Healing Space | How to become more creative by conceiving opposites and holding antitheses in your mind

Illustration by Suneesh K.

Note to readers: Healing Space is a weekly series that helps you dive into your mental health and take charge of your wellbeing through practical DIY self-care methods.

In 1996, Harvard Psychologist Albert Rothenberg undertook a study of 22 Nobel laureates in the fields of chemistry, physics, medicine, and physiology to understand how they do creative work. He also studied documentary evidence of deceased scientists and writers considered geniuses. His observation was that their work was a product of the Janusian process, i.e. ‘actively conceiving multiple opposites or antitheses simultaneously’. Each genius who engaged with the Janusian process went through four phases: motivation to create, deviation, simultaneous opposition, and construction of the theory.

What Rothenberg found is that before you can construct anything of value, you have to be able to consider its antithesis. Albert Einstein had to consider an object at rest but also in motion. Niels Bohr had to consider energy both as waves and as particles. Writers who created the best works used irreconcilable differences—the urge to win and the instinct for defeat, the need to love and hate, loyalty and betrayal—simultaneously.

Have you ever been to one of those interviews for MBAs at companies that fall under the ‘best places to work’ list? Chances are, you were given a puzzle of some sort and asked to work out the problem. Such as how to attach a candle to a wall, or solve a jigsaw with one of the pieces missing, or turn a flat piece of cardboard into a box in just four moves. This comes from research that followed Rothenberg’s. It shows that people who are good at paradoxical cognition, especially in workplaces, are most adept at problem-solving. While there are broadly several kinds of paradoxes, the simpler you see the world, as either/or, black and white, with hard distinctions on either side of the line, the less attuned to reality you are. The more intelligent and pragmatic view of the world requires us to see its complexities, and all of them are not neat or easy. Yet, it is through this conflict of ideas that we allow vital breakthroughs to emerge.

Scott Fitzgerald in his essay The Crack-Up, wrote: “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

This is a philosophy that has underpinned Indian thought for centuries. In the Hindu schools of philosophy, we have Dvaita, dualism and Advaita, non-dualism; and in the Buddhist schools, we have Madhyamika, or the Middle Way, and Two Truths. An example may serve better than theorising: the concept of Maya may propagate that the world is essentially illusory, but it must also teach you how to live in it. After all, you cannot walk into a wall without getting hurt by calling it illusory. You have to live with the truth as it appears. This means you occupy both spaces – that of the wall not being there as well as of the wall being there. All of these point to the ability to reconcile oppositions as fundamental to the Indian way of thinking. In the Western psychological tradition, both truths do not occupy the same space simultaneously but do co-exist in separate spaces.

In Gestalt psychology, this ability to unify our contradictions is vital to the healing process. Are you able to see that you can have both admirable and repulsive qualities within the same person? You can then understand why you love your parents or partner, but also hate some of their actions. Some of us cannot forgive ourselves for our mistakes. This is the root of self-blame, which results in self-sabotage. Some people find it hard to believe the people who say they love them actually do love them, and end up pushing such relationships away. In order to think of ourselves as ‘good’, we begin to repress our negative emotions or thoughts, pushing them into our bodies. Someone who believes being ‘nice’ means never being angry, may actually harbour a lot of simmering resentment but never express it.

A huge part of emotional maturity is accepting the complexity between ourselves and others, within ourselves, and between us as a society or nation.