Sacred Shamelessness: Jung, Ginsberg & Trickster

Shame preserves order by enforcing boundaries; shamelessness facilitates creative freedom and mobility in that it allows you to transcend shame's restrictive boundaries.

When you engage with or overcome shame, you gain the flexibility to explore new possibilities and create authentically.

In this article, I'll explore how a type of sacred shamelessness sparks creative and psychological mobility, with reference to the trickster figure, Allen Ginsberg, and Carl Jung.

Shamelessness brings creative freedom

Shame functions to preserve order: its visceral injunction to silence and its accompanying threat of death – either metaphorical or literal – impede actions that deviate from this order.

Amoral and unanchored to any common value system, the trickster figure has no shame, and is the archetype of play and spontaneity.

Naturally, someone without shame will have greater flexibility and creative freedom, because they won’t be subject to the same restraints or anchored to the same common value system. In Trickster Makes This World, Lewis Hyde explains:

'Creative mobility in this world requires, at crucial moments, the strategic erasure of ethical boundaries. They lose that mobility who cling to beauty, or who suffer from what the poet Czeslaw Milosz has called “an attachment to ethics at the expense of the sacred.”'

Shame is a directive to remain within boundaries, be they ethical, social, artistic, or otherwise. Shameless acts, or acts that engage with shame, involve shifting or erasing these boundaries to open up new possibilities to move and create.

For Ginsberg, working on the ethical boundaries of his family and society that saw homosexuality as taboo was the only way to transcend his inherited values and create authentically.

‘An attachment to ethics at the expense of the sacred’

Milosz’s insight applies as much to the psyche as it does to any artistic endeavour.

Read from a Jungian perspective, ‘an attachment to ethics’ relates to an unindividuated individual whose unexamined life and lack of self-knowledge keep them under the spell of cultural values.

Shame plays a key role here, as it’s often the force that inhibits psychological growth, preventing the individual from transcending these values.

For Jung, this comes ‘at the expense of the sacred'. He was particularly interested in the numinous – experiences that arouse spiritual or religious emotion. Such experiences are marked by mystery and awe and affect us deeply.

They arise from external causes, contributing to powerful feeling states and peculiar alterations of consciousness.

Here he describes his concept of God:

'This is the name by which I designate all things which cross my wilful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans, and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse.'

For Jung, God is the external forces that drive us to continuously evolve – those things outside the borders of the conscious ego that constantly threaten its shape.

Attachment to any value system obscures the sacred abundance that exists outside that system. Shamelessness, or engaging with one’s shame, is the vehicle for accessing this abundance, either as creative or psychic material that expands our consciousness.

Engaging with shame shifts the borders of the self

It’s easy to look at artists like Ginsberg in retrospect and recognise that engaging with their shame was an essential part of their evolution as a person and a creator.

However, when such artists first begin engaging with shame, they have no certainty that it’ll ultimately be transfigured.

When shame commands silence, words feel like a betrayal, evidence freely surrendered that’ll cause suffering and alienation. Engaging with shame means bearing the burden of this suffering and alienation and taking a leap of faith that it’ll lead to an evolution.

This mirrors the Jungian idea that bearing the burden of our suffering and inner conflicts is an essential step in the individuation process – the journey towards a more integrated and authentic self.

In this context, engaging with shame involves confronting the internal structures that define one's sense of self. Shame binds us to a particular identity and prevents us from exploring elements that lie outside those boundaries.

The act of engaging with shame can feel like a symbolic death, but for Jung was a key part of psychological change. The leap of faith inherent in this engagement constitutes a profound act of creation, for bearing the suffering that it causes will push the boundaries of one's very self.