The creative unconscious, a method for collective creation

How can we explain that a group of people can produce a coherent cinematographic work in a short time without a script? A method that shows the creative power of the collective unconscious and non-action.

Unconscious Coherence

For years, I have been offering audiovisual creation workshops where I implement the unconscious, both personal and collective, in the creative process. Just recently, during the annual introductory workshop as part of the MEME master’s program (Master in Eco-Responsible Expography and Museography), this year at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille, I had students experiment with an approach to audiovisual creation that reveals something essential about creative processes. In one morning, the group, which barely knew each other, created a collective film in a single sequence shot in the museum. The result was surprisingly coherent, even though no script had been written, no dramaturgy thought out beforehand. Museum objects took the floor—glasses, sculptures, hangers—and their improvised monologues mysteriously wove a narrative thread that spectators clearly perceived.

How can we explain the emergence of this coherence? This question brings us to the heart of this creation method I have developed over time, which recognizes the power of the collective unconscious and the fundamental importance of human connections in the creative act.

The Paradox of Voluntary Action

This experience perfectly illustrates what Romain Graziani describes in L’Usage du vide (2019): “It seems that the most desirable states, like sleep, can only occur on condition of not being sought after, the simple fact of coveting them being enough to put them to flight.” This paradox of voluntary action, which Graziani identifies as “poorly elucidated and never resolved in Western philosophy”, but “at the center of Taoist thought”, illuminates this creative practice.

Like sleep that flees from those who seek it, deep creation eludes attempts at total control. The participants did not try to build narrative coherence; it emerged from their attentive presence and their availability to the moment. This approach joins what psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott called “playing,” that creative play which requires a transitional space where conscious control relaxes:

“It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.”

Playing and Reality (1971)

The Exercise: Talking Objects and Single Shot

The instruction was simple but radical: create a collective film in a single sequence shot, where each participant films an object that speaks about its relationship to image. No prior script, no organization other than improvised in the shooting space, just a camera that passes from hand to hand without ever stopping. The single shot imposes a strong ontological constraint: as one participant emphasized, “the spectator can clearly see that the camera doesn’t cut, there’s something quite strong, something real, something that really happened in front of the camera.”

This technical constraint becomes creative method. The impossibility of editing forces everyone to be together, in a collective energy close to theater: “even if we’ve forgotten our text, we have to find a trick to move forward”. The transition between each participant is no longer an invisible cut but becomes “our own editing, choreographed, not a computer with software, it’s our gesture between two people.”

The objects had to talk about their problem with their image, between their existence and their image, social networks, filters, harassment issues, etc. This theme resonates particularly in the museum space, the quintessential place of imaging and gazing.

The Submerged Part of Creation

In everything we do, there is the conscious part, what we decide, plan, organize, and then there is all the unconscious, this immense submerged part of the creative iceberg. Why do we choose this object rather than another? Why do we position ourselves in this particular place in space? These decisions, made in the urgency of the moment, are not random. They emanate from a deep intelligence that we do not consciously control.

This unconscious intelligence corresponds to what Christopher Bollas calls “the unthought known,” those embodied knowledges that guide our actions without passing through reflective consciousness. The unconscious is not only personal. Our unconsciouses dialogue with each other, weave invisible connections. They tell each other stories that we don’t perceive in the moment, but which nonetheless structure our common creations.

The paradoxical instruction of the exercise, not to seek to structure collectively, but “each do their own thing”, precisely liberates this unconscious collective intelligence: “it’s a bit like an exquisite corpse... we’ll see what happens, but let’s not try to structure, let’s each do our best, and we’ll see how it structures with the others.”

Non-Action as Active Method

Graziani reminds us that the Taoist concepts of “non-action” (wu wei) and “emptiness” do not designate passivity but a particular form of action that “requires patient observation of the dynamics of the body and different registers of consciousness”. Our method is part of this lineage: it’s not about doing nothing, but about creating the conditions for something to emerge.

Psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion spoke of “negative capability,” this capacity to tolerate uncertainty and the unknown without immediately seeking to resolve them. This suspension of the desire for mastery allows the emergence of new and unexpected forms:

“Negative capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason... Memory and desire interfere with intuition; they form a screen that prevents psychic evolution.”

Attention and Interpretation (1970)

The Fertile Ground of Encounter

If we had carried out this same exercise on the first day, without any meeting having taken place, without the group having taken the time to get to know each other and tame the museum space, the result would have been radically different. What makes a collective creation work is first our conscious will to do well, but above all the state in which we put ourselves.

As Graziani emphasizes when exploring “various spheres of experience, from practicing a sport to artistic creation,” certain creative states require a preparation that is not about planning but about availability. Jacques Lacan evoked this dimension in his seminar on transference:

“There is in every true speech something that infinitely exceeds the intention of the one who pronounces it... It is in this margin of indetermination that the truth of the subject can emerge.”

The Seminar, Book VIII (1960-1961)

Architecture as Unconscious Structure

Another astonishing element appeared: the influence of architecture on our creation. The museum, with its structure, its spaces, its circulations, informed our film without us being conscious of it. This influence joins what Graziani identifies as the “mechanisms of these states that elude any attempt to make them happen deliberately”, architectural space acts on us in a non-conscious way, structuring our movements and interactions.

The choice of setting was crucial: the same film shot in the atrium, on the lawn or in an exhibition room would have been completely different. “The choice of setting, of place, it’s essential... it transmits a lot, even at the sound level, the sound will resonate in a certain way.”

The single shot, this technical constraint that forces us to film without interruption, becomes a formidable catalyst. It forces us to be together, physically and mentally, creating what psychoanalyst René Kaës would call a “group psychic apparatus,” that is, a psychic entity that exceeds the sum of individual psyches.

Dismantling Western Illusions About Action

This approach, as Graziani notes, allows us to “dismantle the errors and illusions about power and will that are at the basis of Western representations of effective action”. Our culture values control, planning, mastery. Yet the most vibrant creations often emerge when we accept to let go of this illusion of control.

Marion Milner, psychoanalyst and artist, described this discovery in On Not Being Able to Paint (1957):

“I began to see that the problem was not to impose my will on the medium, but to create the conditions in which something else could happen... This ’something else’ seemed to have its own life and its own wisdom, if only I could learn not to interfere with it.”

An Open Method

This approach is not a magic recipe but, to use Graziani’s terms, an “original contribution to the intelligence of action” that mobilizes “without opposing them, the resources of Chinese thought and European thought”. It invites us to:

1. Accept the creative void: Not emptiness as absence, but as pure potentiality, space of all possibilities.
2. Cultivate negative capability: Tolerate uncertainty without immediately seeking to resolve it.
3. Prepare without planning: Create favorable conditions without predetermining the result.
4. Recognize unconscious collective intelligence: Trust what emerges from the group beyond individual intentions.
5. Use constraints as catalysts: The single shot, like other constraints, paradoxically liberates creativity.

The Work as Emergence

What emerges from this method are not preconceived works that are then executed, but creations that surprise us ourselves. Graziani reminds us that understanding these mechanisms allows us to grasp “for what reasons, and at the end of what experiences, the Taoist thinkers of ancient China formulated the so disconcerting concepts of non-action or emptiness.”

Our experience at the Palais des Beaux-Arts concretely illustrates these concepts: “non-action” is not passivity but right action, emergent, unforced; “emptiness” is not absence but space of creative potentiality. The diversity of objects, viewpoints and emotions brought by each person creates the richness of the film, not despite the absence of coordination, but thanks to it.

In our Western culture, obsessed with control and immediate efficiency, this approach offers a fertile alternative. It reminds us that the most vibrant works are born in this paradoxical space where, as in the search for sleep or romantic seduction evoked by Graziani, the desire for control gives way to an attentive and open presence.

It is perhaps there, in this acceptance of creative mystery and this trust in unconscious collective intelligence, that true innovation lies: not in ever greater mastery of our tools, but in our ability to create the conditions for the unexpected to happen.