Co-authored by: Nancy Pennington, MSW, Jungian oriented psychotherapistLawrence H. Staples, PhD, Zurich trained Jungian Analyst
Unhappiness and Creativity
We need unhappiness. It is an essential driver of creation and change, despite the earnest attempts of prophets of eternal happiness to save us from the winters of our discontent. Unhappiness makes us uncomfortable with things as they are. Our discomfort, then, prods us into the creative activity necessary to change things as they are into things we hope will be better. Imagine a world in which we had miraculously become happy all the time. Why would we want to risk changing a single thing? Fortunately, nature provides us with an abundance of the discontent that we need but don't want. Of course, there are many other qualities that help us to change and create. Certainly, curiosity and intelligence are prominent among them. Without some energizing drive, however, curiosity becomes idle, intelligence languishes and change becomes modest at best.
Generally we are unaware of the paradox that it is unhappiness that actually drives our urge toward happiness. We have to go through unhappiness to get to happiness. Unhappiness runs the show. It is so unpleasant and uncomfortable that we spend significant portions of our lives and our energy creating and achieving things we have been taught will make us happy and, thereby, permit us to break free of the pain of our discontent. From very early in life, parents, society, books and even advertising have influenced our beliefs about what would make us happy: good grades, good friends, lettering in a sport, getting into the college of our choice, falling in love, getting married, having children, finding the right job, getting promoted, making a lot of money, writing a novel, becoming famous and on and on. It is quite true that all these things can make us happy for a while. The belief, however, that the happiness can be made to become a continuous state, is an illusion. When unhappiness inevitably returns, we identify once more something we believe will make us happy and once again attempt to achieve it. The collective result of all these achievements is the creation of the continuously changing world we live in.
The power of unhappiness to influence change is found in almost every aspect of our lives, even our political lives. In the 2016 elections a deep-seated, seething unhappiness in the body politic may be running the show by catapulting candidates like Trump and Sanders to unexpected heights, at least for the time being. These candidates are not the cause of the wide spread discontent; rather, they are reflecting deep feelings that already existed. They are also exploiting them to the fullest extent possible.
The 2016 electorate seems to be responding increasingly to leaders that are seemingly honest and authentic, and who don't paper over the cancers that so many Americans feel are eating away at their lives. Millions who respond to these candidates are looking for something that will make them feel happier. Unhappiness makes us look for happiness just as the dark makes us look for the light. We only look for happiness and light when things are unhappy and dark.
This is not intended as an exclusive paean to unhappiness. Rather it attempts to right the balance by offering the view that in the pantheon of feelings, unhappiness is at least as important as happiness. Nor is it to diminish the importance of happiness. No one yearns for unhappiness. Everyone yearns for happiness. Understandably, happiness gets the better press. We prefer happiness because we prefer pleasure to pain. We tend to interpret feeling happy as meaning we are living life successfully. We're making right choices. The truth is if we never tasted happiness, the unhappiness that causes us to work and sweat to create the things that we believe would make us happy would be a cruel hoax. Still, despite all the objective reasons for an equivalent importance for happiness and unhappiness, if it were left up to us, we would almost certainly choose to be happy all the time.
The United States Declaration of Independence reflects the powerful valuation accorded the ideal of happiness. Its valuation is so high that happiness is ranked along with life and liberty as the three rights with which our Creator endowed us. Interestingly, Jefferson phrased this right as the "pursuit of happiness," not its attainment. One could wonder if Jefferson believed that achieving and actually maintaining happiness would be detrimental to the creative effort that must unfold, if America were to grow as he hoped. It's the absence of happiness that makes us pursue it. We don't need to pursue something we already have.
This positive valuation of happiness leads to an equally negative valuation of unhappiness, so much so that a cultural bias approaching the force of a taboo is applied to unhappiness. The pressure to be happy is so strong that it is difficult to acknowledge even when one in fact feels unhappy. The pressure to be or, at least, appear happy is insidious. Even married couples are reluctant to broach their unhappiness. The spouse we reveal it to can feel threatened and worry that his/her partner's unhappiness is because of something he or she has done or failed to do. This taboo is expressed beautifully in the television series, Madmen. The doctor of Draper's beautiful wife has told her that he can find nothing physically wrong with her. He suggests she might consider seeing a psychiatrist. In bed with her husband, she repeats what her doctor said and asks her husband if he thinks she should see a psychiatrist. He replied that the only people he knew who went to psychiatrists were unhappy. Then, he asked her if she was unhappy. "Of course not," she replied.
The truth is that much unhappiness lies below the threshold of consciousness. We feel guilty if we feel unhappy because we interpret the feeling as meaning we have somehow failed. We are afraid of this feeling and repress it. Imagine one of us with six children to feed and educate and a huge mortgage. We may be very unhappy in our job but repress that feeling because to acknowledge it consciously and name it would threaten our existence. Unconscious as the feeling may be, it, nevertheless, drives us to identify and create some mode of existence we believe would make us happy.
Despite deeply ingrained ideals that drive our strong preference for happiness, the reality is that nature, in its infinite wisdom, has wired us psychologically in a way that assures we experience sufficient "Divine Discontent" to sustain and promote creation. (Divine Discontent is a Faustian idea reflecting Goethe's view that unhappiness produces a constant striving that leads to the development of culture and the world we live in.) For one thing, it has made happiness ephemeral, like other feelings. It is only one of a great number of feelings that compete for our conscious attention and our psychic space. Feelings of every stripe are constantly jostling and replacing each other. Anxiety, disappointment, anger, pain, pride, guilt, faith, doubt, hate, love, and many variations of these feelings come and go in a steady stream. Nature limits our power to choose or control feelings, especially strong ones. At some level we can sense that they are quite autonomous. That doesn't keep us from trying to change them or minimize their pain and discomfort. Normally, however, we would find it impossible to feel happy when our child has died, or our spouse has left us or we've just been fired. Or let us try to feel unhappy when we've just won the Olympic gold.
Some of our discontent also comes from the cards we are dealt at birth. For most of us, there is always something missing and always someone who appears to have drawn better cards with respect to health, wealth, status, connections, looks, size, physical and/or mental ability, geographic location, race, color, etc. We may be urged not to envy others and even wish not to, but we do.
We are seldom entirely contented with our lot. Part of our discontent arises also from feeling inferior for what is missing and blaming ourselves, despite the obvious hand of fate. Envy and discontent are related. They both have to do with being unhappy with things as they are and with things we wish for but don't have.
This gap between the real and the ideal also reflects a sense that life is fundamentally asymptotic -- a line that continuously approaches a given curve but does not meet it at any finite distance. That's what life is like. We spend our lives striving to get "there" but there is no permanent "there." There is just almost "there." We may briefly get close enough to "there" to experience what "there" might be like, as in orgasm, but we can't sustain it. When we think we have arrived at "there," we often imagine a still better or different "there" to strive for. Experiencing "there," even for a fleetingly brief moment, is key to the striving. It triggers our imagination and creativity to attempt to get there and stay there. B. F. Skinner, psychologist and behaviorist, used rats in his famous experiments that may have had this experience when he fed them only randomly and intermittently. It kept them tapping the food lever. Tantalus is a mythological example of this phenomenon. From his name comes tantalize. The Tantalus experience is pictured as greatly desiring something that is just out of reach. And then there is the Moses experience. He got to see the Promised Land, but didn't get to go there. These are different faces of the asymptotic life. Not being able to get entirely "there" is a significant source of our unhappiness and discontent. Life energized by this productive process can seem cruel but the results are arguably astounding. So are the costs. So are the fleeting moments of satisfaction, happiness and even ecstasy. Feeling happy is one of the most beautiful and prized experiences in life. But it is beautiful and prized for the same reason diamonds are. They are rare.
This asymptotic aspect of life and nature is apparent and expressed quite elegantly in our mathematics. Neither extremity -- zero nor infinity -- can actually be reached mathematically by calculation. We can through calculation get ever closer to and approximate these values but in the end we have to assume them. Despite this human limitation, we still make great progress by being able to come close even if we don't actually get "there." Our calculations are good enough to get us to the moon. We just can't get to the end of the universe, which scientists believe continues to expand at a rapid rate. "There" is a moving target. If there actually were a "there," and we could reach it permanently and hold on to it, creation would cease. There would be no need for it. We would be satisfied with what is. The desire to get "there" and the inability to do so are actually the source of the Divine Discontent that sustains creation.
Progress comes from the striving for an elusive happiness. And its elusiveness is precisely why it is prized. It is why we pursue it with great energy and focus. We strive arduously to achieve those things we believe will make us content. The striving does lead to achievement and moments of happiness, yes, but also to psychological problems. It can lead us to frenetic, obsessive/compulsive behaviors that burden us with stress and, not infrequently, addiction. In the process of pursuing happiness, we often stumble on to drugs, alcohol, gambling and other addictions that more quickly and easily make us happy until they inevitably don't. Or we turn to therapy to help us escape our unhappiness.
Therapy doesn't turn out so well either when it comes to making us happy. We, of course, hope that therapy will help us find this elusive happiness. Unfortunately, we will be disappointed unless we are able eventually to see happiness in a different light. Therapy is unable to do for us what all our achievements have also been unable to do. It will not be able to annihilate unhappiness; nor should it. An important part of the "cure," if we need a "cure," is to comprehend that happiness is an experience that comes and goes in everyone's life. It is perfectly human and normal to experience feelings other than happiness a significant part of the time. In our society there is a strong and ubiquitous pressure to be happy and it can be a great relief simply to realize that nature didn't intend us to continuously be so. Unhappiness does not mean we've failed; it simply means we're human. We also need to grasp the irony that happiness itself, if it were a prolonged experience, would actually be a threat to our growth, development and creativity. We need to accept that the creation of our culture, like the creation of a child, cannot be accomplished without considerable pain, labor and difficulty. Unhappiness is one of the biggest of the prices we pay to purchase the world in which we live. This essential cost creates a huge dilemma. We want the beneficial results of unhappiness without its pain. We forget the refrain of the old song whose title is: "If You Want the Rainbow, You Must Have the Rain." As one patient was ending a long therapy, he simply concluded: "Well, I guess you just have to learn to grin and bear it."
Finally, while therapy clearly does not help us find happiness, it may, if we work hard at it and have a bit of luck, help us find something more important. It may help us find meaning in our lives; help us find what is truly important to us. This could be a welcome outcome. As Dr. Carl Jung once pointed out, we can endure any of life's difficulties, unhappiness and suffering as long as it has meaning.
The Pursuit of Meaning
While it may not be entirely true, it feels as if aging, with all its difficulties, brings with it a mounting share of unhappiness. For this reason, as we age, the pursuit of meaning becomes increasingly important to our health and well-being. With age comes the steady diminution of the faculties we need to experience even fleeting contentment and pleasure. Life becomes more limited as our vision, our hearing, our taste and our sexuality diminish. More and more things begin to hurt. If we can't believe we are doing something meaningful and important in life, we could easily conclude all the suffering from declining health and strength is not worth it. This has its obvious dangers. Without meaning we might not be able to endure.
However, even if we accept that we need to do something meaningful in our lives, we still face the challenge of finding what on earth that might be. When we were in harness in our work, whether work was at home or at the office, or both, we probably felt some degree of meaning from what we did. But when we don't have our work to give us that meaning, when that is gone -- voluntarily or involuntarily, what shall we do? Do we have to write a book? Compose a symphony? Win the golf or tennis tournament? Volunteer for meals on wheels? Give blood? Help a disabled son, daughter or grandchild? Get into politics? Support and even demonstrate for good causes? Reading trashy novels, watching trashy TV or even beautiful sunsets probably won't do it for us, even if in the abstract we think we may have earned the right to do so.
Making our task more difficult and problematic is the fact that even when we conclude we need to do something significant with our lives, we have to figure it out for ourselves. What seems to be of great value for one person may not be for another. We may feel we would be doing something worthy if we wrote a best selling book. Then, we remember someone like Hemingway, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature and then killed himself. Clearly, we aren't necessarily safe even if we are doing something with our lives that is considered worthwhile by the collective society. This latter point is sadly illustrated in the poem, Richard Cory. It's the story of a man who had all the admirable qualities that his collective society approved. Yet, he shot himself in the prime of life. We apparently are on our own when it comes to finding meaning for ourselves. The meaning of a human life is a pretty subjective valuation. If, like Hemmingway or Richard Cory, we don't believe our life, and what we are doing with it, is important, then it isn't.
It is psychologically important to believe in what we are doing. If others consider something to be meaningful, it doesn't matter, if it doesn't feel so to us. And if we as individuals feel something is of value, it doesn't really matter what others feel. Photographing sunsets, painting palm trees, weaving baskets, supporting causes, laughing with friends, writing memoirs or many other less than earth shaking activities may seem pretty wasteful or worthless to others. But they may sustain the individuals who do them as long as they feel they are meaningful. Still, it may well take something also deemed significant by the collective society to satisfy our need for meaning.
Meaning and the Pursuit of Interests
Since we need meaning to bear the unavoidable unhappiness and suffering we are bound to experience, especially in old age, how do we find it? We can't just decide we want to find something valuable to us and have it magically appear. Here's one way. If we want to find out what is meaningful and important to a child, we watch what interests him/her. We watch where his/her attention goes, what he is drawn to. Steven Spielberg's parents did this with him. They watched very keenly what interested him and what he liked. It turned out he really liked cameras. And for him, what he liked and what most interested him turned out also to be very meaningful in his life.
If we want to find what we might value, then, we must do for ourselves what we would do for a child. We have to do for ourselves what Spielberg's parents did for him. We have to watch ourselves like a hawk. Journaling can be an enormously helpful tool in this regard. We cannot journal without paying attention to ourselves. If we attend to and notice what interests us, what we like and dislike, we will be lead to what is meaningful and important to us, just as Spielberg was. (Of course, Spielberg, like all of us, had problems growing up, but mirroring of meaningful interests was not one of them.) Like artists, we pay attention to the subject we wish to paint or write about. In our case, we are the subjects. As we portray each new detail of ourselves, a picture increasingly emerges that shows us who we are. It takes patience. Just as the meaning of a painting cannot be discerned with the first brush strokes, so too the fullness of our meaning appears only as the details of ourselves slowly emerge until they reach a clarifying critical mass.
The suggestion to pay careful attention to our selves isn't about narcissistic self-absorption. It's about a relationship to our selves, a relationship between two parts of our selves in which one part is the observer and the other the observed. What we mean by paying attention is a brief, daily process in which we attempt to become more conscious of our selves by observing thoughts and feelings that normally stream through our minds unnoticed but that contain important information that helps add to our knowledge of who we are and what interests us or doesn't.
The process is enhanced if we carry a small notebook or 3x5 cards or whatever we choose with us wherever we go. When we have a particular thought or feeling that catches our attention, we write it down. (If we wait until the end of the day to note these thoughts and feelings, we can forget many of the important details.) Then when we sit down for our journaling session, we have access to the information we captured at the moment of experience. It takes a long time to acquire all the pieces of our puzzle but when we do so we become the world-leading expert on our own thoughts and feelings. It's both a good and essential investment.
There are some other benefits from journaling. The necessary unhappiness in our lives can create a lot of stress and tension and even guilt that puts pressure on our minds and emotions. Such pressure can make us sick if we don't find ways to relieve it. Journaling serves as a kind of psychic cathartic, a psychic bowel movement, if we may, that clears out psychic detritus that otherwise could become as toxic as backed up bowels. Unhappiness, like food, is essential for our wellbeing, but we need to deal with the undigested and unassimilated contents, if we are to stay healthy. A cathartic effect similar to journaling can also be achieved by a kind of confession in which we divulge inner contents to a trusted and non-judgmental priest, therapist or friend instead of expelling them on to a receptive and non-judgmental page. Journaling, of course, is a way to obtain the cathartic effect on our own.
Becoming conscious of our interests is not an easy task. For one thing, there are often multiple and competing interests that have to be differentiated and prioritized before they can be useful to us. Despite its difficulty, the process is essential to finding our inner guidance system. Throughout our lives it empowers, centers, and sustains us when we can form theories of meaning about what affects and shapes us.
Meaning won't cure the unhappiness we experience in life. Nothing will. It is too essential to life. However, we do know how we feel when we are doing something that is important to us. We feel energy. The energy doesn't abolish our unhappiness, but it is a pretty good remedy for exhaustion and depression.
Meaning and a Connection to Something Bigger Than Ourselves
Becoming connected to something bigger than ourselves endows us with meaning that sustains us through life's pain and difficulties. This connection is meaningful to us because we draw strength, courage, and security from it. As a result, as we embrace this larger entity, we gain confidence in handling our problems so that many difficulties that once hijacked our attention and our energy recede in importance. For example, American colonists almost certainly had a feeling of increased security when they joined together to form the United States. They joined into community for strength, security, support, and safety, knowing that their community was stronger, more secure, more supportive and safer than the individuals that comprised it; the community became for them a power greater than themselves individually. Benefitting from a connection to a power greater than ourselves, is, of course, an ancient spiritual belief.
An insistent drive for survival leads life to create processes that protect it against extinction. An important part of the defense against these threats is a tendency for the smallest elemental particles to connect with each other in order to form increasingly larger entities. Subatomic particles join to form atoms, then molecules and then all of physical life. Letters form words, words form sentences, sentences form paragraphs and on and on to a book and ultimately to world literature. Individual brush strokes and notes join with others to form something bigger. We detect this same tendency in the way humans organize. Earliest life consisted of individuals living in isolation. Then, to gain greater security they coupled, and then formed families, which, in turn, formed tribes. The units eventually formed into city-states, nations and regions like the Euro Zone. Logic would lead us to think that the ultimate object of the increasingly larger units is World Government. Thus, connecting with something bigger than ourselves may mean a unit as small as a couple or as big as World Government.
These bigger entities may become so meaningful and important to us that we become willing to sacrifice our autonomy and, even, ourselves in order to preserve them. The need for meaning and its power in our lives can also be seen in modern examples like ISIS and the willingness of its adherents to sacrifice themselves. Most people find meaning from work or activity that saves lives or helps others. But the need for meaning is so deep that if it isn't found in saving lives or helping others, it may be found in taking lives.
At some time in our lives, many of us have worked a jigsaw puzzle. It's a pretty good metaphor for the psychological process of searching for and discovering meaning by connecting smaller pieces to something bigger. It has to do with our identity. It has to do with who we are. Does our meaning come from being a single piece? From being a single piece connected to some of the other pieces? Or does it come from being connected to the whole thing?
When we see all the disconnected pieces of the puzzle, before seeing a picture of what it is supposed to be, we can't identify what it is. We don't know what it means. We don't really know whether it is the Trump Tower or the National Zoo. We don't know whether it is something ordinary or unique. We start with one piece and look for the neighboring ones in order to discover the identity and meaning of the whole thing.
At the very beginning of life, we are whole. All the pieces are there in potentia. As soon as ego consciousness is born and the process of socialization sets in, wholeness is lost. Large parts of ourselves that parents and conventional society disapprove of get repressed or are not allowed to appear or be expressed. We get narrowed down to what is permissible. The yearning for the lost parts of ourselves gets increasingly stronger until at midlife, the forbidden parts often roar out of the unconscious. It can cause our families and us a lot of problems. We know it as the midlife crisis. Our lives have come to feel meaningless and empty because much of us is inaccessible. We're like a partially completed puzzle that has no identity, and thus no meaning, yet. We yearn for that beginning state of wholeness when we were connected to something bigger. And we spend the rest of our lives trying to find that bigger thing and reconnect with it.
If we are lucky and work hard at it, we begin to find our missing pieces and to restore and relate these desultory bits to the part that is already assembled. The work of discovering our bigger self can be facilitated and enhanced by steps we can take, like honoring our interests, journaling, and creative activity. A good therapist can also help by reflecting back to us parts of ourselves that are revealed in our talk and our dreams. Usually this work doesn't begin in earnest until midlife. As more and more pieces are added, we begin to realize who we are. We begin gropingly to experience our emerging identity. We begin to find what we mean just as we find what a puzzle means the more its pieces are connected. Just as we gain security in the outer world by connecting with something bigger, so too in the inner world we gain strength and confidence by connecting to something bigger. The inner connection to something bigger may be even more important.
This is how we come to feel and experience that meaning in life depends upon this connection to something bigger than we are. We start with all the pieces. We pick up one of the pieces lying in haughty isolation. It has no identity by itself. It means nothing alone. Then, we find where it belongs, where it relates to the bigger picture. At the moment we join the smaller piece to the larger thing, we experience a feeling of meaning. We realize the importance of both the part and the whole. No tiny piece can make the whole puzzle; no puzzle can be complete without the tiny piece. It's what we mean by fulfillment. What starts as a, perhaps, infinitesimal feeling of fullness at the beginning grows ever bigger as the process unfolds. In this process we may pick up pieces of other peoples' puzzles. These pieces have no meaning for us. They don't fit. They don't belong. Only when something belongs to and is related to our bigger self does it resonate with us and have meaning. Only then does it satisfy our hunger and fulfill us. If we attempt to fit pieces of other people's puzzles to our own, we experience an inner rejection mechanism that is, at least metaphorically, similar to what occurs at the physical level in organ transplants. There is a powerful resistance to what is not us.
There is a very practical and concrete way that we can become and remain connected to something bigger than ourselves. It is by means of creative work. With creative work, we ourselves can make the bigger thing while remaining connected to it. We start with an empty canvas. Each successive brush stroke creates something bigger that we are clearly connected to. Similarly, we add a sentence or a paragraph to a book or paper or article we are writing. We enlarge our business or even our house or garden and we have created something bigger. All our creations carry our identity and mean something to us. They reflect who we are as much as Rembrandt's paintings reflect who he is so much so that we can identify a Rembrandt painting without seeing the signature, if we have studied Rembrandt. Each creative act reveals pieces of our puzzle just as each Rembrandt, Picasso or Kahlo reveals pieces of theirs. It takes courage to examine, acknowledge, and develop the heretofore-abandoned fragments of ourselves. It may take equal courage to discard the fragments that belong to or even were sanctified by others, including our parents.
We never totally complete our puzzle. Life is asymptotic. But each step toward completion brings increasing meaning. Our capacity to move ever closer to the end point leads to discoveries and developments of enormous value to our society. This asymptotic gap is actually essential to our creativity. It is in this gap between the last word, the last note and the last brush stroke that the next word, note and brush stroke are created. It is in this gap that the last thing that existed and the next thing that comes into existence is created. Unhappiness and its discontent is the longing that repeatedly fills this gap and leads to great progress and achievement.
PETER V. EMERSON MPA, Associate-Public Policy, Division on Addiction, Cambridge Health Alliance, a teaching affiliate of the Harvard Medical School.
NANCY CARTER PENNINGTON MSW, Jungian oriented psychotherapist with 35 years of experience in private practice. Co-author of The Guilt Cure.
LAWRENCE H. STAPLES PhD in psychology and Zurich trained Jungian Analyst with 25 years of experience in private practice. Formerly, he was a Corporate Vice President of Fortune 500 company. Author of The Creative Soul: Art and the Quest for Wholeness; Guilt With a Twist: The Promethean Way and co-author of The Guilt Cure.