“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.
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