The Courage of Memoir

 

 

Many of the people who have reviewed my book have mentioned my courage — the courage to reveal, the courage to break rules, the courage to tell the truth.

In his February 3, 2014 Amazon review, Paul D. Sanderson Ph.D., a Jungian colleague of mine, writes “It was a powerful and sad memoir. Unfortunately, the author's attempt to heal her early childhood wounds resulted more in pattern replication and violation of the Code of Ethics of her profession than it was a deeper grasp of the ethics of love. A good read, but not a good role model to follow for anyone entering the healing professions who has to deal with sexualized transference and counter-transference dynamics or with the emergence of love within the therapeutic relationship.”

Sanderson is correct in so far as he identifies the replication of the sweet to bitter patterns of my experience that weave the opposites into that third inextricable meshing of what Jung called individuation. I perceive this as a spiraling toward the center.

Jung referred to the torment of ethical decision. As I wrote in my memoir, “he had found the essence of ethics not in the morality of collective opinion, but in the deepest tension held by the opposites within the Self. ‘Ethics are based on the phenomenon of conscience, which derives from a relationship between man and God.’...”

Sanderson’s judgment call has been predicted and anticipated. And his delivery leaves me both sad and mindful of how difficult it is to have a conversation between two people whose relationship with God, whose highest deepest truths are so very different.

I would like to believe that the intention to do no harm, as flawed as that proves to be in human interaction, is a common denominator between us.

I am reminded again of Russell Lockhart's quote, “Trusting the psyche is not an isolated or isolating act. It tends to bring us to the center and to that well at the bottom of the world. Bringing up water from there, each in his own way, with his own effort, is an eros act, not only for ourselves but also for others and for the world. It is this bringing up of psyche from the well and telling it to others that will bring us together.” Would that were true.

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? 

 

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

 

 

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.