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.