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.