Imagination and the New
Creativity includes ruthlessness. It drives to develop, unfold, multiply outward. When our ruthlessness transforms into the imaginative life that operates unconsciously to wipe the slate of our perception clean so that we now and always perceive freshly… we enter a new zone of living. Objects become objective, not under our control but able to offer us real resources for living. Objects appear as durable and resilient, and they reassure us that our destructiveness does not totally destroy. The other person displays for us the secrets of a unique, independent selfhood. In long-range, committed, passionate relationships, one lover addresses the mysterious core of the other. The mystery of the beloved’s creative self opens to the lover the mystery of being…
The love between lovers protects them from attack on their creative selves, and thus they contribute to the social welfare of all of us. For creative living does evoke attack, which rears up to blunt vitality and repel original perception. We feel the threat ourselves, says Winnicott, in moments of integration. We expect attack to follow from all the elements that we repudiate as not-me while we collect together all those experiences of aliveness that integrate into me…
The anxiety of integration helps one face an interpretation of Judeo-Christian tradition that has always troubled many, myself among them. Simone Weil, for example, joined the heretic Marcion in rejecting the Old Testament entirely because of Yahweh’s bloodthirstiness. God’s command to wipe out every one of the Amalekites strikes horror in our hearts… When Saul spares the king of the Amalekites and keeps the best of the sheep and oxen, Yahweh does not spare Saul. Samuel, Yahweh’s prophet, announces Saul’s punishment: “you have rejected the word of the Lord, and the Lord has rejected you from being king over Israel. The Lord has torn the kingdom of Israel from you this very day, and has given it to a neighbor of yours, who is better than you.” If we read these texts through the lens of the anxiety of integration, we see that the gathering of elements of I-am-ness into a unit requires that we must repudiate whatever lies outside.
I am not reducing the text and its savagery to a psychological perception. Life and the probity with which we face it do not allow that. But depth psychology does give us access to a truth as valuable as it is ruthless: to become one, we must unite elements of aliveness at the expense of all else. We make the same harsh decision when we choose someone for a mate and renounce all others, when we embrace an actual child we have parented and destroy the fantasy children we wished for, when we pursue one idea and reject all others, at least for the moment. Such definition is the cost of finitude and its fulfillment.
(Ann Belford Ulanov, watercolor by Badges The Elder)
