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.
