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

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)

CANYONS OF THE SOUL

It often seems not to occur to the contemporary citizen that the ecological crisis that we now face is, in fact, the symptom of the success of a one sidedness of our vision of the world. Armed as we are with the illusion that our rationality represents, most of all, the path to a better existence, that we are becoming a more just, peaceful, and reasonable people, we miss the fact that incrementally the discrete benefits that we have attained at one level of experience are paid for at another. The late Biologist Brian Goodwin, in a little book called, Nature’s Due, observed the following.

“The process of continuous growth that our politicians and economists offer as a path to happiness and fulfillment is in fact a policy of conflict resolution that continually transfers our debt to nature, whose bounty we are living from and systematically destroying.”

 (Goodwin, 2007, p.161)

Central to Goodwin’s observation is a level of unconsciousness on the part of humanity of any means through which the fate of individual could actually be felt as intimately tied to that of nature. The core reason for this is that with the arising of scientific thought and its power, all other modes of existing in the world, and relating to it were not simply eclipsed, but actually negated. Problematic, for this perspective, was the lack of any understanding that that the former forms of awareness that seemed suddenly illegitimate were not addressing the same problems of existence as the one that supposedly supplanted them. The mythological mind, as well as the magical and the archaic, served very different functions, and addressed very different aspects of experience. Most problematic of all, the exclusively outward gaze of the rational mind cast into shadow the inner world of humanity, an inner world whose nature was the very thing driving our actions in the physical world. Sayyed Hossein Nasr states this point beautifully.

“For a humanity turned towards outwardness, by the very process of modernization, it is not easy to see that the blight wrought upon the environment is in reality an externalization of the destitution of the inner state of the soul of that humanity whose actions are responsible for the ecological crisis.”

  (Nasr, 1997, p. 3)

Ralph Waldo Emerson also expressed a very similar view.

“The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty is solved by the redemption of the soul. The ruin, or the blank, that we see when we look at nature is in our own eye. The axis of vision is not coincident with the axis of things, and so they appear not transparent but opaque. The reason why the world lacks unity and lies broken and in heaps is because man is disunited with himself.” 

(Emerson, “Nature”1941, p.114)

All around us today there is a cry to wake up to the climatological crisis. At issue is the fact that we must act differently from now on. While not wishing, in any way, to speak against such a move, my experiences as an analyst tells me that this will likely not be enough. Our attitudes towards the interior universe, with which we all participate, will, in the long run, likely matter far more than our outward gestures.  This is so because in spite of what our society has taught us, the universe of magical consciousness, and of mythic consciousness, forms that still exist within us, served us well. They tethered us meaningfully to the nature around us and rendered visible and relatable the universe within us. Theirs was not a project of domination of nature, but of participation and relatedness with it. It is not a more rational world that we need. It is a more connected one. The problems of our time will likely not be solved by the amassing of information about the material order, but rather through a coming to terms with the one aspect of nature that we understand hardly at all, our own inner nature.

To the modern, the old forms of awareness, those forms which tied human consciousness intimately to the cosmos, represent merely quaint, ill conceived, and unsuccessful, means to manipulate the world. This perspective merely illustrates how trapped within a given perspective we actually are. Rene Guenon wrote;

“Modern civilization appears in history as a veritable anomaly: of all known civilizations, it is the only one to have developed in a purely material direction, and the only one not based on any principle of a higher order. This material development, already underway for several centuries now, and continuing at an ever accelerating pace, has been accompanied by an intellectual regression for which it is unable to compensate.”

(Guenon, “Symbols of Sacred Science”.2004, p. 2 )

The irony of all of this is that, drunk on the power to manipulate nature, humanity has, by virtue of dissociation from nature, nearly succeeded in destroying itself. Psychology, for its part, has participated in this process as theologian Jurgen Moltmann pointed out.

“Any therapy is directed towards health. But health is a norm which changes with history and is conditioned by society. If in todays society health means ‘the capability to work and the capability for enjoyment’, as Freud could put it, and this concept of heath even dominates psychotherapy, the Christian interpretation of the human situation must nevertheless also question the compulsive idolatry which the concepts of production and consumption introduce into this definition, and develop another form of humanity. Suffering in a superficial, activist, apathetic and therefor dehumanized society can be a sign of spiritual health.“

  (Moltmann, “The Crucified God”, 1974, pp. 314-315.)

The irony of much of this is simply that the means to establish our connections back to nature were never really lost. Those forms of awareness, which evolved as meeting places between man and nature, and of which we are the inheritors, never left us. Additionally, the purported superiority of rational thought was itself a myth. To be sure rational thought is indeed, in it’s own way, quite superior. In the realm of manipulating matter for humanities presumed advantage, it is unsurpassed. But the problem lies in its tendency to assume a role of power over all meaning, a role that is logically impossible. Like many other things ascendant, it has became a basis for a societal belief system and has sought to extend its purview infinitely, something it could only achieved through the denial of the existence of anything it could not account for. And like all things that seek dominance and define the world according to a given view, a shift occurs so that they go from being a means to extend humanities relationship with nature, to something that begins to obscure. That is what Emerson told us above.

Poet William Stafford, drawing in part from his Native American roots, offers the following simple poem.

                                              These are some canyons

                                              we might use again

                                              sometime.  

What Stafford points to may be literally come to pass. Humanity, if it survives at all, may find itself once again returning to the shelters that nature once provided for us. But I have in mind another reading of Stafford. That such canyons have always been within us,in the inner landscape of the soul. There to offer shelter from everything we have wanted to see as progress but only served to draw us away from ourseleves.

AUTHOR

Mark Dean, MFA, MA, ATR-BC, LPC is a Certified 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. Mark can be reached at markdean2@me.com.

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.

Written in the Flesh—The Transformational Magic of the Tattoo

 

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.

Mythological Dreams

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

 

Meditation on Mothers and Death

Eshu’s Vision

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

Grief as Anger

           

One of the most recognizable stereotypes of African American women is that of the Angry Black Woman.  I believe that this image of Africanist women has grown out of the Collective’s need to have a Feminine upon which to project strength.

Following the decades after slavery and the plantation system where black women worked in the fields, birthed and lost their children, took care of the children of others and suffered being a mothering slave, it seems that the American psyche would find these women to be strong of character.  This is oftentimes applied to black women—that they are strong.  But sometimes this strength is mistaken for anger—thus the angry black woman stereotype. Stereotypes exist because there was once an image, language, a story that created in our consciousness a tangible remembrance.  The recollection becomes solidified as a stereotype.

When I think about the stereotype of the angry black woman I begin to search deeper, looking for something else that resonates with what has risen to the surface.  But before going there it might be important to see why an African American woman might be angry.  The emotion of anger within ourselves can sometimes make us afraid.  We cannot tolerate the uncontrolled welling up and intense heat of the energy of rage or anger.  We can be equally afraid of the release of this anger.  I’m thinking of a situation that might cause one to be angry and yet be out of touch with how to express this anger—to have it suppressed for the sake of one’s survival. Just for a moment imagine that you are a female child born into slavery in the early 1800’s.  Your mother has birthed you and returned to the cotton fields within a month of your birth.

She sometimes comes home to breastfeed you when given permission but otherwise, your early infancy is spent in the care of an elder in the shack where you may have been born.   You might easily be cared for by a young boy if there is no elder woman available. As an infant, you continue to live with others in the shack who may or may not be biological family.  As you begin to get older you are given chores to perform in the white family’s house or in the fields.  These are minor chores and do not take up much of your time as you can still find time to play with the other small white children of the plantation owner.  The day eventually comes when you are no longer allowed to play with these children.  At the age of 8 or ten you must take on more serious jobs—you become a night-pillow for the mistress or worse yet for the master.  Your body, that never really belonged to you, now becomes recognized by you as being the possession of another. Suspicion of the ownership of your mother’s body is now finalized in your mind as you understand that she too belongs to a white master.  You find that your skin color makes you a slave.  You are told that this is how it is and how it will be for the rest of your life.  Imagine that this is your life—for the rest of your life. Imagine your anger.

The idea that slavery happened so long ago and has no place in our cultural thinking today is a part of  America’s Shadow.  It is difficult to bear the thoughts of what life must have been like back then but this is a necessary part of the healing of our American collective.  We wish to forget and we cannot forget.

When we remember and attempt to make some changes good can happen—a civil rights movement emerges which does not end in another civil war; voting rights are guaranteed by law; segregation ends.

But we cannot shine enough light onto the shadow for too long and so once more we sit at the edge of shadow awaiting the next racial storm to begin.  We have had our Ferguson and all the deaths of Black men and women by policemen within the last five years.  I believe that our cultural complexes are so activated by fear and anger that we have a great difficulty staying with patience for understanding what might help us heal our American racial Shadow.

We can understand our anger, our guilt. What of the grief that lives under the anger?  What happens to the emotion of generations of former slaves?  Jung says that our history is in our blood.  The DNA that we live with identifies us as historical and archetypal human beings.  If I feel into how my ancestors before me lived, whether through mirror neurons or the spirit of ancestors, how do I carry the traumatic emotions such as anger and the underlying grief of centuries-old slavery?  I think that we could be angry but we must also hold a deep place for grief.  So when I hear about the angry black woman, I am also trying to hold psychic space for the grief-filled woman.  Where does this grief emerge from and where does it go?  I think that at this point it could be just enough to consider that such a thing exist—an underlying grief that rests within the bosom of generations of African Diaspora women.  This grief can appear as anger.  Why not?  Within the clinical setting oftentimes the emotion of anger covers sadness and sorrow.  What would make this unlikely in a cultural group that has survived 400 years of slavery?  What is the archetypal grief of a mothering slave? These are questions that I ask myself because of the American life that I lead—both personally and professionally.

Biography

Fanny Brewster, Ph.D., M.F.A. is a Jungian analyst, PAJA member and Core Faculty with Pacifica Graduate Institute.