Chapter Text.
Telos in the experience of giftedness.
Perhaps the most common thing that comes to mind when we think of giftedness is IQ, or intelligence quotient, testing:
| Level | IQ range | Prevalencefootnote 1 |
|---|---|---|
| Mildly (or basically) gifted | 115–129 | 1:6–1:40 |
| Moderately gifted | 130–144 | 1:40–1:1,000 |
| Highly gifted | 145–159 | 1:1,000–1:10,000 |
| Exceptionally gifted | 160–179 | 1:10,000–1:1 million |
| Profoundly gifted | 180+ | Fewer than 1:1 million |
While it may be common to understand giftedness as a statistical issue, or as simply being advanced in language and thought,
footnote 2 the actual experience of the
gifted is rich and dynamic. In the highly excitablefootnote 3 and often highly imaginal world of many gifteds ,footnote 4 life’s volume is amped to ‘10.’
In few places is this gifted intensity more apparent than in the telic expressions of giftedness. Called drive by Jacobsenfootnote 5 and entelechy by Lovecky,footnote 6
such expressions convey the unique sense of purpose
and absolute necessity to act
footnote 7 often seen among the gifted.
For many gifted individuals, the sense of a vital force directing one’s life
footnote 8 begins early. Children as young as age three experience a feeling of being in the
world to do certain things
and receiving a plan for one’s life.
footnote 9 In some children and adults, the aims of these entelechies may remain enigmatic,
footnote 10
while others develop a specific vision, such as that of becoming a doctor.footnote 11
Whatever the ultimate aim of their sense of purpose, the entelechic gifted are independent, self-directed, and [operate] via inner rule.
footnote 12 The ‘catch’ to all this
intrapsychic torchlight, however, is that inner rule does not necessarily mean egoic rule. Gifteds may find that they are yoked, grabbed by the throat,footnote 13 and
driven rather than [driving themselves].
footnote 14 The gifted may seem highly autonomous,footnote 15 but one wonders if, at times, it is the autonomous force of their entelechy,
rather than their person, which is running the show.
Entelechy, in fact, may be one of the primary gifted traits that ‘creates’ a torch-bearer. Though there appears to be little research in this area, clinical psychologist
Lovecky’s work is intriguing. To those standing on the outside, gifted adults seem to have a touch of magic about them.
footnote 16 People are drawn to them, seek[ing]
them out as friends and mentors,
want[ing] to learn from them.
footnote 17 They become leaders unintentionally. Perhaps most strikingly, being near someone with this trait
[entelechy] gives others hope and determination to achieve their own self-actualization.
footnote 18 It seems that the gifted person’s intense orientation toward their own
dreams and visions
is compelling and, to a certain degree, contagious.footnote 19 Lovecky offers Eleanor Roosevelt and Carl Rogers as examples of such high-entelechy gifted leaders.footnote 20
This drawing power, however, may create dependencies and hard feelings when telos leads the gifted toward new projects and goals, leaving them unable or
unwilling to continue on as role models and guides.footnote 21 Gifted individuals may feel vulnerable to and intruded upon by the demands of others
to the extent that
they begin to avoid close relationships.footnote 22 Lovecky, of course, is not the first to highlight the discomforts of having a strong drive. Hillman, too, notes that drivenness
and isolation can go hand-in-hand. Along with a powerful entelechic urge there comes a solitary uniqueness … an archetypal loneliness inexpressible in a child’s
vocabulary and formulated hardly better in ours.
footnote 23
Perhaps the clearest way to convey the experience of entelechic gifteds is to put ourselves in their shoes. In each of the following cases, I invite you to consider the potent independence and vision that empowers these young people to defy authority, convention, and even the expectations of their loved ones:
Experience one.
Imagine you are an eight year-old child in your school classroom. Preparations are underway for the upcoming Valentine’s Day celebration.
In a show of jarringly poor pedagogy, the teacher forbids students from giving valentine cards to Jimmy, who is the class problem.
footnote 24
You are incensed at the injustice of this! Perhaps your small body even trembles with indignation. With remarkable aplomb, you ignore your teacher’s
injunction and buy Jimmy the biggest, most glorious valentine card you can find. On Valentine’s Day, yours is the only card Jimmy receives.
But you are not finished with your protest. After the other children have left the room, you stride up to the teacher’s desk, dump your own unopened
valentines into the teacher’s trashcan, and silently walk out.footnote 25
Experience two.
Consider another lifetime. You, nearly four years old, hear the music of a virtuoso violin player. You are mesmerized. There is nothing for it:
you must play the violin. You ask your parents for a violin for your fourth birthday and they, lovingly, attempt to oblige. Thinking that your hands are
too small for full-sized instrument, however, they provide you with … a toy. A toy?! You burst into sobs, [throw] it on the ground and …
have nothing more to do with it.
footnote 26 Someday, however, you will become a master violinist like Yehudi Menuhin, whose lived experience forms the
foundation for this anecdote.footnote 27
Experience three.
Or: consider what it might be like to be a high schooler in a financially struggling family. You are expected to drop out of school, work full-time,
financially support your kin. Times are tough, after all. And so, heavy in heart, you walk to the administration office, intending to withdraw.
But you, lit from within, suddenly realize you could do more if [you] had an education.
footnote 28 Despite the pressures, you stay in school.
In time, you grow to become a renowned poet — precisely as Langston Hughes did.footnote 29
Entelechy has its shadow side, too, potentially manifesting as stubbornness … [apparent] egocentrism, [and] indifference to conventions.
footnote 30
Experience four.
Now you are a different high schooler. The end of your senior year is in sight. You would be the first in your family to earn a diploma … but you are outraged by a requirement that graduating males wear a tie to the ceremony! Rather than compromise your vision — which might have to do with principles of privilege, gender, or simple personal choice — you boycott the ceremony. Your family, likely heartbroken, attends without you.footnote 31
Other ostensibly negative features of a strong entelechy can include perfectionism, self-inflicted censure,
resistance to input and advice,
and an
[insistence] on reinventing the wheel.
footnote 32 When a person’s vision is strong, any way less than ‘their way’ can seem like an intolerable compromise.
More intensely still, a strong sense of purpose can, at times, feel something like a holy mission
footnote 33 in which the presence of proportion and perspective may be lost.
The tenaciousness of entelechy, the drivenness of drive — these call to mind Jung’s thoughts on creativity, another trait strongly
present in many gifteds.footnote 34 A person must pay dearly for the divine gift of creative fire,
Jung writes.footnote 35 Such costs may include all sorts of defects,
ruthlessness, selfishness, vanity
footnote 36 among them. When telic drive overcomes all other considerations, one’s vision — artistic or otherwise —
may cause disregard for the concerns for other people, whose priorities simply seem to matter less.
Entelechy in the gifted, then, is a phenomenon of both light and shadow. Taken together with the other traits of giftedness such as intensity and complexity, it is hard to avoid the image of a life
subject to an incredible range of mighty, almost archetypal forces. Perhaps one of the most vivid portraits of giftedness comes from this passage from Reynolds and Piirto, who describe
the psychological experiences common to … the talented and gifted
footnote 37 as:
inspirations, dreams, oceanic transcendent moments, insights, intuitions, spiritual visitations, the slings and arrows of outrageous mental states, even unto bouts of unexplainable somatic symptoms, of mental illness, of compulsiveness, of hyperdriven self-destructiveness, bipolar disorder and suicide attemptsfootnote 38
Autonomous psychic powers, intense drives, and experiences beyond the pale, all add up to a life in which the ‘gift’ of giftedness might seem like a real mixed bag — or even a Pandora’s box.
What is it that fosters such extremity of experience? Noted giftedness educator Annemarie Roeper suggests that creative giftedness is a mystery.
footnote 39
Gifteds and their loved ones would likely agree. But perhaps we can render the picture a bit more clearly by considering the structural element of psyche known
for its high affect and high autonomy: that of the personal complex.
Telos in the experience of the personal complex.footnote 40
Psychotherapist Thomas Moore describes the human psyche as a communion of many persons, each with specific needs, fears, longings, styles, and language.
footnote 41
These ‘persons’ are the complexes, the actors in our dreams,
footnote 42 the parts
of our personality,footnote 43
the boys in the basement
of our inner world.footnote 44 They are, in essence, our subpersonalities.footnote 45 Phenomenologically,
writes Cremen, a complex may be thought of as an impulse, pattern of behaviour, recurring mode of imagination, obsessive thought or particular fantasy which
keeps us in its grip.
footnote 46
Of all the happenings in psyche, complexes play the most important part,
footnote 47 and are so ubiquitous it is even possible that
every affect tends to become an autonomous complex.
footnote 48 They are so familiar in our daily experience that we have innumerable phrases to indicate their comings and goings:
- She was a different person.
- He’s got a mean streak.
- She wasn’t herself.
- Something came over me.
- Part of me agrees … but another part of me disagrees.
Jung wrote about the complex as early as his doctoral dissertation in 1902,footnote 49 but began developing his complex theory at the Burghölzli mental hospital, where he started his career.footnote 50 Here, as an administrator of the Word Association Test (WAT), he discovered the presence of certain obstructions to the completion of associative tasks. In their reactions to certain words, patients would cough, stammer, hesitate, laugh, offer foreign language phrases, or even fail to react entirely.footnote 51 It was as if there was something in the psyche which interfered with the smooth communication of the association. This obstructive force was the complex — an intrapsychic figure with a power almost (or even fully) beyond the ability of the egoic self to control.footnote 52
Since the time of the WATs, Jung and his adherents have explored and expanded our understanding of the complex — and much of what we have learned is distinctly telic.
If the WATs made any one quality of the complex plain, it is surely that of autonomy, the capacity of a complex, in some degree, to come and go
according to [its] own laws.
footnote 53 If a complex is constellated and blendingfootnote 54 with the egoic self, it can interrupt, circumvent or otherwise
derail the self-intention of the individual.
footnote 55 What we want or intend may not matter if a particularly powerful complex is ascendent.
While the presence of such autonomy is fascinating on its own merits, I find one question to be of particular interest: Autonomy toward what end?
If we speak of an entity’s autonomy, we are surely expressing something about its will-power,
footnote 56 its ability to enact its own purposes, its goals — its telos.
We often experience the telos of the complex when it countermands our conscious aims — for instance, when we are dieting, but find
ourselves caught in an assignation with a cheesecake. Or, in the case of a more positive complex,
we encounter those moments when we become so intrigued
by an idea that there is seemingly no option but to find out more
footnote 57 even if it means neglecting our work or losing sleep. But the most dramatic
examples of the autonomy of the complex often arise in response to trauma. Consider Kalsched’s self-care system
in which
diabolical personifications of self-attack and abuse
act as a psychic immune system
with the purpose of defending against a threatening
outer reality.
footnote 58 Surely no trauma survivor consciously chooses the onslaught of re-traumatizing dreams and other symptoms originating
with strong-armed protective
footnote 59 complexes. The alters of multiple personality — which are essentially complexes with
ego[s] of [their] own
footnote 60 — also display a distinct autonomy and aim: to take control of the system in order to survive life- and psyche-threatening trauma.footnote 61
Another telos-oriented feature of the complex is its tendency to project, which causes us to [sense] in another [person or object]
a quality actually inherent in oneself but with which one does not consciously identify.
footnote 62 In its worst form, projection leads us to see our own
deficiencies as belonging to others, who we may then, in turn, reject. But I would also argue that, in the case of highly attractive objects —
the psyche’s teleological aims — the complex can project a sense of numinosity, wonder, or ‘sparkle,’ into those
objects, rendering them almost irresistible to the blended ego.
More telic still, perhaps, is the complex’s magnetic
quality.footnote 63 In 1889, the dissociationist Frédéric Paulhan wrote:
Every psychic fact tends to … give rise to psychic facts which can harmonize and cooperate with itself
toward a common goal.
footnote 64 Shargel, with the benefit of a psychotherapist’s experience, renders this for a more
contemporary ear: Complexes are inductive, exerting something like a magnetic pull on perceptions that validate their themes.
footnote 65
In lived experience, this might feel something like wearing rose-tinted (or grey-tinted) lenses, in which everything we witness seems to take
on the same affective shade. The outcome of this, I suggest, is that the magnetizing force of the complex draws us toward a certain end —
to eat that third helping, to protect ourselves against perceived danger, to begin a new love affair. Any time ‘all the signs’ point
to some particular thing, the cause may be synchronicity … but the source may also be our complexes expressing
their telos.
Interestingly, Paulham observes a related telic phenomenon, that subpersonalities tend … to banish from sight the
psychic phenomena which [they] cannot assimilate in the interests of a common goal.
footnote 66 In this case, Shargel might suggest this quality
manifests as all or nothing thinking … [or] if you’re not with me, you’re against me.
footnote 67 Anything which stands
counter to the telos of the complex is ignored or even attack[ed],
footnote 68 a tendency which could account for some of the hostility present in
Kalsched’s self-care system. Whether inner or outer, objects which seem threatening become prey for the imaginal immune system. In this way,
we might consider that the complex has much in common with the natural force of evolution; it favors the telos of survival. Even in the cases of positive
aims and holy mission[s]
footnote 69 among the gifted, the telic object can feel like an utter necessity, a matter of psychic life and death.
footnote 70
Though there may be no physical threat, it may seem that, without this aim, life has no meaning.
Interlude:
The self as complex?.
Phenomenology encourages researchers to set theories aside and instead to embrace the things themselves.
footnote 71 This paper, however, evokes a theoretical
sticking point which I feel uncomfortable leaving unaddressed.
Starting in part four of this monograph, I consider both ‘The Daimonic Voice’ and ‘The Moment’
as expressions of the personal complex. It could be argued, however, that these phenomena arise from the Self as expressions of the process of individuation.
Though Hans Dieckmann has no compunctions about including the Self, along with the anima/us, in a list of complexes which form the stations of the individuation process,
footnote 72
I believe the question of a Self-complex is an important one. In what way can we defend the idea of the Self as a complex?
First, I suggest that Self-type complexes function as other complexes do. Peak
-type Self experiencesfootnote 73 are affect-laden, or suggest an affect which is unique from
that of the habitual attitude of consciousness.
footnote 74 They cast a sense of numinosity and … necessity
footnote 75 onto a religious object, opus, or
life path — a form of projection. Further, their intensity brooks no alternative. In essence, the emotional lockdown
prevalent in the complexfootnote 76 locks
down around a particular image or aim.
Nor does the Self’s tendency to arise as a God-image
footnote 77 separate it from the complex. In fact, the complex frequently projects god-images.
The alcoholic’s handful of addicted complexes may cause whiskey — or the image of one’s own powerfootnote 78 — to shimmer as a divinity.
And whose sweetheart, in the throes of early love, has not glowed like a golden sun god or thrummed like a dark goddess rich with mystery? The ability to appear as,
or to project as, a god-image may be a power not unique to the Self, but one belonging to the complex more generally.
Of course, I cannot say for certain that the Self is a complex. But, then, I cannot say for sure that a complex is a ‘real’ phenomenon, either! For the
duration of this project, I will treat the Self as-if
footnote 79 it is a Self-complex, even as I acknowledge that future research may repudiate (or confirm) my conclusions on this point.