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? 

 

 

 

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.

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?

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.

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.