Lit from within Conclusions .

Chapter Text.

Conclusion.

The torch of telos burned brightly in these gifted person’s experiences and in their personal complexes. Their complexes not only illuminated their respective paths, but enabled each person to serve as a torch-bearer for others. Making art, engaging in science, these individuals shaped the image of what was meaningful in their wider cultures.

While we should take care not to literalize mythical imagery,^{footnote 1} it is intriguing to imagine David, Aomawa, and the others assembled in Ananke’s throne room pre-incarnate, sifting through a heap of lots, deciding which life journey might carry the most meaning for them. David, it seems, decided to accept headaches and fevers if it meant making the films that felt most meaningful to him. Astronomer Aomawa took on years of frustrating fits-and-starts for the sake of a life that would ultimately braid art and science — and would lead others to dream about the stars.

Our complexes have an understandably bad reputation. They can be a source of symptoms, discomforts, even self-abuse. But these troubles, I suggest, have much to do with their sacred charge. The complex is an essential and precious package which ‘contains’ a tender bit of ourselves, a sacred wound, and perhaps also a kernel of meaning and destiny. In this way, I suggest, complexes merit some compassionate forbearance.

But do the essential themes I have explored here — the telos and meaning in complexes, as well as my present call for a humane approach toward them — apply to the complexes in every individual, gifted and cognitively normal, alike? The complexes of the gifted as featured here, after all, may seem outsize relative to others. Morton Prince reminds us, however, that exaggerat[ed] cases serve to reveal the mechanisms that apply in normal situations.^{footnote 2} Consider Jung’s thoughts here: Vocation, or the feeling of it is not … the prerogative of great personalities.^{footnote 3} Rather, it is that, for some of us, the voice becomes more and more muffled and unconscious … as if the voice of the daemon within were moving further and further off.^{footnote 4} Gifted or not, when our symptoms, our discomforts, even our illnesses or addictions come knocking on our door, we might choose to approach these experiences as lampadephores illuminating a path we have avoided, feared, or simply never dreamed of. Our complexes are not, and never have been the bad guys. In truth, they are the torch-bearers, chosen for that high office by nature herself.^{footnote 5}

Afterword
The finished image.

Who is writing this work? The question is not merely theoretical … If I am less the author of this work and more its agent, who, standing at the edge of the work is addressed by it, then the image of myself as the writer of this book is truly to be de-centered.

— Robert Romanyshyn^{footnote 6}

Robert Romanyshyn, author of The Wounded Researcher, writes that it is through the complex that one is drawn into a work.^{footnote 7} This certainly seems to be the case in the lives of my subjects, whether their work was literature, science, or film. It is also, and perhaps especially, true in research.^{footnote 8} But a challenging implication arises here. I — the ostensible author of this dissertation — and you — its reader — are presently engaged with an document which, at least in its nascent stages,^{footnote 9} was one person’s complex: my own.

There is a certain vulnerability in admitting this in print, acknowledging that I have been claimed by a project^{footnote 10} and, as a result, have put the complex workings of my own psyche in plain view. On the other hand, I find a certain loveliness in the realization that I, by way of my own complex-ity, have been led on a teleological journey into the heart of entelechy, and of meaning. This dissertation has acted as a torch-bearer revealing its own nature as autonomous, telic, and drenched in meaning. There is more to me, whispers the opus. Let me be your torch-bearer for a time, and I will show you great wonders.

And I do feel that I have been shown — that I have experienced — wonders. What could be more enchanting than the discovery that each of us is headed somewhere? And not just anywhere, but some place in particular, our destination shaped by, and shaping, our individual personhood. We are being guided, if only from within. Though, I confess, I am not quite willing to rule out the possibility that I once visited the imaginal throne room of Ananke, selected my lot, and forgot it all, having drunk from the River of Forgetfulness.^{footnote 11}

This dissertation is an artifact of the psychic reality of the personal complex. It is a greeting from my own complexes to yours, an invitation to burn brightly, to follow your own inner torch-bearer and, in your own way, to become a torch-bearer yourself. We are not alone. We are members of an intrapsychic community — joined, aided, niggled, and even afflicted, if necessary, into becoming that thing we most want and need to become.

We can ignore, resist, or even despise our inner neighbors. Or we can reply in a spirit of welcoming:

Speak, complexes, for you are wanted and welcome here.

Epilogue.

In order to focus on the experiences of my study subjects, rather than on their status as famous or eminent, my monograph has used first (or middle) names only. With the work now concluded, however, this seems the proper moment to reveal their identities.