Ways in Working

How might I use creativity and traditional psychological concepts as a means for Self discovery and personal development in coaching work?

In March 2023 I published a Master’s thesis in the field of Counseling Psychology that weaved together academic research with creative writing. I presented this thesis to Pacifica Graduate Institute in May that year. Below are my notes from the thesis presentation which you may use as a truncated sample of how I engage with the human experience, illuminate what is beneath the surface, and make meaning of it.

Consider this my open hand, I invite you to shake it.

A Healing Fiction

He wondered how long he’d been lying there. Above him purple beamed off the bougainvillea high in the last light. Pelicans in frame, then out. An ember of instinct moved him to sit from the nausea that held him like quicksand. He heaved. A feverish sweat and cold wind dried salt in angled lines across his face. Eventually he managed to look outward at the beach that had narrowed from when he blacked out, only a few feet of sand and driftwood lay between the bluffs and the sea thundering before him. And now, gazing into the remaining spray of whitewater, he realized he was submerged, the receding wave tightening the shirt around his neck.

On his feet another wave crashed and rushed to his knees. He shook before the ocean’s powerful surge, hypnotized by the dark, intoxicating blue that brought by contrast the laboratory red of chemotherapy dripping at noon that day. He remembered then the sharp rock as it thrashed him earlier. He felt the gash in his hip, noticed the blood in his eyes, and the purple tape around his right forearm that he numbly tore off to reveal a swollen vein. He closed his eyes and in sober detail remembered everything else that made him want to die.

My thesis is an application of James Hillman’s theory of archetypal or imaginal psychology, utilizing Carl Jung’s concept of active imagination in the form of fiction-based research.  How might engagement with creativity illuminate unconscious archetypal dynamics in depression and facilitate transformation in the psyche?

I will take a moment to orient us. This is depth psychology. “Depth” here, '“refers to an imagined direction - down, behind, underneath” (Aizenstat in Roszak et al, 1995, p 94). This is not a psychology of brain anatomy, of axons and dendrites, or behavioral observation. This dimension of psychology is built from Jung’s notion of the poetic basis of mind: that for anything to be experienced in psyche, it must first come as psychic image. This psychology is an operation in the imaginal realm (a termed coined by philosopher Henri Corbin), a middle realm that is neither spiritual nor material, a place of phenomenological experience where tangible, external things interact with internal fantasy images. Where the objective and subjective convene in image-generation, and meaning-making. This mysterious, meaning-making activity is partly what is alluded to when in depth psychology we say “soul”. Working in this psychology is working with images through language and metaphor. The images in my creative piece emerged naturally when I personified a symptom of depression into a fictional character and befriended him in writing his short story.

Why do this? Because a depth orientation sees pathology as an integral necessity of psychological nature, and "can be understood as the soul commanding the attention of the ego, of consciousness, through affliction, through the derangement of the imagination, and through symptoms” (Coppin & Nelson, 2017, pp. 190-192). And to the soul, these pathologies want depth of consciousness as much as those things the ego desires, like success, fulfillment, and happiness. The creative writing engagement in this case sought to bring that depth to the symptom of depression. 

My writing was motivated by an archetypal tenet: "sticking to the image". Image is taken as the primary datum of experience. And the idea is to find the images in our feelings, and in images we can explore what is archetypal, that is, what can be de-personalized, de-literalized into an energetic pattern, revealing a specific type of internal drama. It is in this final gesture that depth psychology alludes to mythic characters – the gods have become our diseases – and by returning a symptom to a mythic/metaphorical correlate, we gain insight into what image we are living in, what story, what narrative; and tending to that story, doctoring that story, and being doctored by it, is tending through healing fiction.

Reverting the opening images of depression to a mythic scenario, research led me to the archetypal senex – Latin for old man. A style of consciousness that forms “as natural, cultural and psychic processes mature, gain order, consolidate and wither” (Hillman, 1989, p. 208). The negative Senex-consciousness is in touch with what is crushing, with death and decay, slowness, dryness, bondage, repetitious ruminations. In the opening of the story we have a character (Depression personified) who is “wound identified, who wants to retreat into pain and loneliness (Hollis, 1994, p. 38) due to the daily toil of life feeling like a battering (p. 50)” (Brighton, 2023). Now, to really know the leaden weight of the senex we have to hold it in relationship to its opposite: the puer aeternus, or divine child, the incessant spirit of youth and endless possibilities. Based on these two paragraphs we have an immediate dynamic to work with, the relationship between senex and puer, and that axis is way out of balance.

Additionally, possibility for transformation was indicated in the presence of the suicidal fantasy. The problem with suicide, Hillman argued, is that it is literalized onto the body" (Brighton, 2023). Seen as metaphor, as image, the death wish points toward a desire for radical change, urgent transformation. And depression as the lowest point (down at sea level) "marks 'the most profound seat here the descent ends and the re-ascent begins' . . . Burial becomes contact with the fertile and profound womb of night" (Vitale in Brighton, 2023). We now have themes of descent, reascent, paradox, fertility, and transformation, these themes, if we are thinking mythically, are illuminating the house of the Greek God Dionysus, which I’ll speak to in a bit.

 Back to the story:

She gazed with wet eyes through the flame. Behind her the cockatoos, the parrots, the toucan, and macaws. Song cascaded from their exotic showcase cages while up the path were other exotic attractions in preparation, in front of her clouds piled in distant twilight, the fanning heat from her torch animating the stack as if was a far eastern temple, some place that held the hope of making sense. What was she doing here anyway? Her white gown and winged sandals reminded her of the through-line—getting paid.

Her gaze lowered. A seal rolled in a kelp bed in the rough white water. Seeing the animal tossed onto a sharp slab of rock, she lost her breath. Halfway down the platform and onto the winding steps her mind caught up with her. Her panicked descent was swift and, fearing being stranded, she propped the stairwell door open with a raft she should have taken with her. She neared the shallows with searching eyes and, still conscious of that paycheck, lifted the designer gown over her head, and dove in. 

An icy swell carried the man toward her. When she had a hold of him, she fought the drag of the wave, and when it crashed, it carried them both to what remained of the beach. A fistful of kelp and t-shirt in hand, she flipped him onto his back, shouting at him while she shook, pressing his chest and filling his lungs until his eyes shot open and he coughed up sea water.

His face collapsed into the sand and she placed a hand on his back.

“Are you ok?” she said, catching her own breath.

He managed to open an eye, seeing a girl bent over him with wet hair.

“Hey,” he said, his gaze following the water dripping from her face onto her bare shoulders, and onto her bare torso, and then he understood. He was dead.

  “I’m going to get you help, OK?”

  Help? He thought. What in the hell for?  

Her foot dug into his back and he could no longer ignore her urgency. He arched his neck toward the cliff where she was half into a white gown, then she was in front of him with her arms extended. His hands were in hers and she pulled him to his feet.

            “I’m James,” she said.

            “Jim,” said he.

            She ushered him toward the private staircase etched into the cliff. “What happened to you out here, Jim?”  

            “Surfing,” he said.

            She glanced at his torn khaki’s and soaked sneakers.

            “You must be pretty terrible.”

            He found himself ascending, zigzagging up a cavernous path. His body hung in kelp, drunk with heavy blood and dying cells. An image of his car flashed in his mind, and his keys at the bottom of the sea, and the noise he was running from, and the sadness. The scent of lotus on the dry white gown a momentary tonic. 

            At the top of the cliff he fell onto a bench and peered through slit eyes at James, whose urgency had transformed into cold, wet bewilderment.

            “Is this your place?” Jim said.

            She laughed, then picked up a tiki torch. “I’m working.”

“Oh. What are you doing?”  

“Pretending to give a fuck. It’s an acting job.”

Before he could express his confusion:  

“Listen,” she said, “you need help, but I can’t afford to lose this job.”

“Can I just use your phone?”

“They took ’em at check-in. You know, you could probably pass for a pirate.” She nodded over his shoulder, “otherwise they’ll kick you out and probably fire me for letting you in. I had to sign like three NDAs to be here.”

He looked up the gravel path.

“I’ll vouch for you.” She said. “There’s a trailer just up the way, go ask for Suzie. And tell her I need a fucking towel.”

He’d be damned to admit it, but he found himself smiling at her. In little time he was beyond the bird cages along a row of cypress trees. His wet clothes heavy and stiff. His mind gone except for one thing: the presence of that awful sense of being at the bottom of the sea. He was thinking about what it was like to live there, a mile beneath the surface, in the dark and quiet comfort, and how when you live there so long you eventually lose hope of resurfacing—not that you won’t resurface, you just know it won’t bring any relief. After enough time there, you realize no one on the surface will ever understand you, which will remind you that you are inherently, undeniably, and eternally alone. Also clear to Jim was how much the animal barreling toward him looked like a large wolf with barred teeth.

His adrenaline spiked as the ferocious beast slowed to inspect him. It’s large black snout and tall ears pried into his lap. Trailing the dog Jim noticed a small boy. The euphoria he read on the child’s face was the only sign he might not be torn to pieces. When the child saw the man standing there, wet, ocean debris on his shoulders and blood dried to his forehead, his open mouth narrowed with curiosity.

“Pirate!” The child said.

Unable to take his eyes from the German Shepard, Jim stammered “yes, I’m a pirate! I was paid to do it. It’s an acting job.”

He wouldn’t have said as much were it not for the wolf before him prepared to sink its teeth in. He had a vision of some billionaire letting their dog have at him until he was properly dismembered, or one of his foreign birds, or a panther hidden away somewhere, maybe put his remains in a helicopter and drop them out to sea, or be eaten in the raw by the human guests. For some strange reason, which he hadn’t the energy to examine, he had no interest dying—at least not like that.

There was a stunning dance between what emerged from me and what came from the research. The misalignment of the senex-puer constellation in depression is often mediated by the emergence of the anima – the feminine personification of soul, the inner image of the feminine in a man or woman, in this case, the character James. Anima also indicates life force, the animate, breath, heat, emotion. At that lowest point of the depression, the anima appears, animates depressed and leads him up to the guarded child.

The story goes on, Jim has stumbled into a satirical modern Eleusian ceremony where all the costumed guests have consumed a hallucinogen and are awaiting the great revealing of mystery . . . Which of course turns out to be nothing more than a private Kanye West concert (I wrote this before his fall from grace, so let’s leave that curious analysis aside). The story ends with a made-over Jim who saves the child from a rattlesnake, instead he is bitten. Looking at this through our archetypal lens, there is reunification with the divine child, depressed-consciousness re-animated moves into sadness, and instinct wills him toward life – to saving life, protecting life, and in it he gets his death, symbolic transformation he desired, opening to possibility of rebirth.   

In conclusion, this active imaginational dialogue conducted via fiction writing, acted to break the enchantment of the depressed-ruled vision that no longer served soul, and reveal a Dionysian dismemberment and rebirth into the many from the one. A falling apart. "Only when things fall apart do they open up into new meanings” (Hillman, 1975, p. 111) (cited in brighton, 2023). This is its own kind of wholeness, one achieved through differentiation and discovering the wholeness, value, and nature of each part – a value that often gets lost in our emphasis of the wholeness of the one. “Keep it together. Keep it together.”

The limiting consciousness that held me in depression formed in response to holding a 40 hour job, full time grad school, a marriage, becoming a parent, a pandemic, and apparently some residual trauma from cancer, and my willingness to keep showing up and getting it done. The boulder comes. I keep going. And then another boulder, and I am in pieces. This time I stay true to it and give it voice. And in sticking with and befriending its images, I’ve witnessed a breaking of the old order, an intervention through various inner figures, and as a result of the work being contained in the form of a short story, the whole image makes up a picture of archetypal analysis – a “loosening”. Dionysus is all over this, in the madness, being in pieces, refuge at the bottom of the sea, the ecstatic torch-lit processional, the intoxication, and the potential of rebirth that is seeded in everything dying. Dionysian loosening of hard won integrations has irrefutable value, if we're really to behold all of ourselves.