1. Psychosis : The psychological storm of creative impulses
Abstract
Every child, born pure, is forced to trade the innocence of the womb for
developmental achievement. Something beautiful is lost in a struggle for survival; it
cannot be recovered and must be endured. This loss is experienced by all, but becomes
painful present for the sensitive souled artists. Mining the depths of their unconscious for
inspirational gold, such people play their dreams and their reality in the service of Eros, a
state of being that is denied to ordinary perception and experience. The sorrow and
torture of everyday wounding that is essential for creativity, for negotiating existence is
intractably linked to the problems of sacrifice, selflessness and our mortality. The
archetypal function of human experience may sometimes usurp the total personality, this
diamonic possession being labeled as psychosis in the contemporary world.
Analytical psychology considers psyche to be more powerful than the mind or the
body, affording it almost a sacred place in the hierarchy of existence. Using such a
conceptual framework and case studies, the paper defines and explores psychotic
phenomenon in mythological as well as clinical context. The link between developmental
trauma, psychosis, religion, meditation, arts, music is explored as is the role of creativity
in externalizing internal chaos thereby enabling the person to master their developmental
milestones. The paper hopes to extract psychosis from the dungeons of pejorative
diagnostic labels into an awareness of a sensibility to a different kind of reality - the
reality that lies within the world that defines dreams, art, and literature among others, the
reality of the instinct, of primordial images, and openness uncontaminated by the
landscapes of the material world.