The creative illness is a specific process of self-transformation, that
enables the subject to reach a new and high state of consciousness by
making him transcend the ego boundaries. It is also known as mystical
experience or enlightenment; Zen Buddhism refers to it with the term
satori or kensho, in Yoga it is called samadhi and in Taoism the
Absolute Tao. While Gurdjieff called it "objective consciousness,"
Thomas Merton used the phrase "trascendental unconscious" and Abraham
Maslow named it "plateau experience" or "climax experience."
In our attempt to understand it, we will begin by transcribing the
different approaches that have been done on it.
In his book THE DISCOVERY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS,
Henri Ellenberger says that the "creative illness follows after a
period during which a strong concern for an idea and the search for a
certain truth prevail.It is a polymorphic state that can appear as
depression, neurosis, psychosomatic disorders or even psychosis.
Whatever the symptoms could be, they are felt as painful, or even
agonizing, with alternating states of relief and worsening. The
subject, however, never loses the thread of his dominant concern.
Normal professional activity and family life are often not hindered,
but even in cases where the subject's social activities remains, he is
almost completely absorbed with himself. He suffers from feelings of
complete isolation, even when he has a mentor who guides him while
undergoing the trial (as the apprentice sorcerer with his teacher). He
lives in a maximum spiritual isolation and has the impression that
nobody can help, consequently he attempts self-healing. His recovery is
fast and spontaneous, characterized by feelings of euphoria, and it
follows from a transformation of personality. The subject is certain
that he has gained access to a new spiritual world, or that he has
obtained a new spiritual truth that must reveal to the world. Examples
of this disease can be found among the sorcerers of Siberia and Alaska,
among mystics of all religions and in certain writers and creative
philosophers " 1.
The clinical aspect of a creative illness differs from one individual
to another-Ellenberger tells us-, although it always keeps the common
features described above. The same author refers to the occurrence of
this process in personalities such as Mesmer, Fechner, Nietzsche, Freud
and Jung.
In the case of Fechner, "at the age of thirty-nine he suffered a
breakdown and had to resign his professional activities over the next
three years. He felt driven to live in complete seclusion, staying in a
dark room with walls painted black or wearing a mask over his face to
protect himself from light. He could not tolerate the vast majority of
meals, was not hungry and ate very little, therefore his physical
condition became precarious. A three-year period of depression was
followed by a shorter one of exaltation. Fechner enjoyed a growing
feeling of well-being, expressed ideas of grandeur, he felt as a chosen
of God able to solve all the mysteries of the universe. All that
culminated in the conviction that he had discovered a universal
principle, so fundamental to the spiritual life as Newton's gravity law
was for the physical world. He called it the pleasure principle
: his hypomaniac euphoria had been transformed into a philosophical
concept. Once recovered, Fechner lived in perfect health for the rest
of his life, but inside him a remarkable metamorphosis had taken
place."
(...) "The strange illness that Sigmund Freud underwent between 1894
and 1900, along with his self-analysis, have led to diverse
interpretations. Some of his opponents claim that he was a seriously
ill man, and that psychoanalysis was the expression of a neurosis . His
followers, like Jones, claimed that his self-analysis was an
unprecedented heroic act, that would never be performed again, which
had revealed the depth of the unconscious to mankind for the first
time.
We believe that Freud's self-analysis was only one aspect of a complex
process (the others were his relationship with Fliess, his neurosis and
the development of psychoanalysis), and that this process is an example
of what can be called a creative illness.
Since his visit to Charcot in 1885 and 1886, he had been concerned
about the problem of the origin of a neurosis, a problem that at some
point became his predominant concern. Since 1894 his sufferings, as
described in his letters to Fliess, could be undoubtedly qualified as
neurotic, and on occasions even psychosomatic. But unlike neurosis, the
focus on a fixed idea was not merely obsessive but also creative.
Intellectual speculation, self-analysis and the work with his patients
were combined in a kind of desperate search for an impalpable truth.
The characteristic feeling of absolute isolation is one of the leading
leitmotivs of his letters to Fliess.
On the other hand, Freud's relationship with Fliess, which has confused
many psychoanalysts, can be easily understood if it is placed in the
context of a creative illness. The person has the feeling of opening a
path into an unknown world and in complete isolation. He desperately
needs a guide to help him in this trial.
The resulting personality transformation in the creative illness is
deep. It is as if the person had followed St. Augustine's call: 'Seek
youself in your inside, turn to yourself, because inside man inhabits
the truth'. That is why personality transformation is inextricably
bound to the condition of having discovered a great truth that must be
proclaimed to mankind. In Freud's case it was the discovery of the
psychoanalytic method and a new theory of mind, and its first evidence
is found in his book The Interpretation of Dreams " 2.
Years ago, Bertrand Russell wrote that the person who undergoes a
mystical experience lies above logic. The mystic feels strongly linked
to humankind and therefore is continually looking for ways to
communicate to others the realities he has discovered. He keeps trying
to depict in rational terms what is perhaps beyond reason.
Maslow, the humanistic psychologist, found out that the climax
experience is accompanied by the individual merge of facts and values,
conflict resolution, loss of anxiety, the discovery of the true being
and a feeling of unity, detachment, generosity, happiness and love.
Carl Jung, for his part, has conducted one of the most extensive
scientific researches about the mystical experience. His study of the
unconscious showed him that mysticism constitutes the natural tendency
of the deep unconscious. He believed that if modern man considers
mystic states pathological, it is only due to a lack of understanding.
Jung himself wrote about mystical experiences as if it was about the
discovery of treasures buried under the collective unconscious, forming
a bond with the impersonal source of life. In this experience, psychic
energy not only suffers a regression to childhood, namely towards the
preverbal stage, but also insofar as the personal stratum ends with
first reminiscences, regression keeps sinking more deeply into the
collective unconscious, in the pre-infant period which contains
residues of the ancestral life of man.
Other studies on this same phenomenon have been able to determine that,
regarding the brain, enlightenment seems to lead to a reshaping of the
neural networks. While previously there were areas of the nervous
system of the brain disconnected or "as if in separate compartments",
in the enlightenment there is a transfer that results in an integration
of the nerve pathways by means of which we think and feel. Our
"multiple brains" become a single brain. The neocortex (the
intellective thinking part), the limbic system and the thalamus
(sentimental-emotional part) and the oblong marrow
(intuitive-unconscious part), reach a mode of intercellular
communication that did not exist previously but had always been
possible. At that moment a threshold is surpassed, this is a probably
accountable step in terms of electrochemical cell changes and of growth
of nerve endings. The outcome is a new state of consciousness 3.
All descriptions suggest that this perceptive state is beyond words and
eminently experiential. In addition, the game of usual opposites
(good-bad, inside-out, near-away, etc.) vanishes, giving way to a
sensation of unity that allows the merging with all that exists and a
direct contact with reality.
So the creative illness is the process able to make us transcend our
individuality, namely, our ego limits. With regard to this, in BEYOND THE EGO BORDERS 4 we said:
"Having reached adulthood, the ego, which can provide us identity, must
abandon his reign, must give way to a new stage, must die? Unable to
feel that every death is a transformation, we see death as the end .
Perception that is alienated in the ego cannot manage to discern the
inexorable passage to a new state, the complete fulfilment of man. "
And as we said in THE PULSATION OF CONCIOUSNESS 5:
"What dies is the ego that we are, what gives particularity to
existence, the individuality, what makes us feel different from others.
It is the death of individual conscience, the conclusion of our
personal matters, the dissolution of our history, the death of what
gave us identity: is the loss of the Form. It is a return to the
starting point after having walked our way, it is the return to the
origin, to the real, after having lived the symbolic. "
And finally, in the article THE UNIVERSE OF ITSELF
6
we said:
"Birth, death, insight and orgasm are special moments where perception
is released from its temporal bonds to offer us 'the universe of the
itself'. Who has had the living experience which allows him/her to
accompany my words will know that I refer to 'a space without time', or
to the 'cessation of chronological time', to this impasse that allows
us to shift from our usual mode of perception. And, only just for brief
moments, we have entered the universe of the itself."
The "enlightenment", "mystical experience" or "creative
illness" is the outcome of personal history dissolution and the return
to perinatal experience. In other words, through our capacity to yield,
we release from the symbolic contents and through our perception come
back to our birth7.The completeness of ego maturation appears to
be the trigger for this regression process beyond the symbols, able to
displace our perception from the body to the field of energy that we
are as well.
Thus, in an abrupt and spontaneous way, body blockades release their
energy and the feeling of falling down (8) comes into the
self-perception of the subject and begins a psychophysics
restructuring, a releasing movement of the stagnant energy. In these
terms, the experience of falling down represents a "release", a
"detachment" of neurotic-making support routines, a "small death", an
interruption in the continuity of personal history.
From the Biofuncionalism point of view, we see in the creative illness
- as in every other illness - the vast human capacity of transformation
and transcendence, the highest goal in the work on ourselves and the
maximum capacity to yield oneself. And in that yield the meeting with
totality takes place without the limits imposed by the ego, perception
perceives itself.
Taking into account the characteristics of present times (widely
described by this publication), we believe that this experience of
personal transcendence could be becoming the only and real way out of
man in front of his inexorable present. Once again, illness claims its
central place in human life.
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