Creative thinking as mushroom picking: a sketch of a psychoanalytical account of thinking-through-writing
I’ve been preoccupied by this passage from Feud’s Interpretation of Dreams about the lattice work of associations which builds up the texture of our dream worlds:
The dream thoughts to which we are led by interpretation cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite endings: they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought. It is at some point where this meshwork is particularly close that the dream wish grows up, like a mushroom out of its mycelium.
Bollas talks about this the Evocative Object World (pg 29-30) in terms of “internal constellations of interest” which “form through the associations of thought during the day, usually in response to discrete episodes of lived experience, following long-standing desires in the self”. The analytical significance comes “When the structure reaches an ‘epiphany’ , understood here as a moment of insight that allows the self to increase its reflective capacity, the person looks upon himself and others in a somewhat new manner”. These constellations of interest, the meshwork, builds throughout our everyday experience. From The Evocative Object pg 63:
Without thinking about it much, when we traverse a city – or walk in our district – we are engaged in a type of dreaming. Each gaze that falls upon an object of interest may yield a moment’s reverie – when we think of something else, inspired by the point of emotional contact – and during our day we will have scores of such reveries, which Freud termed psychic intensities, and which he believed were the stimuli for the dream that night. But as a type of dreaming in their own right, the reveries wrought by evocative objects constitute an important feature of our psychic lives.
The clinic provides a site where these associations can be articulated in a manner that ensures reception. The unconscious communication in the psychoanalytical dyad receives these associations in a manner that contributes to further building the meshwork but also creates the condition for these ‘epiphanies’ to emerges the points at which the mushroom rises up out other mycelium and is picked in a manner which changes everything. You cannot go back to being the person who saw things in the old way. Psychoanalysis provides occasions for articulation along with a specific mode of reception. This process happens outside of analysis as well though, in dreams (as in the opening quotation) but also in our engagement with cultural objects. From Forces of Destiny by Christopher Bollas pg 37-38:
And now and then we will be quite transformed by the uncanny wedding of our idiom and an object meeting up at just the right time. One late afternoon in the summer of 1972, I heard a performance of one of Hindmith’s viola sonata in a small church in New England. It immediately served to process a feature of my idiom, and this occasion sponsored vivid and intense feelings and ideas which lifted me into the next moments of my life. Shall we ever have the means to analyse that? Why that particular work?
In a real sense I was not the same person after reading Eliot’s Four Quartets for the first time. Nor was I the same person after binge-reading Game of Thrones. Nor after reading my first x-men comic when I was a kid. Or seeing Gaslight Anthem live for the first time. Or going to my first rave. Or reading Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo for the first time in my late 20s. Or trying to make my own breakcore this winter. Or indeed really getting into Bollas over the last few months. What I love about Bollas is how he provides the means to treat these cultural experiences in a roughly symmetrical way: some are imbued with cultural capital, others are not, but they all contribute to the elaboration of my personal idiom. I’ve chosen these examples because they contribute to ‘epiphany’ as well: in the sense of leading to a change, even if subtle, in how I see myself and my place in the world. They are points where the micro-structure of my idiom gives rise to a change in the macro-structure of my character. Or to put it more poetically, the mushroom rises up out of its mycelium.
As so often happens I’m reminded of a letter C Wright Mills wrote to his friend, the historian William Miller, who was struggling with a new job he had started:
You ask for what one should be keyed up? My god, for long weekends in the country, and snow and the feel of an idea and New York streets early in the morning and late at night and the camera eye always working whether you want or not and yes by god how the earth feels when it’s been plowed deep and the new chartreuse wall in the study and wine before dinner and if you can afford it Irish whiskey afterwards and sawdust in your pants cuff and sometimes at evening the dusky pink sky to the northwest, and the books to read never touched and all that stuff the Greeks wrote and have you ever read Macaulay’s speeches to hear the English language? And to revise your mode of talk and what you talk about and yes by god the world of music which we must now discover and there’s still hot jazz and getting a car out of the mud when nobody else can. That’s what the hell to get keyed up about.
In the register of Bollas we could say that Wright Mills is reminding his friend of all the sensory pleasures to be found in the world (“too much society crap and too much mentality and not enough tactile and color and sound stuff going on“). These are evocative objects which provoke enjoyable feelings in us. They are the objects which make us feel alive. These include “the books to read never touched”, “all that stuff the Greeks wrote”, “to hear the English language” and “to revise your mode of talk and what you talk about”. But also earlier “the feel of an idea”.
This is a phrase forever lodged in my psyche because it immediately captured the phenomenology of creation for me. I know what it feels like when an idea is ready. I know that if I reach for that idea at that moment then expressing it will be energising and rewarding. I’ve written this blog post in less than 10 minutes so far because my experience is that when I have the ‘feel of an idea’ the words will pour forth because I am in contact with what has been evoked in me. If I write it down to return to it later I occasionally find some residue of the energy but usually it’s an inert experience in which I churn out words to tick something off a list. The versatility of blogging rests in its capacity to provide a continually available occasion for articulating a single idea. If I have that feeling, I can immediately reach for the blog and in less than 20 minutes (almost always) I have articulated the idea I felt.
I now see the ‘feel of an idea’ as a particular kind of mushroom which has emerged out of its mycelium. Much as analysis provide fertile terrain for articulating associations (in a manner which leads to more associations) and which are then received in a fruitful way, writing provides the means through which we articulate idea-mushrooms with different modes of reception which shape what we do with them. In these sense we can think of occasions for articulation provided by the different writing practices as offering different ways of ‘picking’ these idea-mushrooms and working with them. I would argue the creative use of LLMs can be seen in terms of this genealogy, or at least they can be used in this way. This is essentially Bertrand Russell’s advice which I picked up a long time ago:
My own belief is that a conscious thought can be planted into the unconscious if a sufficient amount of vigour and intensity is put into it. most of the unconscious consists of what were once highly emotional conscious thoughts, which have now become buried. It is possible to do this process of burying deliberately, and in this way, the unconscious can be led to do a lot of useful work. I have found, for example, that if I have to write upon some rather difficult topic the best plan is to think about it with very great intensity – the greatest intensity of which I am capable – for a few hours or days, and at the end of that time give orders, so to speak, that the work is to proceed underground. After some months I return consciously to the topic and find that the work has been done. Before I had discovered his technique, I used to to spend the intervening months worrying because I was making no progress: I arrived at the solution none the sooner for this worry, and the intervening months were wasted, whereas now I can devote them to other pursuits.
In Generative AI for Academics I wrote that LLMs can be used to plant ideas in the unconscious mind in this way. What I think I’ve finally sketched out is a psychoanalytical account of what this means and how it differs across different kinds of writing practice. How can we plant ideas and then pick the idea-mushrooms in the most enjoyable and creative way possible? I suspect mostly by having multiple modalities through which we do this work i.e. a range of occasions for articulation with the different modes of reception associated with them.
#BertrandRussell #bollas #cWrightMills #feelOfAnIdea #Freud #Thinking #thinkingThroughWriting #writing
