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.