The Creative Process and the Psychedelic Experience an essay by Dr. Frank Barron featured in the Psychedelic Library. I’ve spoken about him a few times previously in this web log. I met Frank Barron in 1978 while I was attending the University of California, Santa Cruz. I was an undergraduate and Frank a full professor of psychology. He became my mentor and I was friends with him until he died. Perhaps it is no coincidence that he passed in October 2002, the same month I left Santa Cruz for Las Vegas . I had lived there for 26 years. In a way, some part of me died with Frank and I almost feel like I’ve been in an after-death state since I moved to Vegas.
Frank was the guy who turned Timothy Leary on to psilocybin and invited him to Harvard University. I had met Tim two years before and perhaps one of my greatest memories was getting Leary and Barron together for Lunch at the Crows Nest Restaurant, a Santa Cruz restaurant overlooking the Monterey Bay. Frank also taught at Esalen Institute, Big Sur.
In the essay, Frank talks about his study of exceptionally creative people. He found that the more creative the individual, the more likely that person was to have high scores on tests measuring psychopathology. He developed a special scale of MMPI — the test he used to study people’s personalities. He called the scale "ego-strength" which meant an individuals ability to turn their visions into real world creations and a bit more as well. In "Why We Get High" an essay I published about ten years ago, I talk about the meaning of ego:
Transcendental experience is experiences that go beyond the ego but also continue of maintain and encompass the ego. Transcendental experiences are based upon the solid foundation of life in the world or "chopping wood and carrying water" as the Zen Buddhists put it. For those with no strong foundations, altered states might lead downward into more primitive and barbaric states of mind — "the pre" portion of the "pre-trans" split.. Thus the warning should be given, make sure that when you reach for the sky, your feet be planted firmly on the ground.
The key point that is made, and affirmed by both Freud and Jung also, is that the development of the ego is an absolutely necessary requirement for healthy human functioning. In the transcendence of the ego it is important that the experience be given time and space to be reinvigorated in ordinary life, or the person becomes "spaced-out" not capable of functioning in the world. And if we weren’t supposed to function in the world, what are we doing here anyway.?
If you still find all of this hard to understand, then the key to the confusion is in the term ego, which has as many meanings as love or God or any of those other confusing words people are always trying to define. In the ’60′s, we talked about "ego-death" as the ultimate act of mind. John Lenin once commented that after reading the Psychedelic Experience and taking acid a few hundred times, he didn’t even realize who he was or that he had written all of those great songs for awhile.
But "ego-death" no matter how intensively experienced, always leads to "ego rebirth." And why shouldn’t it because the ego is not some negative thing that has to be disposed off. It is the vehicle which allows us to travel through life.
We also link ego with egotistical, as the person who is always patting themselves on the back verbally in front of others or putting on airs. But having a strong ego in the psychological sense doesn’t have anything to do with that either.
Father of self-actualization theory Carl Jung believed that in as a person becomes self-actualized, that first there needs to be a healthy ego developed. But then, after it’s development takes place, then there is a turning away from "ego-centeredness" toward the development of the self, of which the ego is only a part. He called this process "self-actualization."
Read the complete essay here.
“In one of our experiments, the subjects—a group of creative writers—were asked to judge which of two circles was the larger. The circles were of identical area. Under control conditions, where there is no attempt by the experimenter to influence opinion, people split 50-50 on it, as might be expected. When the experimenter introduces a false consensus, about 75% of ordinary subjects will agree with the false consensus. When we tried to establish this false consensus among the creative writers—that the circle on the left was the larger—82% of them said the circle on the right was larger!”
I thought that was interesting. I recognize the same character trait in me – that is to disagree with consensus if possible.
To put it crudely…what a crock of shit.
Take a look around you. See what the ego is doing to people? The conscience is what should be guiding us. When a person is egotistical, they have no conscience. Look at Donald Trump or any other rich asshole. They have inflated egos. This is what it does. And they have no conscience at all. They don’t give a damn about the poor and hungry. The ego is BAD.
An ego is usually understood as the part of the personality that navigates the world. The term ego is not a concept and there is no actual structure you can point to and say, this is the ego. Its a simply a theory that looks at the personality.
Ego inflation is different than a strong ego. When you refer to someone as “egotistical,” you are saying that they suffer from ego-inflation.
So in the context of the system I have just described, observationally it is people with weak egos that are egotistical. They lack self esteem and make up for it by having the negative characteristics you ascribe to ego.
I understand how there can be confusion between strong ego and having an inflated ego, but they do not refer to the same thing.