Artistic Method 2

Essay has the freedom to move anywhere, in all directions: “It acts as if all objects were equally near the center and as if ‘all subjects are linked to each other’ (Montaigne) by free association” (Lopate, 1994, p. xxvii). Crapanzano (1992) contrasts essay’s freewheeling style with the more formal paper and article: “The essay enjoys a freedom, a tenativeness, and a speculative possibility that do not exist in the insistent paper or the determined article” (p.1). Crapanzano goes on to discuss the positive possibilities of the essay and links them to play:

The essay is one genre that gives us the possibility of expressing eloquently some of the thoughts, odd bits of information, epiphanous experiences, and speculative fantasies that are conventionally eliminated in the paper and the article. The freedom of the essay permits, without sacrificing rigor of thought, a play, an irony, a critical awareness that is for me at the heart of the human sciences. Of course most human scientists would take offense at the very suggestion that play, irony and critical awareness are at the heir of their disciplines . . . . Have we assumed for too long now that play and seriousness are opposites? Have we forgotten our childhood when we knew how to play seriously? Or our flirtations when we knew how to be seriously playful? (p. 2)

The essay has what Walter Pater called an “ ‘unmethodical method,’ open to digression and promiscuous meanderings” (Lopate, 1994, p. xxxvii). In essays one may freely digress—since digression’s chief role is to amass multiple dimensions of understanding while bringing as many contexts to bear on a problem or insight as possible. “The digression must wander off the point only to fulfill it. A kind of elaboration, it scoops up subordinate themes in passing” (Lopate, 1994, p. xl). There is a method to the seeming madness of promiscuous wanderings:

The essayist attempts to surround a something . . . by coming at it from all angles, wheeling and diving like a hawk, each seemingly digressive spiral actually taking us closer to the heart of the matter. In a well-wrought essay, while the search appears to be widening, even losing its way, it is actually eliminating false hypotheses, narrowing its emotional target and zeroing in on it. (Lopate, p. xxxviii)

The essay can be cheeky, undisciplined, flexible and humorous, qualities important to Montgomery in her dissertation, as previously mentioned. The essayist has

a penchant for outbreaks of mischievous impudence . . . . Cheekiness is a way of keeping readers alert. It cuts through the pious and the commonplace. Such cool impertinence often takes the form of a self-reflexive moment, which punctures the argument by drawing attention to the stage machinery of essayistic discourse. (Lopate, 1994, p. xxxii)

In spite of, or perhaps because of all of the above, the genre has had an especially strong influence on English Literature. Lopate (1994) recalls that Montaigne’s Essais came out a few years before Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays on appearance and doubt; half a century later, Pascal’s Pensées were directly inspired by Montaigne’s Essais (p. 45).

Essay can be abrupt like conversation, suddenly changing direction, seemingly on a dime, or even a period; essay is also related in its conversational element to dialogue, which is central to the hermeneutic method. Both essay and dialogue acknowledge the multiplicity of selves that we are:

“It is natural to enter into dialogues and disputes with others,” writes the critic Stuart Hampshire “because it is natural to enter into disputes with oneself. The mind works by contradiction.” Personal essayists converse with the reader because they are already having dialogues and disputes with themselves. (Lopate, 1994, p. xxiv)

In the art form of essay, therefore, we have a wonderful vehicle through which to explore play. “The genre’s virtues: curiosity, openness, appetite for pleasure, willingness to reflect, to give oneself to ‘random provocations,’ nature, beauty” (Lopate, 1994, p. xxxiv), also describe play. Adorno writes that

luck and play are what are essential to the essay. It does not begin with Adam and Eve but with what it wants to discuss; it says what is at issue and stops where it feels itself complete—not where nothing is left to say . . . . The essay does not strive for closed, deductive or inductive construction. It revolts above all against the doctrine—deeply rooted since Plato—that the changing and ephemeral is unworthy of philosophy, against the ancient injustice toward the transitory. (Lopate, p. xliii)

Adorno also notes that a usual criticism of essay is “that it is fragmentary and random” but he points out that “the desire of the essay is not to seek and filter the eternal out of the transitory; it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal” (Lopate, 1994, p. xliii). O. B. Hardison Jr. defines essay as “the enactment of a process by which the soul realizes itself even as it is passing from day to day and from moment to moment” (Lopate, p. xliv). For Lopate, the essay is soulful:

In the final analysis, the personal essay represents a mode of being. It points a way for the self to function with relative freedom in an uncertain world . . . . This mode of being suits the modern existential situation, which Montaigne first diagnosed. His recognition that human beings were surrounded by darkness, with nothing particularly solid to cling to, led to a philosophical acceptance that one had to make oneself up from moment to moment. (p. xliv)

In life, as in play, to quote fiction writer Tom Robbins’s (1995) theme from Skinny Legs and All, “we’re all just making it up” (Payton, 1995, online); so what better way than essay to express the play of psyche and cosmic play itself? The notion of fiction enters into play here, because my dissertation will use various culturally created fictions, in a hopefully healing way. Before going on, therefore, I cannot resist a brief digression into fiction.

A Few Facts About Fiction

The word fiction means “made up,” “a story put together.” The English word is derived from the Latin facere and fingere and the two Indo-European roots dhe I and dheigh. According to Shipley (1984) dhe I means “set down, make, shape . . . [Latin] facere, factum: make, made. Fact, factotem: jack-of-all-trades . . . . fiction” (p. 62). Dhe I is also the Indo-European root for thesis, antithesis and synthesis. The other root, dheigh means “touch; knead, mix dough, shape clay; put together; fasten . . . [Latin] fingere, fictum: form . . . . Fiction: story put together” (p. 64). The idea of fiction is important to depth psychology. Hillman (1983b) devotes an entire book, Healing Fiction, to it, where he quips: “Those in literature see the psychology in fiction. It’s our turn to see the fiction in psychology” (p. 18). When Hillman and Ventura (1992) discuss the need for psychoanalysis to have new fantasies about itself, Hillman explains what he means by fantasy, which Ventura has pointed out most people associate with “unreal”:

Hillman: 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.

Ventura: So any perception, in that sense is fantasy.

Hillman: Is there a reality that is not framed or formed? No. Reality is always coming through a pair of glasses, a point of view, a language, a fantasy. (p. 39)

Crapanzano (1992) remarks that the beginning of Freud’s Irma dream begins like a romantic novel. He notes that Freud’s case history was a new genre that Hillman (1983b) discusses at length, in an essay entitled “The Fiction of Case History.” There Hillman discusses this notion of fiction and its relation to depth psychology, especially as it relates to Freud, but goes on to observe:

Jung’s case material presents spontaneous psychic fictions and their interpretations. The stuff is fiction though it be called “unconscious material.” Where Freud was a writer of fictions, in the sense above, Jung was a writer on fictions. And as for Jung, the more fictitious and far-out the better (hence alchemy, Tibet, Zarathustra, astrological aeons, schizophrenia, parapsychology) for such “materials” obliged him to meet them on an equally imaginative level. Jung’s style of writing psychology takes various forms . . . like Hermes whose winged feet touch down as well in Hades as on Olympus and who carries messages from every one of the Gods, Jung’s hermeneutic knew no barriers of time or space—Chinese yoga, Mexican rites, contemporary historical events, hospital patients, modern physics—he would interpret anything, anything was prima materia for his psychological operations. His psychology presents itself as a continuing essay. Versuch. No more than any other great essayist, Montaigne or Emerson for instance, Jung, too, as he always insisted, did not write a system. (pp. 33-34)

Hillman (1983b) saw that one of Jung’s important contributions was his taking the crucial step into drama “approximating psychology to poetics” and realizing that “the nature of mind is poetic . . . . To understand the structure of dreaming we turn to drama, poesis is the via regia to via regia (royal road). The unconscious produces dramas, poetic fictions, it is a theater” (p. 36).

Since Hillman has brought us back to the depth psychology’s fictional beginnings, I need to say a bit about art and its relation to depth psychology’s origins. Otto Rank (1929/1989) observed that play was the prelude to art (p. 323) and as play is behind art, by examining the arts, we can see play shine through.

A Bit About Art

Monaco (1981) notes that the ancient arts (history, poetry, comedy, tragedy, music, dance, and astronomy) were tools for describing the universe and our place in it; they help us understand the mysteries of existence and are imbued with the aura of these mysteries. These arts form the basis of contemporary culture and science. They were “each aspects of religious activity; history recorded the stories of humanity, the performing arts celebrated the rituals, and astronomy searched the heavens” (p. 3). Hill (1992) notes that art is the carrier of the culture’s myth, and goes on to explicate the “common thread of mythic expression” that that he sees running “from primeval religious consciousness down through modern cultural expression” (p. 7). Hill remarks that public art, as a reflection of the societal soul, tells us that “Plato called art a dream for wakened minds, recognizing the connection between inner consciousness and art” (p. 7). Hill also discusses the relationship between the classical arts and the newer media and arts:

Film, television, and other electronic media are arts which incorporate other arts within them and have been shaped by the older arts of music, dance, visual arts such as painting and sculpture and written arts from poetry to literature. They have also had a profound effect on shaping these older arts too. These arts are also media, channels of communication and can be used in scientific and other endeavors as well. (p. 43)

From the beginning, people have always enacted religious devotion in songs, dance and play. Literature is the descendent of drama. The older literary works such as the Mahabharata, the Attic tragedies, the Homeric epics, and the Book of Job are regarded as myths, whereas later writings such as Dante’s Divine Comedy and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are considered to be literature. In addition, myth, drama, and literature are ways of transmitting important ideas:

Aristotle saw literature and drama as the highest forms of learning, no doubt because they have the capacity to bring the highest human ideas down to the lowest recipient and they bring the participant back up to the lofts of religious sublimity. (Hill, 1992, p. 14)

McLuhan (2003) notes: “Ezra Pound called the artist ‘the antennae of the race’ ” (p. 16), who stood between the public culture and the hidden elements of numinous phenomena:

“Creative art is the power to be for the moment a flash of communication between god and man” (Sawyer, 162) . . . It is as if the artist, whether or not he or she recognizes it, carries the historic mythic torch which illumines for all generations the participation of in illo tempore or the sacred time as outlined by Mircea Eliade. The artist, along with the other sages of civilization is also the forge in which myths are wrought into new shapes for each succeeding generation. Northrup Frye says of the artist as mythmaker, “every society is the embodiment of a myth, and as the artist is the shaper of myth, there is a sense in which he holds in his hand the thunderbolts that destroy one society and create another” (Frye, 1963, p. 147 as quoted in Hill, 1992, pp. 10-11)

The founders of depth psychology have been such artists, “early warning systems” (McLuhan, 2003, p. 16), anticipating and articulating what lay ahead—holding thunderbolts at the ready. Their work and that of their successors has helped to shape society, while their art was shaped by prior artists.

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