Euan at The Obvious? has wonderfully beaten me to it, but here's the first of those passages from "archetypal psychologist" James Hillman that I promised in this post on procrastination. (Note that Hillman would not want this misrepresented as a sample of his writing: it's from a book composed of interviews.)
[Feelings of being stuck, procrastination, etc.] belong to the ritus of the work. They're not personal feelings; everyone has them. Work is ritual, and part of the ritual is waste, repetition, boredom, the sense of this-is-a-whole-morning-wasted: I spent three hours in the library, four hours, and I started reading other things that have nothing to do with what I am working on. I have a deadine on Saturday, and I wasted this whole Wednesday morning, it's insane. [See Ann Althouse on this topic.] This is one kind of despair. Another despair: you can't get the thought and it comes in a lump, and no matter how hard you try to write the same paragraph, you can't get the thing to come out. Then you have to leave it in that lump. Another kind of despair is: you don't any longer know what you are saying, what you are doing. You've lost somehow what it is all about. Those senses of inferiority, of waste, of being blocked, of being unable . . . are tremendously important, because in the psyche there is a reason for the block.
Maybe the psyche needs to stay longer where it is, in the dark or as a lump. The feelings of inferiority are also part of the work in another sense: they counteract the fiction of perfection that is necessary for the work to be conceived in the first place. How can you begin anything without a fiction of perfection -- that this is going to be the best! . . . But . . . the fantasy of perfection inevitably carries with it the fantasy of imperfection and failure. Inferiority. These two fantasies go on together, almost simultaneously -- and they must. If they get split apart, one goes through manic-depressive cycles in working. When they are together, and not in up-or-down phases, one lives both the . . . enjoyment and the . . . criticism. . . .
[S]triving for perfection is part of the process of every human activity, but we should not make the psychological mistake of identifying it with the whole process which absolutely requires stubborn blocks, inferiorities, impasses. My own habit is never to push those places . . . I go wherever there is movement. I let my sense of weakness guide me, not my striving for perfection only. I never try to reduce something that is stubborn, directly; I give up on it and then come back and try again. . . . The work goes on working anyway . . .
From InterViews, ©1983 James Hillman, pp. 173-175
Comments