Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) October 29, 2021: In the deeply polemical 2012 book Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative (Northwestern University Press), the prolific Melville scholar and biographer Professor Hershel Parker touts Chapter 13 of Dr. Albert Rothenberg's 1979 book The Emerging Goddess: The Creative Process in Art, Science, and Other Fields (University of Chicago Press, pages 345-380). Simply stated, Professor Parker considers Melville to be a creative literary genius in virtually all of his narratives in prose and poetry. In addition, Professor Parker sees Dr. Rothenberg's 1979 book about the creative process as the gold standard in scholarly studies of creative work.
In the Wikipedia entry about Dr. Albert Rothenberg (born in 1930), we are told that "creativity differs from productivity or competence alone - it consists of yielding something novel or new. Rothenberg's work and findings have consistently focused on a strict definition of creativity as the state or production of both newness and value (intrinsic or instrumental). Clear-cut results and applications of these investigations have measured, in whole or in part, all types and levels of creativity. The findings produced by his research consist, for the first time, of empirically determined highly specific and operational types of creative processes. These have been described through his work in the fields of science and literature, the visual art, and psychotherapy."
Now, my favorite scholar is the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955). For many years, he taught English at Saint Louis University (SLU), the Jesuit university in St. Louis, Missouri (USA). In addition, he served as the William E. Haren Professor of Humanities in Psychiatry in the department of psychiatry in the SLU School of Medicine from 1970 onward until he formally retired.
I will discuss Professor Ong's creative thought. But, more importantly, I want to suggest here that persons need to engage their own creative capacities in order to understand Professor Ong's creative thought. However, writing about the special context of psychotherapy in his 1988 book, Dr. Rothenberg says that "the capacity to engage in such creative activity does not appear to be inborn for either therapists or patients" (page 180) - or, by extension, for academics. It appears that what Dr. C. G. Jung refers to as the transcendent function is involved in activating what Dr. Rothenberg refers to as "the capacity to engage in such creative activity."
For discussion of Jung's concept of the transcendent function, with pertinent quotations from his publications, see Daryl Sharp's handy book Jung Lexicon: A Primer of Terms & Concepts (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1991, pages 135-136).
In any event, I decided to check out Chapter 13 in Dr. Rothenberg's 1979 book because Professor Parker touts it so highly in his 2012 book (esp. pages 508, note 15 and 532, notes 16 and 17). Because Professor Parker sees Melville as a creative literary genius, I can readily understand why he finds Dr. Rothenberg's account of (1) homospatial thinking and (2) janusian thinking in the creative process so appealing for his project as a Melville biographer.
Nevertheless, I subsequently decided also to check out Dr. Rothenberg's 1988 book The Creative Process of Psychotherapy (New York and London: W. W. Norton). It is a guidebook for psychotherapists to use to enhance their approach to psychotherapy. It has no obvious connection with Professor Parker's four biographical books about Melville.
But it does offer Dr. Rothenberg's later accounts of (1) homospatial thinking and (2) janusian thinking, but now mostly in the context of psychotherapy. In addition, Rothenberg further articulates his concept of articulation. (His 1988 book also comes equipped with two well-developed indexes, a "Name Index" and a "Subject Index" [pages 201-203 and 204-210, respectively].
Dr. Rothenberg's extensively discusses of creative articulation in the context of psychotherapy (see esp. page 177) as well as the articulation of error in the creative process of psychotherapy (esp. pages 149-168).
In Dr. Rothenberg's 1988 book, he says, "Two endpoints of the creative process in psychotherapy are the production of insight and of personality attributes and structure" (page 176). But he promptly notes that "insight precedes the development of personality structure" (page 176).
Now, in the context of psychotherapy, Dr. Rothenberg's account of articulation may be the manifestation of what Dr. Jung refers to as the transcendent function at work in the psyche of the person undergoing psychotherapy (with the assistance of the psychotherapist), mentioned above.
Conveniently enough for my present purposes, Professor Ong also discusses articulation, on the one hand, and, on the other, personal structures of ego-consciousness in his perceptive essay "Rhetoric and the Origins of Consciousness" in his 350-page 1971 book Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (Cornell University Press, pages 1-22). In it, he says the following:
From within our present milieu, Gilbert Durand, in his brilliant psychocultural study, Les Structures anthropologique de l'imaginaire [1960], points out that it is rhetoric which effects the transit from the polysemous sign language of symbols to the formalism of logic, where signs have a 'proper meaning.' With rhetoric, man [sic] sets himself against fate: rhetoric is a movement of hope; an upward movement - a 'euphemism,' Durand calls it, 'which will color in the large all the activity of formalization of thought' [Ong's Englishing of Durand's French on page 451, with Professor Ong's reference to see pages 453-459]. Rhetoric does not grow directly out of the preconceptual but is antithetic to it; it is not so fragmenting, however, as the logic toward which it moves will be. Rhetoric is less preoccupied with distinctions, rather more unifying. It works through the imagination, which euphemizes actuality through hyperbole and antithesis [page 453 and 455]. Rhetoric also schematizes what would otherwise be too fantastic into identifiable figures of style that can be made out to be simple embellishments on formal signification [page 457] (this of course is never so formal as extreme analytic philosophers would make it out to be). Being thus intermediary between stages of the noetic world, rhetoric is full of ambiguities and thus difficult to study in depth, which is why, Durand regretfully suggests, it is given so little philosophical and anthropological attention [page 459]. (pages 12-13)
In addition, in Professor Ong's 1971 essay "Rhetoric and the Origins of Consciousness," he also makes the following statement about Erich Neumann's Jungian account of the stages of personal ego-consciousness:
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