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.

Story

Stories are windows that open to the soul. In memoir we dig for memories. Unwrap them. And follow them.

 
“What is your book about?” someone asked this week. I said it was about me.

 “And?”

I said it was about being a psychoanalyst and about falling in love with one of my patients who is now my husband. “Is he still your patient?” the man said.

We are each other’s patients, I said. We help to heal each other in the sphere of patience, suffering and endurance.

When I told him that my husband had been in analysis with me for only nine months before we ended what some call “the treatment,” he laughed and said, “So you had a baby!”

He got the soul of that story, that which is born out of holding the tension of the opposites. The symbol, Jung said, is the best expression of what we cannot know.

 

My memoir cuts a path along a psychological and spiritual edge in the territory of soul. What I’ve always loved about Jungian psychology is that place is its home. Generally psychology serves an effort to decode, to understand and bring consciousness into our lives, while spirituality opens us to mystery, to the ineffable. Its consciousness is of a different order. To join the personal with the transpersonal is, I believe, an act of love.

My story follows my soul’s journey over sixty some years. I offer it because it seems to me that in the sharing of our truths we inch closer to The Truth.

 

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.