It has been realized for a very long time that the memory in its unregenerate form is a dangerous faculty which can put us very wrong. We find very interesting passages about this in Buddhist literature, and I was interested not long ago to find a passage on the problem of memory in the writings of St John of the Cross, the great Spanish mystical writer of the sixteenth century. He says, ‘This emptying of the memory, though the advantages of it are not so great as those of the state of union, yet, merely because it delivers souls from much sorrow, grief, and sadness, besides imperfections and sins, is in itself a great good.’ We may perhaps doubt whether the rather mechanical methods of emptying the memory employed in Catholic monasteries are likely to be very effective; nevertheless it is quite clear that these people were entirely on the right track. There is no doubt that really effective therapy would make use of some of the methods used in religion, combined with the various methods of analysis and abreaction therapy which can serve under modern conditions to cleanse the memory.
So much for the negative side of the unconscious—first the negative side due to physical influences and then the negative side due to repression and to conditioning from the outside. Let us now turn to what I would think is much more important: the positive side of the unconscious. Here again, let us start with the colloquial phrases which indicate the nature of the positive contribution which the unconscious makes to our life. We use phrases such as, ‘It has suddenly struck me’; ‘It has suddenly occurred to me’; ‘I have had a brilliant idea’; ‘A wonderful notion has come into my head’; ‘The violinist gave an inspired performance’; ‘The preacher spoke as though he were inspired’. Here we are back with the old Biblical and Homeric idea of supernatural possession, this time a good possession and not a demonic possession. Homer makes an appeal to the Muses to help him and speaks about minstrels who sin ‘out of the gods’—a very remarkable phrase—and later on in Greek history we get the accounts of the Pythia of Delphi, who received the oracles of Apollo.
Thus we see that when we use words like ‘inspired’, which we do without any particular thought, we are carrying on a very ancient tradition; similarly we find that the Bible is full of these same ideas. St Paul in the Epistle to the Hebrews says, ‘God, who at sundry times and in divers manners, spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets’ (Hebrews 1:1). When one looks at the works of the prophets themselves, one finds that they think of themselves as passive and very often reluctant instruments. They are not particularly anxious to undergo the tremendous influx of some non-rational and much greater power, but they have no choice. Later on, in early Christian times, we have accounts of the passive involuntary reception by the early Christians of what were called ‘charismata’—gifts of the spirit which came involuntarily into certain people.
Let us now consider the positive unconscious in its relation to everyday life. When we look carefully into our everyday experience, we find that the conscious ‘I’ seldom comes up with a really brilliant idea—it is a kind of plodding faculty. We constantly get the impression that our best ideas come to us from an area of our mind which is not our conscious mind; phrases such as ‘It occurred to me’ are good representations of this fact.
The mechanism of the unconscious must be looked at more or less as follows: We consciously take in material which then is passed on to some layer of the unconscious (Freud speaks of this layer as the pre-conscious, but I would think there are deeper layers, beyond the repressed unconscious, where this material goes). There it undergoes a process of digestion and organization, and it is then represented to the conscious mind in the form of some idea which is often felt to be extremely brilliant and illuminating, which the conscious mind could not of itself have concocted.
As this is such an everyday phenomenon, we can take it for granted and not think too much about it. However, we are very decidedly amazed by the more unusual phenomena of the same kind such as artistic inspiration. It is a significant fact that in several of the Indo-European languages the word for ‘poet’ and the word for ‘seer’ are the same. In Latin the word vates means both seer and poet; the same thing is true of the Irish word fili. The whole idea is that the poet receives inspiration from some other source than the merely self-conscious mind, and it is remarkable that many great poets in modern times have felt exactly the same way. Goethe says, ‘The songs made me, not I the songs.’ The French poet Lamartine writes, ‘It is not I who think; it is my ideas that think for me.’ Alfred de Musset says, ‘One doesn’t really work, one listens. It is as though some stranger were whispering in one’s ear.’ And Shelley makes a very curious remark, ‘The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some visible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness.’
There is a very striking phrase which sums up this whole idea in the writings of a romantic German philosopher, Frans von Baader, who says that Descartes was entirely wrong in saying ‘Cogito ergo sum’. What he ought to have said was ‘Cogitor ergo sum’—not ‘I think’ but ‘I am thought, therefore I am’. In so far as I am a conscious ego, I think, therefore I am. But in so far as I am a creative unconscious, and in so far as my conscious ego requires the collaboration of the creative unconscious, I am thought, and therefore I am, on a more important scale than I would have been if I were merely a conscious ego doing my own private thinking—my own private thinking being strictly limited.
What may be called genius is the uprush of helpful material from the deep levels of the unconscious, which is then worked up by the conscious self into an appropriate form. Edison said that genius is nine-tenths perspiration and only one-tenth inspiration, but there has to be the inspiration first and then the work on it afterwards. Genius is the harmonious collaboration of the two parts of our being; it is openness to what lies below us on the unconscious level and the capacity to mould this material into forms which shall communicate to other people and shall carry over some of the meanings and feelings which the original artist had.
We must not imagine that all such uprushes are of the highest quality. Unfortunately, there can be uprushes from the unconscious of the utmost silliness and stupidity. A painful example of this is the case of Voltaire, who prided himself above all on being a tragic poet. Unfortunately, he was a very bad tragic poet. There is an extraordinary letter where he describes the writing of his tragedy Catiline, which is in five acts, in rhymed Alexandrines, and which he completed in a week. Nobody, he writes, who had not felt the afflatus of genius could imagine how such a feat was possible. No doubt that is true, but unfortunately the play is perfectly unreadable. The mode of genius in this particular case did not produce the results of genius.
The most non-genius type of inspiration of this kind is shown by those people who have a gift of automatic writing, who sit down with a pen and let the scripts come pouring out. The vast majority of these scripts are completely uninteresting and nonsensical, but they do come up from the depths in the same kind of way that the inspirations of genius come to men of genius. The difference is that in the case of men of genius what comes up is originally of much better quality, and the work which they then put into it in their conscious state of mind brings the final creation to a pitch where it can be appreciated by other people and felt to be of great significance and importance.
Another particularly odd kind of intervention of the creative unconscious is illustrated by the cases of the so-called calculating boys. Every now and then we hear or read in the papers the story of a child who can perform the most astounding mental calculations—finding the cube root of seven-figured numbers in fifty seconds, etc. Let me quote the charming case of an English calculating boy called
