Inflation: Dealing with the Creative; Saving Your Life.

Dr. Jung: Inflation is something abnormal and it is not necessarily a part of the creative process, though unfortunately it happens of course to be connected with it very often. But a creative artist, for instance, can create without imagining himself to be a creator. He can create just because it is his damned duty to do so, or because he cannot help doing it. That is, a creative person without self-consciousness. As soon as self-consciousness comes in, there is inflation: you imagine that you are the creator and then you are God, because you feel, of course, like ten thousand dollars if you have time to think of it. If you have time, you have already split off from the creative process; you look at yourself and say: “Hell, what a fellow! Isn’t he grand?” And then you are in for it, you are already living in your biography, you see it printed: In the year so and so, on such a day, he had such and such an inspiration. Then you have spoiled your creative process, but you have a most healthy inflation.
Mrs. Crowley: You spoke of the tremendous archetypal forces in Nietzsche. How could he produce Zarathustra without identifying if the archetypes worked in him?
Dr. Jung: Ah yes, but they would not be working in him, he would be working in them: that is the natural point of view.
Mrs. Crowley: Do you mean in the sense of a dance?
Dr. Jung: Of course. They have you on the string and you dance to their whistling, to their melody. But inasmuch as you say these creative forces are in Nietzsche or in me or anywhere else, you cause an inflation, because man does not possess creative powers, he is possessed by them. That is the truth. If he allows himself to be thoroughly possessed by them without questioning, without looking at them, there is no inflation, but the moment he splits off, when he thinks, “I am the fellow,” an inflation follows.
Question: Can it be avoided?
Dr. Jung: Only by obeying completely without attempting to look at yourself. You must be quite naive.
Mr. Baumann: It happens automatically?
Dr. Jung: It happens automatically that you become conscious of yourself and then you are gone; it is as if you had touched a high-tension wire.

Mr. Baumann: You cannot escape it?
Dr. Jung: If you are simple enough. Nietzsche of course could not help looking at the thing and then he was overwhelmed with resentments, because the creative powers steal your time, sap your strength, and what is the result? A book perhaps. But where is your personal life? All gone. Therefore, such people feel so terribly cheated; they mind it, and everybody ought to kneel down before them in order to make up for that which has been stolen by God. The creative forces have taken it out of them, and therefore they would like to personify them, to imagine that they are Shiva, in order to have the delight of being creative. But if you know you are creative and enjoy being creative, you will be crucified afterwards, because anybody identified with God will be dismembered. An old father of the church, the Bishop Synesius, said that the spiritus phantasticus, man’s creative spirit, can penetrate the depths or the heights of the universe like God or like a great demon, but on account of that he will also have to undergo the divine punishment. That would be the dismemberment of Dionysos or the crucifixion of Christ. We shall come presently to the same problem in Zarathustra.

Jung’s Seminar on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, p. 40-41

Bold is mine.