FOR MANY YEARS I have been convinced that something occurs in the creative working of the imagination that is more fundamental—but more puzzling—than we have assumed in contemporary psychology. In our day of dedication to facts and hard-headed objectivity, we have disparaged imagination: it gets us away from “reality”; it taints our work with “subjectivity”; and, worst of all, it is said to be unscientific. As a result, art and imagination are often taken as the “frosting” to life rather than as the solid food. No wonder people think of “art” in terms of its cognate, “artificial,” or even consider it a luxury that slyly fools us, “artifice.” Throughout Western history our dilemma has been whether imagination shall turn out to be artifice or the source of being.
What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience? What if our logic and science derive from art forms and are fundamentally dependent on them rather than art being merely a decoration for our work when science and logic have produced it? These are the hypotheses I propose here.
This same problem is related to psychotherapy in ways that are much more profound than merely the play on words. In other words, is psychotherapy an artifice, a process that is characterized by artificiality, or is it a process that can give birth to new being?
Pondering these hypotheses, I brought data to my aid from the dreams of persons in therapy. By dreaming, persons in analysis, I saw, are doing something on a level quite below that of psychodynamics. They are struggling with their world—to make sense out of nonsense, meaning out of chaos, coherence out of conflict. They are doing it by imagination, by constructing new forms and relationships in their world, and by achieving through proportion and perspective a world in which they can survive and live with some meaning.
Here is a simple dream. It was related by an intelligent man who seems younger than his thirty years, coming from a culture where fathers have considerable authority.
I was in the sea playing with some large porpoises. I like porpoises and wanted these to be like pets. Then I began to get afraid, thinking that the big porpoises would hurt me. I went out of the water, on the shore, and now I seem to be a cat hanging by its tail from a tree. The cat is curled up in a tear-drop form, but its eyes are big and seductive, one of them winking. A porpoise comes up, and, like a father cajoling a youngster out of bed with “get up and get going,” it hits the cat lightly. The cat then becomes afraid with a real panic and bounds off in a straight line into the higher rocks, away from the sea.
Let us put aside such obvious symbols as the big porpoises being father and so on—symbols that are almost always confused with symptoms. I ask you to take the dream as an abstract painting, to look at it as pure form and motion.
We see first a smallish form, namely the boy, playing with the larger forms, the porpoises. Imagine the former as a small circle, and the latter as large circles. The playing movement conveys a kind of love in the dream, which we could express by lines toward each other converging in the play. In the second scene we see the smaller form (the boy in his fright) moving in a line out of the sea and away from the larger forms. The third scene shows the smaller form as a cat, now in an elliptical, tearlike, form, the coyness of the cat’s eyes being seductive. The big form now coming toward the cat moves into the cajoling act and the lines here, it seems to me, would be confused. This is a typical neurotic phase consisting of the dreamer trying to resolve his relationship with his father and the world. And, of course, it does not work. The fourth and last scene is the panic in which the smaller form, the cat, moves rapidly out of the scene. It dashes toward the higher rocks. The motion is in a straight line off the canvas. The whole dream can be seen as an endeavor through form and motion to resolve this young man’s relationship, in its love and its fear, to his father and father figures.
The resolution is a vivid failure. But the “painting” or play, Ionescolike though it be, shows like many a contemporary drama the vital tension in the irresolution of conflict. Therapeutically speaking, the patient is certainly facing his conflicts, albeit he can at the moment do nothing but flee.
We also can see in these scenes a progression of planes: first, the plane of the sea; second, the higher plane of the land with the tree; and third, the highest plane of all, namely the rocks on the mountain to which the cat leaps. These may be conceived as higher levels of consciousness to which the dreamer climbs. This expansion of consciousness may represent an important gain for the patient even though in the dream the actual resolution of the problem is a failure.
When we turn such a dream into an abstract painting, we are on a deeper level than psychodynamics. I do not mean we should leave out the contents of the dreams of our patients. I mean we should go beyond contents to the ground forms. We shall then be dealing with basic forms that only later, and derivatively, become formulations.
From the most obvious viewpoint, the son is trying to work out a better relationship with his father, to be accepted as a comrade, let us say. But on a deeper level he is trying to construct a world that makes sense, that has space and motion and keeps these in some proportion, a world that he can live in. You can live without a father who accepts you, but you cannot live without a world that makes some sense to you. Symbol in this sense no longer means symptom. As I have pointed out elsewhere,1 symbol returns to its original and root meaning of “drawing together” (sym-ballein). The problem—the neurosis and its elements—is described by the antonym of symbolic, namely diabolic (dia-ballein), “pulling apart.”
Dreams are par excellence the realm of symbols and myths. I use the term myth not in the pejorative sense of “falsehood,” but in the sense of a form of universal truth revealed in some partial way to the dreamer. These are ways human consciousness makes sense of the world. Persons in therapy, like all of us, are trying to make sense out of nonsense, trying to put the world into some perspective, trying to form out of the chaos they are suffering some order and harmony.
After having studied a series of dreams of persons in therapy, I am convinced that there is one quality that is always present, a quality I call passion for form. The patient constructs in his “unconscious” a drama; it has a beginning, something happens and is “flashed on the stage,” and then it comes to some kind of denouement. I have noted the forms in the dreams being repeated, revised, remolded, and then, like a motif in a symphony, returning triumphantly to be drawn together to make a meaningful whole of the series.
I found that one fruitful approach is to take the dream as a series of spatial forms. I refer now to a thirty-year-old woman in therapy. In one stage in her dreams, a female character, for example, would move onto the stage of the dream; then another female would enter; a male would appear; the females would exit together. This kind of movement in space occurred in the Lesbian period of this particular person’s analysis. In later dreams she, the patient, would enter; then the female, who was present, would exit; a man would enter and he would sit beside her. I began to see a curious geometric communication, a progression of spatial forms. Perhaps the meaning of her dreams, and the progress of her analysis, could be better understood by how she constructed these forms moving in space—of which she was quite unaware—than in what she verbalized about her dreams.
Then I began to notice the presence of triangles in this person’s dreams. First, in her dreams referring to her infantile period, it was the triangle of father, mother, and baby. In what I took to be her adolescent phase, the triangle was composed of two women and a man, and she, as one of the women, moved in space toward the man. Then after some months of analysis, in a Lesbian phase, the triangle consisted of two women and a man with the two women standing together. In a still later period the triangles turned into rectangles: two men were in the dream with two women, assumedly her boy friend, herself, her mother, and her father. Her development then became a process of working through rectangles to form eventually a new triangle, her man, herself, and a child. These dreams occurred in the middle and later parts of the analysis.
That the symbol of the triangle is fundamental can be seen by the fact that it refers to a number of different levels simultaneously. A triangle has three lines; it has the lowest possible number of straight lines required to make a geometric form that has content. This is the mathematical, “pure form” level. The triangle is fundamental in early, neolithic art—vide designs on the vases of this period. This is the aesthetic level. It is present in science—triangulation is the way the Egyptians figured their relation to the stars. The triangle is the basic symbol in medieval philosophy and theology—vide the Trinity. It is fundamental in Gothic art, a graphic example of which is Mont-Saint-Michel, the triangle of rock rising from the sea capped by the Gothic triangle of man-built architecture which, in rurn, ends in a pinnacle pointing toward heaven—a magnificent art form in which we have the triangle of nature, man, and God. And finally, psychologically speaking, we have the basic human triangle—man, woman, and child.
The importance of forms is revealed in the inescapable unity of the body with the world. The body is always a part of the world. I sit on this chair; the chair is on a floor in this building; and the building, in turn, rests on the mountain of stone that is Manhattan Island. Whenever I walk, my body is interrelated with the world in which and on which I take my steps. This presupposes some harmony between body and world. We know from physics that the earth rises infinitesimally to meet my step, as any two bodies attract each other. The balance essential in walking is one that is not solely in my body; it can be understood only as a relationship of my body to the ground on which it stands and walks. The earth is there to meet each foot as it falls, and the rhythm of my walking depends on my faith that the earth will be there.
Our active need for form is shown in the fact that we automatically construct it in an infinite number of ways. The mime Marcel Marceau stands upon the stage impersonating a man taking his dog out for a walk. Marceau’s arm is outstretched as though holding the dog’s leash. As his arm jerks back and forth, everyone in the audience “sees” the dog straining at the leash to sniff this or that in the bushes. Indeed, the dog and the leash are the most “real” parts of the scene even though there is no dog and no leash on the stage at all. Only part of the Gestalt is there—the man Marceau and his arm. The rest is entirely supplied by our imagination as viewers. The incomplete Gestalt is completed in our fantasy. Another mime, Jean-Louis Barrault, who plays a deaf-mute in the film Les Enfants du Paradis, goes through the whole account of the man who has had his pocket picked in the crowd—he makes one movement for the fat stomach of the victim, another movement for the dour expression of the companion, and so on until we have a vivid picture of the entire event of the pickpocketing. But not a word has been spoken. There is only a mime making a few artful motions. All of the gaps are automatically filled by our imagination.
The human imagination leaps to form the whole, to complete the scene in order to make sense of it. The instantaneous way this is done shows how we are driven to construct the remainder of the scene. To fill the gaps is essential if the scene is to have meaning. That we may do this in misleading ways—at times in neurotic or paranoid ways—does not gainsay the central point. Our passion for form expresses our yearning to make the world adequate to our needs and desires, and, more important, to experience ourselves as having significance.
The phrase “passion for form,” may be interesting, but it is also problematical. If we used just the word form, it would sound too abstract; but when it is combined with passion, we see that what is meant is not form in any intellectual sense, but rather in a wholistic scene. What is occurring in the person, hidden as it may be by passivity or other neurotic symptoms, is a conflict-filled passion to make sense out of a crisis-ridden life.
Plato told us long ago how passion, or, as he put it, Eros, moves toward the creation of form. Eros moves toward the making of meaning and the revealing of Being. Originally a daimon called love, Eros is the lover of wisdom, and the force in us that brings to birth both wisdom and beauty. Plato says through Socrates that “human nature will not easily find a helper better than love [Eros].”2 “All creation or passage of non-being into being is poetry or making,” Plato writes, “and the processes of all art are creative; and the masters of arts are all poets or makers.”3 Through Eros or the passion of love, which is daimonic and constructive at the same time, Plato looks forward to “at last the vision … of a single science, which is the science of beauty everywhere.” 4
Thus the mathematicians and physicists talk about the “elegance” of a theory. Utility is subsumed as part of the character of being beautiful. The harmony of an internal form, the inner consistency of a theory, the character of beauty that touches your sensibilities—these are significant factors that determine why one given insight comes into consciousness rather than another. As a psychoanalyst, I can only add that my experience in helping people achieve insights from unconscious dimensions within themselves reveals the same phenomenon—insights emerge not chiefly because they are “intellectually true” or even because they are helpful, but because they have a certain form, the form that is beautiful because it completes what is incomplete in us.
This idea, this new form that suddenly presents itself, comes in order to complete a hitherto incomplete Gestalt with which we are struggling in conscious awareness. One can quite accurately speak of this unfinished pattern, this unformed form, as constituting the “call” to which our preconscious, out of its maelstrom, gives an answer.
By passion for form I mean a principle of human experience that is analogous to several of the most important ideas in Western history. Kant proposed that our understanding is not simply a reflection of the objective world around us, but it also constitutes this world. It is not that objects simply speak to us; they also conform to our ways of knowing. The mind thus is an active process of forming and re-forming the world.
Interpreting dreams as dramas of the patient’s relationship to his or her world, I asked myself whether there is not on a deeper and more inclusive level in human experience something parallel to what Kant was talking about. That is, is it not only our intellectual understanding that plays a role in our forming and re-forming the world in the process of knowing it, but do not imagination and emotions also play a critical role? It must be the totality of ourselves that understands, not simply reason. And it is the totality of ourselves that fashions the images to which the world conforms.
Not only does reason form and re-form the world, but the “preconscious,” with its impulses and needs, does so also and does so on the basis of wish and intentionality. Human beings not only think but feel and will as they make form in their world. This is why I use the word passion, the sum of erotic and dynamic tendencies, in the phrase “passion for form.” Persons in therapy—or anybody for that matter—are not simply engaged in knowing their world: what they are engaged in is a passionate re-forming of their world by virtue of their interrelationship with it.
This passion for form is a way of trying to find and constitute meaning in life. And this is what genuine creativity is. Imagination, broadly defined, seems to me to be a principle in human life underlying even reason, for the rational functions, according to our definitions, can lead to understanding—can participate in the constituting of reality—only as they are creative. Creativity is thus involved in our every experience as we try to make meaning in our self-world relationship.
Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead also speaks in effect of this passion for form. Whitehead has constructed a philosophy based not on reason alone, but one that includes what he calls “feeling.” By feeling he does not mean simply affect. As I understand it he means the total capacity of the human organism to experience his or her world. Whitehead reformulates Descartes’ original principle as follows:
Descartes was wrong when he said “Cogito, ergo sum”—I think, therefore I am. It is never bare thought or bare existence that we are aware of. I find myself rather as essentially a unity of emotions, of enjoyment, of hopes, of fears, of regrets, valuations of alternatives, decisions—all of these are subjective reactions to my environment as I am active in my nature. My unity which is Descartes’ “I am” is my process of shaping this welter of material into a consistent pattern of feelings.5
What I am calling passion for form is, if I understand Whitehead aright, a central aspect of what he is describing as the experience of identity.* I am able to shape feelings, sensibilities, enjoyments, hopes into a pattern that makes me aware of myself as man or woman. But I cannot shape them into a pattern as a purely subjective act. I can do it only as I am related to the immediate objective world in which I live.
Passion can destroy the self. But this is not passion for form; it is passion gone beserk. Passion obviously can be diabolic as well as symbolic—it can deform as well as form; it can destroy meaning and produce chaos again. When sexual powers emerge in puberty, passion often does destroy form temporarily. But sex also has great creative potentialities precisely because it is passion. Unless one’s development is radically pathological, there will also occur in the adolescent a growth toward a new form, in manhood or womanhood, in contrast to his or her previous state as girl or boy.
The urgent need in everyone to give form to his or her life can be illustrated by the case of a young man who consulted with me when I was writing this chapter. He was the only son in a professional family where his mother and father had quarreled and had fought almost continuously, according to his memory, since he was born. He had never been able to concentrate or apply himself to his studies in school. As a boy when he was supposed to be studying in his room, he would hear his father coming up the stairs and immediately open a schoolbook to cover over the magazine on mechanics he had been looking at. He recalled that his father, a successful but apparently very cold man, had often promised to take him on various trips as a reward if he successfully got through his schoolwork. But none of those trips ever materialized.
His mother had made him her confidante, covertly supporting him in his conflicts with his father. He and his mother used to sit out in the backyard summer evenings talking until late at night—they were “partners,” they “grooved together,” as he put it. His father exercised pull to get him accepted into college in another part of the country; but the young man spent three months there never going out of his room until his father came to fetch him home.
Living at home he worked as a carpenter, and later as a construction worker in the Peace Corps. He then came to New York where he supported himself as a plumber, doing sculpture on the side, until by a kind of lucky accident he got a job as instructor in crafts at a university an hour outside the city. But in his job he was unable to assert himself or to talk clearly and directly to either students or faculty. He was overawed by the young Ivy League graduates on the faculty who monopolized faculty meetings with their chatter which he felt was pompous and artificial. In this dazed and ineffectual state, he first began work with me. I found him an unusually sensitive person, generous, talented (he gave me a wire sculptured figure he had made in my waiting room which I found delightful). He was seriously withdrawn and apparently accomplishing practically nothing in his job or life.
We worked together a couple of times a week for most of a year, in which time he made unusually commendable progress in his interpersonal relationships. He now worked effectually and had entirely overcome his neurotic awe of fellow faculty members. He and I agreed that since he was now functioning actively and well we would stop our work for the time being. We were both aware, however, that we had never been able to explore adequately his relationship with his mother.
He came back a year later. He had married in the meantime, but this did not seem to present any special problems. What cued off the present impasse was a visit he and his wife had made the previous month to his mother, who by that time was in a mental hospital. They found her sitting by the nurses’ desk in the corridor “waiting for her cigarette.” She went into her room to talk with them, but soon came out again to continue waiting out the hour until the time for her rationed cigarette.
Coming back on the train, the young man was very depressed. He had known theoretically about his mother’s increasingly senile condition, but was unable to make emotional sense of it. His withdrawn, apathetic state was similar to but also different from his condition the first time he had come. He was now able to communicate with me directly and openly. His problem was localized, specific, in contrast to the generalized daze he had been suffering from the first time he came. His relationship to his mother was in chaos. In that segment of his life he felt no form at all, only a gnawing confusion.
After our first session the daze he was under lifted, but the problem remained. This is often the function of communication in the therapeutic hour: it enables the person to overcome his or her sense of alienation from the human kind. But it does not suffice in itself for a genuine experience of new form. It assuages, but it doesn’t produce the new form. An overcoming of the chaos on a deeper level is required, and this can only be done with some kind of insight.
In this second hour we reviewed at length his mother’s attachment to him and the understandable upset he would feel at her present condition, even though he had known it had been coming on for years. She had privately made him the “crown prince.” I pointed out that she had been a powerful woman in these fights with his father, that she had wooed him away from his father and had exploited him in her endeavors to defeat his father. In contrast to his illusion that they had been partners or that they had “grooved,” he actually had been a hostage, a little person used in much bigger battles. When he mentioned his surprise at seeing these things, he brought to my mind a story, which I told him. A man was selling hamburgers allegedly made of rabbit meat at an amazingly low price. When people asked him how he did it, he admitted that he was using some horse meat. But when this did not suffice as an explanation, he confessed it was 50 per cent horse meat and 50 per cent rabbit meat. When they continued to ask him what he meant, he stated, “One rabbit to one horse.”
The graphic image of the rabbit and horse gave him a powerful “aha” experience, much greater than any he would have gotten from an intellectual explanation. He continued to marvel at his being the rabbit not in any derogatory sense, but with the felt realization of how helpless he must have been in his childhood. A heavy load of guilt and previously unexpressible hostility was lifted off his back. The image gave him a way of getting at long last to his negative feelings toward his mother. Many details of his background now fell into place, and he seemed to be able to cut the psychological umbilical cord which he previously did not know existed.
Curiously, persons in such situations give the impression of having had all along the necessary strength at hand to make these changes; it was just a matter of waiting for the “sun of order” to melt away “the fog of confusion” (to change the metaphor into Delphic-oracle terms). The “passion” in his example is shown by the alacrity with which he grasped this insight and by the immediacy with which he re-formed his psychological world. He gave the impression—which again is typical for the experience—of having stored up the strength at previous stages until it was finally possible, on getting the right piece of the jigsaw puzzle, to suddenly seize that strength and exercise it.
In our third and last session he told me of his newly-made decision to resign his post at the university, and to find a studio in which he could devote himself entirely to his sculpture.
The communication with me in the first session may be seen as the preliminary step in this creative process. Then came the “aha” experience as the needed insight, preferably as an image, is born in the individual’s consciousness. The third step is the making of the decisions, which the young man did between the second and third sessions, as a result of the newly achieved form. The therapist cannot predict the exact nature of such decisions; they are a living out of the new form.
The creative process is the expression of this passion for form. It is the struggle against disintegration, the struggle to bring into existence new kinds of being that give harmony and integration.
Plato has for our summation some charming advice:
For he who would proceed aright in this manner should begin in youth to visit beautiful forms; and first, if he be guided by his instructor aright, to love one such form only—out of that he should create fair thoughts; and soon he will of himself perceive that the beauty of one form is akin to the beauty of another, and that beauty in every form is one and the same.6
* A friend of mine, on reading this chapter in manuscript, sent me the following original poem, which I quote with permission:
I am, therefore I love
the total sensibility
that looked at me
out of your undefended face
immediately.
I love, therefore I am.