“The downside of my celebrity is that I cannot go anywhere in the world without being recognized.” Stephen Hawking

One sense of the word “ego” is a distorted self-regard, what psychologist Carl Jung referred to as “inflated consciousness… hypnotized by itself.”

But high level achievement often brings with it fame, which can also lead others to have an “inflated consciousness” that interferes with authentic perceptions of a celebrity, and distorts relationships.

Charles Arthur wrote about some of these issues with respect to the famed British theoretical physicist:

“Ask around, and you begin to get the impression that there are people whose feathers are ruffled by Professor Hawking’s fame.

“Peter Coles, professor of astronomy at the University of Nottingham, says: ‘Coffee-time talks in physics departments often come up with the same topic: it’s very difficult to get anybody to say anything critical of him. But to have somebody like that in an establishment that runs on peer review isn’t healthy. The trouble is, people fear that they will be thought of as jealous.’

“However, Bernard Carr, a friend of Hawking’s who is professor of astronomy at Queen Mary College, London, says: ‘The fact is, he is a great physicist. To say he’s the greatest since Einstein is an exaggeration, but he’s a cult figure with the public, and that has to be good for the subject.’

“His book A Brief History of Time has sold more than 10 million copies and been turned into a TV series. There’s probably a copy of the book in every aspirational middle-class home, and equally probably, the last 20 pages remain unperused by human eyes. Brief History must rank alongside James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, as the most regularly unfinished book.”

From The crazy world of Stephen Hawking, by Charles Arthur, The Independent (UK) [date: 2001]

Writer and teacher Eckhart Tolle provides some further explanation of these relationship issues in a section titled Ego and Fame in his book A New Earth.

He writes, “The bane of being famous in this world is that who you are becomes totally obscured by a collective mental image. Most people you meet want to enhance their identity - the mental image of who they are - through association with you…

“They are looking to complete themselves through you, or rather the mental image they have of you as a famous person, a larger-than-life collective conceptual identity. The absurd overvaluation of fame is just one of the many manifestations of egoic madness in our world.”

Tolle quotes Einstein speaking of “a grotesque contradiction between what people consider to be my achievements and abilities and the reality of who I am and what I am capable of.”

Tolle adds, “This is why it is hard for a famous person to be in a genuine relationship with others.. not dominated by the ego with its image-making and self-seeking.”

book: A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose.

Oprah and Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth Online Class Podcast [free]

Articles by Eckhart Tolle.

Related pages:
Ego / narcissism……
Ego / narcissism 2 : quotes articles books
Fame / celebrity : quotes articles books

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Jane Piirto, Ph.D. continues in her book Talented Children and Adults, “What is the impetus, what is the reason, for one talent taking over and capturing the passion and commitment of the person who has the talent? A useful explanation comes from Socrates, who described the inspiration of the Muse… Carl Jung (1965) described the passion that engrosses; depth psychologist James Hillman described the presence of the daimon in creative lives.”

She considers this passion and inspiration “the thorn, because it bothers, it pricks, it causes obsession until it has its way, until the person with the talent begins to work on developing that talent.”

The idea of the daimonic has multiple meanings, “from befitting a demon and fiendish, to motivated by a spiritual force or genius and inspired. It can also mean (as a literary term) the unrest that exists in us all which forces us into the unknown, leading to self-destruction and/or self-discovery.” [From the Wikipedia page on the Daimonic.]

James Hillman talks about the importance of this “unrest” - and writes “We hunger for that… it’s only American psychology that hasn’t got that myth, the myth of calling, destiny. As I say, Mormons, West Africans, Buddhists, Hindus, Kabbalists all have that.

“The shamanistic cultures, the American Indian cultures all had this idea that you have a reason to be here. You are a unique creature and this is not just genetic, or where you are in your family, first son or third daughter, or something, all that kind of causal thinking drops away. I think it’s something people can feel as — I hate the word — empowering, but at least affirming.”

James Hillman is author of The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling.

But on the way to being affirming, the daimonic may be overwhelming, as Carl Gustav Jung commented:

“There was a daimon in me, and in the end its presence proved decisive. It overpowered me, and if I was at times ruthless it was because I was in the grip of the daimon… A creative person has little power over their own life. They are not free, but captive and driven by their daimon.” [paraphrased]

Psychologist Rollo May noted “the daimonic (unlike the demonic, which is merely destructive) is as much concerned with creativity as with negative reactions… constructiveness and destructiveness have the same source in human personality. The source is simply human potential.”

[From my interview with Stephen A. Diamond, PhD: The Psychology of Creativity.]

Jean Houston thinks “Essence is neither a place nor a time, an insight or a state of mind. It is the deepest part of our nature, an actual presence that is innate and inborn. Sometimes it wears a personal face and a form and manifests as an image to our mind’s eye. When it does, some call it a daimon; others an angel. In its incorporeal form, still others think of it as the soul.” [From essay Of Butterflies and Essence - see the page Nurturing talent 2.]

Dr. Houston also commented in our interview about blocking talent in high ability, gifted women: “Often what happens is that they do a lot of things very well, and their essential self, what I call the daimon, the essence of who and what they are, gets lost in the process… they lose their essential nature, and their entelechy.. the dynamic purposiveness in their life.”

In his article Angels and Daimons, Patrick Harpur writes, “while the personal daimon is exactly that - personal - it is also always grounded in the impersonal and unknowable depths of the psyche. It is also, in other words, a manifestation of the Anima Mundi, or Soul of the World - as the case of Plotinus, the first and greatest of the Neoplatonic philosophers, makes clear.”

Patrick Harpur is author of Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld.

Being inspired by a muse or daimon, to realize our talents has personal meaning and value of course - but also social.

An editorial review of the book The Undiscovered Self by Carl Jung says the author “argues that the future depends on our ability to resist society’s mass movements. Only by understanding our unconscious inner nature - ‘the undiscovered self’ - can we gain the self-knowledge that is antithetical to ideological fanaticism. But this requires facing the duality of the human psyche - the existence of good and evil in us all.”

[The image is from Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture, #70 Muses.]

~ ~

Related:

Articles by Jane Piirto
book: Talented Children and Adults: Their Development and Education, by Jane Piirto, Ph.D.
article: In Praise of Positive Obsessions, by Eric Maisel, PhD
page: Depth psychology

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“In her worst moments, the TV made fun of her, ashtrays danced and walls collapsed. She believed she was single-handedly responsible for the deaths of thousands of people. The brains of close associates were taken over by aliens.”

A National Institute of Mental Health study last year found “Most people inherit a version of a gene that optimizes their brain’s thinking circuitry, yet also appears to increase risk for schizophrenia.

“Three fourths of subjects studied had at least one copy of the [gene] version that results in more efficient filtering of information processed by the brain’s executive hub, the prefrontal cortex.

“However, the same version was also more prevalent among people who developed schizophrenia, a severe mental illness marked by delusions, hallucinations and impaired emotion that affects one percent of the population.”

From article Common gene version optimizes thinking — but with a possible downside.

In his Frontal Cortex blog post about this study, Intelligence and Insanity, Jonah Lehrer [author of Proust Was A Neuroscientist] comments, “This actually makes sense. The human brain is a pattern-making machine. We imagine causality and see intentionality everywhere. Schizophrenics suffer from an excess of patterns. (A delusion is just the perception of a pattern that doesn’t actually exist.) So it’s entirely plausible that the same gene that endows with us the machinery to detect patterns (this involves the prefrontal cortex) is also involved with the machinery underlying madness.”

Lehrer also quotes G.K. Chesterton: “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”

According to a related news article, “New research on individuals with schizotypal personalities – people characterized by odd behavior and language but who are not psychotic or schizophrenic – offers the first neurological evidence that they are more creative than either normal or fully schizophrenic individuals, and rely more heavily on the right sides of their brains than the general population to access their creativity.

“Psychologists believe that a number of famous creative luminaries, including Vincent Van Gogh, Albert Einstein, Emily Dickinson and Isaac Newton, had schizotypal personalities.”

From Odd Behavior And Creativity May Go Hand-in-hand.

Fortunately, schizophrenia can be managed far more effectively now.

Oliver Sacks, M.D. (author of Awakenings and Musicophilia) has written that Elyn Saks’ memoir, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey through Madness, “showed how, with medication, sensitive support (and, in Professor Saks’s case, psychoanalysis), a deeply schizophrenic person can achieve a life full of creative work and love and friendships.”

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He writes, “Some researchers divide perfectionists into three types, based on answers to standardized questionnaires: Self-oriented strivers who struggle to live up to their high standards and appear to be at risk of self-critical depression; outwardly focused zealots who expect perfection from others, often ruining relationships; and those desperate to live up to an ideal they’re convinced others expect of them, a risk factor for suicidal thinking and eating disorders.”

Carey quotes Gordon L. Flett, a psychology professor at York University: “It’s natural for people to want to be perfect in a few things, say in their job - being a good editor or surgeon depends on not making mistakes. It’s when it generalizes to other areas of life, home life, appearance, hobbies, that you begin to see real problems.”

The article continues, “Unlike people given psychiatric labels, however, perfectionists neither battle stigma nor consider themselves to be somehow dysfunctional. On the contrary, said Alice Provost, an employee assistance counselor at the University of California, Davis, who recently ran group therapy for staff members struggling with perfectionist impulses. ‘They’re very proud of it,’ she said. ‘And the culture highly values and reinforces their attitudes.’”

Continued in Unhappy? Self-Critical? Maybe You’re Just a Perfectionist, By Benedict Carey.

Image from book: Perfecting Ourselves To Death: The Pursuit Of Excellence And The Perils Of Perfectionism, by Richard Winter.

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Actor Sarah Michelle Gellar continued, “Growing up, I always felt different from other kids… All the success that the series - Buffy - has enjoyed has erased a lot of self-doubts that I grew up with. I don’t feel like the nerd or the loser any more.” [From the page Early Life 2.]

Being different, an outsider, and called by others a nerd or other names, can be upsetting to downright painful when we were kids, but how does that kind of label impact our adult identity, and what does it indicate about social attitudes toward creatively and intellectually exceptional people?

In his article Is It Good to Be Gifted?, David Palmer, Ph.D. writes, “For kids and teens, the pressure to conform is often so great that any deviation from the norm can be distressing. We’ve all heard terms like brain, nerd, geek or worse applied to kids who seem too bookish, or too ‘into’ school.

“Of course, the potential for social problems is not unique to gifted kids; all children are susceptible to teasing, bullying, or social isolation when they don’t fit in, for whatever reason. Gifted kids, though, do share some unique pressures and developmental issues that others may not.”

A review by The Week magazine of the book “Nerds” notes the term was used by Dr. Seuss in one of his books in 1950, but “Soon enough, though, ‘nerd’ came to define something no kid wanted to be.

“Its actual definition has had shifting boundaries, says book author child psychologist David Anderegg.

“Today it connotes ’some combination of school success, interest in precision, un-self-consciousness, closeness to adults, and interest in fantasy.’

“The lack of self-consciousness particularly unnerves other people, Anderegg says. It makes the rest of us feel obliged to keep informing the nerds that they’re nerdy.”

The review adds, “To Anderegg, the nerd stereotype is not just a fleeting playground obstacle. It represents a particularly American strain of anti-intellectualism that has plagued the culture since Ralph Waldo Emerson endorsed the idea that Americans were ‘men of action, not men of reflection.’

“Even on the playground, Anderegg says, the nerd label remains potent enough to change the course of some children’s lives. This, in turn, may affect the nation’s capacity to compete in a global economy… In 2004, U.S. colleges graduated more sports-exercise majors than electrical engineers.”

From review article: Nerds - the book.

Another book emphasizes the destructive impact of these social attitudes.

In his article On The Age of American Unreason, Art Winslow reviews ‘The Age of American Unreason’ by Susan Jacoby, noting that “Half a century ago, the political historian Richard Hofstadter wrote: ‘The widespread distrust of intellectuals in America reflects a tendency to depreciate their playfulness and distrust their piety. Ours is a society in which every form of play seems to be accepted by the majority except the play of the mind.’

“The journalist Bill Moyers,” he adds, “often attacked for the pro-science, pro-rationalist content of his television programs, may have the best line here, quoted by Jacoby from a speech he delivered about Revelations-based ‘end time’ beliefs: ‘One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal.’”

Negative views of intellectuals and artists have often been perpetuated by movies.

Writer John Clark used the film “The Royal Tenenbaums” (2001) as an example of the stereotype that geniuses “must be miserable, nearly always troubled. That way, we can feel better about ourselves.

“In Hollywood, you can never be too rich or too thin, but you can be too smart. It’s OK to have a beautiful face. It’s not OK to have a beautiful mind.” [From article So Smart It Hurts.]

There are, fortunately, some movies that celebrate intellect, such as “The Great Debaters” with Denzel Washington as a professor at Wiley College in 1935 Texas, coaching his student debate team for a match against Harvard.

There is a photo from it, and more about the film in my post Competing to win acknowledgment and excellence and pride - in which I note that in her Wall Street Journal commentary - In Praise of ‘Thought Competition’ - Rebecca Wallace-Segall writes about the erosion of support for stimulating intellectual engagements for teens.

“Their schools — while touting well-known athletic teams — are offshoots of the ‘progressive education’ movement and uphold a categorical belief that ‘thought competition’ is treacherous,” she wrote.

In his article Why Nerds are Unpopular, Paul Graham [author of Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age] writes about his junior high school experience: “My friend Rich and I made a map of the school lunch tables according to popularity. A tables were full of football players and cheerleaders and so on. E tables contained the kids with mild cases of Down’s Syndrome, what in the language of the time we called ‘retards.’

“We sat at a D table, as low as you could get without looking physically different. We were not being especially candid to grade ourselves as D. It would have taken a deliberate lie to say otherwise. Everyone in the school knew exactly how popular everyone else was, including us.

“I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular.”

But many of us can continue to like being nerds - even if that makes us unpopular and outside the mainstream. And we can appreciate others who are outsider cultural creatives.

['I love nerds' image from popgadget.net.]

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Hilary MacGregor writes in the Los Angeles Times, “The book is not the first to give an autobiographical account of living bipolar. It joins the ranks of Kay Redfield Jamison’s “An Unquiet Mind,” Carrie Fisher’s “Postcards From the Edge” and “The Big Awful” (two novels based on her life) and Andy Behrman’s “Electroboy: A Memoir of Mania,” to name a few.

“But set in a glamorous world saturated with money and celebrity, the book not only describes Cheney’s individual struggle against this disease — which afflicts 5.7 million adult Americans of every age, gender and social class — it also provides an apt metaphor for the bizarre psychological terrain of Hollywood.”

“Hollywood is an industry of extremes,” said Cheney, whose clients included Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones. “It is feast or famine, euphoria or despair. Everything has got to be faster, bigger, more, and right now! In a way, you need to be manic to survive.”

“No one knows what percentage of people living in Los Angeles are bipolar,” MacGregor notes, “but studies have shown that there are very high rates of bipolar among people in the arts, which includes musicians, poets and writers.”

“We don’t know why this is the case, but there may be something about the gene for creativity that runs not only in those types of professions but in bipolar as well,” said Dr. Lori Altshuler, the Julia S. Gouw Professor of Psychiatry and director of the UCLA Mood Disorders Research Program.

“The up and down nature of Hollywood life, Cheney suggests, makes it easier for those who suffer to conceal their mental illness here. Bipolar may go undiagnosed in many communities, but in Hollywood, manic traits are not only overlooked, they are celebrated.”

She also thinks “It’s an incredible time to be bipolar. There is so much awareness. There are so many medications. There is so much unexpected compassion.”

Continued in article: Bipolar Explorer, by Hilary MacGregor.

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For an artist, it is a driven pursuit, whether we acknowledge this or not, that endless search for meaning.

Each work we attempt poses the same questions. Perhaps this time I will see more clearly, understand something more.

That is why I think that the attempt always feels so important, for the answers we encounter are only partial and not always clear.

Yet at its very best, one work of art, whether produced by oneself or another, offers a sense of possibility that flames the mind and the spirit, and in that moment we know this is a life worth pursuing, a struggle that offers the possibility of answers as well as meaning.

Perhaps in the end, that which we seek lies within the quest itself, for there is no final knowing, only a continual unfolding and bringing together of what has been discovered.

To create, to express the depth and experience of our consciousness of being alive, all the while knowing that death hovers nearby, that is what we do.

Dianne Albin - continued in article The Task of Meaning-Making.

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Actor Claire Danes also explained in an interview that, as a kid, she “was on this whole perfection trip. And that’s just totally boring. And arrogant!…

“I finally realized after years of therapy.. that you can encourage yourself to move further in a nurturing way.”

Taking care to “encourage yourself to move further” is, of course, something that people typically choose to manage on their own, but a counselor or therapist can help us do it more fully and effectively.

And many highly talented people may experience self-limiting traits like perfectionism, or anxiety and other mood disorders, which can be managed better with the help of a psychotherapist.

But counseling is not just about dealing with disorder.

Educational consultant Annemarie Roeper, Ed.D. notes “Gifted people see life in the most brilliant colors and are capable of the greatest joy and the greatest desperation. They try to build all this into a functioning Self….

“Making sense of themselves and feeling fulfilled are often the forces that lead toward seeking counseling.”

Continued in article Learning to befriend our demons.

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And with perfectionism and high levels of self criticism, many gifted and talented people feel they don’t make it.

Actor Ellen Muth, who starred as George (for Georgia) Lass in the tv series “Dead Like Me,” has admitted she had low self-esteem, like her character, and also said, “But I still feel like I haven’t accomplished anything.. like I haven’t made it anywhere, I haven’t done anything, and I’ll never get anywhere in life, and I’m going to be a failure my whole life. And I know in the rational part of my mind that it’s not true.”

Earlier in her life, at 14, Muth gained widespread acclaim for her portrayal of the young Selena in the film “Dolores Claiborne” and her starring role in the “The Young Girl & the Monsoon” earned her the AFI Los Angeles International Film Festival Best Actress Award in 1999. She is a member of MENSA.

It can help us develop a more accurate self concept as a high ability person to garner awards and acclaim, but most of us do not get much recognition.

Cheryl M. Ackerman, PhD notes in her article Gifted Adults, “It is important to remember that just because a person was not identified as gifted when they were in school, doesn’t mean she isn’t a gifted individual.

“In addition, something that may seem as benign as whether or not a person was identified as gifted can have significant effects on the development of his self-concept and self-esteem.

“While the fundamental characteristics of gifted adults are the same regardless of whether or not they were identified earlier in life, those who were not identified face the challenge of making sense of their gifted characteristics without the gifted label to guide them in any way.”

One of the people in the book When Gifted Kids Don’t Have All the Answers: How to Meet Their Social and Emotional Needs, by James R. Delisle, PhD et. al., is Christine, 15, who asked, “Why is giftedness linked to achievement — that is, what I can or cannot do — instead of what and how I feel?”

As adults, we still are pressured to achieve.

Robert Maurer, PhD, in his article The Vision Thing notes, “Successful people are able to sustain their identity as separate from their profession and what’s happening to them. That’s particularly important in the arts, where what happens to you bears only faint correlation to your talent.”

Related article: Being gifted without the scores - by Nora Brahim.

More High Ability - gifted/talented articles.

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How we think of talents in others and ourselves may have a profound effect on nurturing and realizing those abilities. Maybe “genius” or precocity is not some kind of inborn trait. Maybe talent can be sought - or suppressed.

[The photo is Tom Hulce as Mozart in Amadeus (1984), from the page Achievement / success.]

Carol S. Dweck, PhD, a Professor of Psychology at Stanford, thinks “our society tends to believe that geniuses are born, not made. And I wouldn’t dispute that there might be a strong innate component, but it’s just clear from the histories of so many geniuses that motivation is a key component.

“And when you sift through the literature on creative genius, the researchers agree that motivation is perhaps the number one component in the realization of genius.

“Many of our most illustrious geniuses in every field were people who were considered ordinary as children, and then just caught fire around their topic and achieved amazing things that we know about today-from Darwin, to Coleridge, to Cézanne. All of these people were not necessarily extraordinary children.”

From Interviews with Carol Dweck.

In his article The Myth of Prodigy and Why it Matters, Eric Wargo notes one way “to look at precocity is of course to work backward — to look at adult geniuses and see what they were like as kids. A number of studies have taken this approach, Malcolm Gladwell [author of Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking] said, and they find a similar pattern.

“A study of 200 highly accomplished adults found that just 34 percent had been considered in any way precocious as children. He also read a long list of historical geniuses who had been notably undistinguished as children — a list including Copernicus, Rembrandt, Bach, Newton, Beethoven, Kant, and Leonardo Da Vinci (“that famous code-maker”).

“None of [them] would have made it into Hunter College,” Gladwell observed.

Wargo continues, “We think of precociousness as an early form of adult achievement, and, according to Gladwell, that concept is much of the problem. ‘What a gifted child is, in many ways, is a gifted learner. And what a gifted adult is, is a gifted doer. And those are quite separate domains of achievement.’

“To be a prodigy in music, for example, is to be a mimic, to reproduce what you hear from grown-up musicians. Yet only rarely, according to Gladwell, do child musical prodigies manage to make the necessary transition from mimicry to creating a style of their own.

“The ‘prodigy midlife crisis,’ as it has been called, proves fatal to all but a handful would-be Mozarts. ‘Precociousness, in other words, is not necessarily or always a prelude to adult achievement. Sometimes it’s just its own little discrete state.’

“Early acquisition of skills — which is often what we mean by precocity — may thus be a misleading indicator of later success, said Gladwell.

“’Sometimes we call a child precocious because they acquire a certain skill quickly, but that skill turns out to be something where speed of acquisition is not at all important… We don’t say that someone who learned to walk at four months is a better walker than the rest of us. It’s not really a meaningful category.’

“When we call a child ‘precocious,’ Gladwell said, ‘we have a very sloppy definition of what we mean. Generally what we mean is that a person has an unusual level of intellectual ability for their age.’

“But adult success has to do with a lot more than that. ‘In our obsession with precociousness we are overstating the importance of being smart.’

“In this regard, Gladwell noted research by Carol Dweck and Martin Seligman indicating that different dimensions such as explanatory styles and attitudes and approaches to learning may have as much to do with learning ability as does innate intelligence.

“And when it comes to musicians, the strongest predictor of ability is the same mundane thing that gets you to Carnegie Hall: ‘Really what we mean… when we say that someone is “naturally gifted” is that they practice a lot, that they want to practice a lot, that they like to practice a lot.’

“So what about the ur-child-prodigy, Mozart? Famously, Mozart started to compose music at age four; by six, he is supposed to have traveled around Europe giving special performances with his father, Leopold. ‘He is of course the great poster child for precociousness,’ Gladwell said. ‘More Upper West Side adults have pointed to Mozart, I’m quite sure, as a justification for sending their kids to excruciating early music programs, than almost any other historical figure.’

“Yet Gladwell deftly debunked the Mozart myth. ‘First of all, the music he composes at four isn’t any good,’ he stated bluntly. ‘They’re basically arrangements of works by other composers. And also, rather suspiciously, they’re written down by his father… And Leopold, it must be clear, is the 18th-century equivalent of a little league father.’

“But most importantly, the young Mozart’s prowess can be chalked up to practice, practice, practice. Compelled to practice three hours a day from age three on, by age six the young Wolfgang had logged an astonishing 3,500 hours — ‘three times more than anybody else in his peer group. No wonder they thought he was a genius.’

“So Mozart’s famous precociousness as a musician was not innate musical ability but rather his ability to work hard, and circumstances (i.e., his father) that pushed him to do so. ‘That is a very different definition of precociousness than I think the one that we generally deal with.’

“A better poster child for what precociousness really entails, Gladwell hinted, may thus be the famous intellectual late-bloomer, Einstein. Gladwell cited a biographer’s description of the future physicist, who displayed no remarkable native intelligence as a child but whose success seems to have derived from certain habits and personality traits — curiosity, doggedness, determinedness — that are the less glamorous but perhaps more essential components of genius.”

From article The Myth of Prodigy and Why it Matters, by Eric Wargo, The Association for Psychological Science Observer, Aug 2006.

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