There are things in life that come over you sudden as a flash flood, total as an eclipse — the great loves, the great creative passions, the great urges to conquer a mountain or a theorem. They can feel like an alien invasion, like the immense hand of some imperative has seized your soul from the outside. But when you look back on them once they have had their way with you, if you are awake enough to your own life and conscious enough of your unconscious, you come to realize that they were not a possession by some external force but dispossessed parts of you yearning for integration. This is why our states of possession are some of the most profound experiences we can have as human beings — they are both revelations and transformations of the self, those eruptions of the psyche that raise new summits of possibility for our creativity and our vitality.

The Jewish German analytical psychologist Erich Neumann (January 23, 1905–November 5, 1960) devoted his life to investigating these invisible processes, finally formulating his ideas in four essays published under the title Art and the Creative Unconscious (public library) just before his death.

Almost entirely forgotten today, Neumann influenced some of the great modern shamans of the psyche — particularly Carl Jung, who was once his teacher and in whose own writings on creativity I first came upon the passing mention that led me to Neumann’s work. He was especially interested in the relationship between creativity and the archetypal undercurrents of the psyche, the complexes pulsating beneath our conscious experience, the psychic transformations possible when we fully own our creative energy — transformations that often begin with an experience of possession. He writes:

Every transformative or creative process comprises stages of possession. To be moved, captivated, spellbound, signify to be possessed by something; and without such a fascination and the emotional tension connected with it no concentration, no lasting interest, no creative process, are possible. Every possession can justifiably be interpreted either as a one-sided narrowing or as an intensification and deepening. The exclusivity and radicality of such “possession” represent both an opportunity and a danger. But no great achievement is possible if one does not accept this risk.

Remember: “You are here to risk your heart.” And if love and work are the twin strands of meaning in our lives, the two great creative endeavors of being alive, it is there that we are most prone to possession, there that we risk the most. What we risk, of course, is ourselves — the transformation of the self by the force of what the possession reveals in us: the abandoned and alienated parts of us longing for inclusion in our conscious experience.

Neumann writes:

[States of possession] presuppose a disunity of the psyche, whose integration is an endless process. The world and the collective unconscious in which the individual lives are fundamentally beyond his mastery; the most he can do is to experience and integrate more and more parts of them. But the unintegrated factors are not only a cause for alarm; they are also the source of transformation.

Transformation, however, is one of the great human paradoxes and one of the starkest illustrations of the limits of our imagination — we can never fully imagine who we are and what life is like on the other side of a total transformation, and so we either dread it or dismiss it. (See the excellent Vampire Problem thought experiment.) This, Neumann observes, is because our only reference points are partial transformations:

The word transformation… embraces every change, every strengthening and slackening, every broadening and narrowing, every development, every change of attitude, and every conversion. Every sickness and every recovery are related to the term transformation; the reorientation of consciousness and the mystical loss of consciousness in ecstasy are a transformation.

[…]

Most striking are those transformations which violently assail an ego-centered and seemingly airtight consciousness, i.e., transformations characterized by more or less sudden “irruptions” of the unconscious into consciousness. The irruptive character is experienced with particular force in a culture based on ego stability and a systematized consciousness; for in a primitive culture, open to the unconscious, or in a culture whose rituals provide a bond with the archetypal powers, men are prepared for the irruption. And the irruption is less violent because the tension between consciousness and the unconscious is not so great.

We have all experienced such “irruptions” that feel like alien invasions whenever the physiological foundation of the psyche is dysregulated — in illness and pain, in extreme hunger and thirst, in states of exhaustion or intoxication. In such moments, the unconscious begins to bubble up through the cracks and produces moments of epiphany, conversion, sudden illumination. (Virginia Woolf experienced it in the context of illness and physicist Freeman Dyson contacted it by “going into a sort of semistupor after forty-eight hours of bus riding.”) And yet these personal transformations, as sudden and strange and all-consuming as they may feel, can only ever be partial because, Neumann observes, they “apply only to the affected ego and consciousness, not to the total personality,” that fractal of the universal. Drawing on Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious, he writes:

What we encounter most often are partial changes, partial transformations of the personality… Unless changes in consciousness go hand in hand with a change in the unconscious components of the personality, they do not amount to much… Possession by a personal complex, an emotional content, leads only to a partial transformation that overpowers consciousness and its center, the ego… Whereas partial changes in the personal unconscious, in the “complexes,” always influence consciousness at the same time, and changes effected through the archetypes of the collective unconscious almost always seize upon the whole personality.

An absorbing creative process — one characterized by what later psychologists have termed “flow,” or what Octavia Butler called “a sweet and powerful positive obsession” — can begin as such an “irruption.” (That is what I experienced with my bird divinations, which arrived as a kind of possession that took hold of me daily for months.) And yet, Neumann observes, while all creative work requires some element of possession, what distinguishes great art is that the possession is not the end point of the creative process but a stepping stone to a higher-order motive force serving not self-realization but universal revelation. With an eye to philosopher Martin Buber’s concept of the I-Thou relation, he writes:

The individual who stops in his possession and whose productivity is based on a monomania, an idée fixe, occupies only a low rank in the hierarchy of creative men, though his achievement may still be significant for the collectivity.

Creative transformation, on the other hand, represents a total process in which the creative principle is manifested, not as an irruptive possession, but as a power related to the self, the center of the whole personality. For partial possession by a single content can be overcome only where the centroversion that makes for wholeness of the personality remains the guiding factor. In this event the law of psychic compensation leads to an unremitting dialectical exchange between the assimilating consciousness and the contents that are continuously being newly constellated. Then begins the continuous process characteristic of creative transformation — new constellations of the unconscious and of consciousness interact with new productions and new transformative phases of the personality. The creative principle thus seizes upon and transforms consciousness as well as the unconscious, the ego-self relation as well as the ego-thou relation. For in a creative transformation of the total personality, a modified relation to the thou and the world indicates a new relation to the unconscious and the self, and the clearest, though not the only, indication of psychic transformation is a change in the relation to extrapsychic reality.

Although the creative process, in all its gripping possession, feels so profoundly personal, in its highest form it is inseparable from the universal, from the immensity of the one reality we share, the one experience we share — the fundamental unity which sparked quantum pioneer Erwin Schrödinger’s koan-like pronouncement that “the over-all number of minds is just one.” We habitually lose sight of that oneness as the mind splits into consciousness and the unconscious. Creativity is what we call the process of integrating the two so that we may feel more fully and see more deeply into the nature of reality. Neumann observes:

When we consider the totality of the human psyche, in which consciousness and the unconscious are interdependent both in their development and in their functions, we see that consciousness can develop only where it preserves a living bond with the creative powers of the unconscious… It must not be forgotten that the outside world that we apprehend with our differentiated consciousness is only a segment of reality, and that our consciousness has developed and differentiated itself as a specialized organ for apprehending this particular segment of reality… We pay a heavy price for the sharpness of our conscious knowledge, which is based on the separation of the psychic systems and which breaks down the one world into the polarity of psyche and world. This price is a drastic curtailment of the reality that we experience.

The triumphs of creative work invite a return to that unified reality:

In [great works of art] a fragment of the unitary reality is apprehended — a deeper, more primordial, and at the same time more complete reality that we are fundamentally unable to grasp with our differentiated conscious functions, because their development is oriented toward a sharper perception of sections of polarized reality. In the differentiation of consciousness we seem to be doing the same thing as when we close our eyes in order to enhance our hearing, in order that we may be “all ears.” Unquestionably this exclusion sharpens and intensifies our hearing. But in thus excluding the other senses we perceive only a segment of the total sensory reality, which we experience more adequately and fully if we not only hear it but also see, smell, taste, and touch it.

[…]

In the rapture and beauty of the creative moment… consciousness and the unconscious momentarily become a creative unity and a third term, a part of the one reality.

And so Neumann locates creativity at the crossing point of possession and openness — the place where the intrapsychic forces impelling us in a certain direction meet the willingness to look outward in all directions, to open the self to the universe and the oneness of reality, the world in its completeness and its infinity. With an eye to what he calls the essential “receptive component” of creative work, he observes:

Always and everywhere [the creative person] is driven to rediscover, to reawaken, to give form to this world. But he does not find this world as though seeking something outside him; rather, he knows that this encounter with full reality, the one world, in which everything is still “whole,” is bound up with his own transformation toward wholeness. For this reason he must, in every situation, in every constellation, refresh the openness into which alone the open world can enter.

All four essays in Art and the Creative Unconscious are a revelation. Couple these fragments with Carl Jung on creativity, then step inside the processes and possessions of some of the most creative people alive.