Psychodynamics, Creativity and Mental Health

Anton Ehrenzweig is, I'm sure, right to identify the distinction between the Freudian primary and secondary process as fundamental to creativity. Freud, in articulating the dynamics of psychic processes, needs to invent terminology for the "force" of emotion in instinctive behaviour. "Cathexis" is the word he and Breuer used to describe emotional energy. In "Beyond the Pleasure Principle", Freud has this to say about the primary and secondary processes.

I described the type of process found in the unconscious as the 'primary' psychical process, in contradistinction to the 'secondary' process which is the one obtaining in our normal waking life. Since all instinctual impulses have the unconscious systems as their point of impact, it is hardly an innovation to say that they obey the primary process. [...] it is easy to identify the primary psychical process with Breuer's freely mobile cathexis and the secondary process with changes in his bound or tonic cathexis. If so, it would be the task of the higher state of the mental apparatus to bind the instinctual excitation reaching the primary process. A failure to effect this binding would provoke a disturbance analogous to a traumatic neurosis; and only after this binding has been accomplished would it be possible for the dominance of the pleasure principle (and its modification, the reality principle) to proceed unhindered.

He's basically saying that untrammelled emotional energy leads to madness. In section VII, he says

We have found one of the earliest and most important functions of the mental apparatus is to bind the instinctual impulses which impinge on it, to replace the primary process prevailing in them by the secondary process and convert their freely mobile cathectic energy into a mainly quiescent (tonic) cathexis. 

Ehrenzweig's insight is to see that this process is fundamentally the same as the act of creation, but that its a continual process of binding-up the primary process and disintegration of the secondary process. Furthermore he identifies how this process relates directly to pedagogical techniques for teaching creativity. Devices for artistic production function to disintegrate the material of the secondary process (over which the Superego has a powerful grip) and send it back into the primary swamp. Those same devices give new form to the process of binding the primary process as new things are brought into consciousness.

Freud and Ehrenzweig suggest that if this stops working mental illness follows. Most particularly, if the Superego's grip on the primary process is so strong and unshakeable that nothing can lead to the fragmentation of its binding, then repression will result. Freud says "The essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious". The psychotherapeutic approach is to bring out repressed instincts into contact with the conscious mind. It's like jump-starting a motor which has stopped working.

The creative imagination of the artist uses various techniques for challenging the Superego's dominance. Starting from a distorted surface is one, of which serialism in music is a simple example.

I've been experimenting with improvisation using fragments of notated music - in this case Bach and a bit of Schubert. I feel that if I was freely improvising with no boundaries, what comes out tends to follow set patterns - things which I am thinking, cliches which are imposed on my own subconscious by my superego. The results are a bit flat. But with the disruption of a "broken surface" of musical extracts, I've found that I become more creative and inventive. It's an interesting experience...

But there's a level at which maybe Freud misses something. There's something about history - about the fact that it's Bach that I use to manipulate. This leads us to Jung's theory...

In "The concept of the Collective Unconscious", Jung writes:

In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical  psyche (even if we tack on the person unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals.  This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychical contents. 

I've always been attracted to Jung. Now perhaps he's saying the same thing as David Bohm - that somewhere, there is an "implicate order" - some kind of fundamental origin in the symmetry of the universe. And Bohm also notes that through music, we come into direct contact with it (see  http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/david-bohm-on-music.html)