On Healing

As I recover from the MOHS surgery that cut out cancer cells spreading across my nose like pearly white moss beneath the skin’s surface, a cancer my dermatologist biopsied the day after I published my book, I find myself reflecting on wounds and healing. And synchronicity.

 

From Russell Lockhart’s book Words As Eggs; Psyche in Language and Clinic, I read of the synchronistic mysteries of psyche and soma and of cancer as an invitation to deepen consciousness. I am mindful of the fine line here between naming an opportunity for reflection that comes after the white space of injury’s descent and an insidious magical thinking that blames the victim. As George Orwell wrote, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

 

In the restful stretches of my day, transported by the sounds of the pianist Yiruma to a place of solace while the newly grafted skin roots into my face, thoughts on healing pass like the clouds outside my window. Surrender, grief, self-care that finds the maternal source of gentleness and my deep gratitude for the love of family and friends carry me forward.

 

The skin cancer rooted in my childhood sunburns that leaves a scar in the center of my face resonates with the story of my life that I have just released. Trauma and the suffering of recovery whatever its source takes us into a liminal space that defies description. It is the space that this watercolor came from a few days after my surgery. Lockhart writes, "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.”

Unfortunate Love

 

Dr. Thomas Kirsch has just written a review of my book on Amazon. A respected elder in the Jungian world, past president of the San Francisco Institute and former longtime vice president and president of the International Society of Jungian Analysts, Dr Kirsch writes: I am writing a memoir myself, but it is much less personal than this one. The author writes about her falling in love with her patient and what she did about it. She went to a lot of therapy and supervision, and she was still in love with the patient. She ends up marrying the patient. She is an excellent writer, and she describes her process very well. Unfortunately, this happens too often in depth psychotherapy work. A good read if the subject interests one.

I am honored that Dr. Kirsch reviewed my memoir in spite of the line “Unfortunately, this happens too often in depth psychotherapy work.”

I rather find it unfortunate that those who practice depth psychology are unable to openly accept and honor the mysteries of love and the ways of the Self when that translates into an intimate relationship conceived in analysis and born outside its boundaries. Dr. Kirsch acknowledges this happens often. “Too often,” he says. Who knew?

It is time to ask how this happens, and how often. And why it is never discussed.

Every trained therapist knows about transference and the ethical mandate regarding the boundary between the personal and the professional. Analysts work within the tension of power and love, a tension that weaves between responsibility and compassion inside a frame of time and fee for service. The patient’s welfare, healing and individuation must be front, center and the essence of the work.

But what happens when that tension breaks the analytic vessel, when the psyche of the patient and the psyche of the analyst converge in a depth of connection that defies professional boundaries?

I know enduring and loving relationships can and do evolve out of every kind of psychotherapy. It would be interesting to hear the stories of those whose fate has led them down this road. But a seemingly impenetrable silence surrounds these stories.

Jung wrote that truth needs a language that alters with the spirit of the times and that as our consciousness increases we are confronted with new situations that require new ethical attitudes.

One could argue that indeed our greater consciousness around abuse and power has informed contemporary collective psychological codes of ethics, but what of love and healing and the individual experience of the archetype of the Self? What would a more finely differentiated ethical attitude that holds the tension of those opposites look like?

It is so easy to judge where you haven’t been.

Many thanks to Patricia Damery for her honest review of my book which she published on her blog and on the Depth Psychology Alliance blog site.

Review: Platko's In the Tracks of the Unseen

• Posted by Patricia Damery on December 3, 2013 at 8:00am
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Some topics are so controversial we cannot discuss them. Jane Davenport Platko’s In the Tracks of the Unseen: Memoirs of a Jungian Analyst brings one of those topics into full view: when the doctor and patient fall in love.

While we psychoanalysts and psychotherapists have thorough discussions as to why these kinds of relationships are problematic, we seldom have open discussions about what happens when they seem to work. Those who have entered such relationships rightfully fear judgment. I will be honest. I have a bias. Having barely survived the 1970’s in psychology after early experiences with therapists and teachers who did not know the power of the tool of the transference, I developed a healthy respect of the need for “boundaries,” as we put it in the talk of our trade. As a result, I often have had a hair trigger reaction when these boundaries are transgressed. For the most part, I think my stance has merit.

But Platko’s story demonstrates it is not so simple. What happens when the analytic vessel cannot contain the feeling within a transference format, when the Self has something different in mind? Are there times the therapeutic meeting is a springboard into the soul connection of friendship or romantic love and this is not exploitive of the patient?

With great integrity, honesty, and courage, Platko lays out her vulnerabilities and history, antecedents to both a friendship with her first analyst and then marriage to a man who had been her patient. Her decisions are not impulsive. In fact, she deeply and openly suffers them with her then current analyst and with her then husband.

In the preface she quotes Jung, “My story is my truth.” This story is Platko’s truth, and one can only feel compassion, awe and concern for a woman reveals herself so openly in order for us to understand the decisions she has made. There will be judgment!

When I began reading In the Tracks of the Unseen, I did not want to put it down. Platko is a good storyteller, and I have not read a book like it. It is well written, albeit disturbing, submerging the reader in the rawness of human attachment and the lonely quest of a woman who followed her heart. This is an important book in that it questions some suppositions of the last decades, taking the structure of love in analytical relationships down to the studs. There are no answers here, only a kind of solutio. Perhaps it is only now that we can follow “the tracks of the unseen,” to a larger playing field that may redefine ethics and the challenges of the human connection in the vessel of analytic work.

The Coming of Winter

 

Most writers of memoir need not expect the chill and silence that has followed in the wake of my words. My story touches upon the history of a psychoanalytic community, and while mine is not a narrative about the New England Society of Jungian Analysts, it references, in part, my experiences within it. Over a period of thirty-some years this institution and ever-changing collection of analysts have played a major role in my life.

Because of my love for the man who is my husband, who was initially for a period of nine months my patient, I have lived under the threat of professional excommunication for twenty-three years. For the most part mine was not an unknown story because from the start I turned to many of my colleagues for help and because of the surefire spread of gossip. In the early 90’s there was no ethics code that spelled out “A member shall not engage in physical contact of a sexual nature with a former analysand for at least two years after cessation or termination of the professional relationship.” But there was the written expectation that the analysts of this society “shall conduct themselves in their work according to the highest ethical standards and shall act in the best therapeutic interest of their analysands.”

It was clear to me from the start that I was stepping across a line that involved wearing a scarlet letter. I was also told from the start that to tell my story would be professional suicide.

Everyone should be free to love who they love, President Obama said in a recent speech referring to the LGBT community. Albeit for complex reasons, this is not true in the psychological community. Yet no one speaks of that.

I have colleagues and friends who support me in the telling of this story, even those who may not be in agreement with my beliefs, and I am forever grateful to them. And then there are those whom I have known for decades who receive the announcement of my book without a word.

Carl Jung based his psychology on the principle of individuation, becoming true to a higher Self that contains the opposites and I believe strives ultimately for the good. I have written a memoir that includes the breaking of silence as part of my individuation process.

 

What does it take to hold the tension of the opposites, between silence and speech, between your truth and my truth, to hold the still point and the talking point in a dialogue that moves us ever closer to the center and heart of our humanity? 

 

 

 

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.