On Remembering conversations, I have had—

New Yorker Cartoon by War and Peas (Elizabeth Pich and Jonathan Kunz)

                           

My husband hears me talking on the phone, and standing at the threshold of my study, throws kisses. He says, with certainty, “You are talking to your boyfriend.” I laugh with embarrassment that he has caught me in the act of being happy. On the phone, a friend has just made it clear that he sees our friendship as important, and the reason he offers, in a most straightforward manner, is that it makes him happy to talk with me. I am touched, but also seriously bewildered that his desire for our friendship, means so much to him that it occasions this special call.

My husband admits, days later, that he was teasing me, and the kisses were because I sound happy for the first time in a longtime. He said that my mood is contagious, and it appears to restore the hope in him that I could be simply happy again. I muse, “Have I really been that unhappy?” “Who knew?”

Although bringing a certain pleasure, this sincere offer of friendship is also unsettling. How did my friend know for certain that conversations could make him happy, or more importantly understand that a friendship with me could have that impact? Can conversations make us happy, and if so, what is it that allows this to happen with some people and not with others?

Asking these questions to myself, jolts me into an awareness that I am beginning to feel like a visitor from another planet, an anthropologist from Mars, organizing facts to begin to understand what it means to be human. It appears I must have forgotten something basic. I am sure that I knew, at least part of the answer to these questions intuitively, and instinctively before, but the full organic understanding has now fallen away into the shadows. I am slowly coming to understand that these last few years have clouded, for me, the notion of what it is to be human, of friendship and what it means to simply talk with another human being.

Paula Marantz Cohen, in her book, The Talking Cure: An Essay on the Civilizing Power of Conversation, suggests that simply talking to each other freely, and without guile may help us out of what ails our troubled society. Perceptively rephrased, and enlarged by Hua Hsu in his review of Cohen’s book in the New Yorker, (“Good Talk” March 20, 2023), says, “Maybe because life moved at a slower pace and every interaction wasn’t so frightened with political meaning, we had the opportunity to recognize our full humanity. Nowadays, Cohen argues, we are sectarian and ‘self-soothing.’ Cohen suggests that we return to the basics: to brush up on the art of conversation.”

Does talking to others, and sharing our stories help us become more fully human? I find it hard to remember when I felt safe enough to allow myself to experience and share uncertainty with others, to dare to deviate from “group think,” and to struggle with paradox or ambiguity, in the face of the power of political polarization. Polarization always carries with it the serious danger of a possible hierarchical misstep, and the terror of social ostracization. Have I become a chameleon, changing colors to match the surround to avoid becoming a social outcast? This seems much more possible to me now, than it ever did before. Has fear of further isolation, dissipated what I once most deeply knew?

Cohen, describes true conversation as a kind of sanctuary, and I ask, “Is it still possible to create this safe space?” Pausing to recall, these cherished moments, products of conversations created in the safety zone that Cohen describes, I confess that I don’t recall the content of what was actually discussed. I only remember the experience of being in a moment, in time, when what has been asserted as the world order, morphs into something subversive inside of me, and the accepted social truths take on a new perspective, open now, to questioning.

I remember that moments before these conversations took hold of my psyche, I have a highly valued internal harmony and safety which holds me in a comforting and familiar nostalgia. Moments into these conversations, something that I can only describe as “happening” takes center stage with its bracing instability. Now, adrift in the wind between the imagined and the “real,” it is clear that I couldn’t have entered this territory alone.

What is clearly understood, or believed to be understood by me, appears in these conversations to re-surface as a newly formed unstable compound, a mixture of a newly known and unknown, both, oddly familiar and totally foreign. This newly created unstable compound also reveals a fragile moment of unanticipated personal risk.

It occurs to me that these kinds of conversations in the past, with their potential for internal transformation, have helped me piece together what it means to live in this world, to understand my own narratives, to distinguish it from others, to learn how to empathize and resonate with the rhythm of another’s life, and even to begin to value my own life. In short, it is in the temenos of the safe conversation, that I begin to understand how to love others and in time, myself.

How does one’s lexicon merge with and transform another’s giving each the strength to search out one’s own path, to value another’s path, and to no longer regurgitate the social proscribed truths, the easy “opiate of the masses”—an opiate that keeps us in lockstep, unthinkingly, reaffirming the truths of an often heartless world?

As I try to review, or describe what has happened in these ephemeral moments of conversation, as I try to understand what is not really understandable, it comes to me that what actually occurs is that two people simply have mustered the courage to talk with each other, heart to heart. The results can make history.

Joan Golden-Alexis, PhD is a clinical psychologist and Jungian Analyst practicing in New York city. She is the Director of Training of the Philadelphia Jung Institute. You can reach her at drjoangolden@gmail.com.

A is for “Anxiety”: The New ABC’s: Thoughts of Ukraine

“A” is for “Anxiety,” “B” is for “Boredom”, “C” is for “Coping Mechanisms”
                  (Julia Suits, Cartoon, “Parent reads on the ABC’s,” published in the New Yorker, December 7, 2020)

I have been musing about living in a new reality, new for me, and for my children and grandchildren. How do I explain what is happening to them, when I am hardly able to explain it to myself? How do I understand the myth, or the hope of democracy in this world fading into the mist? Is there a new symbol, a new myth, an old myth, a trusted fairytale, a trickster figure that can emerge from the darkness of my psyche, our psyche, that can help me identify a new form, or, an old form re-configured for the future?

The events in the Ukraine spring unexpectedly to mind. Many of us of Jewish origin have heard our grandmothers or great grandmothers speak of the Pale. I know, in particular, my grandmother spoke of Kyiv, of the, pogroms, and the Cossacks who were particularly ferocious towards the Jews. She spoke most poignantly of her sister, an outspoken, writer of powerful seditious poetry, who felt compelled to jump out of a high window to her death to avoid impending rape and murder.

This is my grandmother’s story. It is the story that has taken the form of a haunting within me. It is a wound, an undefined darkness that is always threatening to catch up with me, rendering me terrified of my own words, and penetrating me with an indescribable dread. This story is now embodied in the form of panic and fear of self-expression that has permeated my family’s life, and at the same time coalesced my family’s extraordinary ambition. I know, also, that except for my grandmother’s ingenuity, stamina, and concentration, I would be one of those displaced, terrified by Putin’s recent moves, forever separated from having the space to know what I need to know to live.

My grandmother’s words about this were always in Russian. She never could bring herself to speak of it in Yiddish, her comfort language, the language of her intimate home, and never, never in English, as she would not allow these experiences to be translated forward, joining her new life to her old one.

I knew that we were from outside of Kyiv, as it came to me that Jews were not allowed to live within the city limits, but instead only allowed permanent residency in defined areas within the Pale. Ukraine in particular, was famously and infamously, violently anti-Semitic. However, now, moving beyond its ugly past, Ukraine has elected a Jewish man, Volodymyr Zelensky to be its president, and is clearly involved in seizing control of its own history. This moment in history, these events, would have been unbelievable to my grandmother.

My personal hauntings took on a new form when the president of Russia informed the world in an hour-long mesonic rant recently (February 2022) that he thinks “that Ukraine should not exist at all.” Thanks to promises of American protection, Ukraine has had the confidence to step away from Russia’s authoritarian shadow. Biden, while powerfully empathetic to this cause has of this date refused to offer substantial help. He has failed up to this point to pair diplomatic overtures with sufficiently powerful credible military pressure. For now, the Ukrainians are on their own. However, in my experience of this kind of moment, one is often and necessarily on one’s own.

It seems at this moment in time, the arc of Ukrainian history, and the history of the wandering Jew, wanting a homeland, and wanting to be free in that homeland, have actually coalesced for me, and, perhaps, for the Ukrainians. For centuries a sense of “Ukrainianness” developed as they too would not assimilate into the Russian Empire. According to Applebaum:

to say “I am Ukrainian” was once upon a time, a statement about status and social position as well as ethnicity. “I am Ukrainian” meant you were deliberately defining yourself against the nobility, against the ruling class, against the merchant class, against the urbanites. Later on, it would mean you were defining yourself against the Soviet Union…The Ukrainian identity was anti-elitist before anyone used the expression anti-elitist, often angry and anarchic…

Ukrainianness in this century has become intertwined with aspirations for democracy, for freedom, for rule of law, for integration in Europe.

Ukraine has elected a Trickster figure to lead the way—the Ukrainians have unanimously elected Volodymyr Zelensky, a total outsider, a Jewish actor born in eastern Ukraine who has no political experience. His only credential is the that he is famous for playing a downtrodden schoolteacher who rants against corruption, and wins.

In his comic narrative, Zelensky portrays extreme powerlessness. He is extreme in his self-effacing nature, pathetic in his lack of any of the social qualities, and connections that would allow him to do this, but he does it. He reverses the course of power, the powerless become powerful through an inner resource that emerges because their powerlessness is played out magnificently and humorously by the trickster who always knows how to turn the tables on those in power. This is the kind of narrative, and the kind of heroic character, that Ukrainians value the most.

Zelensky combines an unassuming nature, with the profound ability to articulate, and to reach to the inner struggle of each of us to manifest ourselves in an unjust world in better correspondence with our souls. He combines the ability to make his impact stronger through humorous unexpected twists. He combines this with embodied Ukrainian physical courage, and a bloodless determination when necessary. All of this seems to emerge from a natural and powerful anarchism.

With this, he redefines the image of the Jews, who for me, walked seemingly without a fight into the Warsaw Ghetto and forward to the death camps. Zelensky helps me squarely confront my own inter-generational dread of speaking out boldly, of acting boldly—a paralysis built up of many generations of the experience of inexplicable violence, loss and grief.

He is pictured in the news, with a gun on his shoulder, fighting, not announcing that he will have others fight. He seems to know and has accepted that he will be most likely “murdered” as a result of his willingness to head this insurrection.

Zelensky, speaking for his country has a spark, that may ignite the world to fight along with him. But this same spark will ignite Putin to escalate. He has a quiet fire that may ignite many fires. This is a very dangerous stance. But for me, his presence changes the image that has held me captive for a lifetime—the image of the wandering Jew who can’t find a safe home, always wandering, and always exposed to inexplicable and unpredictable violence. This Jew is often the object, rarely the subject. Through Zelensky, it may be possible for me to witness another side of this hidden character within me, perhaps hidden in the shadows, perhaps always there—an aspect that has often been silently murmured on the lips of many new generations of Jews since the Holocaust.

Zelensky speaks a bit for these generations. He said recently, while refusing an escorted escape for him out of the Ukraine: “I am here. We are not putting down arms. We will be defending our country, because our weapon is truth, and our truth is that this is our land, our country, our children, and we will defend all of this. That is, it. That’s all I wanted to tell you.”

It seems I might need this kind of actual and mythic trickster in order to continue with the business of being and becoming myself.

Reference:

Anne Applebaum, “Calamity Again,” The Atlantic, February 23, 2022.

Author:

Joan Golden-Alexis, PhD is a clinical psychologist and Jungian Analyst practicing in New York city. She is the Director of Training of the Philadelphia Jung Institute.

A Jungian Look at: Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man by Mary L. Trump, Ph.D. (2020)

A depiction of  the punishment of Tantalus by Italian painter Gioacchino Assereto (1600-1649).

In the opening pages of Mary Trump’s book about her family, she describes a visit to the White House to celebrate the birthdays of her aunts: Maryanne, who is turning 80, and Elizabeth, who is turning 75.  It’s 2017 and the aunts’ younger brother is now the President of the United States.  The author shares her reflections on her last name, something that once was a source of pride but now is a reminder of her complicated family legacy.  Then she introduces the major players in her family but the one that stands out most in this book is her grandfather, the family patriarch.  The first memory she shares about him is when she stood before him as a 20-year-old asking permission to return to college.  He questions her decision, calling it “stupid” and suggesting she go to trade school and become a receptionist.  She holds her ground and insists she wants to return in order to get her degree.  Then she describes his response: “I must have said it with a hint of annoyance, because my grandfather narrowed his eyes and looked at me for a second as if reevaluating me.  The corner of his mouth lifted in a sneer, and he laughed. ‘That’s nasty,’ he said.  A few minutes later, the meeting broke up.” (p. 3)

Mary Trump is a psychologist and she appears to have spent plenty of time reflecting on of her family, since she lays out a very thorough anamnesis of her family’s difficulties that resulted in the death of her father at age 42 and the rise of her uncle’s fame.  At the center of this saga is her grandfather, Fred Trump, a self-made German immigrant who had no time and no tenderness for his five children.  The author describes her grandfather as rigid, callous, and controlling.  He spent six days a week at the office and did not believe that taking care of his five young children was his responsibility.  Since his wife was often ill, their care was left to a nanny or to the eldest sister; neither, of course, being able to provide the nurturing and care that would lead to a secure attachment and healthy personality.  In writing about those early years of her father’s siblings, the author applies her psychological understanding to show how the two youngest children (Donald and Robert) learned to never show neediness.  This lack of proper parenting explains the “not enough” of the books title.  The “too much” refers to the negative attention and stifling expectations placed on Freddy, the eldest son.  Reading his story is painful, especially as the author makes it clear that despite an early attempt to break away from his father, he was unable to do so psychologically.  After failing in his chosen career Freddy returned home to suffer more humiliation and defeat until his untimely death.

 From a Jungian perspective, the problem the author describes is negative father complex.  A complex refers to unconscious contents, usually resulting from childhood wounds or trauma, that develop around a common feeling tone.  A complex operates autonomously, outside of a person’s awareness, so that when it’s triggered, one’s actions follow a certain predictable pattern.  This becomes particularly problematic when the complex leads one to act in ways that are against one’s best interest or bring harm to others.  A negative complex indicates that the effect on the person was detrimental and it can take many forms.

By Mary’s description, Fred Trump was an autocrat and gave his approval only his children followed his rules.  When they didn’t, they were subject to being mocked and humiliated.  As the eldest son, Freddy was expected to work at the Trump Management office; however, he wanted to be a pilot.   Instead of supporting Freddy’s dream, his father criticized him, calling him “a glorified bus driver” and saying he was an embarrassment to his family.  Fred Sr. valued toughness, so he ridiculed any show of vulnerability and mocked his eldest son when he apologized for failing to intuit his father’s expectations.  Consequently, Freddy’s self-worth eroded over time and he was left with an overwhelming sense of shame and worthlessness.  Freddy’s desperation to get approval from his father persisted throughout his adult life so that his dream of being a pilot was sabotaged by his drinking. He returned home, a failure in his own eyes and in the eyes of his father.  This is one of the potential pitfalls of a negative father complex: the son has to follow the path set out for him by the father, even if the son’s abilities and temperament are not suited to the role the father expects him to play. 

Another problem in this family was the differential treatment Fred bestowed on his sons.  The dynamics between Freddy, the eldest son, and Donald, the middle son, recall the archetypal themes of warring brothers where one is clearly preferred to the other.  As in the Biblical story of Cain and Able, one lives and the other dies.  There are also themes of the younger stealing the elder’s birthright, such as in the story of Jacob and Esau.  Jacob’s mother helps him fool the father, but in the Trump family, it is the mother’s neglect of her sons that creates a vacuum and increases the competition between the sons for favor from their father.   But it is the father’s role in setting up this unintended rivalry that twists the gut.  After his eldest son failed in securing a difficult business deal, he withdrew any but the merest financial support for Freddy and his family.  Consequently, they were denied an application for a house and lived in a drafty Trump owned apartment that was never repaired.  At about the same time, Donald was being driven around in a company car and earning profits from his father’s business deals despite not have contributed to them in any way.  The author points out the discrepancies in the arrangements between her parent’s divorce and Donald’s.  Her mother received $600 a month in alimony; Donald’s first wife signed a pre-nuptial agreement that included a bonus of $150,000, worth almost 21 years of what her mother received.  In this telling, it is clear that one son’s gain is the other’s loss, and this continues to the next generation when Freddy’s children realize that they were cut out of their father’s share of the inheritance.

The dynamics of the Trump family, as described by Mary Trump, are reminiscent of a Greek tragedy and brought to mind the tale of the doomed house of Atreus.  The trouble began with Tantalus who, as a friend of Zeus, was invited to the banquets on Mount Olympus.   Tantalus stole the food of the gods and fed it to humans.  Later, Tantalus invited the gods to a banquet.  In order to test them he cut up his son Pelops and added him to the stew.  The gods and goddesses were horrified and refused to eat it.  In the Trump family, it was the eldest son who was cut up and sacrificed while the middle son was given honey and nectar.  It did not end well for Tantalus. His kingdom was ruined, and he was strung from a fruit tree that leaned over a lake.  Every time he reached for the fruit, it would evade his grasp and when he bent to drink, the water would recede.  Although he was hungry and thirsty, he could neither eat nor drink.  In the Trump family Fred’s children were emotionally starved and, despite Fred’s wealth, many of them lived with a scarcity mentality.  The final chapters of this book describe the cursed cruelty of the Trump family, passed down through the generations.  A sad but tantalizing tale.

AUTHOR

Jeanne Creekmore, PhD.  is a Jungian Analyst in Washington D.C.  She has a degree in Clinical Psychology from the Union Institute and a Master’s Degree in art therapy from George Washington University.  jeannecreekmore@gmail.com https://www.dcpsychotherapy.com/psychotherapist_creekmore.html

Can We Speculate a Failure of Nerve?

Shadow stalks, trying to be included and understood …CW Jung
New Yorker Cartoon by Unidentified cartoonist

Virginia Woolf said that there is a spot the size of a shilling on the back of one’s head, which one can never see for oneself.  At present, I am wondering, if we have lost the essential energy to find a way to see that spot, or to get the help needed to see it. Perhaps, in these disruptive and unsettling times, it has become necessary to keep that spot unassailable. It is certainly possible that at this moment, the place that lies in the shadows at the edge of our personal and collective unconscious may remain in the dark due to a failure of nerve.

Without a doubt our nerves are frayed by the demands of the “Spirit of the Times” and the attempts of one tribe or another (even if it is our tribe) to intrusively define reality. This is particularly disheartening and disorienting when the proclamations of intention or of “truth” are profoundly, obviously, and compulsively unanchored to any moral compass. We are confronted daily with our too willing participation in the sins of society against humanity. The most horrendous of these is slavery, (racism of any kind) and for us, the sin is not experiencing this crime in the profoundly disorganizing, and reorganizing fashion necessary to fully understand our complicity in it, and what we have lost of our humanity as a result.

In our attempts to bring meaning to our current circumstances, a disconcerting symptom (or consequence) has emerged: this is settling for clichés and abstractions which are devoid of subtle affect and nuance. As a result, we are tossed between compelling and seductive spins on reality. “Cliché” is after all, “the thing we all try to escape,” in our life and in our work. The offense, of losing hold of the struggle, and succumbing to cliché, however, according to James Wood, “is not merely aesthetic or musical: it is epistemological—cliché blocks our apprehension of reality. In place of singularity, it substitutes commonality; in place of private oddity, it offers the shared obviousness,” and most importantly, for me, it intensifies a shared oblivion. (The New Yorker, 9/2020, p. 70). It appears there is much of value lost to psyche in this bland and often coy translation of external events, and our consequential unresponsiveness to what is most essential for us to understand.

It is most striking to me that as I try to place into words for myself and for my patients the collective, and political context in which we all live today, my words often “fail the novel, the specific just at this moment when it is most critical that they succeed. Is it too speculative to suggest a failure of…nerve here, (my nerve) as if the most burning material”… cannot be taken in, and metabolized, made translatable and enlarging? (Ibid, p.70) The moment is instead subtly soothed over, colored by the conventional gaze, which results in an innocuous abstract version of events. I begin to understand how dangerous it is, to be unwilling to pause, and to struggle to reconsider.

Such moments of disconnect (disassociation), momentarily slow the heartbeat for a few minutes, and then return us, like a good day of indulgences, to our original breathless state. Is the air less breathable, the fires on the west coast observably limiting the refreshing moment of a good deep breath? Or have I lost the ability to pause, to fully suffer the moment. I make excuses for myself as I am living in this time, and as easily defined by it as my friends and my patients. I make excuses for not continuing the unendurable struggle to keep informed of the powerful forces that threaten to define and hold my life captive, and above all to blind me to the captivity.

A moment, most striking in this context, occurred when working with a couple who are gratified at the success of their efforts at building a place of reflection in a marriage, a relationship that began with outrageous and unmonitored reactivity to one another. This place of reactivity has, surprisingly to them, been replaced by a place of informing compassion. This space has allowed them to build generative structures, both internally and externally in their marriage and their life.

Yet, they feel, magnetically held by a stultifying context. In fact, unable to discern this force with any objectivity they feel that they can muster only limited movement. They describe this movement in place as iterative, compulsive and annihilating of any perceived movement at the surface. They acknowledge that we are living in a context, a collective moment that needs to be further understood. This knowledge appears to be an important first step towards an awareness of an inner force that profoundly limits their autonomy.

Linda, 83, forced to shelter in place, in solitude, has a dream. With her dream, the “Spirit of the Depths,” offers her a possibility that is both refreshing and informing. It is easy to overlook that the “Spirit of the Depths” not only relates to the personal psyche, but to what is unconscious that lies in the collective and cultural as well. She reveals her dream:

_{I was going to be in a play. The time for the play was practically upon us—I hadn’t seen the script, and then someone handed me the script. I immediately started reading it and studying it. My friend Charlie was also in the play, is in the same situation. And now reading his part. We are thinking we are going to memorize it because we are starting soon. I have got to do it because it needs to be done. …Something to do with this time, the times, the pandemic, something unusual has to be done—I have to do it.}

It seems, these problematic times gives Linda a new access to her personal mandate. The “Spirit of the Depths,” has given her access to a part of herself that is very different from the persona and the ego. “Someone” handed her the script, that allows her ego to act in tandem with the shadow (animus), and allows the unlived aspects of her life to emerge. She experiences this with an urgency, and she seems to know intuitively that being handed the script demands her performance. She accepts the powerful and fated necessity of the mandate. She accepts that it is the time to act.

I have seen the mandate that has become accessible for Linda emerging in me, and in friends and patients. In these times it appears we either begin to manifest some openness to what we have not readily seen as fateful patterns in ourselves, or we sink into stultifying complacency. It appears that the play is thrust upon us, and this includes the implicit mandate, “I’ve got to do it because it needs to be done.”

Accessing this moment takes a bit of nerve, but when I witness the accessing of this in myself and others, it seems to flow through each of us with as much necessity as the river flows to the sea.

AUTHOR

Joan Golden-Alexis, PHD is a clinical psychologist, a Jungian analyst, and couple and family therapist located in New York City. She is a senior training analyst at the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association, and Director of Training at the Philadelphia Association of Jungian Analysts. She writes on art, psyche, and the intersection of psychoanalysis and the political. drjoangolden@gmail.com

Reverie: All That We Can Hold

What the Silence Says

I know that you think you already know but –

Wait

Longer than that.

even longer than that.

​​Marie Howe, Magdalene: Poems

Now there really are many spaces in between. 

Between the memories of not-that-long-ago missing family that has transitioned.

Between the remembrance of walking into a room and what is forgotten in a moment’s slice of time.  The sought for object gone.

Between the small anxiety of trying to remember last night’s dream image and being startled (again) into realizing that the death numbers of those who have died from the pandemic has not waited. 

It keeps growing each day. Somewhere.

There is a silence in which I walk feeling my way along. Masked. Covered. Bubbled.

Uncertain.  

I sometimes think that I’m waiting. Not like at 42^nd Street, hot July day, for the 4 train. Knowing it will come. More like watching clouds float across Caribbean waters. 

They move like something unexpected. 

Uncertain.

This is the word we use now. Uncertain.  All the conversations about what we knew for the future have almost stopped.  There is a silence here. It meets us in that space where we might consider nothingness. It can feel like the uselessness of the self just before falling into giving up. Letting go.

We can still hold on though once we recover from the blankness of the space between.

Dissociation.

We can hold on to hope that things will change once we recover. Once we get the remedy.  The vaccine.

Some of us can hold on to our rage at such malicious incompetency that has allowed so many to die.

Then the silence returns and we hold all that we can.

Fanny Brewster Ph.D., M.F.A. is a Jungian analyst, Professor of Depth Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute and member analyst with PAJA. She is a multi-genre writer who has written about issues at the intersection of Jungian psychology and American culture. The Racial Complex:  A Jungian Perspective on Culture and Race is her most recent book. (Routledge, 2019). Dr. Brewster is available through her website, www.fannybrewster.allyou.net/

AN AMERICAN THING

Christopher Weyant, The New Yorker, June 19, 2015

Two years after the Parkland shootings, the children of a Miami middle school created a magazine entitled First Shot. Some of the students, involved in the magazine, wrote the following poem, and on the two-year anniversary of the shootings (February 14, 2020) sent it out to all the members of the House and the Senate. The accompanying letter stated that 130 children have been killed in school shootings, and they are hoping that their representatives in congress will feel “sad enough” to do something about it. I ask, along with these middle-schoolers, who exist much closer to the pulse of what is possible, than I do, “Will they feel sad enough, or even sad at all?”

First Shots      

Children walk out the door hands raised as in praise.

Men still talk in suits and ties

While they watch, the future dies.

I don’t want to be first shot.

The middle-schoolers, make it clear that “hands raised as in praise” in a scene involving gun violence, are hands raised in abject surrender. It is heart-wrenching to witness this poignant gesture, depicting  the children surrendering, not only to the other youths, who wish to do them violence, but to the myopia of their forefathers, who “talk” and “watch” as the “future dies.” According to the children, these forefathers, dressed in the uniforms of power and wisdom, have lost their feeling for the children, for the future, and for the possible. We, the witnesses, of the moment, are obliged to suffer the voices of these children falling mute, their song extinguished, or reduced to speaking in between the voices of the things already established.

The voices ignored are the sounds of the emergence of the new. Jung terms this openness to the future, the emergence of the child archetype, which according to him heralds the “Divine Child.” The “Divine Child” surfacing in our dreams, or in our lives, fosters “the liberation from imprisonment” by the frozen and inert aspects of our psyche, and “the liberation and strength in advancement.” (Black Book 7, pp.76-70, The Red Book) This wise energy supplies the telos for the individuation process both personally and collectively.

Ferenczi, calls this intuition for, or whiff of the future, the “Wise Baby.” For Ferenczi, dreaming of the “Wise Baby” is dreaming of the child who, having been extremely and often traumatized, has acquired, highly acute sensitivities, intuitions, and wisdom beyond his years. Dreaming of the “Wise Baby” announces the potential within the dreamer for this kind of wisdom. (Ferenczi, 1923, p. 349)

For both Jung and Ferenczi, in the poem above, the voice of the child archetype, or the voice of the “Wise Baby,” are reduced to the shadows, and eradicated of their power to transform our vision of the future. Ignoring the child, ignoring what the children have to say, we close our ears and eyes to the possible, and allow the future to be a carbon copy of the past.

According to Levinas, “fecundity is the property of the child.” (Quoted in Critchley, 2015, p. 102). It is through the fecundity of the child, through the dynamic of the child archetype, as expressed through the force of their fears, their hopes, and the power of their song that stale repetition ceases.

Viewing change in this way, it appears the dynamics of the child archetype, has the potential to create a different sense of time, one that is transformative and creative. One can imagine that through the refreshing, and creative energy of the child archetype, monotonous, and iterative time is dislodged.  Instead, the child archetype introduces a time that moves creatively through a multiplicity of transforming acts, where each of the following acts resolves the preceding one, and opens, and anticipates the next. Through this transformational time, there is a rupture in stagnating continuity. This is a rupture that at the same time is a linking, a “continuation across that rupture.” (Ibid., 107) Living in “transformational time” created by our connection with the child, and through the child archetype, can bring us into a renewed and renewing light of day, where the novel is a welcome companion.

References:

Story reported on NPR, on February 14, 2020, from WRLM by Jessica Bakerman

Critchley, Simon, 2015. The Problem with Levinas. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Ferenczi, S. (1923/1994). “The Dream of the Clever Baby”. In Further Contributions to the Theory and Technique of Psychoanalysis. (J. I. Suttie, Trans.) London: Karnac Books.

Jung, C. G. The Red Book. 2009. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Author

Joan Golden-Alexis, PHD is a clinical psychologist, a Jungian analyst, and couple and family therapist located in New York City. She is a senior training analyst at the Philadelphia Association of Jungian Analysts, and the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association of New York. She writes on art, psyche, and the intersection of psychoanalysis and the political. (drjoangolden@gmail.com)

A DAY IN AUGUST

a visit by spirit

He came just before dawn
my first companion in chains
the father of four sons
who died
exhaling his last fevered breath
onto my back
now he returns
breathing softly onto my worn flesh
he whispers in my ear
words I cannot understand
but  I know it is him
telling me of the pain
the joy of leaving his body
the apprehension of giving up life.
I listen intently
to know what my life
could be on another journey
a different kind of journey.

He does not touch me
will not touch me
unless I say
yes,
take me.

Pushed forward
by the cradle rock of the ship,
leaning,
I smell him
not as when we were chained brothers
with the pungency of vomit,
bloody sweat sticking to our salt bodies,
but different.

Slight guava scent after first morning rain.

I am tempted to touch him,
let him take me

beyond where my captured body lay
but a great fear grabs me.

Squeezes my heart.
Holds my breath.
I cannot release, free myself.

And so he leaves me with my fear
and the terror of this life.

From, Journey: The Middle Passage, Psychological Perspectives, v. 59, Issue 4

A Day in August

 Four hundred years ago the White Lion arrived in Hampton, Virginia,following it’s ocean voyage from Britain.  This ship’s arrival and its occupants were to contribute to the creation of an American society that combined all that many of us hold dear, and paradoxically that which many of us have the strongest desire to change.  Aboard the White Lion were twenty-plus enslaved Africans stolen from Angola. These men and women, were the ancestors of African Americans who were sold throughout Southern states, building an economically strong plantation system that amassed wealth for white America.

 Many of us who seek change in our American social system wish to increase social justice.  This type of justice points to a history of slavery and racism in the early American colonies and through four hundred years of social injustice.  Injustice that included not only economic suffering, but also immense psychological and mental trauma. 

It is difficult to separate Africanist suffering into strands of economic, gender, educational.  These and more are so evenly braided together—from our American Constitution, to our contemporary education system.  Not one place of our American society and psyche has been untouched by the arrival of the White Lion Africans who came ashore that day in August.

Engaging the psychological work of healing intergenerational trauma, recognizing  cultural complexes,  understanding archetypal DNA and epigenetics involved in attachment theory, related to the African Holocaust, binds us. All of us—as Americans.  There is often a wish, perhaps as an aspect of a racial complex, to forget, create amnesia regarding those first African American ancestors.  However, it rests with all of us who live today to remember them as creating the path for millions who followed.  Their journey was one of suffering, as was that of their descendants.  My writing is to remember and honor those first Angolan Africans stolen and brought to America. It is to remember them with love and compassion because their path has been our path, and we have not yet finished the journey. 

Dr. Fanny Brewster is a Jungian member analyst with PAJA,  Professor at Pacifica Graduate Institute, and the author of The Racial Complex:  A Jungian Perspective on Culture and Race. (Routledge 2019). Dr. Brewster is available through her website, www.fannybrewster.allyou.net/

FECKLESS FAIRYTALE FATHERS

Everyone knows about terrible mothers in fairytales – and they were originally mothers. The Brothers Grimm spun them into stepmothers, feeling that multiple instances of mothers who envied, betrayed, and abandoned their daughters would be too grim for public consumption. (They may also have considered the likely negative impact on sales.) Happily, stepmothers were safe to hate, and their eventual defeat could be all the more celebrated.

As a child I was hazily aware of peculiar family dynamics in fairytales, but what with fiery lakes, magic mountains, and mean stepmothers, a disappeared dad was almost beyond my capacity to notice. I got to thinking about this because my friend Audrey recently told me she hadn’t allowed her sons to read fairytales when they were young. “Too many weak fathers,” she said. “I didn’t want my boys learning that women would compensate for their failings.” I thought of Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, Beauty and the Beast, and Rumpelstiltskin, well-known tales that come readily to mind. There are more such tales but I think I’ve made my point.

Cinderella and Snow White had tuned-out dads. After their starter wives died, they acquired new ones as easily as buying a new appliance. Household order now restored, these lords of their respective manors whisked themselves off to—somewhere. Perhaps these fathers were too dissociated–or just disinterested–to notice their daughters’ abuse, much less their collusion in it.

Other dads were surprisingly witless wimps. When Rapunzel’s old man got caught stealing the greens his pregnant wife craved – doubtless the start of the kale craze – he agreed to hand over their baby after birth as payment. In Hansel and Gretel’s even more food-deprived home, dad ditched his kids in the forest—twice—because even though he felt bad about it, his wife insisted, so what could he do?

The third group of failed fathers skipped any pretense of blamelessness and out-and-out sacrificed their daughters to save themselves. Beauty’s father allowed her (she insisted!) to live with the Beast so he wouldn’t have to. The father of the nameless maiden in Rumpelstiltskin set her up for life in a dungeon or decapitation (take your pick) by telling the king she could spin straw into gold. The father of The Girl Without Hands – a lesser-known tale for grisly reasons — chopped off her hands after making a deal with the devil.

Now I know that from a Jungian point of view, all the characters in a fairytale represent various aspects of an individual psyche: we all have an inner maiden, witch, prince and so on. From that point of view, each of the tales I’ve cited can be viewed as a depiction of the psychological development of the feminine. These heroines snap out of their innocence complex to overcome their negative father complex. Then the contra-sexual inner opposites unite, which means each she marries a princely he, and happily-ever-after wholeness is achieved.

No child—and few parents, for that matter–read fairytales this way. I had worked my way around the library corner from the syrupy Peter Rabbit, Raggedy Ann and Mother West Wind tales to the juice and justice of fairytales. Here, fish and frogs talked, mile-high beanstalks sprang up overnight, and forests were places of mystery and surprise. I was thrilled.

The heroines who inspired me were the ones who sacrificed themselves for others. I could–would!–love the Beast, or silently knit sweaters out of nettles to save my six swan brothers (and nobly ignore my bleeding fingers). I would take on the tasks required to rescue Tam Lin from the Queen of the Fairies, though having to hold hot coals gave me pause.

I can acknowledge the logic and merit of Audrey’s injunction against fairytales. If her sons might have learned that they wouldn’t be accountable for missing backbones, daughters like me learned that love was often defined as unstinting and selfless service. But I also absorbed a felt recognition of a truth that hadn’t risen to consciousness: feckless fathers and mean mothers are a reality. Heads up, kids —you’ve been told, this story is old, and you’re not alone.

If the heroines I loved were self-sacrificing, they were also radically persevering – and/or brave, clever, and incredibly good. If these girls (and they were girls) were overlooked, neglected or abused, neither had they been steeped in cultural gender norms. They didn’t learn what they were not supposed to do, so Cinderella took off for the ball, Rapunzel hopped into bed with the prince, and the miller’s daughter faced down Rumpelstiltskin. Harsh circumstances forced them to find individual solutions, which even today is not a bad idea.

We tend to idealize parental love and paint childhood in pastels despite what any therapist (or your next-door neighbor) can tell you about family shadow. Or trauma. Fairytales dive right into the dark side. Whether our situation then or now is merely unfair or unspeakably awful, fairytales tell us that given the givens, we’d better get real and get going. Even if we don’t live happily ever after (spoiler alert: we won’t) we can live authentically, learn a lot, and climb hand-over-hand into wholeness.

Deborah Stewart is a Jungian Analyst and Licensed Clinical Social Worker residing in Cape Cod, MA. She can be reached at www.DeborahCStewart.com  She is a member of the Philadelphia Association of Jungian Analysts, where she co-chairs and teaches in the training seminar. She is an active member of the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts and participates in other professional organizations. She is co-creator and contributor to This Jungian Life podcast at www.ThisJungianLife.com. She has a special interest in trauma and is the author of Encounters with Monsters: The Significance of Non-Human Images of Trauma in the Psyche.

It was the Best of Times; It was the Worst of Times

                      It was the Best of Times; It was the Worst of Times

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. 

–Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Recently, I re-read this paragraph which was, as I recall the experience, forced on me in Highschool. It had meant little, or nothing to me at the time, except for the music that the rhythm of the words left in my ears, and a slight vibration to that music, that the music in words, always leaves in the heart. I am surprised to discover that the depth of meaning contained in these oppositions could, this many years later, offer me something so essential.  Now, the words bring light to the dark corridor, I have recently entered. I had attributed this darkness simply, and one-sidedly, to the “Spirit of the Times,” giving no nod to its opposite, and its potentially broadening “Spirit of the Depths.”

Ali Smith, a Scottish author, states in her interview in the Paris Review, in the Spring of 2017:

What is the point of art, of any art, if it doesn’t let us see with a little bit of objectivity where we are?…I use the step-back motion that I learned from Dickens—the way that famous first paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities creates a space by being its own opposite—to allow readers the space we need to see what space we’re in.

…We are living in a time when lies are sanctioned. We always lived in that time, but now the lies are publicly sanctioned. Something tribal has happen which means that nobody gives a damn whether somebody is lying or not because he is on my side…in the end will truth matter? Of course, truth will matter….But there is going to be a great deal of sacrifice on the way to getting truth to matter to us again.

Dickens tells us in fiction, the truth, that perhaps, at times, only fiction can offer. “Fiction tells you, by the making up of truth, what really is true.”(Smith, 2017) In this case, and, obviously, in many others, fiction offers entrance to a world that we may not have yet come to fully know from the travels and meanderings of our own psyche.

It is through fiction that we have an opportunity to occupy the realm of the opposites. Dickens’ prose creates for us the organic experience of occupying the coveted realm of possibility. Reading the beginning quote, has within it the inherent possibility of transporting us to a moment when the opposites can be experienced together, or at least in in the vicinity of one another.

For Jung, it is shadow, that stands at the gateway to this experience. Shadow’s presence leaves the door open to begin our acquaintance with the opposites. Jung, in describing the function of shadow, draws attention to shadow’s subtle, and unconscious exclusionary process, and suggests that it requires a depth of moral fortitude and integrity to be willing to tolerate the dissonance that the presence of shadow creates.

How much can we learn from the phrase: “It the worst of times,” when we have the courage to add, it’s shadow opposite, “it is the best of times” to it; and when we add to “we had everything before us, the phrase, “we had nothing before us”? For me, expanding my psychic realm like this, creates a sympathy for noticing things at the margins. I have learned from life, that extraordinary things happen at the edges. Jungian theory requests that we hover there, gaining perspective and regaining a lingering sense of the possibility offered to us at the edge of things.

Many of us have grown up in the margins of the realm created by our mothers, challenged by the world of our fathers; the realm of the nationality of one parent, transformed by the nationality of the other; the realm of our home life, augmented and changed by our school life; our private internal life, augmented by the outside world in which we live; our lived life, transformed by the life brought to us by our reading, and the multiplicity of our education.

Collectively, has also been enlarged  for me in my lifetime. My sense of “White” has been augmented and transformed by my changing sense of “Black”; the meaning of “Nationalism” has changed by the foul history of “nationalisms.” On my first trip to Europe my sense of being an American, was shattered (and enlarged) by the French seeing my country as inhabiting only part of the vast continent of North American. Also, the word “colonies” that I learned all about in history has been profoundly transformed by my understanding of the word, “colonization.”

I have learned from all of this that opposites do not exist easily and cooperatively, and naturally in consciousness. One side of the equation seems to live in the darkness to allow us to exist peacefully in the realm of the “oneness” of the other side, and it’s consequential, one-sidedness. It is only when we are able to hold these oppositions as neighbors that we realize how much is hidden from us, how much has been lost.

I know from all this, that transformational things happen on the edges, that the numinous and the mysterious happens on the edges.  Great art, fiction, and our dreams informs us again, and again that much that seems impossible, is possible at the edges. It is where the opposites meet, where margins can be celebrated and where anything is possible.

However, there is a great deal of sacrifice on the way to getting the margins of things to seriously matter to us again. It always involves allowing ourselves to be seriously and utterly disturbed.

Joan Golden-Alexis, Ph.D. is a Jungian Analyst and psychologist in New York City. Her practice consists of individuals as well as couples. drjoangolden@gmail

Reference:

Begley, A. “The Art of Fiction, No. 236,” Paris Review, Issue 221, Summer.

Dreams at the Interface of Personal and Collective Trauma

Courtesy of Gregory Pagano

Currently trauma is often defined, less in terms of the personal (the individual), and more in terms of the collective (the social-political) with its potentially insidious soul-destroying qualities. This is Maria Root’s concept of everyday or “insidious trauma.” Root, here is referring to the “traumatogenic effects of oppression,” racism, marginalization, and hegemony.

Presently, psychoanalysts recognize the resulting condition of psychic paralysis that exists in an individual exposed to collective psychic trauma. Such individuals are said to have a psyche colonized by collective and colonial imperatives, including the internalized attitudes of cultural inferiority. (Fanon, 2008)[1] This internalization often entails “the loss of an unnamable domain…which one might…mistake for constitutional exile.” (Kristiva,1982)[2]

Constitutional exile (the feeling of being set adrift, disoriented, and disconnected from oneself) produces one of the most damaging aspects of psychic trauma. This is the loss, of a connection to one’s interiority, and access to a creative unconscious that can provide the psychic space for the reparation and reconstitution of internal processes, impacted by trauma. The result is a devastating inhibition in the growth of awareness of the extent of the psychic injury, and above all, a loss of a linking to one’s autonomy and agency that could provide the psychic space for repair.

Many schools of psychoanalysis emphasize the power of the unconscious in the healing of a socially traumatized psyche. Some point to dreams for bringing a more detailed map of the psychic territory impacted by the trauma, and exposing the linkages to other vulnerable places within the individual. In this context, Jung offers what he terms “The Spirit of the Depths,” [3] an aspect of psyche, composed of both conscious and unconscious processes, available through our dreams, that offers a space of reflection, born of an understanding of the images that flow from the unconscious.

It is this force, according to Jung, that offers the vision to unshackle both an individual life and also provides the symbols that offer recovery from the impact of a culture that may be tumultuous, disorienting, and assaultive to its members’ autonomy. These kinds of dreams can prove fertile for the personality, enabling it to move creatively forward, reacquiring or transforming inadvertently overlooked parts of the self, and linking them to those encapsulated by the trauma.

It follows, that our dreams, once embraced, can provide, one way, that we can return from a place of exile, homelessness, rootlessness, and powerlessness, and help reinstate the inalienable rights denied by a corrosive, society. Our dreams can offer us entrance into the psychic space that we can call “home,” a home that offers acquaintance with what is essentially ours, initiating autonomy from what has been destructively imposed. Freedom, redemption, depth of feeling and understanding of the world around us, and ourselves, is intimately connected to keeping the door ajar to this psychic space.

There are some dreams that appear to be specifically commenting on the “Spirit of the Times”—the impact of the social context—the collective—and at the same time seem to be commenting on the personal. These dreams offer the special gift of shedding light on both the distinction between the personal and the political, and their juncture, giving insight to their linkage, and their impact on each other.

I have termed this type of `dream, “dreams at the interface.” Although not all dreams prompt a feeling that they are commenting on the “Spirit of the Times” as well as personal complexes and issues of the individual dreamer, Lama Z. Khouri in her poignant essay “Buried Neck Deep” in Room 10-18.5[4] offers just such a dream and gives us the opportunity to study the linkage between the personal and political in some detail.

As we explore Khouri’s dream we will see how the personal and political have interacted to produce her current experience. The dream, itself, with its message understood, can help her restore generativity and choice in her psyche, a psyche that she describes as impacted through her identification as a Palestinian (a people, both colonized and abandoned by other Arab countries, their plight overlooked) and having a profound emotional connection to, and understanding of the people of a village in Gaza symbolically (and literally) described by her as an “open-air prison.”

It is almost impossible, not to pause, as one attempts to absorb the catastrophic and emotive power of the image, which is center stage in Khouri’s dream, dreamed 12 years ago, when her son was age 4, and now again is rising to consciousness. It seems that such an image can only emerge from a psyche that has had the primary experience, and in addition been a primary witness to, the insidious traumatogenic power of oppression. The dream imagery carries forward to her consciousness and ours the soul-destroying aspects of collective trauma.

However, it is important to note, that dreams rarely restate what the dreamer already knows, their gift is always to be our most informing friend, constantly surprising, urging us to notice shadow aspects of ourselves, existing, in the darkened areas of our psyche. Focusing on these areas, clarifies linkages, and assumptions that may give us the capacity to unlock doors to internally, and externally constructed prisons.

It is this aspect of Khouri’s dream that we look to for the vision to unshackle her personal complexes, and issues that have arisen in relationship to her collective experience of trauma. These personal issues can be just as catastrophic and immobilizing, left unnoticed, as the original collective psychic trauma. In addition, when the collective and personal aspects of the trauma are not sorted, their interaction can dramatically intensify psychic pain.

In addition, when such a powerful dream image rises to the surface of consciousness yet a second time, it carries the suggestion that there must be something important that Khouri needs to notice. Perhaps it might possess the quality of the “unthought known” of Christopher Bollas[5]. a “thought” that is existent in one’s psyche, but its poignant and transformational power makes it impossible to process.

She writes:

Lately, a dream I had twelve years ago has been coming back to me. I dreamt that my four-year-old son (he’s sixteen now) was buried neck deep in the middle of a neighborhood and surrounded by modest houses. Passersby would kick his face, but he remained silent, as if the kicks were part of life and not to be contested — as if, to survive, he needed to keep his mouth shut.

She explains:

This dream has had many meanings for me. Twelve years ago, I thought my four-year-old son in the dream was me: buried in a failed marriage with nowhere to go. Of late, my son in the dream has become the Palestinian people: “You either capitulate or we will continue to beat you to the ground.” Their struggle for freedom is terrorism, children throwing rocks are arrested or killed, many young adults have no hope —

Although many of the assumptions and images in the dream may seem resonant to, and even a result of living intimately connected to a colonized nation, it is important to note that there are many assumptions in the dream that are stated as “just so” aspects of life, and it may be those that the dream seems to be opening up for consideration and questioning. I have noted these in bold above.

Are kicks in the face part of life and not to be contested? The dream figure acts “as if” this is true He acts as if to survive, he needs to keep his mouth shut. Is it true that in orderto survive, one must remain silent?

Khouri says, at first, she thought the dream image was her, buried in a failed marriage with no place to go. However, one can be buried in a failed marriage without being silenced and kicked in the face, and buried neck deep with no efficacy, no motility other than the voice.

She says, later that she felt that the dream image reflected the reality of the Palestinian people. However, one can be oppressed, harassed, socially imprisoned, and impacted by the Israeli’s abuse without assuming kicks are part of life, and not to be contested, or without assuming that abuse is normal.

Most centrally one can be in an oppressive marriage, and/or oppressed by an aggressive nation, and still not decide in order to survive one must keep their mouth shut. The dream describes a certain conscious orientation to reality, certain assumptions about life, and what one needs to do in order to survive, and it shows the dream figure “buried up to the neck” in these assumptions, and immobilized by them. It appears to me that it is these assumptions that allow the dream figure no “wiggle room,”  and that it may be these assumptions, left unquestioned, that have accumulated to construct his “open-air prison.”

It appears that it is not the collective trauma itself that has destroyed the dream figure’s power, and autonomy. Rather it is these assumptions about life that has the dream figure catastrophically and hopelessly mired. The dream figure has no wiggle room in relation to the assumption that abuse is a normal part of life; that there is a normal and natural connection between abuse, and the inability to act; that the connection between abuse and silent acceptance is normal; and that silence, and immobility are the only survival techniques. Above all, the dream appears to be attempting to bring to the consciousness of the dreamer a new option—the possibility of questioning the wholesale truth of the powerful phase—”You  either capitulate or we will beat you to the ground.” 

It appears that the dream is here now, or 12 years ago, and is remembered, again, to continue its dialogue with her. The dream specifically throws light on these assumptions, and opens them to reflection.

Khouri, concludes her essay with these thoughts:

It is not enough for me to hold and contain the client’s pain. I need to do what I can to change their sociopolitical environment.

Impacted by the powerful image in her dream, I would also add that Khouri may notice dream images of her clients, or thoughts and associations that demonstrate personal vulnerabilities and narratives, that exist in their personal psyche in relationship to the larger collective trauma. Bringing these to consciousness, differentiating the power imposed from the outside, from the power given to the outside through internal personal assumptions, and personal narratives, giving the link between the two, heat, focus, and conscious reflection, may bring these “just so” assumptions to awareness, and create a greater inner sense of personal choice for her clients.

Footnotes

1. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, (London, United Kingdom: Pluto Press, 2008). 
2. Julia Kristeva, (Leon S. Roudiez, Trans.) Powers of Horror; An Essay on Abjection, (Columbia University Press,1982). 
3. Jung, CG, “Liber Primus,” The Red Book, (New York and London, W.W. Norton and Company, 2009), 241.
4. Room-18.5: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action. (2018) Iptah.org (analytic-room.com)
5. Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (New York, Columbia University Press, 1987).

Joan Golden-Alexis, Ph.D. is a Jungian psychoanalyst and psychologist in New York City. Her practice consists of individuals as well as couples. (drjoangolden@gmail.com)

---