Perspective and the art of living

I am taking a drawing class. I have drawn and painted from as far back as I can remember; dreams, gardens, faces, trees of every season—for the most part unaware of what I was doing, outside of knowing it was not art.

Our first lesson was on perspective, a technique for creating the illusion of depth and spatial relationships on a flat surface. Our teacher introduced the terms horizon line and vanishing point, showing us how through determining our viewpoint, eye level on the paper, the angles of everything we represent can fall in place.

The drawing exercises I have been doing got me thinking about the word perspective, from the Latin perspicere, to look closely at, to see through.

In drawing what we see depends on from where we look. What is above the horizon line reveals the bottom of an object, what is below the horizon line reveals the top. What is to the right reveals the left and so on. If we sit on the grass we see a tree through a child’s eyes.  

A memoir offers the reader the author’s perspective on parts of her story. Like a drawing, it is a line in the sand.

As we move through life our horizons, our vanishing points may shift, and with them our perspectives, though a bowl of lemons remains a bowl of lemons, and an experience of love, what about that? Does that remain etched in the heart? No matter how or when we look at it.

We may look at a dream or into a dream. We may speak of illusions. And suffer them.

What we see looking inward and looking outward, the relationships of things and situations, whether in a dream, in a drawing, in a memoir, or in myriad forms of relationship, speaks to who we are. Our perspectives on life, measured, shifting, emotional, offer us mirrors that reflect our souls. Or so it seems to me.

From what perspective do you see things? And there are so many.

(I will be away for a few weeks and will return to this blog once I am back.)

Hope in memoir writing and in living

 

 

March in New England, despite its temperatures that drop into the teens, heralds hope. The spring equinox packaged in light, not just in lengthened days but in a palpable brightening, reminds us that nothing stays the same. On this cusp of a season, not a day or a week or a month but of a pregnant trimester, we enter the throes and sacrifice of awakening. Little wonder that both the Christian mystery of crucifixion and resurrection, and Persephone’s rape and return are set in spring.

Writes Mary Oliver in her poem “On Winter’s Margin”
 

         “and what I dream of are the patient deer

         Who stand on legs like reeds to drink the wind;—

         They are what saves the world: who choose to grow
         thin to a starting point beyond this squalor.”

Writing memoir, in the thaw of memory, we revisit and revision our tracks. The prefix re indicates repetition. Again and again we reclaim our stories translating then to now. And out of that raw mix of image and emotion springs hope. Each memoir carries its own desire. A wish to be seen, to connect, to share personal truths in the service of something greater may inspire the memoirist, consciously or not.

Hope’s twin, despair, lurks in shadow. The vital rains of spring run like tears down the windowpane. And in the chaos of a trashing wind deadwood comes loose.

In writing and in living, hope may be faint, fragile, deep, resolute or profound. It may falter in the face of repudiation. Singular or all embracing, from health to peace on earth, our hope gives us courage to grow thin to a starting point beyond squalor.

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.

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.

 

 

 

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.

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.