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?