The Psyche and Literal Mindedness

"The psyche's reality is lived in the death of the literal."
--Gaston Bachelard

I've found that when trying to write a work of fiction loosely based on fact, if I get bogged down in literal-minded details of what "really" happened ("wait, he didn't actually say this," or "that tree was on the other side of the street"), the flow of the story just grinds, painfully and almost audibly, to an imagination-stultifying halt.

Similarly, when trying to make some sort of sense of my life, rational analysis of this and that is not only fatiguing and despair inducing, it's often downright counterproductive. It's probably news to almost no one that the psyche, when trying to tell the conscious mind something, uses techniques that, at first, defy literal-minded or purely rational problem-solving skills. That kind of rational analysis can be useful, but only as an adjunct to the more emotional, imagistic, symbolic props that (astoundingly) manage to make their way through the clutter of consciousness to the surface. Some of my dreams would seem, on first glance, to have nothing to do with my life at all. I may not even appear in them. One of my recent dreams, involving a sad act of pseudo-sex between two not-so-famous actors, a pre-eminently logical, certified public accountant-type brain would have tossed in the trash as completely irrelevant information. Ostensibly, I was nowhere to be found in this dream. Only after I realized that not just one but both the actors symbolized parts of myself did the dream make perfect sense to me.

Psychotherapeutic gains (I won't use the word breakthroughs, since that word to me has always implied a cure, and I consider myself in no way "cured"), I've found, don't happen through logic alone. They've been principally emotional connections that got made almost in spite of my efforts to "understand" my problems in an analytical way. I made just such an emotional connection recently, after which the logic of it seemed quite obvious. The fact that I have, like many neurotics, and even more than most, blunted and buffered and buried my emotions to block their considerable pain made this emotional connection, unfortunately, that much harder to make, to experience, and therefore it seemed years, actually decades, overdue.

So the writing of fiction-or memoir-becomes a rather tricky act of suspending logic, delaying it to the editing phase, freeing the mysterious, hard-to-capture psyche to create art.

--Ray