a lot of energy and people find they don’t have enough leftover to manage other parts of their lives. That looks like a very reasonable transitional depression

Deb: I think with grief, it’s kind of a psychic amputation, if you will. It’s adjusting to a huge absence of something that was there. With a partner, a child, sometimes a parent, and that the energy is just, feels like it’s just gone, which is very different from the creative kind of depression that happens in the second half of life. And this is where Jung pioneered this idea that something new is trying to come into being. As awful as it can feel at the time it is in the interest of psychic growth, of individuation and wholeness versus something has been truncated, something has been disappeared.

Lisa: There also can be these depressions where people just feel very, very stuck. They feel, they feel sort of, well, I don’t know, like they’re wandering through the desert and there is no end you know. And that, that I think can arise when there’s been sort of early attachment wounds.

Joseph: They call it anaclitic depression. Sometimes that can be masked by the vitality of youth, that people literally have enough physical energy to muscle through the first 30 years. Then these developmental deprivations come back and demand attention to make themselves known.

Lisa: And I suppose these are not necessarily clear distinct categories. I mean, I think they could overlap, don’t you think?

Deb: Yes, of course they can overlap. And as Joseph said, dreams can tell us, can give hints. And so of course can the person’s history. If the person is grief stricken, that’s right there at the forefront of what can be known and said, and from the person’s history of a lot of disruption, difficulties with primary caregiving people in that person’s life. We can have a pretty good idea that there was early relational trauma and disrupted attachment. And I think survival, evolutionary psychology and just the way we’re made takes us through most of the normative stages of life, of puberty and falling in love and wanting to have a home maybe or go to college or uh, any one of these other kinds of normal life tasks. And people can look better than, but then in a sense, uh, that early damage is covered up by achievement and going through developmental stages in what looks like a pretty good, normal, healthy way.

Joseph: I think it also shows up in the relationship with the analyst and in the relationships with other key people. We all are as we are and once we relax a little bit we bring forward our relational style. A part of our work is to be able to attend to and be curious about how we are being related to. That can give us a hint about that anaclitic early attachment wounds that are trying to be spoken to in the consulting room.

Lisa: And what do you think that looks like in the analytic relationship?

Deb: Are you asking about this kind of early attachment related?

Lisa: I mean, you know, I have my own ideas but I’m just thinking the listeners maybe wonder, what does that really look like?

Joseph: One area that always is interesting is when a client only tolerates mirroring in the interaction.

Deb: And say what mirroring is.

Joseph: Sure. If the client says something to me, I hear it and rephrase and repeat it back to them as a signal that I have been attentive to them. That is a therapeutic skill and a relational phenomenon. When people are close friends, they demonstrate that behavior as well.

Lisa: Unconsciously we do it.

Deb: Parents do it for children.

Joseph: Absolutely.

Deb: Oh my goodness! You can do a somersault?! Yeah.

Joseph: That’s validating. But there are times in analytic work when we have to introduce new ideas or we have to confront. If that is incredibly jarring or deeply disturbing to somebody, that gives us clues as to how their relational structure is made of which we can be curious. Maybe at some point if things go well, we can bring attention to it.

Lisa: So I’ll just say I like that. And then I’ll sort of add another one, which is where it feels like there’s a there’s a lack of symmetry with the attachment, where perhaps I feel very enlivened in the presence of the person. But he or she reports that, for example, that he doesn’t feel very connected to me. And I’ll think, well that’s interesting because I’m feeling connected to you, and so that will make me curious about sort of early attachment stuff. That might be another way.

Deb: Yes, all kinds of things I think show up depending upon whether the person’s attachment style is a sort of a clinging or dependent. I can’t get enough or that distancing thing that you just mentioned have. I don’t feel attached. I don’t feel that this relationship is really enlivening for me. And then there is the disorganized person who’s there and then not there, and then different kinds of emotional reactions that can be kind of all over the place and feel chaotic. And the person has a really hard time managing and regulating his or her feelings in the relationship. Instead of having basic good faith that I, for example, as the therapist am basically they are well intended, basically connected and able and willing to provide that

person with something. That’s not this kind of dynamic that can show up in the relationship, in the transference as we say.

Lisa: So I want to bring us back to creative depression for just a second and I want to share a quote if I may? If that would be okay. So this is a quote from Marie Louise von Franz who was a close collaborator of Jung’s. And I’m going to ask for your indulgence, oh listeners, with my German pronunciation in advance because I don’t speak German. So she says: “We have a beautiful German word for creativity. It’s schopfen. It means to take water up with a bucket out of the well. That’s how it really feels to be creative. You have to say, now how do I feel or think myself and then you have to go deep, deep in a depression and go in a well and pull out the water from the depths and then you dream about positive animus figures.”

Deb: So she’s really talking about suffering.

Lisa: Yes!

Deb: Suffering the depression, suffering that image of going down in the well and laboriously hauling up bucket after bucket.

Lisa: And you don’t know if you’re going to find water or not.

Deb: Yeah, it is the journey of the don’t know, so you go down, you go down in the depths, whether it’s Joseph’s image of Libido and energy just falling through the cracks or Von Franz’s image of the well, you go down without knowing what you will find, how far down it is, how much of it there is.

Joseph: She gives us a nice additional definition of animus energy; that the animus or the vitalizing inner masculine is the medicine for lifelessness, exhaustion and depression.

Lisa: Or it’s what appears once you make contact with the life giving water again, and that might be a good place to leave it for now and switch to a dream.

Deb: This is a dreamer, a woman who is 33 years old and the dream is: “I was gardening and all my seeds were failing. The plants they were producing looked old and withered as they broke the soil. I went to a water barrel to irrigate the sad plot and instead of water there was a red liquid in the barrel. Not sure if wine, blood. It didn’t seem significant. I siphoned some down a hose to the garden and what looked like snow started falling and covering the garden. Then in a back corner of the garden, I saw movement. When I approached the spot, I saw a person stand up from under the soil as if he had grown like a plant. I don’t know who it was in waking life, but in the dream he seemed familiar. I remember being more intrigued them bewildered by the person. Then I woke.”

Lisa: That is quite a dream.

Deb: And it really connects so well with what we’ve been talking about as a creative depression and what can come up from the depths.

Lisa: I think this dream is actually the perfect image for creative depression and I should say that we picked them independently.

Joseph: It’s synchronicity at work. I’m thinking about suffering and the labor of creative depression, and how the dreamer is needing to water her garden with blood or what I think of as blood, the red liquid.

Lisa: Well, and red wine stands in for blood, so we’re in that territory.

Deb: And is it not part of mythological structure that there was a ritual of fertilizing the fields with blood and with people would lie down in the fields. That there was some connection between human life force, the sacrifice of the old God, the corn God in order to fertilize the fields.

Lisa: This is fertilizing the field with blood. That’s what it is.

Joseph: I think that’s such a powerful poetic image for what we were talking. Sacrifice is that agony one undergoes prior to the emergence of new life. We’re watering our barren fields with our own blood in hopes that something new will emerge. That is powerful. It’s so powerful. I want to do a little structural analysis of this dream. We’ve talked before on the podcast about the when/then construction. that you can say in a dream when this happened, then this happened, there’s a sense of causality. So, all of the seeds are failing. The plants look old and weathered. Then I water the field, I irrigate this field with the blood and then this very surprising thing happens.

Lisa: So the field is barren until there is this kind of blood sacrifice.

Deb: What do you make of the snow falling? That seems important too. Siphoning this blood or wine down to the garden. But then snow falls and covers the garden.

Lisa: So one of the things that comes up for me about this is Snow white because that initial image and Snow White is the blood red. She’s looking at a field of snow — the mother in the fairytale — is looking outside at the snow falling, and then she pricks her finger and there’s a drop of blood and she says, oh, may I have a daughter with skin as white as snow and lips as red as blood or something. There’s some formula for that sort of the white and the red. And uh, and so. So snow is sort of purifying. It’s cleansing, it’s white, it, it blankets the world with a sort of a clean new slate. I think of the snow in the sense of purifying.

Joseph: Is there something necessary about the snow in the process? I’m thinking about that in gardening. If you don’t have a hard frost that lasts long enough, certain things will not fruit. Like apples. Apples can’t be grown in the deep south because it doesn’t get cold enough. So, in the process, instinctively the psyche knows that even though the blood of life has been put on the field, it has to have a hard frost for things to fruit. I think this is instructive. As an analyst, even as the blood or the libido flows in the psyche, we may not be done with depression.

Lisa: It might have to freeze over first.

Joseph: To gestate apples. I think you need something like eight weeks of temperatures that are in a deep freeze for an apple tree to give something.

Lisa: You know, this reminds me of the Greek myth about sowing the dragon seeds. I’m sorry. The dragon’s teeth and uh, and then all this, all the soldiers popping up. I am not recalling up the full story right now, but it’s this idea that this man has grown up like a plant.

Joseph: I think there’s an old alchemical image of Adam who has died and from his phallos springs the tree of life.

Deb: There is a drawing of that as well.

Joseph:  There’s something about the completion of the putrefaction; the deadness of the old thing must be complete in order for the energy to be harvested for a new organic form. The person who grows from the soil seems to be a beautiful image of something happening outside of the ego’s control. That is the autonomy of the psyche.

Lisa: It is not what the dreamer intended.

Joseph: No, they thought that the seeds they’d chosen to sow were going to sprout

Lisa: And instead something quite other happens.

Joseph: That’s right.

Lisa: So if we were going to imagine, if we were just going to kind of make up a story about this dreamer and her life situation, you know, obviously we’re just sort of playing fast and loose here, but what might we say?

Deb: Well, what the dream of herself says is that she is currently actively seeking soulful dynamics.

Lisa: I guess I was struck by “I was gardening and all my seeds were failing.”

Deb: Yes.

Lisa: So whatever, whatever activities she was involved in in her life that she was hoping to be fruitful were just, they weren’t bearing fruit.

Deb: And it seems like, I mean I can just imagine here that you know, the ego being very busy doing, planting seeds or doing projects and planting and all the rest of it, and where the new life enters is from an entirely unexpected source.

Lisa: And it itself is in a very unexpected form.

Joseph: The failing seeds can be the failure of meaning to sprout. For instance, in the occupation of the dreamer, she may be able to set in motion all of her decisions. She decides she was going to purchase this home. She purchases a home. She decides she’ll take a vacation, she takes a vacation, and then in the end, it doesn’t sprout the level of meaning or gratification she thought it would.

Lisa: The plants look old and withered. They don’t have any life anymore.

Deb: This ties in very much with what we were saying about a creative depression. Is that all the stuff that should work or should be meaningful and it should be meaningful, should lead me to having an enlivened life becomes old and withered. Not through any external world, uh, you know, sort of cataclysmic event, but something in consciousness gets old and withered.

Joseph: If we think about that in a naturalistic interpretation, we’re literally in a garden and the soil and climate do not support the sprouting of those seeds. There is something fundamental in the climate of the psyche that is not supportive.

Lisa: Or those seeds are not good. I mean, I’m thinking about the gardening that I’ve done and I’m not a very good gardener, but sometimes the seeds, the seeds are too old and they no longer germinate.

Deb: We might say that what was appropriate to one age just not appropriate to another, that this dreamer is 33, but what was enlivening meaningful, fruitful at age 23, let’s say, is no longer

appropriate, growing, fruitful at age 33.

Lisa: So I’m also aware that the new thing comes in the form of a man, and so this puts us back in the territory that we’ve been in. The animus.

Deb: Something autonomous and other in the psyche.

Lisa: That seems — I mean if she’s looking for soulful dynamics, this seems to be a very positive dream. Yes, because the animus would sort of connect you with your soul or would be an image of that soul, in fact.

Deb: And it’s just perfect that that’s exactly how we feel about animus images. I don’t know who he is. Consciousness — the dream ego as we say, doesn’t know who it is, but he seemed familiar. It’s some way that this is known.

Joseph: If this were my client, I would encourage them to sketch a picture of the man that’s grown out of the soil, and journal an imaginative dialogue back and forth with this person. Even daydream interacting with the person, because it’s through emergent images that the soul moves life force around inside of us. Adding additional interactions with what we hope is a life-giving image can further the process, move it along more swiftly or more fully than would happen otherwise.

Lisa: And I just wanted to pick up on the, the emotions that the dreamer reported. She says that her emotions were first resignation and then she was intrigued. And what I like about that is this idea about resignation that you have to surrender to this process. And we see that in the fertilizing the field with the blood. It is sort of, it is a sacrifice. And then there’s the surprising new thing.

Deb: So a hopeful dream. She says she is actively seeking a soulful dynamic and something has come to meet her.

Joseph: The psyche responds.

Deb: The psyche responds, and she is intrigued and we’ve talked before about how important it is to be interested, to be curious, to take these offerings from psyche. Just what you were saying, to sketch, to imagine a dialogue to live with this image and as if this were a seed we wanted to encourage it and not just brush off a dream image like this as well, that was an interesting dream. No, that was an interesting dream! It was a soulful dream and it is important. Something has come to meet you and how do we stay connected with it?

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