On Compassion

 

 

Kuan Yin is the shortened form of Guan Shi Yin, which means "Observing the Sounds of the World."

 

I keep in my office a white porcelain statue of Kuan Yin, the Buddhist bodhisattva of compassion, the goddess of mercy. When I was a child my mother often placed this same statue beside one of her spare and elegant flower arrangements on our dining room table. In my memoir and in my life going forward I attribute the essence of Kuan Yin’s mercy to the final peace brokered between my mother and me, though through my childhood and even into my adult years she and I were both short on compassion for each other. Now, long since her passing, my empathy for the challenges she faced as a woman, as a mother and as a human being lives on.

 

The dictionary defines compassion as "the deep feeling of sharing the suffering of another in the inclination to give aid or support, or show mercy." Rooted in the latin com, with, and pati, to suffer, along with the root pei, to hurt, compassion shares its origins with the words passion, possible, passive, and patient. Compassion implies a submission to co-suffering. It evokes strong feeling and hope.

 

In Kuan Yin we feel the feminine element, the archetypal good mother attending to the sufferings of her child. This goddess embraces the spirit of the lotus, the flowering of enlightenment that emerges from the mud.

From The Teaching of Buddha; A Compendium of Many Scriptures Translated from the Japanese I read “The spirit of Buddha is a great compassion and love to save all people by any and all means. ‘Your suffering is my suffering and your happiness is my happiness,’ said Buddha, and he does not forget that spirit for a single moment, for it is the self-nature of Buddhahood to be compassionate.”

 

Compassion is a relational concept. Self compassion, compassion directed toward a part or parts of oneself, is subjectively interactive. Within each of us are those sufferers and witnesses who share in our sufferings and seek to alleviate them.

 

Flowery and obvious words. What human heart turns away from another's suffering without sympathy and a desire to help? Is not compassion one of the pillars of the psychotherapy profession?

Our compassion is challenged when the sufferer is our torturer, where meekness and forgiveness pave the road to understanding.

Though you don't see much written about compassion in Jungian psychology, is it not the Self, that experience of Christ-consciousness or the Buddha-nature, that intangible knowledge of wholeness in individuation that extends this spirit of mercy to all?

Observing the sounds of the world, what kind of listening is that?


 

 

Perspective and the art of living

I am taking a drawing class. I have drawn and painted from as far back as I can remember; dreams, gardens, faces, trees of every season—for the most part unaware of what I was doing, outside of knowing it was not art.

Our first lesson was on perspective, a technique for creating the illusion of depth and spatial relationships on a flat surface. Our teacher introduced the terms horizon line and vanishing point, showing us how through determining our viewpoint, eye level on the paper, the angles of everything we represent can fall in place.

The drawing exercises I have been doing got me thinking about the word perspective, from the Latin perspicere, to look closely at, to see through.

In drawing what we see depends on from where we look. What is above the horizon line reveals the bottom of an object, what is below the horizon line reveals the top. What is to the right reveals the left and so on. If we sit on the grass we see a tree through a child’s eyes.  

A memoir offers the reader the author’s perspective on parts of her story. Like a drawing, it is a line in the sand.

As we move through life our horizons, our vanishing points may shift, and with them our perspectives, though a bowl of lemons remains a bowl of lemons, and an experience of love, what about that? Does that remain etched in the heart? No matter how or when we look at it.

We may look at a dream or into a dream. We may speak of illusions. And suffer them.

What we see looking inward and looking outward, the relationships of things and situations, whether in a dream, in a drawing, in a memoir, or in myriad forms of relationship, speaks to who we are. Our perspectives on life, measured, shifting, emotional, offer us mirrors that reflect our souls. Or so it seems to me.

From what perspective do you see things? And there are so many.

(I will be away for a few weeks and will return to this blog once I am back.)

The Incest Taboo - in therapy and in life

 

In my story of how after nine months of some pretty intense psychotherapy my patient and I decided to end our therapeutic relationship for a more emotionally and spiritually honest coupling that leveled the playing field I break a taboo. Even in its telling. The publication of my account of what it has been like for my husband and me to live with this history for twenty-four years has elicited the predicted ire and scorn from parts of the psychological community.

The evolution of a therapy relationship into an intimate relationship is a highly charged topic. It unearths an archetype, threatening the cornerstone of psychotherapy from back in the day of Freud and Jung. The incest taboo. This taboo lies at the core of the transference phenomenon, where the conscious and unconscious of both therapist and patient meet and mix in ways not dissimilar to the ways we all relate to one another, but with the exception that in therapy it is the therapist’s responsibility to do whatever she can do to bring consciousness into the resulting stew of projection and projective identification better known as human relationship. Which is a very long-winded way of saying the buck stops at the therapist’s door. And it is, I believe, every therapists' conscious desire to do no harm.

The bottom-line here points to what in psychotherapy is imaged as the inner or interior child of the patient. It is the patient’s child-self that must be protected at all cost. The two-year rule found in many psychological ethics codes, which mandates a two-year waiting period between the termination of therapy and the beginning of a sexually intimate relationship, is primarily designed to keep the former patient’s child-self safe from any sexual exploitation. An inarguable intention.

Let me be perfectly clear. I am not, nor have I ever been, an advocate of converting therapy relationships into sexual relationships. Though I have dared to reveal intimate details of my history in an effort to show how the broken pieces of my psyche fit into the puzzle of my husband’s psyche in a way that brought us together, there is nothing cavalier in that telling.

I say in my memoir,

To my mind the move from analysis to a romantic partnership was necessarily daunting and those who made it blithely were fools, or worse. But to declare that a union forged along the seam of transference was sure to fail would be a poor prognosis for most relationships—so much of attraction being born of projection.

I do agree there must be rules to protect the vulnerable. But there will be exceptions to any rule. And those stories have a right to be heard.

And the forbidden, I believe, must be continually revisioned and renamed. What exactly are we talking about? What anathema? What map locates love, need, desire, and abuse? And where are the wise counselors able to fine tune the mapmaking?

There needs to be clarity in language, certainly in psychology. Is there really no difference between incest committed between adults and children in families and the incestuous pulls in therapy and in life?

From the start, my husband maintained that I reminded him of his mother. Only in the best sense, he would say. His mother, who had her demons, was one of the most generous, funny, salt of the earth, intelligent women I’d ever met. In fact, I experienced her in many ways as the mother I’d never had, and my mother-in-law and I became close friends. Sweet, some might say.

Others could argue my vulnerable husband was seduced by his therapist mother, and make a case against our relationship, a relationship in which we have been mostly happy together for twenty-four years, calling it pathological, exploitive, inappropriate, and some do.

My memoirs are my reflections on the mysteries of my life. My story is my personal truth. I have not offered it as a collective model.

Deeper conversations about psychological ethics and codes of conduct, about the transferences and countertransferences in therapy, about morality, and the regulation of love and the regulation of sex, and the rational and irrational forces that affect individuation, and about whether those countless couples who live in hiding because their love for each other began in a therapy relationship should be judged as criminal or immoral or insane, these conversations, it seems to me, are waiting to be had.

Out on a limb

 

 

Why invite a stranger, or for that matter a friend, into the written labyrinth of your story? Why undress the question ‘who am I?’ in public view?

Unlike the streaming of a journal, a memoir is more like a pond. Elliptical. Still. Final. Like a book of photographs, a memoir captures not the day to day facts but the images of a life. Writes, film writer, Robert Mckee in his book “STORY, Substance, Structure, Style, and The Principles of Screenwriting,” the truth of the story, “is located behind, beyond, inside, below the surface of things, holding reality together or tearing it apart, and cannot be directly observed.”

In the writing of my memoir, I set out to follow James Baldwin’s standard of relentlessly forcing from one’s experience, “the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.” My intention was to bear my soul. To tell my truth.

But to be a psychoanalyst who is married to a former patient and to tell that story not as an apology, nor even as a minimalist, but as a love story and a celebration complete with all the mutual madness and trauma and need that was located “behind, beyond, inside, below the surface…” leaves one, to say the least, out on a limb.

When you finish and publish a memoir you don’t finish your life. You do learn new things about yourself and about others. Though I have been brought to my knees, not for a second do I regret writing this book. I am learning more about trust and truth. About fear and courage and how much I have of both. When you put a memoir out into the world it is not yours anymore. It becomes a mirror for the projections of others. But it is not that simple.

To write one’s truth in the silent morning does not prepare one to bear the protest from those pushed too far in it’s telling.

Breaking the rules, said Herbie Hancock in one of his recent Harvard Norton Series lectures on “The Ethics of Jazz”, is something we associate with individuals who have taken the collective to another level. He noted Martin Luther King, Mandela, Rosa Parks, Harvey Milk, Miles Davis as individuals who have pushed others into a consciousness of something outside their comfort zone. To those unseen others who have broken rules not to harm but to remain true to their highest moral authority he offered encouragement.

Hancock referred to breaking the rules responsibly. Jung would add, out of “the torment of ethical decision.” With as much consciousness as one can bear.

When you put a memoir out into the world it becomes your mirror. You get to see where your courage fails you.

In the nakedness of vulnerability, stripped of persona, where we are all simply human beings trying to do our best, Herbie Hancock, a great human being, reminds me, “You do not need to like everyone, but you do need to love them.”

 

Where do you find your moral authority? And why?

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.