a meditation on weeding

 

 

As trite as it may be to use gardening as a metaphor for living, I find myself while on my knees in my garden pulling out weeds doing just that.

The dictionary defines a weed as “a valueless plant growing wild, especially one that grows on cultivated land… any undesirable or troublesome plant…that grows profusely where it is not wanted.”

What makes a plant or a thought or a behavior desirable? And what does weeding out what is troublesome entail?

I follow the word cultivate — to till, to refine, to promote growth and nurture — from the root kwel: to revolve, move around, dwell; to the Latin colere, to cultivate, inhabit, to the Greek and Sanskrit, circle, wheel. Which takes me to a garden or a life that is worked and cared for. Carl Jung wrote that the circle and the wheel were symbols for the transcendent Self, what he also called “the ordering principle.” Which brings us around to a cultivated consciousness.

Jung spoke of differentiated feeling, a fine-tuned judgment call that translates into living one’s values.

When is a weed a wildflower? Desirable. Or an invasive strangling vine? Unwanted. How much is in the eyes of the beholder?

How do we weed out our demons? And we all have them. Things we work on.

It’s those “weeds” with the roots that go so far down and back, that return year after year, which insist that we go deeper into our selves into the untilled ground of our being, that ask more from us and lead us back to our humanity.

However we make room for and express our uniqueness, however wild or staid, let us treasure the flowers.

 

Shades of Crazy

 

“And you know that she’s half crazy and that’s why you want to be there,” has always been my favorite line from Leonard Cohen’s song Suzanne.

In An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison, inside Styron’s Darkness Visible, threaded through many of Kim Chernin’s autobiographical books — one of my favorites A Different Kind of Listening: My Psychoanalysis and Its Shadow — not to mention Carl Jung’s The Red Book, the psychological sufferings of the authors are revealed. What kind of writer dares to shine a light into the darker corners of what we call crazy and brave the critques that come from owning that personal space?

Inside the frame of mental illness, between the covers of the DSM, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, that tome of dis/ease that is constantly updated with its differential diagnoses and complications, we find every hue of madness. Neuroscience and psychopharmacology have great merit, and a medical model can offer hope to those who suffer from intolerable affect which may perpetuate trauma or usurp the life force in futility. But we must take care around the dangers of drawing lines between us and them.

Which relates to why it takes courage to own and share the darker, wilder shades of our lives.

Creative fire, spiritual descent and opening, and hard-won lessons in love travel through the door of madness. Jung stressed consciousness, and he introduced the method that he named active imagination, a conscious effort by the ego (our oh so limited consciousness and sense of ourselves) to engage and relate to the mysterious realm of the unconscious. More than a conversation with demons or dream figures or painting a scene that illuminates other worlds, active imagination, also named by Jung the transcendent function, holds the tension of crazy and sane. It bears it. Works it. Owns it.

 

On Compassion

 

 

Kuan Yin is the shortened form of Guan Shi Yin, which means "Observing the Sounds of the World."

 

I keep in my office a white porcelain statue of Kuan Yin, the Buddhist bodhisattva of compassion, the goddess of mercy. When I was a child my mother often placed this same statue beside one of her spare and elegant flower arrangements on our dining room table. In my memoir and in my life going forward I attribute the essence of Kuan Yin’s mercy to the final peace brokered between my mother and me, though through my childhood and even into my adult years she and I were both short on compassion for each other. Now, long since her passing, my empathy for the challenges she faced as a woman, as a mother and as a human being lives on.

 

The dictionary defines compassion as "the deep feeling of sharing the suffering of another in the inclination to give aid or support, or show mercy." Rooted in the latin com, with, and pati, to suffer, along with the root pei, to hurt, compassion shares its origins with the words passion, possible, passive, and patient. Compassion implies a submission to co-suffering. It evokes strong feeling and hope.

 

In Kuan Yin we feel the feminine element, the archetypal good mother attending to the sufferings of her child. This goddess embraces the spirit of the lotus, the flowering of enlightenment that emerges from the mud.

From The Teaching of Buddha; A Compendium of Many Scriptures Translated from the Japanese I read “The spirit of Buddha is a great compassion and love to save all people by any and all means. ‘Your suffering is my suffering and your happiness is my happiness,’ said Buddha, and he does not forget that spirit for a single moment, for it is the self-nature of Buddhahood to be compassionate.”

 

Compassion is a relational concept. Self compassion, compassion directed toward a part or parts of oneself, is subjectively interactive. Within each of us are those sufferers and witnesses who share in our sufferings and seek to alleviate them.

 

Flowery and obvious words. What human heart turns away from another's suffering without sympathy and a desire to help? Is not compassion one of the pillars of the psychotherapy profession?

Our compassion is challenged when the sufferer is our torturer, where meekness and forgiveness pave the road to understanding.

Though you don't see much written about compassion in Jungian psychology, is it not the Self, that experience of Christ-consciousness or the Buddha-nature, that intangible knowledge of wholeness in individuation that extends this spirit of mercy to all?

Observing the sounds of the world, what kind of listening is that?


 

 

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.)

The Incest Taboo - in therapy and in life

 

In my story of how after nine months of some pretty intense psychotherapy my patient and I decided to end our therapeutic relationship for a more emotionally and spiritually honest coupling that leveled the playing field I break a taboo. Even in its telling. The publication of my account of what it has been like for my husband and me to live with this history for twenty-four years has elicited the predicted ire and scorn from parts of the psychological community.

The evolution of a therapy relationship into an intimate relationship is a highly charged topic. It unearths an archetype, threatening the cornerstone of psychotherapy from back in the day of Freud and Jung. The incest taboo. This taboo lies at the core of the transference phenomenon, where the conscious and unconscious of both therapist and patient meet and mix in ways not dissimilar to the ways we all relate to one another, but with the exception that in therapy it is the therapist’s responsibility to do whatever she can do to bring consciousness into the resulting stew of projection and projective identification better known as human relationship. Which is a very long-winded way of saying the buck stops at the therapist’s door. And it is, I believe, every therapists' conscious desire to do no harm.

The bottom-line here points to what in psychotherapy is imaged as the inner or interior child of the patient. It is the patient’s child-self that must be protected at all cost. The two-year rule found in many psychological ethics codes, which mandates a two-year waiting period between the termination of therapy and the beginning of a sexually intimate relationship, is primarily designed to keep the former patient’s child-self safe from any sexual exploitation. An inarguable intention.

Let me be perfectly clear. I am not, nor have I ever been, an advocate of converting therapy relationships into sexual relationships. Though I have dared to reveal intimate details of my history in an effort to show how the broken pieces of my psyche fit into the puzzle of my husband’s psyche in a way that brought us together, there is nothing cavalier in that telling.

I say in my memoir,

To my mind the move from analysis to a romantic partnership was necessarily daunting and those who made it blithely were fools, or worse. But to declare that a union forged along the seam of transference was sure to fail would be a poor prognosis for most relationships—so much of attraction being born of projection.

I do agree there must be rules to protect the vulnerable. But there will be exceptions to any rule. And those stories have a right to be heard.

And the forbidden, I believe, must be continually revisioned and renamed. What exactly are we talking about? What anathema? What map locates love, need, desire, and abuse? And where are the wise counselors able to fine tune the mapmaking?

There needs to be clarity in language, certainly in psychology. Is there really no difference between incest committed between adults and children in families and the incestuous pulls in therapy and in life?

From the start, my husband maintained that I reminded him of his mother. Only in the best sense, he would say. His mother, who had her demons, was one of the most generous, funny, salt of the earth, intelligent women I’d ever met. In fact, I experienced her in many ways as the mother I’d never had, and my mother-in-law and I became close friends. Sweet, some might say.

Others could argue my vulnerable husband was seduced by his therapist mother, and make a case against our relationship, a relationship in which we have been mostly happy together for twenty-four years, calling it pathological, exploitive, inappropriate, and some do.

My memoirs are my reflections on the mysteries of my life. My story is my personal truth. I have not offered it as a collective model.

Deeper conversations about psychological ethics and codes of conduct, about the transferences and countertransferences in therapy, about morality, and the regulation of love and the regulation of sex, and the rational and irrational forces that affect individuation, and about whether those countless couples who live in hiding because their love for each other began in a therapy relationship should be judged as criminal or immoral or insane, these conversations, it seems to me, are waiting to be had.

Out on a limb

 

 

Why invite a stranger, or for that matter a friend, into the written labyrinth of your story? Why undress the question ‘who am I?’ in public view?

Unlike the streaming of a journal, a memoir is more like a pond. Elliptical. Still. Final. Like a book of photographs, a memoir captures not the day to day facts but the images of a life. Writes, film writer, Robert Mckee in his book “STORY, Substance, Structure, Style, and The Principles of Screenwriting,” the truth of the story, “is located behind, beyond, inside, below the surface of things, holding reality together or tearing it apart, and cannot be directly observed.”

In the writing of my memoir, I set out to follow James Baldwin’s standard of relentlessly forcing from one’s experience, “the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.” My intention was to bear my soul. To tell my truth.

But to be a psychoanalyst who is married to a former patient and to tell that story not as an apology, nor even as a minimalist, but as a love story and a celebration complete with all the mutual madness and trauma and need that was located “behind, beyond, inside, below the surface…” leaves one, to say the least, out on a limb.

When you finish and publish a memoir you don’t finish your life. You do learn new things about yourself and about others. Though I have been brought to my knees, not for a second do I regret writing this book. I am learning more about trust and truth. About fear and courage and how much I have of both. When you put a memoir out into the world it is not yours anymore. It becomes a mirror for the projections of others. But it is not that simple.

To write one’s truth in the silent morning does not prepare one to bear the protest from those pushed too far in it’s telling.

Breaking the rules, said Herbie Hancock in one of his recent Harvard Norton Series lectures on “The Ethics of Jazz”, is something we associate with individuals who have taken the collective to another level. He noted Martin Luther King, Mandela, Rosa Parks, Harvey Milk, Miles Davis as individuals who have pushed others into a consciousness of something outside their comfort zone. To those unseen others who have broken rules not to harm but to remain true to their highest moral authority he offered encouragement.

Hancock referred to breaking the rules responsibly. Jung would add, out of “the torment of ethical decision.” With as much consciousness as one can bear.

When you put a memoir out into the world it becomes your mirror. You get to see where your courage fails you.

In the nakedness of vulnerability, stripped of persona, where we are all simply human beings trying to do our best, Herbie Hancock, a great human being, reminds me, “You do not need to like everyone, but you do need to love them.”

 

Where do you find your moral authority? And why?

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.

Windows on Suffering

 

 

Writes Jung, “the principal aim of psychotherapy is not to transport the patient to an impossible state of happiness, but to help him acquire steadfastness and philosophic patience in face of suffering. Life demands for its completion and fulfillment a balance between joy and sorrow. But because suffering is positively disagreeable, people naturally prefer not to ponder how much fear and sorrow fall to the lot of man. So they speak soothingly about progress and the greatest possible happiness, forgetting that happiness is itself poisoned if the measure of suffering has not been fulfilled. Behind a neurosis there is so often concealed all the natural and necessary suffering the patient has been unwilling to bear.” Psychotherapy and a Philosophy of Life

To bear or to heal? What can be healed? What must be borne? Steadfastly with philosophic patience, or not. Which brings to mind Paul’s words in Corinthians 13. “Love bears all things.... Love is patient…”. One might say the religious function emanates out of our human grappling with sorrow and love.

 

The relief of psychic suffering is the cornerstone of psychological theory. Words on diagnosis, prognosis, and interpretations and interventions of every imaginable hue fill volume after volume in the literature of psychology.

Say all you want about attachment. Separation, trauma and sorrow are ubiquitous.

In Donald Kalsched’s book Trauma and the Soul, where he differentiates between neurotic versus authentic suffering, he refers us to this quote from Jung about a patient’s lack of willingness to bear the natural, necessary sufferings of life.  A quote that leaves the taste of the heroic. As does, for me, Kalsched’s analysis of Dante’s descent into the underworld.

Kalsched calls for a witnessing consciousness, something provided initially by the psychotherapist, he says. But what of the majority of people on this earth not willing, able, or interested in engaging in psychotherapy, let alone cognizant of its existence? Perhaps they bear witness to the sufferings in their lives through their interactions with the people whom they love—or through nature, music, poetry, or prayer.

In the ancient women's mysteries of Demeter and Persephone, suffering is a portal into the land of the dead. Of this, the poet Louise Gluck writes in her book Averno,

          “I think I can remember

           being dead. Many times, in winter,

           I approached Zeus. Tell me, I would ask him,
           How can I endure the earth?

And he would say,

           In a short time you will be here again.
           And in the time between

 You will forget everything:

            Those fields of ice will be
            The meadows of Elysium.”


This is a different window from the one where the hero stands with his pipe and his book.                                         

Mystery or Theory: Book Review of Trauma and the Soul, by Donald Kalsched

As I read Donald Kalsched’s book Trauma and the Soul there were times I felt a deep resonance with my own recently published memoir. Kalsched’s analysis of dissociation with its need to save the split-off soul-child, his decisive stand around the spiritual core of what psychology names the unconscious, and his call which echoes that of C.G. Jung’s for a third world between the worlds of matter and spirit, a transcendent space, are masterfully delivered in this book.

From a theoretical perspective this author has left no stone unturned. His bibliography speaks volumes. Expounding upon the salient developments in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, Kalsched’s analysis includes the thinking of William James, Freud, Jung, Klein, Winnicott, Kohut, Grotstein, and Schore; a list that does not begin to do justice to his interpretations of innumerable contributors to this ever-changing theoretical landscape.

A man of intelligence, compassion, and depth, Kalsched writes, “the soul needs a story, a resonant image that is adequate to its own biography.” In his book he tells stories, he tells his patients’ stories (and for the most part they are women), the story of The Little Prince and of Dante’s journey into the Inferno.

Though I highly recommend this book, particularly for those in the field of depth psychology, but also for victims of trauma in search of recovery, I would add that to my mind Trauma and the Soul offers “a psycho-spiritual approach to human development and its interruption” that reflects the profoundly rational masculine influence of Western thought on psychology.

The cover leaves us with an image. “Blake’s good and evil angels struggling for the possession of a child.” The evil angel is black. The good angel and child are white. All are male.

Madonna of the Pomegranates

 

 

Growing up, the way I understood all that was numinous came through the Christian lens of our New England Congregational church. Christ and God, Father and Son, were the central players. Mary appeared in passing, the way women often did.

I do not remember my mother ever saying a word about Mary, though every Christmas she brought out a blue ceramic statue of the Mother and Child and set it beside an arrangement of greens. She embroidered that image, blues on blue with low lights of purple, an embroidery that I still hang with the season.

Two weeks ago, fortuitously I thought, I discovered deep in a drawer of the dining room hutch a small plaque of Mary and Jesus with an inscription on the back that read, “Rafael. Madonna of the Pomegranates.”

Symbolically pomegranates are known to represent fertility, abundance, sweetness, and ‘the womb’. Pomegranates are the fruit of the underworld. Its sweet seeds seal Persephone’s fate.

In Rafael’s rendition Mary’s left hand rests on a book, while in her right hand she and her infant Son together hold a pomegranate. Could this be eros and logos in the hands of the Mother?

My friend says the dead have a way of communicating with us. In an imaginal world, in a world between worlds, I find a gift from my mother that speaks to all that was unsaid between us.

But more than that. As I meditate on this image morning after morning I take solace in some essential feminine mystery that like the hero’s journey of separation, initiation, and return, speaks to change and transformation in an endless cycle of death and rebirth. So much more is written from the standpoint of masculine psychology and myth. And while the masculine and feminine do and must contain each other, what I see in this body of this Mother with the darkened heart is the unbearable wisdom of loss. Suffering through and fighting through are not mutually exclusive options, nor does or should any discussion of the masculine and the feminine principles necessarily refer to anyone’s gender. And yet, when I let this image into my heart what I feel is the knowledge of sorrow that every mother holds.

The divine speaks to us through the filter of our projections colored by our personal needs and sufferings. The Madonna of the Pomegranates I imagine is a feminine Christian image of the contemplation of the pomegranate—of unspoken sexuality, of the dark days of Demeter’s rage, of the Pieta’s eternal grief. In this study of textures and light, fingers and ineffable expressions Raphael has given us the mirror that all great art gives, a taste of eternity.

Heart

 

It is Valentine’s Day. A cold morning. I sit at the window and look out at the rooftops and the car covered in snow. The bare trees stand motionless against the flat grey sky. Silence, stillness, shelter are among winter’s lessons.

The holiday evokes Eros, and I ponder Russell Lockhart’s words “Eros means telling,” which leads, he says, to the suffering of relationship. Eros is bittersweet, writes Anne Carson; or even, rather, the “sweetbitter” of Shappo’s poem that Carson quotes, noting how here the bitter follows the sweet. Eros as the god of love, as the principle of relatedness, unmasks us and makes us vulnerable. As a counterpart to logos it balances reason with feeling.

From Russell Lockhart I learn of the relation between “courage” and the Latin word “cor” meaning heart. Both can be broken.

From where I sit the naked branches intersect to form an imperfect mandala through which I watch the swell of light.

“My story is my truth,” wrote Jung.

My memoir is a written testament of my life, no longer mine and always mine.  “The endless transformations of the individuation process include the way we meet and endure the unbearable,” I wrote.

I defend my love for my husband and his love for me and the ethics of that love and of its beginning as the truth of my heart and soul.

What do you defend? And why?

The courage of memoir, I believe, is the courage to suffer the judgments and projections of one’s readers, sometimes in silence. Sometimes not.

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.

Spaces

In the predawn I am sitting in the cushioned wicker chair next to the window in the dining room, my new spot to watch the light rise in the sky. I look over at the doorway that opens to the front hall with the wall sconce by the stairs, at the patterns of pearly light and steely shadows against the white stucco walls, and I am captivated by the space. The wide angles of the doorframe open to the dark living room, a slice of stairway ascending to the right. I draw it, photograph it and describe it in my journal.

I move into it. Not physically. But the way one moves into a timeless moment that is numinous. And those moments, I believe, surround us.

I am reading Donald Kalsched’s book Trauma and the Soul; A psycho-spiritual approach to human development and its interpretation. Kalsched, a Jungian analyst, describes an “intermediate space between the worlds in which we are all most alive.” The “worlds” that he writes of are the worlds of consciousness and the unconscious. He refers to them in many contexts—as the inner world of imagination and the outer material world of facts, as the sacred and the profane. Kalsched acknowledges that there are many doorways that can lead us into mysterious interior spiritual realms and posits that we can evolve into both worlds, concluding “If we are going to ‘individuate’ in the true meaning Jung gave to that term, then we must let ourselves grow from these two roots.” 

In many respects this book offers a theoretical amplification of my memoir. It mirrors my final dream of a mother/child, Demeter/Persephone dream figure who “embodies the mysteries of abundance and poverty, of attachment and separation, of the reds, and the blues,” and who “carries my soul.”

Kalsched’s focus is on trauma, and on dissociation as a soul-saving defense which keeps “an innocent core of the self out of further suffering in reality by keeping it safe in another world.” In my first chapter I write about an experience that I remembered from the age of four.

 “My guess is, it was soon after we moved into the house when I began to disappear in the windowless hall between my bedroom, my parents’ bedroom, the bathroom, and the entrance into our living room; since I still needed to stand on my stool to see into the medicine cabinet mirror.

…All I can say is, in that hallway I left my body.

 …What I am trying to describe is what I believe to be my earliest reportable experiences of dissociation, a splitting off of consciousness. A vacant self.”

I go on to describe other altered states that I experienced as a child, transcendent states as well as the dark terrors of the night.

The tracks of the unseen (In the Tracks of the Unseen) are the tracks of my soul. My memoirs are stories of trauma and the healing that comes from holding the tension of the opposites, part human, part divine, in a third space, a liminal space from where looking into the front hall with the wall sconce by the stairs in the predawn can be transcendent.

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Healing

As I recover from the MOHS surgery that cut out cancer cells spreading across my nose like pearly white moss beneath the skin’s surface, a cancer my dermatologist biopsied the day after I published my book, I find myself reflecting on wounds and healing. And synchronicity.

 

From Russell Lockhart’s book Words As Eggs; Psyche in Language and Clinic, I read of the synchronistic mysteries of psyche and soma and of cancer as an invitation to deepen consciousness. I am mindful of the fine line here between naming an opportunity for reflection that comes after the white space of injury’s descent and an insidious magical thinking that blames the victim. As George Orwell wrote, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

 

In the restful stretches of my day, transported by the sounds of the pianist Yiruma to a place of solace while the newly grafted skin roots into my face, thoughts on healing pass like the clouds outside my window. Surrender, grief, self-care that finds the maternal source of gentleness and my deep gratitude for the love of family and friends carry me forward.

 

The skin cancer rooted in my childhood sunburns that leaves a scar in the center of my face resonates with the story of my life that I have just released. Trauma and the suffering of recovery whatever its source takes us into a liminal space that defies description. It is the space that this watercolor came from a few days after my surgery. Lockhart writes, "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.”

Unfortunate Love

 

Dr. Thomas Kirsch has just written a review of my book on Amazon. A respected elder in the Jungian world, past president of the San Francisco Institute and former longtime vice president and president of the International Society of Jungian Analysts, Dr Kirsch writes: I am writing a memoir myself, but it is much less personal than this one. The author writes about her falling in love with her patient and what she did about it. She went to a lot of therapy and supervision, and she was still in love with the patient. She ends up marrying the patient. She is an excellent writer, and she describes her process very well. Unfortunately, this happens too often in depth psychotherapy work. A good read if the subject interests one.

I am honored that Dr. Kirsch reviewed my memoir in spite of the line “Unfortunately, this happens too often in depth psychotherapy work.”

I rather find it unfortunate that those who practice depth psychology are unable to openly accept and honor the mysteries of love and the ways of the Self when that translates into an intimate relationship conceived in analysis and born outside its boundaries. Dr. Kirsch acknowledges this happens often. “Too often,” he says. Who knew?

It is time to ask how this happens, and how often. And why it is never discussed.

Every trained therapist knows about transference and the ethical mandate regarding the boundary between the personal and the professional. Analysts work within the tension of power and love, a tension that weaves between responsibility and compassion inside a frame of time and fee for service. The patient’s welfare, healing and individuation must be front, center and the essence of the work.

But what happens when that tension breaks the analytic vessel, when the psyche of the patient and the psyche of the analyst converge in a depth of connection that defies professional boundaries?

I know enduring and loving relationships can and do evolve out of every kind of psychotherapy. It would be interesting to hear the stories of those whose fate has led them down this road. But a seemingly impenetrable silence surrounds these stories.

Jung wrote that truth needs a language that alters with the spirit of the times and that as our consciousness increases we are confronted with new situations that require new ethical attitudes.

One could argue that indeed our greater consciousness around abuse and power has informed contemporary collective psychological codes of ethics, but what of love and healing and the individual experience of the archetype of the Self? What would a more finely differentiated ethical attitude that holds the tension of those opposites look like?

It is so easy to judge where you haven’t been.