Chapter 3 - Unconscious Origins of the Creative Trance

Summary

We live in a multiplicity of personal worlds, all connected through the power of our unconscious mind and its capacity for trance. This vast unconscious, far larger than conscious awareness, appears to initiate all our movements. The cognitive unconscious, with its perceptual-cognitive abilities, automated motor skills, and implicit memory, facilitates creative expression while clinically, our unconscious emotions, internal conflicts, and repressed desires drive the inspiration and passion of a creative trance. Relinquishing conscious control in the creative process can be a type of artistic projective identification. As the visual artist Joan Mitchell says, “the painting tells me what to do.” Unlike the slow sequential thinking of the conscious mind, the unconscious is a parallel processor quickly integrating multiple variables to bring depth and complexity into the creative process. It carries out multipart repeated behaviors that become automatic fluid expertise, as in the violinist no longer concentrating on finger positions and the archer instinctually positioning a bow.