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 42nd 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/
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)
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 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.
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
Frantz
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, (London, United Kingdom: Pluto Press,
2008).
Julia
Kristeva, (Leon S. Roudiez, Trans.) Powers
of Horror; An Essay on Abjection, (Columbia University Press,1982).
Jung,
CG, “Liber Primus,” The Red Book, (New York and London, W.W. Norton and
Company, 2009), 241.
Room-18.5:
A Sketchbook for Analytic Action. (2018) Iptah.org (analytic-room.com)
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)
To tattoo one’s body is merely one of the thousand ways of conjugating the verb ‘to be’ that fundamental concept of our metaphysics—Michael Thévos
What lies deepest of all in man, is the skin—Paul Valery
In the last several decades both in academic circles and as a method of healing, analytic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, with its central focus on the unconscious and the multilayered psyche, has decreased in popularity. Seemingly, reflective of the current zeitgeist, cognitive therapy with its narrow focus of symptom reduction, has taken the lead. In the popular therapeutic discourse, symptom relief, has replaced symbolical understanding of the symptom—the symptom understood as an access point to unconscious and potentially transformative aspects of the personality.
In contrast, tattoos, and other forms of body modification, as a method of healing (having been utilized for centuries to cure arthritis, to express autonomy, and to connect with higher and sacred curative powers), have increased in popularity. Seemingly reflective and reinforcing of a zeitgeist which emphasizes the innate metaphysic of becoming and memorializing that metaphysic on the surface of the body, tattoos have made an explosive impact. Currently, tattoos creep like vines on the arms, legs and torsos of many, unabashedly and comfortably crossing gender, educational and social barriers.
In fact, ink art has exploded, and now according to research studies 15 to 38 percent of Americans have some kind of long-term body art. What was once considered self-mutilating behavior and a psychiatric problem has now become the cure. Body art is on the move, and for the first time in history American women are more likely than men to get tattooed; 23% have tattoos as compared to 19% of men; and 14% of men and women have two or more. It is a now a credible hypothesis, that the increase in body modifications have arisen to fill the vacuum left by the loss of a symbolic and metaphorical connection to the unconscious.
Tattooing and the process of tattooing brings the emphasis back to the body, the skin, and most directly to the multi-layered psyche as a focus of interest. In fact, except for psychoanalysis, little in my opinion more directly connects the body, and corporality to interiority and the Self, than various forms of body modification. Privileging the body, always privileges psyche; modifying the body, often awakens and strengthens linkages between consciousness, and the unconscious psyche.
Although many express the importance of the surface appeal of their tattoos, rarely does the narrative end at that point. Most, who tell their stories, weave an intricate connection between the tattoo of choice, the story of its healing potential, and its connection to the never-ending project of self-expression and transformation. “Written on the skin—the very membrane that separates the self from the world—tattoos are diary entries, public announcements, conversation pieces, counter-cultural totems, valentines to lovers, memorial to the dead, reminders to the self. They are scars and symptoms, mistakes and corrections. Collectively they form a secret history of grappling with the self in relationship to body….” [i] In fact, tattoos often directly transform the place of profound wounding, (from sexual assaults, to deeply invasive or deforming surgeries) sealing and containing them, reclaiming the body for the Self and initiating a generative process within.
The defining feature of tattooing is the making of indelible pigmented traces which are inside or underneath the skin behind what seems like a transparent layer. When in tattoo, the skin is transformed, and gives its own half-life over to a newly “living” image. This underscores the tattoo’s potential to effectively represent the interior of the psyche. It is the transformation of an area of the skin into an image (or script) which appears to elevate the tattoo to a form of psychic expression. This combined with choosing a particular image, and designating a particular placement on the body, places the power in the hands of the person who is experiencing something internally and makes choices. These choices result in a physical permanent mark on the skin, and a potential point of deep connection with the unconscious psyche.
One can conceive of the process of tattooing as a converting of the skin into a “ritual space” for healing.[ii] The tattoo and the process of tattooing, despite its conversion into a sanitized and modernized process, remains a form of corporeal transformation. What is external is transformed into something internal to the subject; and memory, a critical property of contemporary self-identity, is externalized and fixed upon the skin. Accordingly, tattoo artist Vkyvyn Lazonga claims that “getting pierced and tattooed tends to develop a person’s awareness of memory; the piercings or tattoos become points of reference that reinforce the self and history, and such practice do more than merely ‘remind’ or ‘reinforce’, they may also elicit who the person is or is becoming. In this sense they evoke, not only the registration of external events but internal depth.” [iii] Chinchilla, the British tattooist adds that, “everything that she inks on people is already inside them…she only opens the skin and lets it out.” [iv]
What is central to the conversion of the skin to a vehicle of psychic transport is what Alfred Gell, in his account of Polynesian tattooing, has termed the, “technical schema” of tattooing: “the puncturing, cutting and piercing of the skin; the flow of blood and the infliction of pain; the healing and closure of the wound; and the indelible trace of the process, a visible and permanent mark on, yet underneath the skin: ‘an inside which comes from the outside…’ the exteriorization of the interior which is simultaneously the interiorization of the exterior.” [v]
Central to this process, is both the intentional wounding, the opening and then closing of the body, and the pain. Pain is an intrinsic and necessary aspect of the process of body modification and psychic penetration. Such practices speak to important and powerful concerns around flesh (body) and Self, linked with these processes of bodily inscription. Lacassagne[vi] speaks of these tattooed marks as “scars that speak”. I would add here, these are scars that not only speak, but in so doing, create a dialogue between inner and outer, and between interiority and exteriority.
This method of theorizing about the tattoo, is interesting as it captures a quality of the paradoxical and turns on the idea that there is an interaction or play between the “interior” and the “exterior” aspects of the tattoo, and the indelible mark that is simultaneously on and under the surface of the skin. This play of opposites, inside and outside, symbolic and corporeal and their interaction creating something new, underscores Jungian thought, and provides a context with which to explore with our analysands, (a population already involved in symbolic work) how tattoos function within their own internal-external processes, and opens the question, if this population, requires bodily inscription less than other groups.
In this context, it is interesting to understand, the moment when an analysand already involved in a deep symbolic connection to psyche, develops the need to have an indelible pigmented mark carved into their skin. Is that a moment akin to how Jung imagined the “big dream,” a notification from psyche of a momentous transition in the person’s life? Culling from the many narratives surrounding tattooing, I think this may be true. But, if this is the case, the question arises as to why some analysands are called to mark the occasion in this way; why is it that he or she are called to have it, “written in the flesh”; and how does this act impact the on-going treatment? Cultural and social changes, provide the opportunity for those who seek analysis to feel comfortable tattooing, but this is clearly not the whole of what is involved. The link between the metaphorical connections involved in body modification, and the generative movement of psyche appears to be a fruitful area for further study.
[i] Mifflin, Bodies of Subversion, 2013, p. 147. [ii] Lars Krutak, Spiritual Skin: Magical Tattoos and Scarification, p. 8. [iii] V. Vale and Andrea Juno, ‘Introduction” in Modern Primitives, ed. Vale and Juno, p. 5. [iv]Tattoo International, CLLV, November 1994, p. 11. [v] Alfred Gell, Wrapping in Images: Tattooing in Polynesia. Oxford, 1993, pp.38-39, quoted in Susan Benson, “Inscription of the Self: Reflections on Tattooing and Piercing,” p.237…in Caplan, Written on the Body. [vi] Quoted in Ibid p. 237.
Author
Joan Golden-Alexis, PHD, is a clinical psychologist, and certified Jungian analyst, practicing in New York City. She is on the teaching faculty of the Philadelphia Association of Jungian analysts, the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association of New York, and the clinical faculty of Yeshiva Graduate School of Psychology. Her practice consists of individuals and couples. She can be reached at drjgolden@earthlink.net.
According to Jung, the unconscious spontaneously produces images that are mythological in nature, meaning that they are symbolic, universal, and address the nature of the cosmos, and our place in it. Mythologems, or mythological motifs, are a kind of pre-existing psychic natural resource, present at least in potential in the deep layers of the psyche of every person. These mythological images are the raw materials from which the grand narratives that we know of as myth are formed.
Myths are products of the unconscious and reveal its workings. Jung wrote that “myths are original revelations of the preconscious psyche, involuntary statements about unconscious psychic happenings.”[i] Jung believed that myths and dreams spring from a common source – that they both draw from to the same aquifer of universal images. “The whole world of myth of fable is an outgrowth of unconscious fantasy just like the dream.”[ii] Jung believed that the motifs found in dreams and myths were so similar that they were nearly identical.
Dreams, being statements of the unconscious, play no small part in the therapy….The indubitable occurrence of archetypal motifs in dreams make a thorough knowledge of the spiritual history of man indispensable for anyone seriously attempting to understand the real meaning of dreams. The likeness between certain dream motifs and mythologems is so striking that they may be regarded not merely as similar but even identical. This recognition not only raises the dream to a higher level and places it in the wider context of the mythologem, but, at the same time, the problems posed by mythology are brought into connection with the psychic life of the individual.[iii]
Joseph Campbell adds some nuance to Jung’s assertion that myth and dream originate from the same source. He contends that myths are produced with the help of consciousness, and contain not merely upwelling of instinctual wisdom, but the distillation of generations of lived knowledge.
If we are to grasp the full value of the materials, we must note that myths are not exactly comparable to dream. Their figures originate from the same sources – the unconscious wells of fantasy – and their grammar is the same, but they are not the spontaneous products of sleep. On the contrary, their patterns serve as a powerful picture language for the communication of traditional wisdom. This is true already of the so-called primitive folk mythologies. The trance-susceptible shaman and the initiated antelope-priest are not unsophisticated in the wisdom of the world, not unskilled in the principles of communication by analogy. The metaphors by which they live, and through which they operate, have been brooded upon, searched, and discussed for centuries – even millenniums; they have served whole societies, furthermore, as the mainstays of thought and life. The culture patterns have been shaped to them. The youth have been educated, and the aged rendered wise, through the study, experience, and understanding of their effective initiatory forms. For they touch and actually bring into play the vital energies of the whole human psyche. They link the unconscious to the fields of practical action.[iv]
The grand mythic narratives, therefore, have been forged by culture. Myths tell us how to live and contain the distilled wisdom of the ancestors. Mythological stories, then, always tell us something important about the collective. They instruct the individual about how he or she ought to orient toward the wider culture. It may be that, at decisive moments in personal individuation, our individual choices intersect with larger collective currents. At these times, our personal story becomes part of the larger myth unfolding in the life of society around us. It is likely that mythological dreams appear at just such junctures.
As Jung points out, our dreams often include images that could have come from myths or fairy tales. There are big symbols such as snakes or trees, and these are accompanied by big feelings. Or our dreams have supernatural creatures or occurrences. Animals talk. There are witches or vampires. Then we know we are in the realm of the mythic. When mythological dreams appear, it may be that these are there to link our personal story to collective events, to place our personal drama decisively in a historical context. If we are indeed connected to the entirety of human experience through the underground rhizome of the collective unconscious, and influence flows both ways, then receiving a dream from this level of the psyche alerts us that we are in the flow of a collective psychic happening.
Consider the following dream:
It was a sunny day, and I was carrying a little girl dressed in a long white gown to be baptized. The path to the church led up a steep hill. But I was holding the child safely and securely in my arms. All of a sudden, I found myself at the brink of a crevasse. I had just enough time to set the child down on the other side before I plunged into the abyss.[v]
The image of the little girl alerts us that we are potentially in mythological territory. The child is a profound symbol of futurity, of that which is both fragile and yet destined to survive us. Jung says that the child is a symbol that new thing that appears spontaneously as a result of the union of opposites just at that time when we feel most stuck and desolate.
The “child” is born out of the womb of the unconscious, begotten out of the depths of human nature, or rather out of living Nature herself. It is a personification of vital forces quite outside the limited range of our conscious mind; of ways and possibilities of which our one-sided conscious mind knows nothing; a wholeness which embraces the very depths of Nature. It represents the strongest, the most ineluctable urge in every being, namely the urge to realize itself.[vi]
The transpersonal content symbolized by the little girl is being carried by the dream ego toward a ritual experience of rebirth and consecration. The dream is reassuring that this content will survive beyond the destruction of the conscious personality. As a symbol, the child can stand for that which was there before consciousness, and that which will remain after consciousness ceases to be.
The child…is thus both beginning and end, an initial and a terminal creature. The initial creature existed before man wan, and the terminal creature will be when man is not. Psychologically speaking, this means that the “child” symbolizes the pre-conscious and the post-conscious essence of man. His pre-conscious essence is the unconscious state of earliest childhood; his post-conscious essence is an anticipation by analogy of life after death.[vii]
Just as our actual children will survive us and go on to carry a part of our essence into the infinite future, the symbolic child carries transpersonal values into the future beyond our personal, temporally limited engagement with them. (The image of the child is used to suggest just such a content at the end of the film 2001 A Space Odyssey.)
In fact, this dream was dreamt by Sophie Scholl on the night before her execution. According to the biography written by her sister, Scholl interpreted the dream to her cell mate thus:
“The child represents our idea, which will triumph in spite of all obstacles. We are allowed to be its trailblazers, but we must die before it is realized.”[viii]
Such a dream reveals to us the mythic substrate on which our personal drama unfolds. Mythological dreams may also perhaps reflect the currents of history and world events which flow beneath us at all times, but which we may not be capable of detecting without the benefit of hindsight.
Mythological dreams are usually Big Dreams, dreams that affect us powerfully, and stay with us for years. Mythological dreams encourage us to fulfill our personal destiny, so that we can take up our unique role in the life of the collective. They seem to appear at nodal points in our life, often prefiguring decisive moments when we face a choice whether to move in the direction of our mysteriously pre-ordained unfolding.
[i] “The Psychology of the Child Archetype,” The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, CW 9i, par. 261. [ii] “Principles of Practical Psychotherapy,” The Practice of Psychotherapy, CW 16, par. 17. [iii] “Foreword to White’s ‘God and the Unconscious,’” Psychology and Religion: West and East, CW 11, par. 450. [iv] Jospeh Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, pp. 256-257. [v] Beradt, C. (1968). The Third Reich of dreams. With an essay by Bruno Bettelheim. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, pp. 107-108. [vi] “The Psychology of the Child Archetype,” The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, CW 9i, par. 289. [vii] “The Psychology of the Child Archetype,” The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, CW 9i, par. 299. [viii] Beradt, C. (1968). The Third Reich of dreams. With an essay by Bruno Bettelheim. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, p. 108.
AUTHOR
Lisa Marchiano, LCSW is a certified Jungian analyst in private practice in Philadelphia. She blogs at http://www.theJungSoul.com and is the co-creator of This Jungian Life podcast. She can be reached through http://www.lisamarchiano.com
In contemporary society the reigning notion of psychology has increasingly come to be dominated by the physical sciences. Consequently discussion of ethics in psychology has largely been framed on the practice of medicine. The supposition underlying such a framing holds that events in the psyche are much like those in medicine, that is, due to specific causal factors and this furthermore suggests a definition of the psyche as a collection of effects. There are a number of good questions to ask with regard to this state of affairs the most important of which is whether or not the actual nature of the psyche is consonant, or even compatible, with the terms imposed upon it by a medical accounting of its nature. If the answer is yes, we may give some credence to the present state of affairs. But if the answer is no, even in part, a new notion of ethics must be introduced that would accord with the actual nature of the psyche.
One need not take the matters very far in order to realize that any approach to remediation of psychological suffering that proceeds from a fundamental misunderstanding, or mischaracterization, of the phenomenon with which it is concerned is likely, at some level, to yield problematic results. The question regarding the relationship between the nature of the physical sciences and that of the psyche is not a difficult one to answer. The psyche is not by nature an exclusively physical entity and its workings exceed those describable by the cause and effect relations that would characterize a purely physical universe. The phenomenology of the soul, therefore, cannot be adequately folded into either medicine or the physical sciences. It exists at a very different level of manifestation and pertains to an entirely different order of phenomena.
I feel the need to pause here. I have learned from experience that to suggest that science is not the only means through which one may define what is real is regarded as a sort of heresy. Doing so often invites dismissal and even scorn. This is an odd occurrence in psychology whose natural order includes, not only those measurable forms and patterns that would be the legitimate scope of scientific inquiry, but the entirety of those aspects that make up the context of immediate experience. It is also an odd appearance if the prevailing air currently adopted by psychology is scientific in nature as science purports dispassion as one of its core tenants. This latter feature reflects a shift in the situation of science within the cultural consciousness, one that alerts us to the fact that science has slipped it bounds and had become a belief system. However, if one removes from our understanding of the psyche, the existence of consciousness, of meaning, and any notion of the creative, which itself reflects the living aspect of psychic existence, one then has no need for the term psychology at all, for we are not longer speaking of a logos of the soul but simply an arrangement of matter. Herein lies the problem. The passion with which the contemporary mentality has molded science into a social belief system, and accorded it an exclusive status as the arbiter of what may be considered real, is something that actually represents an obstacle in even understanding psychologically, let alone establishing a genuine ethics of the soul. The exclusion of some criteria, and the overemphasis of others, leaves us with a distorted concept of the soul, not to mention the fact that the chosen means for authenticating reality runs counter means that would be appropriate for truly psychological understanding.
The supposition that the psyche is a scientifically definable entity is actually a logical absurdity, but it is an absurdity void of any awareness of its absurd nature. Once any approach to the soul is limited to that framed according to a single mode, it is impossible for awareness to come into contact with any dimension of experience that would challenge what has now become a fundamentalist stance. The underlying mode of consciousness underlying scientific inquiry is the rational mode. This mode has its specific function, an important one in the conscious life of the individual, as well as in society. In the development of technologies, and in acquiring information regarding the spatiotemporal order of things this mode functions in a vital manner. But set up as an arbiter of all reality it becomes an agent of dissociation, establishing schisms between the diversity of aspects of consciousness that would naturally inform one another. Understood from another viewpoint that is capable of engagement with a plurality of forms of consciousness, even contradictory ones, it represents a hegemonic state of affairs, absurdly so. One does not go too far in analogizing this situation to a kind of colonization of the psyche by a particular mythic structure, and this is the core of the problem. The rational mind has sought to take over the role of the mythic consciousness rather than assuming its rightful place as one mode within a plurality of modes of consciousness. It is likely that it is the assertion of its factual basis that leads rational consciousness into a denial of its unconsciously mythic role. Under such circumstances, one aspect, within a plurality, has managed to assert dominance over the rest of the possibilities.
Were it the case that rational consciousness actually represented the apogee of emerged forms of consciousness, one might make a positive argument for its hegemonic status, but alas, this is not the case. It was not idle intent that moved Einstein to state, “The rational mind is a faithful servant and the intuitive mind a sacred gift. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” If we can speak of a hierarchy of forms, rational consciousness would naturally assume a lesser role. It is therefore ethically problematic to exclusively equate rational consciousness with psychological health, as some forms of psychotherapeutic approach tend to assert. Such an assertion merely points to the idea that conformity to an established societal myth is the measure of psychological health. If so, the ethical question then rests upon the ethics of the society in question. Here, there may be problems.
One of the problems that we face is the fact that any mode of understanding will tend to extend its structural principle so that it appears universal in scope. This process has a functional aspect in that it expands the depth of understanding along the lines of the particular mode in question and, in some cases, forms the binding structure of a society. This latter tendency, to act as a binder, is a mythic role. But at the same time this process gives rise to a shadow result as it narrows consciousness and begins to imprison consciousness within its own limited confines. This secondary result is pathological, not only in the individual, but also at the broader societal level. The rational mind organizes its vision of the cosmos according to its precepts, as a rational entity that will ultimately be reducible to rational terms. This assumption is, from a mythic standpoint, almost indistinct from the religious one that saw in the cosmos the workings of a divine will exclusively. These two modes never shared the same reference language because they arose out of very different functional roles within consciousness and pertain to very different orders of phenomena. Both have historically appeared purposeful in their respective realms of functioning. However, once established in the role of being at the top of a hierarchic paradigm and armed with an insistence on an unassailable claim to confer truth, what was at first purposive, became altogether malignant. The very same thing that once extended humanity’s embrace with life now begins to constrict it.
Part of the problem resides in science as a legitimate mode of engagement with phenomena within its own parameters, as opposed to science as a mythic structure. The dilemma that we are in is that one mode of consciousness has attempted to usurp the functional role of another. The notion that religion could replace the function of science is a fairly easy fallacy for most in contemporary society to perceive. But that science has assumed the mantle of myth is less clear to us. This is so because we are living within it. The myth of origins of rational consciousness is one in which all phenomena must conform to physical law. However such a notion excludes phenomena that are more than physical in nature.
As a binder that establishes a coherent bond between individuals within a society that is highly diverse and fragmented, any cement for that bond is likely to become that to which all parties may agree. The problem appears to arise when such a bond assumes the form of a unifying myth that cannot actually function effectively in a mythic manner. The rational mind understands myth as a false or provisional explanation. Myth is an inferior, or un-evolved attempt at fact. But myths primary role is not the establishment of fact, nor even a compensation for its lack, but rather it serves to cohere a diversity of experience into a form that renders the flow of existence both meaningful and relatable. This means that myth acts as a bridge between forms of consciousness, and the diversity of phenomena that correspond to them, rather than reducing them to a single mode of understanding. Myths are fictive constructs that reveal an objectivity that is of an entirely different order than that understood by the rational mind. The two run in almost diametrically opposed manner. Ratio means to divide, but myth is a fictive construct whose form embodies within it the cohered reality of lived experience. It unifies a natural diversity into a unified livable reality.
Each myth has something that is true as it base but no mythic structure known to humanity is able to account for the totality of possible truths. Rather, it creates an image of a totality out of the truth it touches and provides a means of maintaining the continuity of our relations with it. The role played by each myth differs, not only between civilizations, but also between individuals, each of whom carries within them a construct in image form that holds together the universe that they know. That such a myth is born out of conditions of privilege, privation, safety, or trauma, has little impact upon the fact that it retains its unique and fully objective nature, an objectivity linked to the context of a lived life and a unique truth, rather than in spite of it. It is a naturally arising form that exceeds description according to means lying outside of it and can only be understood through entering into its world. An approach to this world is entirely different than the one utilized in the sciences as we now conceive of them for its nature exceeds linearity and is itself a creative mutation rather than another iteration along the lines of a previously established order. Such an approach as is needed, while perhaps not necessarily religious in nature, requires something of a stance in consciousness that one did find in most religious constructs; the ability to not know, and to anticipate the existence, or appearance, of an order that exceeded ones ability to predict in advance. The loss of contact with this ability within a society, as well as within a discipline that purports to now define what it means to be a human being in relationship to the broader cosmos, is a problematic state of affairs at best.
What I have been suggesting is that an ethic associated with the psyche will have far more to do with the nature of myth and the fictive, rather than with fact, so long as our definition of myth includes an understanding of its functional nature. This includes the meaningful unification of highly diverse modes of awareness into a coherent system, one that will allow life to be lived fully in a psychological sense rather than merely a physical sense alone. The implications of this for the ethical approach of the psychologist, is that the psychologist must be prepared to enter into the mythic reality of the patient as opposed to standing at a distance safely ensconced in a societal one which reduces the mythic function to a state of unreality. This is so because the mythic reality of the patient, no matter how non-rational it may appear, has at its core a truth that is conveyed through its dramatizations and imagistic expressions, only some of which may conform to the realm of fact.
It is this above all that seems essential if we are to consider an ethics of the soul, for soul speaks to us not in parts, so much as through them. It is the ethical task of the observing consciousness of the psychologist to tend as carefully as possible to all of the diverse utterances of the soul without resorting to a scheme that would assert one dimension of the psyche arbitrarily over another. This dimension of ethical consideration demands a discipline that is actually far more exacting than is found in other fields, for it asks of the would be explorers of psychological reality that they participate in the very emergence of psychic reality at multiple levels of awareness even as they maintain the ability to observe and relate to it. In that sense the psychologist is not merely recording but also tending to that which is emerging and even becoming a part of that process. In that sense it is through the very being of the psychologist that psychological reality is realized in an internal sense rather than through means that are external to the context of experience. This is a demanding task but perhaps given the nature of the psyche, the most ethically pertinent approach that we may take.
In a future posting I hope to expand on some of the natures of the diverse aspects of consciousness and the stances within consciousness that may be called upon (at least potentially) for any actual encounter with the soul to take place if we are not to overtly reduce it. These include not simply those that frame the modern myth, but mythical, magical, and archaic ones as well, ones that modern thought presumed it had surpassed. These seemingly more “primitive” forms continue as functional aspects of humanities intimate bond with the cosmos and their influence may be everywhere seen so long as one is willing to look. In that regard a visiting of esoteric thought in particular is well worthwhile. The image from the visionary Jakob Bohme, (above) is one such example. Bohme’s cosmology suggested a transit to higher knowledge through a return to an intimate contact with nature, a paradigm that has a profound meaning to it and is applicable to daily analytic practice. It reflects the position that I am putting forth here; that the plurality of forms of consciousness each have functional value, and that this functional value persists in our makeup in a manner that contradicts the modernist myth of matter. Indeed I would suggest that the incapacity of consciousness to loan its own function to nature is likely the singularly most tragic pitfall of modern civilization. It is not fact alone that ties us to nature herself any more than science can define the psyche. A review of esoteric forms will be helpful in showing how highly invested such forms are in compensating what is actually lacking in the contemporary mentality. What they restore is a function within consciousness that permits a spanning of the realm of the archetype with that of the discrete life of the individual. Another way of saying this is that they connect the mundane world of material things with their eternal origins. In so doing they complete a circuit of reconnection and renewal.
AUTHOR
Mark Dean, MFA, MA, ATR-BC, LPC is a Jungian Analyst and an art psychotherapist with credentials as a Registered, Board Certified Art Therapist and Licensed Professional Counselor (PA) with nearly twenty years experience. He has been an Adjunct Professor at Arcadia University since 1990. Previous work experience includes providing addiction treatment at the Charter Fairmount Institute, Clinical Case Management for the Adult Day Program, and serving as the Clinical Coordination of the Geriatric Outpatient Programs at Belmont Center for Comprehensive Treatment as well as his private practice. His volunteer work includes providing clinical intervention with violent and displaced youths in the Violence Postvention Program and at The Northern Home for Children in Philadelphia. Mr. Dean has been the recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Award for Artistic Excellence and has twice received the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts Award. Prior to his graduate training as an art psychotherapist, Mr. Dean was a professional artist. His work is featured in several prominent private and public, national, and international collections. He can be reached at http://www.psychearts.org
Crows with iridescent rich feathers swoop in layers in front of my windshield. Their chatter hales down like hard pellets fallen from an August rain cloud in this October month. I drive into furious black wings, expecting they can be swept aside, made invisible, that they have not chosen me, but only like me, are weary after night flight across a sleeping continent. Their black pea eyes refuse to blink. They push roughly against air forcing me to breathe deeper like the first time, out of the birth waters, trying to catch that first breath of air. On this umbilical highway each exhalation releases: wings rise and fall to earth, these messengers of Eshu, bring divination, falling like rain, blur my vision in embryonic thin air. Finished, they fly east to the ocean. Sunrise reflects like water and oil on wings of charcoal. The space behind my heart darkens, while nigredo feathers fallen to earth, predict my mother’s death.
The summer is only beginning, though these hot, humid days suggest August, rather than the light touch of warmth that June most often brings. For the last several months I have been thinking, actually more ruminating about mortality, and to say it in what seems a more blunt manner, dying. This is the close personal death—not the distant one of a collective ritual such as Catholic extreme unction or the death of an actor playing someone dying in a movie. It is not the hearing of the death of an actor who has been immortalized on the screen. I question. How could he die? How old was he anyway—surely not that old? Then I remember the years since I first saw him on screen. I realize that the difference of our age is not that great. I might be closer to death then I think. Of course I am because I cannot know the minute nor the hour. This thought makes dying seem so very close to me. As if I will die. Can die—soon. For these few seconds I know this and think I can actually feel my body dying.
I have begun with my own mortality but I also want to talk about mothers and our holding and lose of them. In a soft way, like a small pocket of lightly swirling cove water, under the ocean, I have been thinking only about my own personal mother’s death, and so a patient came not too many days ago, because she is in mourning about her own mother’s recent death. Of course, every one who walks through the analytical door is carrying a gift, a contributing reason for my existence as I am for theirs. They are each bringing something I must hold with love and bear with courage. This is because I have forgotten and need reminding of my necessary life work.
I wonder if it isn’t too mournful and dreadful in some way to be thinking about death in the summer. Doesn’t it belong in a dark month, a rainy, cloud-driven late January day? As a depth psychologist I can safely say not—it’s all right to bring the darkness anytime as it never really leaves us. Yes, there is safety here but there is also safety in wanting the light—the beautiful light of a blue-sky June day.
I struggle with wanting both—because I actually need both. It does remind me of what appears as a paradox to me of having someone bring you into the world, be your first place of heart connection, all the while having them die, and yet still be with them in memory. This is for all the years the rest of my life. This might seem so simplistic in thought but it holds a great importance in how I feel my life and feel into my life.
This apparent eternal connection to life and mother, even through her death, sometimes even more so because of her death, interweaves through my life and that of my patients.
As I read through pages of author discussions in service of writing a book on what I have called Archetypal Grief—African American mothers losing their children for generations due to slavery, and the emotional pain of such losses, I feel myself to now be living within the phenomenological field of mothers and death. But like many things, I feel myself to have been chosen in this moment because I have chosen a topic—a theme, that wants to be expanded upon and yet carries the weight of intergenerational trauma that remains today.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, a pioneer in the field of writing about death and dying, begins to inform my writing work—allowing me to develop an idea for a new model of consideration. This idea is that something changes the model of grief with intergenerational dying and mourning caused by an archetypal event such as slavery. It is almost as if a mother, and all the enslaved future daughters she births and their daughter’s daughters, moving down the maternal line, will have no place for denial or bargaining as regards death. Emotionally, there can only be room for anger, depression and acceptance. This is what can frame the lived experiences of mothering slaves bound to death through birthing and intergenerational child loss. I’m speaking of this because it has threaded through my consciousness for the past year as I write about enslaved mothers. I also know that it lives in me as a member of this cultural collective.
Working Hands Sunset red next to azure blue next to spring green, the colors of the quilt stream, an unchecked flow of colored river gradually meeting shore, the working brown of my grandmother’s hands.
This past Mother’s Day was a May Sunday in the middle of the month. I performed a short ritual in remembrance of my mother and all of the women of my matriarch lineage. I also remembered the women on my father’s side of family. This day designated for mothers is not the only one in which we think about the women who have given us life. In speaking of the mother archetype Jung says:
Like any other archetype, the mother archetype appears under an almost infinite variety of aspects….First in importance are the personal mother and grandmother, stepmother and mother-in-law….or a remote ancestress….The qualities associated with it are maternal solicitude and sympathy; the magic authority of the female; the wisdom and the spiritual exaltation that transcend reason; any helpful instinct or impulse; all that is benign, all that cherishes and sustains, that fosters growth and fertility. The place of magic transformation and rebirth, together with the underworld and its inhabitants, are presided over by the mother.
C.G. Jung, CW, vol9i, para. 156, 158
As I consider the passage of my own mother into death, I think more of my own to-come experience of dying. I think about how we can be afraid of dying. As I age, I realize I am in the category of one more likely to die. This is sobering. It doesn’t seem to matter how much presence death has when one is younger—in the twenties, thirties, the later years adds a different quality dimension. How I can be afraid of it, and how each patient who discusses dying of a parent, friend or stranger is actually referencing their own death. I believe this is why we must consider wisdom as we age. It seems an important exchange—a trade-off, a softening offered against the hard edge of ego consciousness leaving the body.
As I write now, I wonder about my own purpose on choosing this meditation on mothers, death and dying. It feels not like swimming in a spiral of self-aggrandizement but more like a spider traversing her web. Seeking a place to belong while knowing that all is at once home.
Blue Pearl Stepping outside of the hospital where she had just died, my arms have become wings. Blue pearl surrounds my heart and moves in the birthing motion of a star, unencumbered by fear of loss, now desiring only a child’s life. I am warm with sunrays. All false joys are tossed away like disappointing fruit, fallen next to discarded sorrow. All of it waiting to be washed away by the next rainfall. Ocean stone shines cerulean glory, pierces doubt, recovers with winds of truth any falsehood about love, and it’s power to heal all that hurts. Caresses heartbreak. Breathes tender. Like the velvet softness of aged skin. Sapphire reflects upon itself, star to star, captures my breath, recreates it pearl by pearl. And by this I know you have arrived safely.
AUTHOR
Fanny Brewster Ph.D. M.F.A., is a Jungian analyst and author of African Americans and Jungian Psychology: Leaving the Shadows. (Routledge, 2017). She is a faculty member of the Philadelphia Jung Institute and can be reached through www.fannybrewster.com
I have been thinking about Sleeping Beauty lately—remember her? She was never one of my favorites. I felt on early reading that she was rather a twit, stumbling upon the one and only spindle left in the entire kingdom and then pricking herself with it. Surely, at age 15, she should have developed more hand-eye coordination. This unlikely occurrence—how sharp could a spindle be, anyway?—caused every living being in castle to fall into a coma, even the flies. I mean really, SB.
As a child, I resonated to tales of ego strength: Jack, after his initial bad bargain (trading the family cow for a handful of beans), climbed the beanstalk and polished off a giant. Cinderella had the chutzpah to go to the ball and was rewarded with a prince. Hansel and Gretel roasted the horrid hag in her own oven—gotcha. SB, on the other hand, zonked out for 100 years, and was then awakened by a prince who happened to show up at just the right moment. If there was a life lesson in this story, it wasn’t apparent to me then.
But let’s get to the Evil Fairy part: EF wasn’t invited to the celebration of SB’s long-awaited royal birth, so she crashed the party and cursed SB, which turned into the fateful spindle-prick and 100 comatose years even for flies, not to mention innocent citizens. All this because SB’s parents were royally witless. In one version of the tale, EF wasn’t invited because the king and queen ran short of gold dinnerware. In another, they thought EF was dead, and didn’t bother to check.
Neither did they explain the evils of spindles to their daughter in case the burning and purging they had decreed missed a few. Or, the minute SB turned 15, assign a bevy of bodyguards to fend off any spindles that might be stalking her. Instead, the king and queen went on a trip, SB went poking around the castle—and guess what? There was a spindle right there in the castle—duh!
With everyone out cold, plant life sprang into action: a Trump-tower high hedge of thorns grew up around the castle and entrapped any would-be hero trying to get through (what a way to die). But on the exact day the hundred-year curse was up, the malevolent hedge opened to Hero Prince, who was visiting the area and was curious about the rumored castle avec princess. Of course HP found SB even though she was up in a remote tower with that terrible spindle. Everyone in the castle came back to life, now very unfashionably dressed, and HP and SB got married, code for Problem Over.
What I found frustrating about this tale was its lack of human agency, and along with it, assurance that I, like many a hero and heroine, can overcome even the most daunting difficulty. Feckless parents are a common occurrence in fairy tales, but even dummlings like Jack could finagle a way out of a situational jam. SB, however, totally checked out, only to be rescued by a prince who was mostly in the right place at the right time—no clever effort, brave feat, or lofty love.
From a Jungian viewpoint all the characters in a fairy tale can represent aspects of an individual psyche. We can recognize parts of ourselves in SB’s clueless parents, an innocent princess, and the fury of a disdained fairy. What an unappealing cast of characters—I mean characteristics.
But what I have found most irritating in this tale is its fatalism: sometimes you-know-what happens and we just have to wait in situ until a savior arrives. But no worries: when the time is right (even if it feels like a century), a hero-prince-rescuer will show up. Life and energy will then be restored without anyone having to make much effort. This is hardly a heartening message.
But wait: the fateful chain of events began when the king and queen excluded the 13th fairy. Because they were unable to engage her darkness, the shadow she represented became actively hostile. The royal couple had hoped to ensure their daughter a rosy life, but her life, and ours, must necessarily include shadow.
Conscious and unconscious must have it out with one another, a process Jung likens to that of hammer and anvil. Two sturdy opposites are required for psychic life and conscious individuation. Otherwise, as we see in the tale, collapse and stasis ensue.
The king and queen’s denial of shadow illustrates one of Jung’s famous dictums: When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate—which, as we know from the tale and from life, exacts a high price. Because everyone except the late and lucky hero falls unconscious, resolution resides outside human agency. Redemption is left to the archetypal realm as fate.
We can, of course, mitigate fate: “We have to discover more consciousness, to extend consciousness, and the more it is extended the more we get away from the original condition.” (CW 11, p. 967) Perhaps that famous, fateful spindle can prick us into the value of ever more conscious engagement in our lives.
AUTHOR
Deborah Stewart is a Certified Jungian Analyst on Cape Cod. She is a faculty member of the Philadelphia Jung Institute and a co-creator of This Jungian Life podcast. You can reach her at http://www.deborahcstewart.com
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