[The following is an excerpt from my book, "Archetypes for Writers: Using the Power of Your Subconscious," (Michael Weise Productions, 2007), available on Amazon.]
Writing & the Self
You can take me down
To show me your home
Not the place where you live
But the place where you belong.
To show me your home
Not the place where you live
But the place where you belong.
Every artist is a native of an unknown country, which he himself has forgotten . . .
but remains all his life somehow attuned to it.
Most people would acknowledge that there is a difference between one’s own writing and writing one does for someone or something else, between writing that comes from some deep core place in oneself and writing done for external purposes. One’s own writing is not dictated by some external requirement, form, or structure. It is dictated from within – yet with a special interplay between one’s internal world and the world outside. As Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote:
Trust the spirit,
As sovereign nature does, to make the form;
For otherwise we only imprison spirit
And not embody. Inward evermore
To outward, -- so in life, and so in art.3
The Self
In order for writing to happen this way, from inward to outward, even where prompted by outside events, a process of dialogue and dictation must arise from somewhere inside, carrying some internal imperative. What is this place or thing? From where does the imperative arise? Probably the simplest way to identify this place or thing is just to call it “the Self.” One’s own writing arises simply from the Self. Or, put another way, it is the Self that engages in one’s own writing. Proust writes:
What we have not had to decipher, to elucidate by our own efforts, what was clear before we looked at it, is not ours. From ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the obscurity which lies within us, that which to others is unknown.4
Although it is somewhat redundant to define one’s own writing as a central act of the Self, this step has important implications for a writing approach. That the Self exists must be a given. If we did not acknowledge that the Self exists, we’d have to make up something else that would be equivalent.
No matter what the ultimate source of the Self, whether God-created, a biological phenomenon, genetic, intrinsic, or paradoxically self-created, we must acknowledge that something exists that creates our will and our sense of who we are. While the Self may or may not be consciously “self-aware,” each of us nonetheless has a “sense of self” from which we operate. Only the Self can legitimately express or define itself. We certainly may define others, define what we think are other people’s selves, but the only one who can say what is so in each of us is our Self. Only you know what you feel, what you know, what you experience. No one else can define this but you.
Expression of the Self
Your Self may only be able to define itself by the act of Self-expression. In other words, any act of self-definition is an act of Self-expression and any act of self-expression is an act of Self-definition. Only by self-expression can the Self realize itself. Silence or lack of expression is not Self-realization. Realization requires an act.
The Self must therefore be allowed the freedom to engage in expression in order to realize itself. Because the Self is realized by fulfilling its own chosen structure or form, any externally imposed structure or form, any external restriction, limitation, or requirement will necessarily exclude some part of the Self.
The purpose of the archetype approach in this book is to arrange things both internally and externally in such a way that the Self may engage in Self-expression and definition. That is what archetype work is about. For, while the Self will constantly attempt to express itself through whatever means it finds, if there is no way to capture and make concrete its expressions, they will dissipate and be absorbed into the outside world of other possibilities.
Archetype work is not about imposing character or story archetypes onto your psyche. It is about helping your subconscious to articulate the archetypes that are already contained in it.
This definition of one’s own writing as the ultimate expression of the Self is the difference between the approach in this book to one’s own writing and other approaches to writing. It is not that other approaches do not or cannot “work,” whatever one means by that. It is simply that the archetypes approach is wholly grounded on the concept of the expression and realization of the Self.
The Elusive Self
However, even so, any approach depends on the diligence of application of the practitioner. You must continuously do the work. Furthermore, the Self is elusive and unquantifiable. The reason for its elusiveness is the same as the reason that the Self does not find automatic expression in the world, the same reason that there is an inherent struggle for each and every Self to express its core being: the vast world is not arranged in its sole service. Each of us has good reason for why we hide our Self behind masks and smoke screens. It is a dangerous world out there. There is no automatic ground staked out just for the realization of you and your Self. The task, thus, of realizing the Self belongs exclusively to the Self. As Proust wrote:
As for the inner book of unknown symbols . . . if I tried to read them[,] no one could help me with any rules, for to read them was an act of creation in which no one can do our work for us or even collaborate with us.5
There is yet another reason for the elusiveness of the Self that plays into this equation: the Self largely functions in the subconscious.6 This fact has an enormous consequence for writing. Let me pose a string of suppositions to which I must ask your temporary indulgence in order to make a difficult point: because one’s own writing comes from one’s Self and the Self resides in the subconscious, if I, the teacher, am to reach your Self to enable writing, I must speak directly to that Self, which means speaking to the subconscious.
I have found this to be the case. Now, it may be true that in order to reach the Self, one does not need to speak directly to it. Perhaps one can reach the Self by other means. Let me simply say that in my twenty years of experience teaching this approach, and over forty years using and talking about it, I have never found a way to reach the writing Self without speaking directly to it, which means speaking to the subconscious.
[Speaking to the subconscious - see future posts.]
1 Copyright 1991 Wet Sprocket Songs (Sony Music Entertainment, Inc.)
2 Marcel Proust, The Captive (Vintage, 1971) 347-8.
3 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, 5:224-8. Spelling modified.
4 Marcel Proust, The Past Recaptured (Vintage, 1971) 140.
5 Id. at 139.
6 This book cannot be and is not intended to be a treatise on the complex inner workings of the mind. For purposes of the archetypes approach, sufficient evidence of these workings is found in a few central works upon which I rely and which I discuss in Chapter Eight of my book, "Archetypes for Writers." I reach no further into the subject than that which is needed to clarify certain aspects of this approach.
