Thursday, December 5, 2013

Many thanks to Patricia Damery for her honest review of my book which she published on her blog and on the Depth Psychology Alliance blog site.

Review: Platko's In the Tracks of the Unseen

Some topics are so controversial we cannot discuss them. Jane Davenport Platko’s In the Tracks of the Unseen: Memoirs of a Jungian Analyst brings one of those topics into full view: when the doctor and patient fall in love.

While we psychoanalysts and psychotherapists have thorough discussions as to why these kinds of relationships are problematic, we seldom have open discussions about what happens when they seem to work. Those who have entered such relationships rightfully fear judgment. I will be honest. I have a bias. Having barely survived the 1970’s in psychology after early experiences with therapists and teachers who did not know the power of the tool of the transference, I developed a healthy respect of the need for “boundaries,” as we put it in the talk of our trade. As a result, I often have had a hair trigger reaction when these boundaries are transgressed. For the most part, I think my stance has merit.

But Platko’s story demonstrates it is not so simple. What happens when the analytic vessel cannot contain the feeling within a transference format, when the Self has something different in mind? Are there times the therapeutic meeting is a springboard into the soul connection of friendship or romantic love and this is not exploitive of the patient?

With great integrity, honesty, and courage, Platko lays out her vulnerabilities and history, antecedents to both a friendship with her first analyst and then marriage to a man who had been her patient. Her decisions are not impulsive. In fact, she deeply and openly suffers them with her then current analyst and with her then husband.

In the preface she quotes Jung, “My story is my truth.” This story is Platko’s truth, and one can only feel compassion, awe and concern for a woman reveals herself so openly in order for us to understand the decisions she has made. There will be judgment!

When I began reading In the Tracks of the Unseen, I did not want to put it down. Platko is a good storyteller, and I have not read a book like it. It is well written, albeit disturbing, submerging the reader in the rawness of human attachment and the lonely quest of a woman who followed her heart. This is an important book in that it questions some suppositions of the last decades, taking the structure of love in analytical relationships down to the studs. There are no answers here, only a kind of solutio. Perhaps it is only now that we can follow “the tracks of the unseen,” to a larger playing field that may redefine ethics and the challenges of the human connection in the vessel of analytic work.

Sunday, December 1, 2013

The Coming of Winter




 






Most writers of memoir need not expect the chill and silence that has followed in the wake of my words. My story touches upon the history of a psychoanalytic community, and while mine is not a narrative about the New England Society of Jungian Analysts, it references, in part, my experiences within it. Over a period of thirty-some years this institution and ever-changing collection of analysts have played a major role in my life.

Because of my love for the man who is my husband, who was initially for a period of nine months my patient, I have lived under the threat of professional excommunication for twenty-three years. For the most part mine was not an unknown story because from the start I turned to many of my colleagues for help and because of the surefire spread of gossip. In the early 90’s there was no ethics code that spelled out “A member shall not engage in physical contact of a sexual nature with a former analysand for at least two years after cessation or termination of the professional relationship.” But there was the written expectation that the analysts of this society “shall conduct themselves in their work according to the highest ethical standards and shall act in the best therapeutic interest of their analysands.”

It was clear to me from the start that I was stepping across a line that involved wearing a scarlet letter. I was also told from the start that to tell my story would be professional suicide.

Everyone should be free to love who they love, President Obama said in a recent speech referring to the LGBT community. Albeit for complex reasons, this is not true in the psychological community. Yet no one speaks of that.

I have colleagues and friends who support me in the telling of this story, even those who may not be in agreement with my beliefs, and I am forever grateful to them. And then there are those whom I have known for decades who receive the announcement of my book without a word.

Carl Jung based his psychology on the principle of individuation, becoming true to a higher Self that contains the opposites and I believe strives ultimately for the good. I have written a memoir that includes the breaking of silence as part of my individuation process.

 






What does it take to hold the tension of the opposites, between silence and speech, between your truth and my truth, to hold the still point and the talking point in a dialogue that moves us ever closer to the center and heart of our humanity? 

 

 

 


Friday, November 22, 2013

The Stories We Tell



 

When you write a memoir you must choose which stories to tell—and how to tell them.

Do you write from a stream of consciousness? Can you find the edges? Do you tell the truth? Even to yourself. When you write over time, over years, reflecting, re-membering, re-writing, “down the bones” as Natalie Goldberg says, does the truth change?

Can you extract the last drop of sweet to bitter, that which James Baldwin called art, or plumb the bottom of what Jungians call the complex—the tight tangle of repressed material we carry like a moat in the eye? To heal a complex Jung says one must drink the very last drop to turn bitterness to wisdom. With your words will you cross the river Styx into the underworld and make as William Styron did “Darkness Visible”?

What we dare to write does not stop being daring when we dot the last i and cross the last T and close the computer unless we are prepared to burn our pages along with our bridges and press the delete button. But if memoir is to be a piece of our individuation we may decide to take that step that Jung called the most difficult piece of the individuation process and reach across the void and say this is my story and my story is my truth.

And there may be those who get it and there will be those who do not. But once you let it go it is not yours. It has a life of its own. It is a line in the sand and in the mind of the reader. It disappears with the tide or becomes a thorn in a shoe. Or just perhaps it touches a heart in hiding. And a door opens.

Friday, November 15, 2013

On Memoir



 
Now that my memoir is in the marketplace of Amazon.com and in the hands of people I know and people I don’t know I have a new perspective, a perspective of one who has put a message in a bottle and set it into the stream. Perhaps it will catch on a rock and be buried in the mud. Perhaps a mother or a lover or an analyst or a trauma survivor will discover it. Perhaps its words will resonate with the blues that reverberate through the timeless notes of suffering and soul.

Perhaps it will begin a conversation.

What do I want from this, a reader asked me. Part of me doesn’t want anything, I said, What I have wanted, to tell my story, I have done. Then I am reminded of something Russell Lockhart wrote in his beautiful book “Psyche Speaks; A Jungian Approach to Self and World.” He writes, “a dream wants a dream; a poem wants a poem.” He writes of Eros, that spirit of longing for connection. A memoir wants a memoir. A story, a story.

But no one speaks to this more eloquently than Carter Heyward, in her book “When Boundaries Betray Us; Beyond Illusions of What is Ethical in Therapy and Life,” written in 1993.

Says Heyward, “There is in each of us a need to be heard to speech. A need born of our souls, the place of all real meeting, in which every I-Thou and all unalienated erotic power is conceived. This need in each of us is not a pathology. It is not a weakness. It is not a sin. The need does not originate in abuse. Its roots are not shameful. It is not immature. This need is not something to be treated or healed, liberated or outgrown. It is something in each of us to be cultivated and cherished, experienced and shared, with respect and tenderness, awe and humor…. There is in each of us a need to be heard to speech. This need is the root of all genuine healing and the source of all creative revolutionary movement. It is the wellspring of our redemption, and it is the hope of the world.”

Jung wrote in a letter quoted by Marie-Louise von Franz, “One of the most important and difficult tasks in the individuation process is to bridge the distance between people.” Memoir as individuation builds bridges that lead in many directions.

Friday, November 8, 2013

On what Is Real



 

When I was a little girl I stood on a chair at the kitchen counter and took turns with my mother mashing sugar into softened butter in a large yellow bowl. My mother’s cookies, a staple in our household, were kept in a tin can on top of the refrigerator.

Inside that bowl today the fine lines of tiny cracks and the gray wear of countless spoons against its baked yellow sides tell stories of tenderness and temper.

Jungian analyst, Patricia Damery, in her blog for her fascinating book Farming Soul writes about reality and perception as she refers us to her story of individuation, a deeply spiritual journey. She writes along the liminal edge of truth.

Which got me thinking about how many ways we ask the question, “What is real?” as we move to the edges of our consciousness. In my book In the Tracks of the Unseen I address that question in part around experiences of trauma and memory and dissociation. I write about the urgency that sometimes comes with uncertainty. The spiral descent to knowing.

When Jung was asked if he believed in God he answered that he didn’t believe, he knew.

For me, when I look into my yellow bowl that I now so treasure what is real is the sweet taste of cookie dough and the smiles and tears of a child.

Thursday, October 31, 2013

Harvest

 

 

Yesterday I published my memoir IN THE TRACKS OF THE UNSEEN: MEMOIRS OF A JUNGIAN PSYCHOANALST. It is available on Amazon.com. It’s hard to describe what it means to me. More than that, it’s hard to feel into this season of harvesting after some forty years of trying to write a book and twenty some years of writing it, not without interruptions but with the constancy of purpose to tell my story. 

And the door I chose was the one without gate-keepers, the one that brings to mind the sounds of Jimmy Cliff singing “You can get it if you really want, but you must try, try and try, try and try.” The rejection slips from years back do not need to stop you. I chose the door that said, “Yes you can!”

For me self-publishing is the perfect choice because it is in the tracks of self, of my self, of the Self, that I have journeyed.

To birth this book on the cusp of Halloween feels timely.

I write in Chapter Three about the town where I grew up.


Wethersfield was an historical landmark. After ridding its territory of Native Americans, this then lily white town became known in part for its witch trials and the execution of three witches.

 
Sadly witch-hunts are not only a thing of the past.

I have found that when you live life as close as you can to the course of truth you may touch down on mysteries that unsettle the status quo. Halloween bows to the pagan, to the Celtic harvest festivals, to the hallowed darkness and the liminal edge between life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness.

In Chapter Thirteen of my memoir, as a twenty-seven-year-old single mom I introduce my first Jungian analyst.


I transferred from the bus to the subway and got off in Central Square. Climbing the littered smelly stairway up to Mass Ave, I looked up into a brilliant blue sky. I couldn’t say she reminded me of anyone I’d ever met, barely remembering what was said; but then the way she said, “She had the right name,” when I’d told her about Delores dying came back to me—that and a certain sadness in her eyes that I saw once I’d stopped crying. As I turned toward Myles’s new school, I remembered how she’d concluded that my fear of life was robbing me of the energy and motivation that I needed to move forward, the way she laid that summation down like a gauntlet.

Myles was waiting for me with a picture he’d drawn of his family.

“There’s Whitey,” he said, pointing to a sketchy circle with ears and a tail. That was another thing that had made Daveda sad, the story about Blackie….

“Can we get a pumpkin?” Myles said, kicking a path through the leaves that buried the sidewalk.

“They’re cheaper at the Stop and Shop.”

“Come on, Mommy, pleeeease.” He stretched the word out to just before it became annoying. I had sixteen dollars left from tips. His hand closed around mine as we neared the curb.

We stood on the corner in front of the market. “How about this one?” I reached for a small round one from the orange row lined up against the cracked foundation.

“How ‘bout this one,” he said, almost doubling its size.

“Look at that sky,” I said as we came out of the store, running my fingertips through his soft full Afro, his small arms wrapped around the dented oblong shape.

I had told Daveda that Myles was my lifeline and my teacher. "Quite a big job for such a little guy," she'd said.
 
 
 

Saturday, October 26, 2013

On Love



 






When I was a child I carefully printed onto an unlined white piece of paper the words of Paul from 1 Corinthians 13. For years I kept that paper on my bureau between framed pictures of my uncle and my father. “Love bears all things… endures all things.”

At the age of twenty-two I discovered in Jung’s autobiography that same verse to which he’d added, “In my medical experience as well as in my own life I have again and again been faced with the mystery of love…. Here is the greatest and the smallest, …the highest and lowest…. Whatever we can say, no words express the whole. To speak of partial aspects is always too much or too little, for only the whole is meaningful.”

I particularly like reading Jung’s thoughts recorded from the later part of his life. In these “Late Thoughts” on love, he tells us that he is not talking about desire and preference, but about God. He says that when man names love by the name of God it “is a confession of his subjection, his imperfection, and his dependence; but at the same time a testimony to his freedom to choose between truth and error.”

At times it can be no small thing to name the difference between truth and error, particularly when one is called to violate ideological and collective truths by choosing the truth of love.

More than anything, Jung’s vision of love and truth was and is what makes me call myself a Jungian.

Thursday, October 17, 2013

Story



Stories are windows that open to the soul. In memoir we dig for memories. Unwrap them. And follow them.
 
“What is your book about?” someone asked this week. I said it was about me.

 “And?”

I said it was about being a psychoanalyst and about falling in love with one of my patients who is now my husband. “Is he still your patient?” the man said.

We are each other’s patients, I said. We help to heal each other in the sphere of patience, suffering and endurance.

When I told him that my husband had been in analysis with me for only nine months before we ended what some call “the treatment,” he laughed and said, “So you had a baby!”

He got the soul of that story, that which is born out of holding the tension of the opposites. The symbol, Jung said, is the best expression of what we cannot know.

 
My memoir cuts a path along a psychological and spiritual edge in the territory of soul. What I’ve always loved about Jungian psychology is that place is its home. Generally psychology serves an effort to decode, to understand and bring consciousness into our lives, while spirituality opens us to mystery, to the ineffable. Its consciousness is of a different order. To join the personal with the transpersonal is, I believe, an act of love.

My story follows my soul’s journey over sixty some years. I offer it because it seems to me that in the sharing of our truths we inch closer to The Truth.

 

Thursday, October 3, 2013

Psychic Connection







This blog is an open letter, a part of a platform for my self-published memoir that in a few weeks will be released into the ether of cyberspace and onto the virtual shelves of Amazon.com.

On this site I write about the psychology of Carl Jung whose words I have read and reread and been taught and have taught for over forty some years. I am open to deepening that conversation and invite your comments and questions.

But this is more than a blog about Jung. It is a window that opens into my life story. It sets the stage for my book and helps me to consider how my more private self interfaces with that of an author and memoirist. It visits the question of vulnerability.

In one of the blurbs on my book’s back cover, psychoanalyst and author Robert Bosnak writes, “Davenport Platko vividly describes love, abuse and the healing mysteries of psychoanalysis. She openly struggles with the questions of boundaries and transgression in a way rarely available in psychotherapy literature. …whatever our response, in her Tracks we are moved by her generosity in which she gives of her own life to help us see.”

Best-selling author and a leading figure in the quest for healing and consciousness, Kim Chernin, in her blurb writes that this “daring and authentic book…is more even than a compelling personal story. It asks us to consider rules and prejudice, the courage it takes to break rules and the unexpectedly positive outcome that is possible. I found it hard to put down.”

The path I follow in my writing leads along the edge between the personal and the archetypal. It doesn’t always feel like the safest path. I believe charting my way can lead to meaning, and as Jung says, “Meaning makes a great many things endurable, perhaps everything.”

Perhaps too, psychic connection comes with the knowledge that while we are all on the same path, the choices we make, the detours we take, matter, which is what makes the telling of our stories so compelling.

One way I find psychic connection is word by word. As James Baldwin wrote, “One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.”

Connecting psyche to psyche, to me, means living and telling one's truth to the best of one's ability. What does it mean to you?

Sunday, September 29, 2013

A Question of Ethics


 



If you had asked me twenty-five years ago what my memoirs would be about, and even then I imagined that someday I would publish them, I would not have included in my list of themes, ‘a question of ethics.’

I would have included the subject of my interracial relationships and my fight against the immoralities of racism. I would have included Jung and the way his teachings about being true to one’s Self have informed my life. I would have named the joys and trials of motherhood. Trauma, sexual healing, the mystery of psychoanalysis and the even greater mysteries of love, these were the topics that filled years of journals that I would, I imagined, someday share.

But then in my early forties I fell in love with one of my clients. And out of that analysis was born a mutually healing and humanly flawed coupling—my partnership with the man, my husband, whom I’ve been with for the last twenty-two years.

This part of my story comes up hard against the ethical edicts of the psychological community whose blanket condemnation of a romantic relationship beginning in analysis casts a pall over those couples who share this complex fate. And there are more than you might imagine. ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell,’ is the unwritten policy, and behind that is a significant threat that holds the livelihood of these analysts and psychotherapists in check.

And so this question has become a major theme for me, as I follow In the Tracks of the Unseen the ethics of love and the ethics of owning my life.

Friday, September 27, 2013

The Self


 

What stranger passion
Than that in which so many
Sleeping things transform themselves
Into words that make

A silence of flowers?…
                                   Rainer Maria Rilke

 
Jung writes, “Intellectually the Self is no more than a psychological concept, a construct that serves to express an unknowable essence which we cannot grasp as such, since by definition it transcends our powers of comprehension. It might equally well be called the ‘God within us.’”

 At some point in time, Jung’s use of the term self was changed to Self, I have heard to avoid confusion with other schools of psychological thought and everyday speech that use the term self to describe a more conscious state of identity. In Jung’s writing there is an inconsistency in the capitalization of the word Self, which adds confusion. In this blog, I take the liberty of capitalizing all of Jung’s references to Self as they apply to the above definition. 

 At the age of twenty-one, single and pregnant, sitting in a psychology class at Boston University, I discovered the work of Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist who lived from 1875-1961. The core of his message has informed my life for forty-five years. Wrote Jung, “…the Self is our life’s goal.” Though my understanding of what that meant to Jung and what it means to me has shifted over time, it has always included an aura of mystery, of something suprapersonal that holds the totality of what psychology calls consciousness and the unconscious. An enigmatic wholeness.

Jung called the Self the ordering principle.

Gathering words to reflect and make sense or non-sense of my experiences, dreams, and emotions, I believe, engages the Self. I see memoir as a Truth telling of light and dark with a moral imperative where meaning and values matter.

In the first paragraph of the preface to my book I write: “As I look back over the years of writing this memoir, I note my deliberations over what to include and what to exclude in naming the essential. But an elephant is an elephant is an elephant, even when you’re blind.”

 The Self is the elephant in the memoir.

Friday, September 20, 2013

Self-Portraits


In Jung’s essay, Concerning Rebirth, he tells this story.

“There was once a queer old man who lived in a cave, where he had sought refuge from the noise of the villages. He was reputed to be a sorcerer, and therefore he had disciples who hoped to learn the art of sorcery from him. But he himself was not thinking of any such thing. He was only seeking to know what it was that he did not know, but which, he felt certain, was always happening. After meditating for a very long time on that which is beyond meditation, he saw no other way of escape from his predicament than to take a piece of red chalk and draw all kinds of diagrams on the walls of his cave, in order to find out what that which he did not know might look like. After many attempts he hit on the circle. “That’s right,” he felt, “and now for a quadrangle inside it!” –which made it better still. His disciples were curious; but all they could make out was that the old man was up to something, and they would have given anything to know what he was doing. But when they asked him: “What are you doing there?” he made no reply. Then they discovered the diagrams on the wall and said: “That’s it!” –and they all imitated the diagrams. But in so doing they turned the whole process upside down, without noticing it: they anticipated the result in the hope of making the process repeat itself, which had led to that result. This is how it happened then and how it still happens today.”

Jung spent a good part of his life trying to explain what the individuation process looked like. Self Knowledge, he said, is one of the most difficult and exacting of the arts. As a creative psychological process, as a spiritual art, he likened it to alchemy. Using the metaphor of gold making, he drew his own diagrams on the inside of his cave. He created his truth, his story, while holding the tension between the personal and the archetypal. He left us portraits and maps.

Truth, Jung said, needs a language that alters with the spirit of the times. Each person’s story, it seems to me, contributes to that venture. There are of course the gifted, whose creativity appears, while not without work, as instinctual as the spider’s web-making, or The Red Book of Jung, or the horn-playing of Myles. Here meaning is not found in explanation but in essence. Art and archetype appear as one. 

And then there are the rest of us. Like the mythical Psyche, we rely on the aid of the ants that arrived in her story to assist in the task of sorting through inextricable minutiae. These tiny creatures that in the song we sing to our children, “go down into the earth to get out of the rain,” are social insects. In the myth, they are the agents of Eros. It is Eros, Psyche’s lover, that principle of relatedness and self-care, that mystery within every psyche, which we await when creativity eludes us.

Through the lens of Jungian psychology, our self-portraits employ our efforts to portray our deepest truths, claim our shadows, and celebrate our daily lives in the service of what Jung called the Self, or the image of the divine within. There is no formulaic sequencing of how many times and ways one must fall apart and come together, no necessary pacing on this journey toward wholeness. Whether we descend and ascend with revelatory intensity, or crawl like a snail, or simply sit, the way my father often did, the way I love to do, we become who we are.

I believe, one way or another, we are all laboring with the birth of our world’s ever-emerging consciousness. Our self-expressions appear in our faces and in our eyes. Sometimes we write them. Or sing them, or dance them, or paint them. We laugh them. Weep them. Pray them. And dream them.
 
In the modern allegorical love story of Avatar, the feminine Natiri says, “I see you,” to her beloved masculine counterpart, Jake. “I see you,” he replies.
 
Individuation is a love story, because without love, love as a depth of self-knowledge and compassion, and a depth of self-knowledge and compassion shared, we don’t get too far.

Friday, September 13, 2013

Bridges


In the twenty plus years of writing In the Tracks of the Unseen: Memoirs of a Jungian Psychoanalyst, there were stretches when I jumped ship. There were years when the idea of sharing my story was too daunting, the vulnerability unthinkable.

E.B. White wrote, “All writing is both a mask and an unveiling.” And Rilke advised only write if you have to—since the writing life can become both a blessing and a curse.

But if your soul requests it, my advice is write—even if you never share a word. For, in the act of finding your words you may discover parts of yourself. I find that when I allow the process of writing to work on me a sort of alchemical cooking happens, so that when I am folding clothes or cutting up an onion or standing in the shower a phrase or idea arrives like the elegantly marked spider that suddenly just appeared outside my window.

Memoir writing involves self-reflection; that ingredient which Vivian Gornick wrote changes the situation into the story. Wrote Jung, “My story is my truth.”

Our words can bridge the mythical waters of Memnosyne and Lethe, those rivers of memory and forgetfulness that run through the underworld. They can link soul to spirit, logos to eros.
 
What I love about Jungian psychology is its focus on the art of being, on the spiritual practice of becoming true to oneself through that endless incremental deepening of consciousness. Jung wrote that there is no individuation and no individuality without consciousness. Individuation, he said, has two principal aspects, “in the first place it is an internal and subjective process of integration, and in the second it is an equally indispensable process of objective relationship.” It calls for intrapsychic and interpsychic bridging.

The individuation process, I believe, is a path that knowingly or not we are all traveling. It is not a destination. “Life,” wrote Jung, “has always to be tackled anew.” 

In the conclusion of my memoir I describe our stories as mirrors. We can look into them and return to ourselves. We can make of them an offering.

 

 

Sunday, September 8, 2013

In Search of Self-knowledge and Soul

My soon-to-be published memoir, In the Tracks of the Unseen: Memoirs of a Jungian Psychoanalyst, is the inspiration behind this blog. The story of my struggle to be true to myself, from long before I could have articulated that and through sixty some years of becoming, I have written and rewritten as memoir over the past two decades. Before that I captured sketches of emotion between colorful covers of journals that line the shelves in my bedroom and on yellow legal pads and in worn spiral notebooks that are buried in a cardboard box in the back of my closet.
 
Perseverance furthers.

In 1969 at twenty-two, white, single, and living alone with my newborn biracial son, it was The Diary of Anais Nin, James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, and Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections that got me through the night. I love memoir and autobiography and everything in between and I’m not too particular on which is which; rather, I'm looking for the soul of the author.

Jung wrote, “What the world lacks is psychic connection.” That, it seems to me, calls for a certain intimacy and mercurial daring--even foolhardy courage, which some will attribute to my memoir in that it includes the story of falling in love with one of my clients, or analysands. Jung wrote that the most difficult part of the individuation process was the relationship between people. Meaning, in the process of becoming oneself, in bringing rays of consciousness into that infinite realm of the unknowable or what psychology calls the unconscious, it is easier to deal with the multiplicity of selves within than to hold the exponentially more complex union of opposites required in human relations.

Memoir begins, for me, in the predawn hour where I sit with my coffee and my journal and write down a dream or a reflection. It is in the interior work of suffering the tension of the opposites, of weaving those sweet to bitter threads, of recording the intricate and simple designs of my humanity, where I find the articulation of my story to be an integral part of this life-long individuating journey.