Sunday, September 29, 2013

A Question of Ethics


 



If you had asked me twenty-five years ago what my memoirs would be about, and even then I imagined that someday I would publish them, I would not have included in my list of themes, ‘a question of ethics.’

I would have included the subject of my interracial relationships and my fight against the immoralities of racism. I would have included Jung and the way his teachings about being true to one’s Self have informed my life. I would have named the joys and trials of motherhood. Trauma, sexual healing, the mystery of psychoanalysis and the even greater mysteries of love, these were the topics that filled years of journals that I would, I imagined, someday share.

But then in my early forties I fell in love with one of my clients. And out of that analysis was born a mutually healing and humanly flawed coupling—my partnership with the man, my husband, whom I’ve been with for the last twenty-two years.

This part of my story comes up hard against the ethical edicts of the psychological community whose blanket condemnation of a romantic relationship beginning in analysis casts a pall over those couples who share this complex fate. And there are more than you might imagine. ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell,’ is the unwritten policy, and behind that is a significant threat that holds the livelihood of these analysts and psychotherapists in check.

And so this question has become a major theme for me, as I follow In the Tracks of the Unseen the ethics of love and the ethics of owning my life.

Friday, September 27, 2013

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.

Friday, September 20, 2013

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.

Friday, September 13, 2013

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.

 

 

Sunday, September 8, 2013

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.