creative artists are simply models of people who turn to the imagination to work with things. That’s why one needs to read the biographies of artists, because biographies show what they did with their traumas; they show what can be done — not what they did but what can be done — by the imagination with hatred, with resentment, with bitterness, with feelings of being useless and inferior and worthless. Artists found modes in the imagination to process it
if you’re an artist you know that stuff is your ore — you know that, and that’s why many artists steer clear of therapy. They don’t want that ore processed in the wrong way. The obsession that prevents it from being valued as ore is the obsession with processing, the obsession with smoothing it out. It doesn’t become as damaging unless you think it shouldn’t be there. That’s what I mean about the therapeutic attitude hurting the actual potential of people.
Make those things be felt. I see it as a kind of building of doorways, opening conduits, and making channels, like a giant bypass operation, throwing in all kinds of new tubings so that things flow into each other. Memories, events, images, all become enlivened. And our feelings about this ore become more subtle. Learning to appreciate it - that’s one thing therapy can do
If you go to therapy, watch out for the collusion between the therapist and the part of you that doesn’t want to feel the ore.” There are many ways to repress feeling the ore, one of which is processing it. The different schools of therapy have different processing systems, but all of them are fixers. From my angle, fixing what’s wrong represses the ore.
The notion of transformation that dominates therapy: transform something useless into something useful. A consumer’s ideology, also as an industrialist: you’re making a profit out of it And the psyche doesn’t like that. So what it says is, “Okay! I’ll make you boring.”
Fantasy is the natural activity of the mind. Jung says, “The primary activity of psychic life is the creation of fantasy.” Fantasy is how you perceive something, how you think about it, react to it. Reality is always coming through a pair of glasses, a point of view, a language—a fantasy.