This essay explores the phenomenon of superconscious activities and their expression in personal consciousness, particularly focusing on the mechanism of inspiration
By Roberto Assagioli, Doc. #12087 – Assagioli Archives – Florence. Formatted and Edited with Notes and Appendix by Jan Kuniholm[i]
Abstract: This essay explores the phenomenon of superconscious activities and their expression in personal consciousness, particularly focusing on the mechanism of inspiration. Examples such as “lightning calculators” demonstrate the independence of superconscious activities from ordinary personality traits. The text discusses the creative process in musicians and composers like Mozart and Chopin, highlighting spontaneous and impermanent manifestations of genius. Additionally, it delves into instances of scientific discoveries occurring through sudden insights. The intricate relationship between the superconscious and normal consciousness is illustrated through anecdotes like Rossini’s composing under duress and Coleridge’s interrupted dream-poem. The distinction between inspiration and creation is elucidated, drawing parallels with physical generation. External and internal stimuli, as well as emotional turmoil, are identified as catalysts for creative expression. While acknowledging psychoanalytic interpretations, the text suggests caution in their reception. Overall, it calls for a deeper understanding of how the superconscious operates and communicates with conscious personality.
Let us first consider the manifestation of superconscious activities through their downpouring expression into the personal consciousness, which, as already mentioned, constitutes the mechanism of inspiration.
Among certain cases which clearly show the complete independence of the superconscious activities from the ordinary personality are the so-called “lightning calculators.” These people have the ability to instantly give the solution of an arithmetical problem that normally would require long and fatiguing calculation. Here are a few examples from among many. “Little Colburn,[ii] at eight years of age, gave immediate answers to problems like the following: how many minutes are there in 48 years (25,228,890), to which the boy quickly added, “and there are 1,513,728,000 seconds;” and the cubic root of 268,336,125 (equals 645). [iii]
Some of these marvelous calculators began to use their faculties at a very early age; Fuller [iv] at three years old and Ampère at four.[v] Furthermore, even if some of them, such as Ampère and Gauss,[vi] have given subsequent proof of scientific genius, the majority have shown a very mediocre intelligence, and some have even been mentally deficient. It is noteworthy also that in some cases the faculty weakens and disappears with increasing age. These calculators have often been asked how they arrived at their results, but they were unable to explain it or account for it.
Here is the interesting introspective analysis which Ferrol makes of the way his faculties work:
Ever since I was a child, I have been able to calculate in this intuitive way, so that I often thought I must have lived before. If I was given a difficult problem, the answer rose up immediately within me without my knowing at all where it came from. I set out to look for the way, retracing the path from the results. This intuitive way of answering, which never failed, grew parallel with the demands that were made upon it. I often have a feeling that someone is standing near me, whispering the desired answer or the sought-for way, and it usually speaks of ways that few or none have trodden before me and that I would not have found if I had had to search for them. [vii]
The same characteristic of independence of the normal consciousness is found in large degree in the creative and inventive faculties from which come the works of art, scientific discoveries and technical findings.
Among the musicians there are cases of surprising precocity. Mendelssohn commenced to compose at five years of age, Hayden at four, Mozart at three. At that age the personality is in an almost rudimentary state and could not produce the compositions. In adults, the independence of the creative faculty is proved by the fact that its products reach the waking consciousness in a generally spontaneous, sudden, imperative, impersonal way.
Mozart made a subtle analysis of this state of inspiration:
When I feel I’m in a good mood, whether I’m traveling by car or walking after a good meal, or in the night when I can’t sleep, thoughts come to me in droves and most easily. Where and how do they come from? I don’t know, I don’t do anything. The ones I like, I keep in my head and hum them, at least that’s what others tell me. Once I’ve got my tune, another is soon added to the first one and all these pieces end up forming la pâte. My soul then ignites, if nothing disturbs me. The work grows, I can still hear it and make it more and more distinct, and the whole composition is completed in my head, even if it’s long. I then take it in a single glance, like a beautiful painting or a young boy — it is not done successively in the detail of its parts, as must happen later, but I hear it in its entirety, as a whole, in my imagination. What a delight for me . . . What is done in this way is no longer easily forgotten . . . If I then start writing, all I have to do is pull it out of the bag in my brain . . . I can be interrupted while I’m writing; people can come and go around me, but I’ll keep writing; I can even talk about chickens, geese, Gretchen and Barbe, and so on.[viii]
“For Chopin,” writes Georges Sand, “Creation was spontaneous, miraculous; he found it without seeking, without foreseeing it; it arrived complete, sudden, sublime.” [ix]
De Musset said, “One does not work but listens and waits; it is as if someone unknown was speaking in your ear.” [x] And Lamartine: “It is not I who think; it is my ideas that think in me.”[xi]
A very clear and amusing instance of the sharp distinction which exists between the conscious personality and the superconscious activity is that of the Italian composer, Rossini. Rossini had once promised his manager to deliver a comic opera for a certain date, but he was a lazy man; the date was approaching and he had not even started to compose the opera. The manager, knowing him well, resorted to drastic measures. He locked Rossini in his room and told him that he would not receive any food unless he produced a certain amount of work daily. As Rossini was particularly fond of copious, good food, he was particularly sensitive to this menace. Thus forced to compose, in an angry mood he furiously wrote down with great rapidity some of his most vivacious and cheerful music, while lying in his bed and throwing out of the window page after page, which were hurriedly transcribed by three copyists who were encamped in the little square below. The fact that the two different levels of Rossini’s being were in quite an opposite mood, significantly proves how independently the various parts of a human being can function.
There are many cases of scientific discoveries and technical inventions which occur in a similar fashion; namely, through sudden and spontaneous irruption into consciousness. The great naturalist Buffon testifies, “You feel something like a little electric shock which strikes your head and at the same time touches your heart. That is the moment of genius.”[xii]
An inventor while reading a novel suddenly understood the way by which a special prism might be constructed — a problem on which he had meditated a long time without success. Professor Kekulé recounts that, while riding on the top of a bus in London, he saw the atoms dancing in the air in a way as to enable him to formulate his theory concerning atomic groups.[xiii]
Without being great artists or scientists, there are many of us who have felt new ideas arise while writing, as if our writing had taken on unforeseen developments. In some cases, the inspiration surges up during sleep, awakening the sleeper. An often quoted example is that of Hamilton who formulated the theory of “quaternion,” a complex mathematical concept, while sleeping.[xiv] Another mathematician, Maignan,[xv] while dreaming, discovered some new theorems; in the same way, Krüger[xvi] solved highly complicated problems.
A well known instance is that of Coleridge who, while sleeping, composed two or three hundred lines of a poem; on waking, he wrote fifty-four of them fluently, but then he was interrupted, and this made him forget the others completely.[xvii] This incident shows how delicate is the connection between the superconscious and normal consciousness, and how easily interrupted is the communication between the two states.
Let us now investigate, as far as possible, how the superconscious works and how it transmits the results of its activities to the conscious personality.
The first point which should be clearly realized is that inspiration and creation should not be confused, but constitute two different stages of an organic creative process. An analogy with physical creation can greatly help us to clarify this subject. There is indeed a close parallelism between psychological creation and physical generation. In both, the first stage is represented by fecundation, conception. In the former, the fecundating element is often an external stimulus which strongly strikes the fancy, arousing deep emotions and intense feelings, thus putting in motion the superconscious faculty.
An example, all the more noteworthy because the writer was accustomed to compose slowly, reflectively, with the greatest conscious cooperation, was the poem, May Fifth, by Alessandro Manzoni.[xviii] The unexpected announcement of Napoleon’s death moved him profoundly and inspired the rapidly-written hymn. In it, the poet clearly describes the internal excitement which prompted “his genius,” (namely, his superconscious) to write the poem.
Sometimes there are many intense, external stimuli which act directly on the superconscious but remain unrecognized by the ordinary consciousness of the artist. In other cases, however, the stimulus is not external but internal. It consists of a tendency, an impulse, a sentiment or a problem which agitates the artist and which, being unable to find outlet, satisfaction, or solution in life, expresses itself in a creation of fantasy, putting its own creative force into that.
In relation to the sublimation and artistic transfiguration of personal sentiments, Heinrich Heine[xix] has appropriately said, “From my great sorrow, my little songs are drawn.”
Such emotional genesis has been put into evidence in various psychoanalytic studies, although some of the interpretations made by psychoanalysts, including Freud himself, appear often far-fetched and [their reception] should be greatly qualified. Some of the more reasonable and convincing are found in Baudoin’s book, Psychoanalyse de l’Art.[xx]
Appendix:
Assagioli Archives Doc. #14247 [xxi]
A LETTER FROM MOZART
From La pensée de Mozart by Jean-Victor Hucquard
(Editions du Seuil, 1958) Translated from French by Jan Kuniholm
What exactly is my way of writing and working, when it comes to great and arduous things? No matter how much I think about it, I can’t think of anything better to say than this: when I’m in good shape and in good physical condition, for example on a carriage journey, or on a walk, after a good meal, or at night when I can’t sleep, then ideas come best and in great floods.
From where and how? I don’t know and I can’t control it. The ones I like I keep in my head, and hum them to myself; at least that’s what others have told me. If I stick to it, I can gradually think of ways of making a good pâté (sic) out of these pieces, according to the requirements of counterpoint or instrumental timbres, etc. . . . It warms my soul, especially if I’m not disturbed. It grows and grows, and I develop it more and more clearly. The work is then almost finished in my head, even if it’s a long piece, so that I take in the whole thing in my mind at a glance as if I were seeing a beautiful painting or a beautiful human being. In my imagination, I don’t hear it in order of succession, as that must come afterwards, but I grasp the whole, so to speak, all at once. Now that’s a treat!
The whole invention and elaboration takes place in me like in a beautiful dream; but the best moment is when I can control the whole thing by inner hearing. I don’t easily forget what I’ve worked out in this way, and it’s perhaps the most beautiful gift God has given me. When I come to write, all I have to do is take everything I’ve just said out of “the bag” in my brain. So it’s quite easy to get it down on paper because it’s really finished, as they say, and there are rarely any major differences between what I write and what was in my head. That’s why I can also let myself be disturbed while I’m writing, and anything can happen around me: it doesn’t stop me from writing, and I can chat at the same time about chickens and geese, Gretel and Bardel, and other trivia.
[i] The original manuscript of this document is a typed essay in English. Internal evidence suggests that this essay may have originally been written in Italian and translated into English either by the author or by his secretary. This editor has made a few grammatical and pagination corrections, etc. but the text is substantially unchanged. The autor may have intended to edit this essay further but no later version has been found. Editor’s interpolations are shown in [brackets] while elisions . . . are shown as found in the original. —Ed.
[ii] Zerah Colburn (1804-1839) was an American boy from Vermont who was discovered to have amazing abilities at calculation and the solving of fairly complex mathematical problems. —Ed.
[iii] Mackenzie, W., Metapsichica Moderna [Modern Metapsychical Research, 1923] p. 132-133. —Author’s Note.
[iv] Tom Fuller (1710-1790), known as “the Virginia calculator,” came to America as a slave at the age of 14. He was entirely illiterate but in about a minute and a half converted 70 years, 17 days, and 12 hours to seconds, even correcting the result of an examiner who had failed to account for leap years. He could mentally multiply numbers of up to 9 figures. — Quoted in Mitchell, Frank D., “Mathematical Prodigies,” in The American Journal of Psychology, January 1907, p. 63. Accessed at https://www.jstor.org/stable/1412172 March 2024. —Ed.
[v] Related by Mitchell, ibid. p. 96. André-Marie Ampère (1775-1836) was a French physicist, inventor and mathematician, and a founder of the science of classical electromagnetism. He was largely self-educated. —Ed.
[vi] Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) was a German mathematician, astronomer and physicist. His prodigality is related by Michell, ibid. p. 84. —Ed.
[vii] Ferrol is mentioned in Mitchell, ibid., several times, but the source of this quotation is unknown. He is known to have been French and lived in the early 20th century, and was able to mentally perform very complex calculations. —Ed.
[viii] Quoted in French by Dr. Felix Regnault, “Comment Travaille l’Homme de Genie,” [“Concerning the Work of Men of Genius] in La Revue Vol. XLIV, 1903, Paris, pp. 79-80 (digitized by Google Books from the UCLA Library, accessed March 2024). It is not known whether this quotation is authentic and the original source is unknown. It may have been spoken by Mozart when visiting Paris as a young man. — (originally a free translation from the French by the author) — Newly re-translated from original French text by this editor. A different, and probably more accurate, version of this quotation of Mozart was typed out in Assagioli Archive Doc. # 14247, and is translated in the Appendix at the end of this essay. —Ed.
[ix] George Sand (pseudonym of Aurore Dupin, Chopin’s lover, companion and confidante), Histoire de ma Vie [The Story of My Life], Part 5, Chapter XIII. —Ed.
[x] Quoted by Regnault, op.cit. p. 79. Alfred de Musset (1810-1857) was a French dramatist, poet and novelist, known for his autobiographical novel La Confession d’un enfant du siecle [The Confession of a Child of the Century]. —Ed.
[xi] Quoted by Regnault, op.cit. p. 79, and translated by the author. Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869) was a French author and poet. —Ed.
[xii] Quoted by Regnault, op.cit. p. 81. and translated by the author. Comte de Buffon was a French naturalist, mathematician, and cosmologist, Director of the King’s Gardens in Paris. —Ed.
[xiii] Friedrich August Kekulé (1829-1896) was a German organic chemist who originated the theory of chemical structure. —Ed.
[xiv] Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1805-1865) was an Irish mathematician, astronomer and physicist. His work was fundamental to modern theoretical physics. Quaternions cannot be easily described in ordinary language. —Ed.
[xv] Emmanuel Maignan (161-1676) was a French physicist and theologian. He taught mathematics in the convent of the Trinità dei Monti in Italy, where he lived for fourteen years, engaged in mathematics and in physical experiments. —Ed.
[xvi] Peter Krüger (1580-1639) was a Prussian mathematician, astronomer, and polymath. —Ed.
[xvii] According to David James Lamb, in an essay titled “What Dreams May Come: Coleridge and the Pains of Sleep” (www.causticfrolic.org), Coleridge’s “poem entitled Kubla Khan, subtitled A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment, is one of his most celebrated works. It was famously composed in an opium-fueled, semi-conscious reverie somewhere in the English countryside. During this feverish dream, Coleridge claims to have composed upwards of 300 lines detailing his magisterial and preternatural visions of the summer palace of Kubla Khan, a Mongolian warlord who descended from Genghis. However, before Coleridge could pen his dream-epic, he was interrupted by the now infamous “person on business from Porlock.” The person from Porlock delayed Coleridge in some idle conversation for a while, and to the poet’s horror, he subsequently found he could only recall some 50 lines. This became the poetic fragment we know now as the poem Kubla Khan, which regularly tops surveys of most beloved or favorite verses across the English-speaking world.” —Ed.
[xviii] Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873) was an Italian poet. His poem Il Cinque Maggio [May Fifth] was inspired by the death of Napoleon, May 5, 1821. —Ed.
[xix] Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) was a German poet, writer, and literary critic. —Ed.
[xx] Charles Baudoin, Psychoanalyse de l’Art. —Author’s Note. Available in English as Psychoanalysis and Aesthetics, translated by Eden and Cedar Paul, 1924, re-issued 2010. —Ed.
[xxi] The original is a typed manuscript in French. This is presented as an alternate version of the quotation in the text; see Note 8 above. —Ed.
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