Intention and Spontaneity: Authenticity and the Creative Process

Abstract

In the creative process, intention and spontaneity are distinct yet related positions of consciousness in relationship to the unconscious: planned and unplanned, directed and receptive. Both are necessary for creativity. Rather than binary opposites, intention and spontaneity could represent a relationship between two ways of perceiving: one that divides things into parts and one that intuits the whole. C. G. Jung saw himself as having two opposing personalities, the rational scientist and the intuitive creative. This duality was reflected in Jung’s assumptions about artists, art, and the creative process. Jung spent much of his life making art, and he used creative therapy with his patients. However, his thinking about the arts, shaped by philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, deplored aestheticism and mistrusted the healing power of beauty. Aestheticism for Jung meant the inflation, escapism, and dissociation he attributed to the artist. Jung may have feared being swept away into the depths, as many artists do. Perhaps that is why he never finished The Red Book, and never left a clear road map for the artist, although he offered warnings. This research traces the origins and legacies of Jung’s thinking about creativity, as interpreted by an artist. Through dreams and works of art that reveal unconscious patterns, this study explores the sources of authentic experience, creative inspiration, and transformation. A meaningful and rewarding creative practice may rely upon moving beyond binary models of consciousness to find a dynamic balance between intention and spontaneity, the part and the whole.