The Stories We Tell

 

When you write a memoir you must choose which stories to tell—and how to tell them.

Do you write from a stream of consciousness? Can you find the edges? Do you tell the truth? Even to yourself. When you write over time, over years, reflecting, re-membering, re-writing, “down the bones” as Natalie Goldberg says, does the truth change?

Can you extract the last drop of sweet to bitter, that which James Baldwin called art, or plumb the bottom of what Jungians call the complex—the tight tangle of repressed material we carry like a moat in the eye? To heal a complex Jung says one must drink the very last drop to turn bitterness to wisdom. With your words will you cross the river Styx into the underworld and make as William Styron did “Darkness Visible”?

What we dare to write does not stop being daring when we dot the last i and cross the last T and close the computer unless we are prepared to burn our pages along with our bridges and press the delete button. But if memoir is to be a piece of our individuation we may decide to take that step that Jung called the most difficult piece of the individuation process and reach across the void and say this is my story and my story is my truth.

And there may be those who get it and there will be those who do not. But once you let it go it is not yours. It has a life of its own. It is a line in the sand and in the mind of the reader. It disappears with the tide or becomes a thorn in a shoe. Or just perhaps it touches a heart in hiding. And a door opens.

On Memoir

 

Now that my memoir is in the marketplace of Amazon.com and in the hands of people I know and people I don’t know I have a new perspective, a perspective of one who has put a message in a bottle and set it into the stream. Perhaps it will catch on a rock and be buried in the mud. Perhaps a mother or a lover or an analyst or a trauma survivor will discover it. Perhaps its words will resonate with the blues that reverberate through the timeless notes of suffering and soul.

Perhaps it will begin a conversation.

What do I want from this, a reader asked me. Part of me doesn’t want anything, I said, What I have wanted, to tell my story, I have done. Then I am reminded of something Russell Lockhart wrote in his beautiful book “Psyche Speaks; A Jungian Approach to Self and World.” He writes, “a dream wants a dream; a poem wants a poem.” He writes of Eros, that spirit of longing for connection. A memoir wants a memoir. A story, a story.

But no one speaks to this more eloquently than Carter Heyward, in her book “When Boundaries Betray Us; Beyond Illusions of What is Ethical in Therapy and Life,” written in 1993.

Says Heyward, “There is in each of us a need to be heard to speech. A need born of our souls, the place of all real meeting, in which every I-Thou and all unalienated erotic power is conceived. This need in each of us is not a pathology. It is not a weakness. It is not a sin. The need does not originate in abuse. Its roots are not shameful. It is not immature. This need is not something to be treated or healed, liberated or outgrown. It is something in each of us to be cultivated and cherished, experienced and shared, with respect and tenderness, awe and humor…. There is in each of us a need to be heard to speech. This need is the root of all genuine healing and the source of all creative revolutionary movement. It is the wellspring of our redemption, and it is the hope of the world.”

Jung wrote in a letter quoted by Marie-Louise von Franz, “One of the most important and difficult tasks in the individuation process is to bridge the distance between people.” Memoir as individuation builds bridges that lead in many directions.

On what Is Real

 

When I was a little girl I stood on a chair at the kitchen counter and took turns with my mother mashing sugar into softened butter in a large yellow bowl. My mother’s cookies, a staple in our household, were kept in a tin can on top of the refrigerator.

Inside that bowl today the fine lines of tiny cracks and the gray wear of countless spoons against its baked yellow sides tell stories of tenderness and temper.

Jungian analyst, Patricia Damery, in her blog for her fascinating book Farming Soul writes about reality and perception as she refers us to her story of individuation, a deeply spiritual journey. She writes along the liminal edge of truth.

Which got me thinking about how many ways we ask the question, “What is real?” as we move to the edges of our consciousness. In my book In the Tracks of the Unseen I address that question in part around experiences of trauma and memory and dissociation. I write about the urgency that sometimes comes with uncertainty. The spiral descent to knowing.

When Jung was asked if he believed in God he answered that he didn’t believe, he knew.

For me, when I look into my yellow bowl that I now so treasure what is real is the sweet taste of cookie dough and the smiles and tears of a child.

Harvest

 

 

Yesterday I published my memoir IN THE TRACKS OF THE UNSEEN: MEMOIRS OF A JUNGIAN PSYCHOANALST. It is available on Amazon.com. It’s hard to describe what it means to me. More than that, it’s hard to feel into this season of harvesting after some forty years of trying to write a book and twenty some years of writing it, not without interruptions but with the constancy of purpose to tell my story. 

And the door I chose was the one without gate-keepers, the one that brings to mind the sounds of Jimmy Cliff singing “You can get it if you really want, but you must try, try and try, try and try.” The rejection slips from years back do not need to stop you. I chose the door that said, “Yes you can!”

For me self-publishing is the perfect choice because it is in the tracks of self, of my self, of the Self, that I have journeyed.

To birth this book on the cusp of Halloween feels timely.

I write in Chapter Three about the town where I grew up.

Wethersfield was an historical landmark. After ridding its territory of Native Americans, this then lily white town became known in part for its witch trials and the execution of three witches.

 

Sadly witch-hunts are not only a thing of the past.

I have found that when you live life as close as you can to the course of truth you may touch down on mysteries that unsettle the status quo. Halloween bows to the pagan, to the Celtic harvest festivals, to the hallowed darkness and the liminal edge between life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness.

In Chapter Thirteen of my memoir, as a twenty-seven-year-old single mom I introduce my first Jungian analyst.

I transferred from the bus to the subway and got off in Central Square. Climbing the littered smelly stairway up to Mass Ave, I looked up into a brilliant blue sky. I couldn’t say she reminded me of anyone I’d ever met, barely remembering what was said; but then the way she said, “She had the right name,” when I’d told her about Delores dying came back to me—that and a certain sadness in her eyes that I saw once I’d stopped crying. As I turned toward Myles’s new school, I remembered how she’d concluded that my fear of life was robbing me of the energy and motivation that I needed to move forward, the way she laid that summation down like a gauntlet.

Myles was waiting for me with a picture he’d drawn of his family.

“There’s Whitey,” he said, pointing to a sketchy circle with ears and a tail. That was another thing that had made Daveda sad, the story about Blackie….

“Can we get a pumpkin?” Myles said, kicking a path through the leaves that buried the sidewalk.

“They’re cheaper at the Stop and Shop.”

“Come on, Mommy, pleeeease.” He stretched the word out to just before it became annoying. I had sixteen dollars left from tips. His hand closed around mine as we neared the curb.

We stood on the corner in front of the market. “How about this one?” I reached for a small round one from the orange row lined up against the cracked foundation.

“How ‘bout this one,” he said, almost doubling its size.

“Look at that sky,” I said as we came out of the store, running my fingertips through his soft full Afro, his small arms wrapped around the dented oblong shape.

I had told Daveda that Myles was my lifeline and my teacher. "Quite a big job for such a little guy," she'd said.

 

 

 

On Love

 

When I was a child I carefully printed onto an unlined white piece of paper the words of Paul from 1 Corinthians 13. For years I kept that paper on my bureau between framed pictures of my uncle and my father. “Love bears all things… endures all things.”

At the age of twenty-two I discovered in Jung’s autobiography that same verse to which he’d added, “In my medical experience as well as in my own life I have again and again been faced with the mystery of love…. Here is the greatest and the smallest, …the highest and lowest…. Whatever we can say, no words express the whole. To speak of partial aspects is always too much or too little, for only the whole is meaningful.”

I particularly like reading Jung’s thoughts recorded from the later part of his life. In these “Late Thoughts” on love, he tells us that he is not talking about desire and preference, but about God. He says that when man names love by the name of God it “is a confession of his subjection, his imperfection, and his dependence; but at the same time a testimony to his freedom to choose between truth and error.”

At times it can be no small thing to name the difference between truth and error, particularly when one is called to violate ideological and collective truths by choosing the truth of love.

More than anything, Jung’s vision of love and truth was and is what makes me call myself a Jungian.

Story

Stories are windows that open to the soul. In memoir we dig for memories. Unwrap them. And follow them.

 
“What is your book about?” someone asked this week. I said it was about me.

 “And?”

I said it was about being a psychoanalyst and about falling in love with one of my patients who is now my husband. “Is he still your patient?” the man said.

We are each other’s patients, I said. We help to heal each other in the sphere of patience, suffering and endurance.

When I told him that my husband had been in analysis with me for only nine months before we ended what some call “the treatment,” he laughed and said, “So you had a baby!”

He got the soul of that story, that which is born out of holding the tension of the opposites. The symbol, Jung said, is the best expression of what we cannot know.

 

My memoir cuts a path along a psychological and spiritual edge in the territory of soul. What I’ve always loved about Jungian psychology is that place is its home. Generally psychology serves an effort to decode, to understand and bring consciousness into our lives, while spirituality opens us to mystery, to the ineffable. Its consciousness is of a different order. To join the personal with the transpersonal is, I believe, an act of love.

My story follows my soul’s journey over sixty some years. I offer it because it seems to me that in the sharing of our truths we inch closer to The Truth.

 

Psychic Connection

This blog is an open letter, a part of a platform for my self-published memoir that in a few weeks will be released into the ether of cyberspace and onto the virtual shelves of Amazon.com.

On this site I write about the psychology of Carl Jung whose words I have read and reread and been taught and have taught for over forty some years. I am open to deepening that conversation and invite your comments and questions.

But this is more than a blog about Jung. It is a window that opens into my life story. It sets the stage for my book and helps me to consider how my more private self interfaces with that of an author and memoirist. It visits the question of vulnerability.

In one of the blurbs on my book’s back cover, psychoanalyst and author Robert Bosnak writes, “Davenport Platko vividly describes love, abuse and the healing mysteries of psychoanalysis. She openly struggles with the questions of boundaries and transgression in a way rarely available in psychotherapy literature. …whatever our response, in her Tracks we are moved by her generosity in which she gives of her own life to help us see.”

Best-selling author and a leading figure in the quest for healing and consciousness, Kim Chernin, in her blurb writes that this “daring and authentic book…is more even than a compelling personal story. It asks us to consider rules and prejudice, the courage it takes to break rules and the unexpectedly positive outcome that is possible. I found it hard to put down.”

The path I follow in my writing leads along the edge between the personal and the archetypal. It doesn’t always feel like the safest path. I believe charting my way can lead to meaning, and as Jung says, “Meaning makes a great many things endurable, perhaps everything.”

Perhaps too, psychic connection comes with the knowledge that while we are all on the same path, the choices we make, the detours we take, matter, which is what makes the telling of our stories so compelling.

One way I find psychic connection is word by word. As James Baldwin wrote, “One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.”

Connecting psyche to psyche, to me, means living and telling one's truth to the best of one's ability. What does it mean to you?