@Thenomain said in Tulpas or Roleplaying?:
There is a TED Talk that I wish I could find about the depression that sets in after you're successful. The speaker, who I believe may have been Anne Lamott of Bird By Bird fame, talks about how the Greeks used to have the Muse, and Household Gods, and other such things. These would allow them to externalize their successes and failures, to have a place to put such thoughts that weren't squarely on their own talents. She argues—I believe successfully—that having an external allows us to accept what happens because it's not strictly our fault, nor our responsibility to repeat the act.
That sounds quite a bit like Elizabeth Gilbert's TED talk Your Elusive Creative Genius.
People believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reasons. The Greeks famously called these divine attendant spirits of creativity "daemons." Socrates, famously, believed that he had a daemon who spoke wisdom to him from afar.
The Romans had the same idea, but they called that sort of disembodied creative spirit a genius. Which is great, because the Romans did not actually think that a genius was a particularly clever individual. They believed that a genius was this, sort of magical divine entity, who was believed to literally live in the walls of an artist's studio, kind of like Dobby the house elf, and who would come out and sort of invisibly assist the artist with their work and would shape the outcome of that work.
So brilliant -- there it is, right there, that distance that I'm talking about -- that psychological construct to protect you from the results of your work. And everyone knew that this is how it functioned, right? So the ancient artist was protected from certain things, like, for example, too much narcissism, right? If your work was brilliant, you couldn't take all the credit for it, everybody knew that you had this disembodied genius who had helped you. If your work bombed, not entirely your fault, you know? Everyone knew your genius was kind of lame.
