Giftedness

Definition.

There are a number of definitions and descriptions of giftedness. In creating a Jungian image of giftedness, I propose five markers of giftedness which orient from Jungian theory:

1. The gifted have a rich, often highly reflexive experience of their internal world.
2. The gifted experience the daimon intensely.
3. The gifted are opus-centric.
4. The gifted are often torch-bearers.
5. The gifted have a pronounced connection to unitary reality.

Exploring the five markers of giftedness.

1) The gifted have a rich, often highly reflexive experience of their internal world.

One upon a time, the Oracle at Delphi proclaimed that there was no man wiser than Socrates.^{footnote 1} Socrates, baffled by this proclamation, set out to discover if the Oracle was correct. After speaking to a number of apparently wise and knowledgeable men, Socrates concluded that he was indeed wisest, if only because:

I do not think that I know what I do not know.

— Plato^{footnote 2}

Here, Socrates has scrutinized his inner experience. How is his thinking like that of others? How is it different? In fact, Socrates might be understood as an early advocate for a life of metacognition, the practice of watching one’s own thought processes.^{footnote 3} Far from exclusive to the philosophically learned, metacognition is among the essential components of giftedness.^{footnote 4} From a gifted child’s inquiry as to why the inner world does not manifest visibly in the outer world — Why can’t I see what I’m thinking? — to the mature meditator who observes the subtle processes of consciousness, metacognition is a more than a tool. It is a way of being.

There are, of course, many other forms of rich inner experience. The traits that accompany Dabrowski’s imaginational overexcitability certainly qualify: vividness of imagery, richness of association, liking for the unusual, and a facility for dreams, fantasies, and inventions.^{footnote 5} Speaking specifically to the inner lives of gifted children, Jung takes particular notice of intelligent fantasies which demonstrate originality, consistency, intensity, and subtlety.^{footnote 6} Such experiences become reflexive when we keep dream journals, write poetry about our intrapsychic experience, ask questions about the nature of the internal world — all practices which, anecdotally speaking, are common among gifted individuals.

Yet another form of rich inner experience among the gifted, I suggest, is a sensitivity to one’s own psychic plurality. In reviewing the literature of giftedness, one finds numerous accounts of multiplicity of mind. We see this in ‘Tracia,’ who observed:

I feel like I’m a gathering of personalities. Not that I’m split off from them … like people with multiple personality disorder … but a combination of characters … There’s the playful, mischievous me who tends to stir things up … Then I can swing into the serious-minded overbearing conventional me … There are a whole bunch of characters in me, and I think I need them all.

— ‘Tracia,’^{footnote 7}

Gifted authors like Philip K. Dick echo similar sentiments:

I feel I have been a lot of different people. Many people have sat at this typewriter, using my fingers. Writing my books.

— Philip K. Dick^{footnote 8}

In Jungian thought, psychic plurality is largely an expression of the personal complexes, those subpersonalities within us which we often experience as the ‘parts’ of ourselves.^{footnote 9} So foundational to the operation of psyche are the complexes that Jung considers them to play the most important part of all functions in the internal world.^{footnote 10} Further, it is through a process of reflexivity, of bringing the unconscious contents of the complex into consciousness, that we begin to undertake the most important of Jungian journeys, that of individuation.^{footnote 11}

2) The gifted experience the daimon intensely.

Here we turn to Hillman’s work, in which he cites a deep connection with the daimon — one’s genius — as a source of high levels of creativity and eminence. The ‘noteworthy,’ however, are not the only ones to experience the daimon. Every single person, Hillman writes, is born with a defining image.^{footnote 12} More, he posits, Individuality resides in a formal cause.^{footnote 13} Whether we call that cause image, character, fate, genius, calling, daimon, soul, destiny^{footnote 14} — or even view it as a mythological flourish on the gifted trait of entelechy^{footnote 15} — the daimon has our interest at heart.^{footnote 16}

Some, like Socrates, have a long-standing connection with a daimonic voice:

It began in early childhood, a sort of voice which comes to me, and when it comes it always dissuades me from what I am proposing to do, and never urges me on.

— Plato^{footnote 17}

Dr Anne Rudloe, marine biologist and Zen practitioner, also experienced a voice:

‘Here it all is but I don’t get it,’ I thought glumly... Drop ‘I don't get it,’ just keep ‘Here it all is,’ came the internal voice.

— Anne Rudloe^{footnote 18}

For David Lynch, the polymathic film director, daimonic communications are unvoiced but distinct, guiding him to certain projects. Offered the director’s chair for a particular film, he had this experience:

A hydrogen bomb went off in my brain. I said, ‘That’s it.’ It was like I knew it from somewhere in the deep past. That was absolutely the one.

— David Lynch^{footnote 19}

For others, the voice of the daimon speaks in sudden silences. Dr Aomawa Shields, an astronomer, recalls:

When I was twelve, my school class was shown the movie Space Camp, about a bunch of kids who accidentally get launched into space while they're at space camp over the summer. As I watched, I got really still. You know, the way you get when everything about something is you — all for you — and you know it, even if no one else does yet.

— Aomawa Shields^{footnote 20}

Jung, too, was in possession of — or was perhaps possessed by — a daimon which expressed itself absolutely and ruthlessly.^{footnote 21} Gently or forcefully, the daimon impels the gifted forward, often expressing itself as a powerful drivenness.

3) The gifted are opus-centric.

If the daimon is a driving force, then the opus — the work — is the focus of that drive. The opus, writes Neumann, is its creator’s child; it is the product of his individual psychic transformation and wholeness, and at the same time a new objective entity which opens up something to mankind … a form of creative revelation.^{footnote 22}

For Socrates, we might consider that the love of wisdom, philosophy, was his opus:

The wisest of you men is he who has realized, like Socrates, that in respect of wisdom, he is really worthless. That is why I still go about seeking and searching in obedience to the divine command, if I think anyone is wise … and when I think that any person is not wise, I try to help the cause of God by proving that he is not.

— Plato^{footnote 23}

For others, the opus may be less concrete, perhaps a life-long process — for instance, the ongoing pursuit of arete, or excellence. It may be the creation of a supportive, nourishing home or community. Or the opus can be a series of smaller projects which, taken as a whole, evoke a greater, perhaps ineffable, truth.

Whatever the opus, the unborn work in the psyche of the artist or gifted person is a force of nature that achieves its end either with tyrannical might or with the subtle cunning of nature herself.^{footnote 24} In the face of such a powerful force, the gifted may experience themselves as subordinate to their work, even as the opus has escaped from the limitations of the personal and has soared beyond the personal concerns of its creator.^{footnote 25} Such observations sympathize with Jacobsen’s reflection that, for the gifted, personal interests can come to feel like a holy mission.^{footnote 26}

It may be the demands of the opus, in fact, which generate some of the more challenging traits of giftedness: ruthlessness, selfishness, vanity,^{footnote 27} as well as stubbornness … egocentrism, discourteousness, and indifference to convention.^{footnote 28} When the work stands out as the most important thing, other considerations — from self-care to tending our relationships — can fall away.

But as powerful, and even as ‘negative’ as the opus can seem, it is also something profoundly alive in the soul.^{footnote 29} It is through dedication to the opus that the gifted make their offerings to the higher self and to the world.

4) The gifted are often torch-bearers.

In the final sentence of his essay, The Gifted Child, Jung writes: The gifted ones … are the torch-bearers, chosen for that high office by nature herself.^{footnote 30} This powerful image suggests that the gifted are individuals who lead, guide, or light a path.

Under the sway of their native humility,^{footnote 31} I suspect few gifted individuals would identify themselves as torch-bearers. With that in mind, the question of whether Socrates was a torch-bearer might best be answered by considering his effect on the generations that followed him:

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

— Alfred North Whitehead^{footnote 32} >

Given the hundred-plus generations of Western philosophers since Plato’s time, not to mention all the writers, artists, and theorists he has inspired, it seems fair to say that Socrates bore a torch that burned brightly, indeed. How can we account for such profound influence?

Lovecky’s writings suggest that the gifted trait of entelechy is often accompanied by a propensity for torch-bearing. People … seek such people as friends and mentors.^{footnote 33} They give others hope and determination to achieve their own self-actualization.^{footnote 34} Through their dedication to the opus, the entelechic gifted evoke similar commitment in others, drawing others to strive toward something greater.

Though this form of leadership might seem likeliest to coincide with eminence, torch-bearing is really about guiding by example, whether any others choose to ‘follow along’ or not. The gifted parent is a torch-bearer for their children. Gifted teachers light the way for their students. The essential point here is that the gifted — by way of both their entelechy and their opus — cast a focused light on certain areas of emphasis and, in some form, share their discoveries with the people in their lives.

5) The gifted have a pronounced connection to unitary reality.

Socrates mused:

If the truth about reality is always in our soul, the soul must be immortal, and one must take courage and try to discover — that is, to recollect — what one doesn’t happen to know, or more correctly, remember, at the moment.

— Plato^{footnote 35}

He believed that learning is recollection,^{footnote 36} suggesting that, in some way, we are each connected to a vast store of knowledge. Further, Socrates considered that there is a certain realm where all truths reside — and that through our reason, we can develop an understanding of these truths.^{footnote 37} Such a domain might be understood as a form of unitary reality, a term which springs from the work of Erich Neumann.

In Neumann’s view, unitary reality is that state in which the spiritual coalesces with the psychic and the reality of the world to form a single, unitary whole.^{footnote 38} He also argues that creative persons — the gifted — have a special relationship to this deeper, more primordial, and at the same time, more complete reality^{footnote 39} The gifted are captivated by unitary reality and return to it over and over again during their lives.^{footnote 40}

While Neumann’s image may resonate for many, I would also suggest that the unitary reality may ‘look’ different for different people. For instance, while Neumann’s unitary reality carries a distinctly spiritual tinge, a materialist scientist might embrace a unitary reality in which all things can be understood, if only we perceive them from the proper vantage point. A person with a strong imaginational overexcitability might perceive such a reality as an integration of dream, fantasy, and waking realities.

Annemarie Roeper, too, envisions a unitary reality:

We are spiritually connected to each other and the universe as a whole. It is my belief that this connection exists in everyone’s unconscious, but that the gifted are uncovering more and more of these relationships because they know that reality is greater than that which we perceive in everyday life.

— Annemarie Roeper^{footnote 41}

Ultimately, of course, a truly unitary reality would embrace all of these things and more. Yes, we are all part of a vast wholeness, but each of us interprets that totality through our unique, personal lens.

Perhaps even more essential than the gifted person’s special relationship with unitary reality is the way unitary reality and opus interact in the gifted psyche. Neumann posits that the gifted feel drawn to reunite the split world through the formative power of their creative Eros, and in this way to restore a fragment of the unitary reality.^{footnote 42} We live in a world of schism — mental and material, cultural and political, personal and interpersonal. But the projects of the gifted — be they artistic, scientific, activist, or otherwise — often have a direct or indirect aim of re-establishing a sense of connectedness. Jung’s psychology, for example, pointed toward a unity of psyche, conscious and unconscious. Einstein strove for a unified field theory. George Washington Carver unearthed a universe of treasures within a single object: the simple peanut. The impetus to restore a fragment of unitary reality may, in fact, be one of the most fundamental manifestations of giftedness — an inescapable call to recall our source, whatever we understand that source to be.