Literature, Creativity and the Psychological Journal: At A Journal Workshop by Ira Progoff (1992)

Introduction

Writing is an especially fluid creative medium. The parameters and possibilities are almost unlimited, defined by the multifarious variety of language. Writing is intimately linked to psychological process, some of which is conscious and easily described, and some of which is not. Journal writing - in particular - is a means of exploring how subjectivity can be expressed in words. This practice can be a form of creativity, a means of unlocking creativity, or the basis for further creative work.

Ira Progoff

Progoff studied with psychologist Carl Jung; he wrote about 17 books and was the Director of the Institute for Research in Depth Psychology at Drew University Graduate School, from 1959 to 1971. He is most well known for his method of journal writing, designed to access the unconscious mind and release creative energies. His work is interesting for several reasons.

1) Firstly it is based on Carl Jung's ideas, which gives Progoff a stature rather different from the more common 'positive thinking' approach to creative development.

2) Secondly, his work uses a structured method of personal writing that anyone can do by themselves; group workshops are valuable but not essential.

3) Thirdly, when the online journal or web log is becoming increasingly popular - thousands of new sites appear every week - Progoff's ideas provide a critical framework to understand personal diary writing.

4) Most importantly, Progoff's journal method is based on creative process. It is a self-development approach to creative development, underpinned by the Jungian outlook. Progoff viewed "the life of the artist (as a) prototype by which we can recognise the necessary movement of energies in an individual's life" (Progoff: 142).

Comparisons

Julia Cameron bases her Artist's Way ideas around the 'morning pages': you fill several pages of paper with spontaneous and uncensored writing, about whatever is on your mind. It is designed to be a clearing out process, to facilitate creative flow. Progoff's method is structured in the sense that you write in a similar spontaneous way, but around defined themes. Following on from this - and more importantly - are exercises which integrate the raw material of prior entries, enhancing your perspective on your own life. He compares this to another creative situation:

The experience of recognition that will come to you then will be very much like learning to play a musical instrument. After slow and stumbling beginnings, you suddenly realise that you now comprehend not only the keyboard as a whole but the infinite possibilities for combining the keys creatively. From that point onward, the instrument is accessible to you with all its potentials (Progoff: ix).

Progoff emphasises that you do not consciously try to do anything; the results are generated within the unconscious. If we accept the notion of the unconscious mind - popularised by Freud and refined by Jung - then Progoff's methods may be more valid than creative growth programmes which rest on active techniques at a conscious level.

Freud, The Artists Way and Carl Jung

Freud taught people to 'free associate' as a means of unravelling and deciphering unconscious patterns Sitting at home in the morning is different to being in a consulting room with a psychoanalyst - classically, lying on a couch with no eye contact.. However, Cameron teaches people to express whatever they have to say - trite and mundane or poignant and profound, in a similar free-association manner, to unlock creative energies. Freud was analytic, whereas Cameron focuses on creativity and integration. Freud's view of creativity was sometimes cynical: he saw it as a means of recovering psychic balance, like dreaming, rather than a healthy aspiration. It was for this reason - and others - that Jung broke away and developed his own system:

If the meaning of a poetic work can be exhausted through the application of a theory of neurosis, then it was nothing but a pathological product in the first place, to which I would never concede the dignity of a work of art. (However) today, it is true, our taste has become so uncertain that often we no longer know whether a thing is art or a disease (Jung 1989: 207)

Carl Jung

Jung had a more positive and optimistic view of the psyche where there are higher levels of personal discovery, as symbolised in mythological stories. He worked extensively with artistic practice, notably with drawing and painting, and identified common and recurring themes in his clients which he correlated with mythological stories and symbolic systems like alchemy. He found that many of his clients frequently produced structurally similar paintings, comparable to traditional mandalas. He concluded that the mandala was an archetypal design, created and representative of psychic wholeness. We can see Jung's influence in the current practice of Art Therapy - recognised by the NHS - and other psychologists have developed an artistic method based on 'sand play'.

Jung's outlook acknowledges the importance of creative aspiration and the ideals and power of art. Progoff studied and understood Jung's ideas, and applied them not to painting, drawing or sand-pictures, but to literary expression.

Literature and Psychology

All literature has a rich psychological dimension. It operates on many levels: not only the imaginary characters and their problems, hopes and interactions, but also as an expression of the writer's psyche. When writers and artist's talk about their work, they often refer to unplanned discoveries and unforeseen developments, as if the work 'takes them over'. This might sound implausible and indulgent, but it could be a reasonable way of describing unconscious process:

Writing is a psychological matter: at once a conscious activity and an unconscious one. Reconciling and balancing the two - making the unconscious conscious, and making the conscious tap the elements that are less than conscious - is an essential part not just of the process of writing, but becoming a writer in the first place (Malcolm Bradbury in Brande 1996: 13)

Most people read literature more than write it. We enjoy the experience of having the imagination shaped by a skilful author. In the modern computer age, the term 'interaction' has become a widespread goal: whether it is in digital games, web sites, or sophisticated television. Yet reading a novel is interactive; walking though a gallery and gazing at traditional paintings is interactive. This term does not only apply to technological wizardry. Reading is interactive because we make interior pictures and interpretations as rich and varied as any multi-media experience - probably more so.

Progoff's journal method is based on the psychology of literature, and he reverses the more common situation where you explore someone else's work. This is significant. Art of all kinds is not automatically or necessarily creative; much of it is imitative. Creative work means you become the author of something yourself. Progoff begins his book by referring to religious Bibles, which are written by other people. Reading them is imitative, because you are not generating insight yourself (Progoff: 2, 4). He suggests that journal writing is - if you follow his procedures - potentially writing your own Bible, based on personal creativity rather than passive imitation. As Jung said, "Only the mystic brings creativity into religion" (Jung 1989: 206). In other words religion is imitative; only the mystic understands spiritual discovery. This reference suggests the more elevated i.e. 'spiritual' aspect of Progoff's method.

Active Imagination

Freud used free association; Jung used what he called active imagination. Active imagination is a psychological state between everyday awareness and the dream world. It occurs naturally in circumstances like listening to stories, watching the flames in a fireplace, and listening to the sea.

Progoff uses active imagination, but called it "twilight imagery". It is the central method for working intuitively with diary entries. Thus, the book tells you to "sit in stillness" and move into "twilight imaging":

The key to Twilight Imaging lies in the fact that it takes place in the twilight state between waking and sleeping. We find that by working actively in that intermediate state of consciousness, we are able to reach depths of ourselves with which it is very difficult to make contact by any other means (Progoff : 77-78)

Diaries and Creativity

If you visit www.diaryland.com you will find thousands of online diaries - mostly authored by young people. Very often, these personal writings have a theatrical quality where the author self-consciously recognises they are communicating with an audience (whether you or anyone else find their work is another matter). The following is an extended example; I include all of it because it 'sets the scene' like a piece of theatre

Apart from being entertaining, this shows the psychology of diary writing as it is normally practiced. It is a dialogue with an audience that may or may not exist - ultimately, with oneself. In a dated study of 1965, English teacher David Holbrook noted

The metaphorical processes of fantasy expression are healing and creative in themselves, just as our dreams sometimes have great beauty in their own right, and help develop our relationship with the world…Art is a primary human need, because it is one chief means to understand experience. There are truths about human nature and life it can convey which are different from empirical truth but no less valid. What we are glad to have from psychiatry is confirmation that these things are so - in a world which tends for various reasons to deny them (Holbrook 1965: 5).

Holbrook's volume investigates and describes the interior world of imaginative culture, particularly the literary efforts of children in English classes. He claims he is in awe of children's work, when "even in the most unlikely dust-laden classroom atmosphere one may touch the secret places of life" (1). He describes the human condition as living in the "throes of a continual contest to make what we can of living imperfectly with an imperfect nature, in an imperfect world" (4). He gives many examples of imaginative exploration like the poem by Lorna, of class 1A:

There's a place that I know

A secret place

That no body knows of

But me that knows, of it:

I go there when I am lonely,

And when I m'am sad

It makes me happy and glad that I m'am alive (7).

Naïve and ungrammatical as this is (does that matter?), it refers to psychologically important facts: that which is deep and important in the imagination, how it is linked with child development, how literature addresses and expresses it, and - implicitly - how our interior life continues into adulthood.

The child's natural creativity is a source of inspiration for adult practitioners; Cameron describes her 12 stages as recovering safety, recovering identity, recovering power, recovering integrity, recovering possibility, recovering abundance, recovering connection, strength, compassion, self-protection, autonomy and faith. These are encompassed in the wider goal of recovering your creativity. In other words, we had these faculties when we were children, but lost them when we grew up and had to negotiate the tough reality of living adult lives. Psychologist Alice Miller says the same thing in The Drama of Being a Child - except in her case, she claims that we lose not only our creativity but our natural and uncorrupted identity, because of the pressures of adult expectations that do not always coincide with the child's needs. Miller used painting - rather than literature - to facilitate first her own psychological recovery, and then that of her patients. As Jung also found, art allows you to express and integrate hidden or unconscious parts of the psyche.

Diaries, and Progoff's method in particular, are a means of enhancing creativity; they allow you to express and reconfigure your imaginative and conceptual world. In a sense, all literary and artistic work is a personal diary, expressed in different ways. Virginia Woolf, Allen Ginsberg, Franz Kafka, Anais Nin and Katherine Mansfield kept diaries and these volumes give us an insight into their creative process. A diary is an intellectual and emotional playground, a place where uncensored expression is possible. Progoff's system utilises this psychological fact, and embeds it into a wider framework that incorporates what Jung would have recognised as his technique of active imagination.

Authenticity

If creativity is an extension of the self - conscious or unconscious - then self understanding must be linked to creative process. This is not an attempt at control, but an awareness of how to manage and facilitate creativity however it works for you. This might mean that you appreciate how you cannot analyse or control the process. There are two routes here: the superficial level and the deep level. The Artist's Way is superficial and there are elements of self-promotion in Cameron's book; it is peppered with references to her own creativity, her relationship with director Martin Scorcese etc. This is entirely absent in Progoff's book. He could have mentioned his dissertation, his private study with Carl Jung etc. but never does this in his 422 page volume. It is a deeper, non-commercial and more mature approach, a method of self enquiry rather than a collection of ideas and techniques, with insights like the following:

We should not place ourselves in the position of talking about a process that we do not actually know as facts of our inner experiences, for that leads to intellectual chatter rather than to…reality (Progoff: 12).

The journal method allows people to:

Discover within themselves the resources they did not know they possessed. It is to encourage them to draw the power of deep contact out of the actual experiences of their lives so that they can recognise their own identity and harmonise it with the large identity of the universe as they experience it (Progoff: 13)

When journal keeping is not related to the larger development of one's life, it lacks a sustaining principle. Progoff's method helps us see the movement of our life history as a whole, from the vantage point of the present moment. It helps us position ourselves between the past and the future, encouraging us to look particularly at four dimensions of experience which he called Life/Time, Dialogue, Depth and Meaning, and within these categories find threads of continuity. It is a gentle framework for evoking new ideas and contexts, i.e. a new perspective. At the heart of the method is the metaphor of a well which is connected to an underground stream. You learn how to reach into this well to find new and refreshing resources.

References

Brande, Dorothea (1996) Becoming a Writer; Macmillan, UK

Cameron, Julia (1995) The Artist's Way; Pan Books, London

Holbrook, David (1965); The Secret Places; Methuen, London J

ung, Carl (1989) Psychological Reflections; Ark Paperbacks, London

Miller, Alice (1987) The Drama of Being a Child; Virago, London

Progoff, Ira (1992) At A Journal Workshop; Tarcher/Putnam, New York