Inner Depths

My Vedanta Dilemma Resolved

2011-10-31T17:17:00.000-07:00

You are that which you are seeking. —Saint Francis

In My Vedanta Dilemma, I posed these questions:

Should I do my yogic practices and meditations in order to achieve that state of oneness with the Universal Consciousness (or Brahman), as instructed by many Indian masters of the Vedanta tradition? Or do those very practices meant to enlighten merely reinforce the illusion of separateness between myself and Brahman, which, by definition, must be false since Brahman is defined as the oneness of all things? Should not my realization of the Universal Consciousness, which exists beyond all thought, emotion, and ego-based craving, be a sudden clear-seeing, a realization of what already is, not a goal one strives to attain? For to strive to attain that goal is to fall into the illusion of appearances (or Maya), where we buy into notions of separateness, multiplicity, and want.

The writing of that article coincided with a brief yet enlightening exchange with Hanuman Dass, a writer on nondualism and entheogenic experiences (and a recent Twitter follower/followee), whose insights have helped me clarify my position on the question. (Check out his blog at http://hanumandass.wordpress.com.) Dass (2011a) said:

There are two camps. One camp says you MUST practice or do sadhana to realize the Self. The other camp says NO PRACTICE! Practice to them is just more ego conditioning, being on a path to somewhere called liberation is just another ego-story.

So who’s right? Both are right. They are two different vantage points to view liberation from. The first camp (which includes traditional Advaita Vedanta, Buddhism, etc.) starts from the perspective of the illusory person and prescribes several practices aimed at breaking the illusion of ego and thus recognizing you were Brahman or Buddha all along.

The other camp (neo-Advaita, etc.) says you are already that which you seek. Nothing you can do as a separate entity will get you what you already are! The only course is to recognize your true nature by self-inquiry or investigation of the self.

I am definitely in the neo-Advaita, I’m-already-that-which-I-seek school of thought. Call me lazy, but lifetimes of arduous meditation practices to realize what I already am does not sit well with me. However, Dass (2011a) was quick to point out the value of practicing:

The big thing IMO is if you practice, do it without desire for the fruits of the practice. Don’t meditate to get enlightened, do it because it calms the mind, sorts the thoughts, etc. Mainly just look as often as you can at that ‘place’ from which You are Conscious of all that manifests.

Meditation practice, to be sure, has enormous value, as does karma yoga, bhakti yoga, raja yoga, jnana yoga, and the myriad other ways we honor the Divine. When we experience in meditation that nanosecond of silent awareness, that consciousness devoid of thought, we are touching the hem of Brahman. That experience is invaluable to our insight into our true nature. And surely we must reinforce that insight over and over again with repeated practice because it is so easy to get lost in the pleasure-seeking, fear-avoiding neurosis of our minds. So yes, practice, practice all you want. But that is a very different stance to take than saying that sadhana is necessary to achieve enlightenment. The latter only serves to reinforce our captivity in that sticky, tangled web of Maya.

What, then, is this clear seeing, this immediate recognition of one’s divinity? What is the experience like? Who has achieved it (and how would we know)? Since Brahman itself is beyond all words and thoughts, there can be no adequate description of the experience. Perhaps a few great, enlightened poets down the ages have been able to capture the experience in words, but the whole business, at bottom, is ineffable: it cannot verbalized.

So again that annoying question returns: What should I do? Dass (2011b) said:

What you are in essence is Awareness. Ask yourself ‘Who Am I’. You will say ‘I am David’. Take away the ‘David’. What is left? ‘I Am’. This ‘I Am’ is a thought in the mind that arises upon the conviction or intuition that you Are. You think ‘I Am’ because you know that you exist. So the thought ‘I Am’ is a reflection upon your essential Being, the Awareness that is synonymous with ‘concepts’ such as God, Brahman, Atman, Consciousness, Oneness, or Beingness.

Try to rest in that intuition, that knowing who you are.

Dass (2011a) went on to wonder about the nature of grace in all of this:

I find that liberation is only truly possible in light of grace. Maybe that’s a belief but how do you explain your coming to intuit your essential nature? Were you looking for the dissolution of who you think you are? Who would WANT the death of the ego?! Its the end of you! It seems rational that grace is at work here!

(See also Dass’s (2011c) four-part dialogue with Colin Drake on the nature of spiritual practice and the experience of enlightenment.)

To sum up:

(1) Never cease your exploration of spiritual practices, but do so with warmth, friendliness, humor, and nongrasping. Know that your practice is not a means to an end but an opportunity to wonder, to be curious, and to delight in your being.

(2) As many times as you can remember throughout the day, bring your attention to the silent awareness that is the ever-present ground of your experience. Practice identifying “you” as the “You” of this silent, egoless, pure state of awareness.

(3) Continue your self inquiry in ways that are authentic to you.

(4) Remember that enlightenment is a timeless, here-and-now experience, not a future event, least of all one you must strive tirelessly to attain.

(5) If you find yourself becoming too serious and self-absorbed over the whole matter, remember that that is more Maya, more ego-driven, illusory baggage that you need to toss off.

(6) Be open to grace.

An idea for an article that I have been kicking around is how to conceptually integrate Vedantic teachings with depth psychology. Stay tuned. . . .
__________________

References

Dass, H. (2011a). Who am i? Hanuman Dass. Retrieved October 30, 2011 from http://hanumandass.wordpress.com/who-am-i/.

Dass, H. (2011b). LSD, entheogens, and nonduality—some autobiographical insights. Hanuman Dass. Retrieved October 30, 2011 from http://hanumandass.wordpress.com/2011/10/21/lsd-entheogens-and-nonduality-some-autobiographical-insights/

Dass, H. (2011c). A dialogue with Colin Drake on practice. Hanuman Dass. Retrieved October 30, 2011 from http://hanumandass.wordpress.com/tag/colin-drake/page/2/

My Vedanta Dilemma

2011-10-24T18:54:00.000-07:00

You are happy when you are not trying to be happy. —Zen Saying

A couple of articles on this blog have touched on Vedantic principles in the context of depth psychology, but in this article I’d like to focus solely on a question regarding the Vedanta spiritual tradition, a question I affectionately refer to as my Vedanta dilemma.

Vedanta recognizes two experiences of reality: Brahman and Maya. Brahman is the Universal Consciousness, the Absolute Reality, the formless, boundless, nameless Godhead from which everything is created. Brahman transcends time, space, thought, and form. Brahman is eternal consciousness and eternal love. Brahman is the deep oneness from which springs everything that you and I can name. Brahman cannot be named or defined; it transcends all naming and defining.

Maya is a world with which we are much more familiar: our day-to-day experience of separateness, multiplicity, conflict, suffering, craving, and all that is attached to ego, emotion, thought, and the distinction between “me,” “you,” and “them.” Maya is marked by endless cycles of pain and pleasure, calm and anxiety, hunger and satiation.

Maya is said to be illusory in that the separateness and multiplicity that are its hallmarks are illusions masking the deep oneness that connects all things (i.e., Brahman).

The Vedanta masters teach that our proper spiritual path is to see through the illusion of Maya and to enter the timeless, thought-less experience of God-consciousness. They say our goal is to come to Brahman experientially and nonintellectually through various yogic and meditation practices. These practices, when mastered, allow us to experience our true, unfettered nature, our divine essence, our pure consciousness, our oneness with Brahman. Once achieved, the veil of Maya is lifted, and we have a direct encounter with God-consciousness.

Conceptually, I find this all very reasonable. In fact, intuitively I know it to be true. But here is my Vedanta dilemma:

By definition, any intellectual distinction between Brahman and Maya, as I have done above, is more Maya. Musings on the nature of Maya and Brahman are done in the realm of thought and the inevitable dualities and multiplicities that are the hallmark of Maya. My distinction between Brahman and Maya is yet another pitfall of Maya, since it bespeaks of dualistic thinking.

If Brahman is truly Brahman—that is, if Brahman is the oneness of all things—than what I call Maya must also be Brahman.

But we haven’t gotten to my real dilemma. I’m actually okay with the paradox that Maya must also be Brahman. I’m even okay with defining Brahman as something beyond defining.

My Vedanta dilemma is: What should I now do?

If I pursue the yogic practices described by Vedanta teachers, I continue to be bound by Maya, since I am in essence saying: I’m not there yet. I haven’t achieved Brahman yet. I’m working towards something which as of now is out of my reach.

But to define Brahman as out of my reach is to fall into Maya’s web of illusion. If Brahman is Brahman, then it is not out of reach at all. It is right here, right now, everywhere. Wouldn’t it be more proper to say: I am already that. (By “I,” I don’t mean the ego-I, I mean my consciousness.) That is, I am already here, now, and everywhere. (Tat tvam asi, as Hindus say. Thou art that.)

Following this line of thinking, I would go on to say that I need not do a thing. I already am that which I seek, and to seek it is to be caught up in the illusion of separateness. Therefore, I will let go of my yogic practice and rely only on insight—not an intellectual insight, but a kind of sudden, transporting, here-and-now experience that is beyond all verbal description. Since my yogic practice is inherently fettered by Maya, I can put it aside and just somehow get it, right here, right now, in a way I will never adequately describe in words.

That is my Vedanta dilemma. Should I do my practice or should I do nothing and just get it? And the fact that I have boiled down this discussion into an either-or question shows that even my dilemma is probably not valid because I’ve steered myself into another dualistic way of seeing the problem.

Ah, Maya.

Dissociation and Archetypal Defenses

2011-10-02T16:49:00.000-07:00

I believe that dreams transport us through the underside of our days, and that if we wish to become acquainted with the dark side of what we are, the signposts are there, waiting for us to translate them. —Gail Godwin

I finally got around to reading The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit by Donald Kalsched (1996), a book I should have read years ago when I was beginning my exploration of depth psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute. Kalsched artfully describes the defense mechanisms that the psyche employs to protect a child’s fragile ego after he or she experiences severe trauma. The mechanism employed is psychic fragmentation and dissociation, such that the child can compartmentalize, or repress altogether, the effects of traumatic experience so that the personal ego remains protected from overwhelming pain.

Kalsched (1996) goes on to explain that an internal protector—an angry, often rageful, figure—develops in the individual’s psyche in response to the trauma. This protector is imbued with raw, archetypal energy and a take-no-prisoners attitude meant to protect the individual from any further pain. This raging inner protector could exist solely in the realm of the unconscious, appearing to the individual in his or her nightmares; or it may be experienced consciously as an inner voice that speaks up when raw emotion or difficult memories are experienced. In either case, the angry protector is an autonomous entity with a life of its own, separate and apart from the “host” ego.

Unfortunately, this inner protector is so bent on guarding the individual’s fragile ego, it will attack, shame, and persecute the very ego it is trying to protect as a way of keeping that individual cut off from further cruelty from others. What begins as an ally and protector becomes a hypercritical and shaming inner voice that slaps down the ego before others have a chance to do so. Internal insults like “You’re no good, you’re stupid, nobody loves you” serve to keep the individual fearfully withdrawn from the world so that no further harm can come to him or her.

A perverse, internal Stockholm Syndrome develops: the individual, held captive for decades by this cruel protector, is unable to leave this long-standing and trusted friend. And the captor, of course, has no intentions of letting go or taking an exit—“he” (or “she”) exists in the realm of raw, archetypal emotion, impervious to reason.

So what’s an ego to do?

Depth psychology asserts that integrating unconscious content into consciousness is the movement toward wholeness and psychological healing.

Great, how do I do that?

Only a fool would offer a formula, but we begin where we always begin: by paying attention.

__________________

References

Kalsched, D. (1996). The inner world of trauma: Archetypal defenses of the personal spirit. New York: Routledge.

All Is Psyche II

2011-02-21T12:09:00.000-08:00

Everything is everything. —Lauryn Hill

Since writing “All Is Psyche” on this blog, I have read two books that explore the nature of consciousness and how it relates to observations made in quantum physics experiments: The Innermost Kernel: Depth Psychology and Quantum Physics. Wolfgang Pauli’s Dialogue with C. G. Jung by Suzanne Gieser (2005) and The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World by Amit Goswami (1993). Both discuss synchronicity and other Jungian concepts in the context of quantum-mechanical phenomena, such as wave-particle duality, nonlocality, and the presence of a conscious observer influencing experimental outcomes.

Both books are a bit dizzying. Gieser’s (2005) focus on epistemology and accurately recreating the key players’ thought processes is often maddening. Though Goswami’s (1993) attempt to create a unified theory that incorporates every observable aspect of consciousness is convincing and remarkably thorough, one easily gets lost on the intricate scaffolding that he is building.

While reading both books, a voice in the back of my head kept returning to these questions: What does all this get me? Will these books crack the code of consciousness so that I can end my suffering and consciously create my life as I would like it to be? While chastising myself for such a selfish agenda, I also recognized that the questions speak to every pilgrim’s quest: How might I unlock the secrets of existence to reduce the suffering in the world and live a full and meaningful life?

Goswami’s (1993) marriage of ancient Vedantic teachings and scientific discoveries of the 20th century is very exciting, and his conclusions fall into place nicely (though multiple readings are required amid the myriad terms for different experiences of consciousness and how they interrelate). He makes the basic premise quite convincing: the Universal Consciousness, the ground of all being, is peering out at its own creation through your eyes and mine. The act of conscious observation, as evidenced in quantum experiments, collapses the wave-potentiality of the material world into a particle-reality that we experience as solid, fixed, and predictable through the classical laws of physics. Consciousness chooses the outcome of the creative event through observation. (Goswami is quick to point out this is not a choice of the personal ego-I, but of the Universal Consciousness (p.112)).

So if this is true—and, by the way, it is—why are human beings so damn awful to one another?

All of our cruelty and suffering is due to the illusion of separateness. Upon collapsing wave-potentiality into particle-reality, the One becomes the many, and “I” and “you” and “them” all appear to be separate entities. Our oneness at the deepest level of our being is obscured and forgotten, setting off events that create our suffering and the evil that we do to one another. Just about all spiritual and religious traditions set out to explain the existence of evil and suffering, but I find this one the most satisfying—intuitively, experientially, and, it turns out, scientifically.

I am confident that this quantum-Vedantic point of view, termed monistic idealism, is absolutely true, though I have only begun to plumb its depths experientially. Though intellectually satisfied, I return to the nagging questions I posed above: What do I do with all this? How do I incorporate this into my life in real terms? What power does my ego-I have to reduce suffering in the world and consciously create a reality steeped in Brahman (or God or the Universal Consciousness or whatever word speaks to you)? What is the relationship between my ego-I and the Universal Consciousness which has created it?

Please return to this blog for further exploration of these questions.
____________________

References

Gieser, S. (2005). The innermost kernel: Depth psychology and quantum physics. Wolfgang Pauli’s dialogue with C. G. Jung. Berlin: Springer.

Goswami, A. (with Reed, R. E., and Goswami, M.). (1993). The self-aware universe: How consciousness creates the material world. New York: Putnam.

Stories

2010-12-01T10:51:00.000-08:00

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms. --Muriel Rukeyser

Because of the intimate link between storytelling and depth psychology, I am a big fan of Narrative Therapy. Michael White and David Epston (1990), developers of Narrative Therapy, proposed that “in order to make sense of our lives and to express ourselves, experience must be ‘storied’ and it is this storying that determines the meaning ascribed to experience” (pp. 9-10). By storying one’s life as a sequence of events across time, one arrives at a coherent account of oneself and the world around one, and the success of this storying provides one with a sense of continuity and meaning (p. 10). White and Epston argued that psychotherapy provides a framework wherein one may re-author or re-story experiences, if the dominant narrative one is currently living in is not representative of one’s lived experience or is otherwise detrimental (pp. 13-18). A key component in this re-storying is the externalizing of problems, whereby the presenting issues are objectified or made separate from the person so that they are rendered less fixed and less restricting (p. 38). Externalizing problems opens up new possibilities for clients, allowing new perspectives and alternative stories to develop (p. 39).

Here are two stories for comparison:

Story 1

Roger was an insomniac by the age of four and had his first panic attack when he was thirteen years old. While growing up, his father's emotional aloofness and his mother's addiction to tranquilizers engendered feelings of abandonment and worthlessness. By the time he was an adolescent, Roger's insomnia and anxiety were consuming him, as was a preoccupation with death and frequent fantasies of taking his own life. At age 21, Roger made a suicidal gesture that landed him in a psychiatric ward for seven days. For the next five years, Roger worked through most of his anger and depression in therapy and found that it helped a great deal. At age 26, he landed a relatively satisfying job that allowed him some creativity. At age 30, he discovered that his calling in life was to become a psychotherapist, and he went on to get his masters in counseling psychology.

Roger discovered that he had the smarts, creativity, and talent to overcome the challenges of his childhood and to carve out a meaningful life for himself.

Story 2

Roger was an insomniac by the age of four and had his first panic attack when he was thirteen years old. While growing up, his father's emotional aloofness and his mother's addiction to tranquilizers engendered feelings of abandonment and worthlessness. By the time he was an adolescent, Roger's insomnia and anxiety were consuming him, as was a preoccupation with death and frequent fantasies of taking his own life. At age 21, Roger made a suicidal gesture that landed him in a psychiatric ward for seven days. For the next five years, Roger worked through most of his anger and depression in therapy and found that it helped a great deal. At age 26, he landed a relatively satisfying job that allowed him some creativity. At age 30, he discovered that his calling in life was to become a psychotherapist, and he went on to get his masters in counseling psychology.

Roger discovered that the adversities he faced as a child were in fact gifts to him because they prepared the ground for his becoming an authentic and empathic psychotherapist.

While the events in both narratives are the same, these are in fact two different stories. The first tells the story of a hero who triumphs over adversity. The second tells the story of a hero who sees a meaningful connection between his adversities and his life's calling. A third story might be about a hero who realizes that we are all ultimately responsible for what we make of our lives.

As therapists we are often tasked with helping our clients reframe and re-story the events they recount to us in the consulting room. A client's willingness to re-story his life will, of course, vary from client to client. Long-entrenched false belief systems and stories that the client has been repeating to himself ad nauseam over a lifetime can make reframing a life story challenging for therapists. But when successful, re-storying can open up new paths and new possibilities for clients, setting them on a trajectory theretofore unseen.

From a depth perspective, the archetypal motifs of a life story can be appreciated and played with. Whether one reframes one's life as the hero's journey or a Sysiphean tragi-comedy, mythic themes will always show up because our very lives come from psyche, and so they are told in the language of psyche. Recognizing the mythic ground upon which the events of our lives play out gives our living stories poetry, breadth, and creative power.

__________________

References

White, M., & Epston, D. (1990). Narrative means to therapeutic ends. New York: Norton.

The Purpose of Psychological Symptoms

2010-11-28T19:27:00.000-08:00

Symptoms tell us that we can never take back into our ownership the events caused by the little people of the psyche. —James Hillman

Depth psychology recognizes two qualities of psychological symptoms. First, symptoms are autonomous; they show up not through any decision by the conscious ego but by way of unconscious forces deep within psyche. Symptoms present of their own accord, and, when the conscious ego becomes aware of them, the ego formulates the question, "What's wrong?"—thereby beginning what is hoped to be a long and fruitful dialogue with the unconscious.

Second, psychological symptoms have a purposive nature: they reveal the unconscious's drive toward some end, some purpose, that may not be immediately apparent to the conscious mind. As June Singer (1994) wrote:

Looking at a symptom in this way corresponds to Jung's "purposive view" of neurosis. . . . Jung. . . wanted to know where the symptoms might be leading the patient, that is, what unconscious purpose might be operating. He believed that the way to uncover meaning in events and developments was to observe the direction in which they were pointing, that is, to look for the purposive aspect of the symptom. (pp. 36-37)

Whereas the autonomy of the symptom is apparent, its purposive nature is often not so readily recognized. There is no doubt, however, that all symptoms—from cutting, to hoarding, to addiction—have a purpose. Cutting may be an unconscious attempt to be in control, hoarding an attempt to feel safe, and addiction an attempt to be pain-free. When the conscious mind recognizes the purpose of the symptom, it can go into the underlying unconscious forces that are at work. Symptoms are evidence that the psyche drives towards healing. We could say that the soul reaches out to the conscious mind through the presenting symptom. As depth psychology emphasizes, the integration of unconscious content into consciousness is the healing function, and the symptom is the catalyst for that integration.

Symptoms that present in families and other systems are no different. A symptom that shows up in a child, disturbing the family system, holds a purpose for the family unit as a whole. Therefore, I was surprised to read in Family Therapy: Concepts and Methods: "The idea that symptoms serve a function in families has been discredited" (Nichols & Schwarz, 2008, p. 115). I am curious to know exactly by whom and by what evidence this idea has been discredited. Nichols and Schwarz rightly point out that there is the danger of creating an adversarial relationship between therapist and parents (p. 115) if the therapist tells Mom and Dad that Jimmy's panic attacks and insomnia allow them to avoid their own problems—that they are scapegoating the child by making him the identified patient.

Yet blaming parents for scapegoating their child need not be the conclusion a depth psychotherapist draws when looking at the purposive nature of symptoms within the family. Rather, we recognize that Jimmy's anxiety attacks are not happening in a vacuum; they are an integral part of a larger system where anxiety may be completely repressed or otherwise not tolerated. Jimmy's psyche does not operate independently; it is part of an ongoing exchange of psychic energy, conscious and unconscious, among individuals in the family.

In fact, Jimmy has unconsciously chosen to hold the family pathology for the rest of its members. There appears to be an unconscious compassion at work, a willingness on Jimmy's part to shoulder the burdens of the whole family. The parents' willingness to allow this could be viewed as a kind of unconscious scapegoating (and for two parents who are unable or unwilling to own their own shadow material, this may be true), but it is not necessarily the case. For Jimmy's part, holding the symptom for the family might serve any number of purposes, such as keeping Mom and Dad engaged in him or forcing them to be the strongest members of the family if their own efficacy as parents is slipping.

Psyche operates as a whole among members of a system, and there is a fluid nature in the exchange of psychic content, including unconscious communication among individual members. Just as the individual's symptoms cannot be separated from the family, the purpose of the symptom cannot be separated from the family system either.

Understanding the symptom as psyche's way of making unconscious content conscious—the very process of individuation—helps us to depathologize the individual and broaden our understanding of the complex dynamics within individuals and families.

________________

References

Nichols, M. & Schwartz, R. (2008). Family therapy: Concepts and methods. (8th ed.) Boston, MA: Pearson Education.

Singer, J. (1994). Boundaries of the soul. New York: Anchor Books

All Is Psyche

2010-10-11T08:25:00.000-07:00

The human psyche shows that each individual is an extension of all of existence. —Stanislav Graf

There is an unfortunate misconception that just about all of us believe: the world around us is "out there," separate and apart from our inner world, and one's consciousness is contained somewhere within one's body, ending at the border of the skin or, perhaps, the outer edge of the brain. In this point of view, one's consciousness is the product of the living organism that it inhabits, and the world which it looks out upon is objective, devoid of conscious content, and without any psychic connection to one's inner experience, conscious or unconscious.

This misconception, nearly universally assumed as fact, has far-reaching effects. It reinforces feelings of separateness from the world, which can result in alienation, fear, a sense of powerlessness, and feelings of victimization. It subordinates one's inner experiences to "objective" reality and pits one against forces that are supposedly beyond one's control.

The fact is, there is nothing that you can experience outside of your own conscious awareness. Even if you believe in a mechanistic, Cartesian universe (which quantum mechanics has disproved), you must concede that "out there" can only be known and experienced "in here." As far as your individual experience is concerned, all is psyche. Even if you believe that "out there" exists independently of psyche, you cannot experience it as such. You, psyche, and the world are in it together.

There are a few phenomena that dispute the idea that my consciousness lives somewhere inside my head, separately and independently from the world around me. The most compelling is a famous experiment in the field of quantum physics, replicated over and over again in laboratories all over the world, that showed that the presence of an observer influences the behavior of particles. In these experiments, when an observer (i.e., a camera capturing the event for human observation) watched a particle travel, the outcome always met the expectations of the observer. But when the camera was taken away, the particle took on properties that defied the logic of known classical physics; that is, it defied the expectations of the scientists conducting the experiment. The presence of the observer influenced the outcome of the experiment every time.

Other evidence, perhaps less convincing to some, that there is a mysterious communication happening between my inner world and my outer one is paranormal phenomena, prayer, and intention-setting. We may judge these experiences variously from simple coincidence to so-uncanny-they-must-be-real, yet their variance does not discount their validity—it simply means that we do not understand all there is to know about them.

But there is another very wonderful phenomenon that points to the fallacy that I'm "in here" and the rest of the world is "out there" and no conscious connection between us exists: synchronicity. Synchronicity can be understood as "a meaningful coincidence of two or more events, where something other than the probability of chance is involved" (Jung, 1957/1971, p. 505). Jung recounted this experience from his own life:

On April 1, 1949, I made a note in the morning of an inscription containing a figure that was half man and half fish. There was fish for lunch. Somebody mentioned the custom of making an "April fish" of someone. In the afternoon, a former patient of mine, whom I had not seen for months, showed me some impressive pictures of fish. In the evening, I was shown a piece of embroidery with sea monsters and fishes in it. The next morning, I saw a former patient, who was visiting me for the first time in ten years. She had dreamed of a large fish the night before. A few months later, when I was using this series for a larger work and had just finished writing it down, I walked over to a spot by the lake in front of the house, where I had already been several times that morning. This time a fish a foot long lay on the sea-wall. Since no one else was present, I have no idea how the fish could have got there. (p. 506)

To me, debating whether Jung experienced a chance grouping of events or a communication from psyche meant to enlighten him is to miss the point. By doing so, we fall into the false dichotomy of science versus mysticism, a duality that is an outgrowth of a whole host of assumptions that, upon close examination, hold no water. We should not make uncanniness a required condition for meaningfulness!

Instead, let the approach to this sort of phenomenon be this: to enjoy the rich symbolism of the fish, to delight in the creative processes that find communication and connectedness in the occurrence, and to revel in the soulful endeavor of finding deep, potentially transforming wisdom in an event that would have passed Jung by had he not been paying attention.

Synchronicity happens every day; you need only turn your attention to it. It is tragic that our culture created a false duality between science and mysticism, for it forces us into a silly debate that misses the point. The truth is, the story that is you is being reflected back to you by the world around you, and there is nothing mystical or paranormal about it. Psyche is flowing everywhere, "inside" you and "outside" you. Conscious and unconscious content flows in and out of your awareness, splashing onto a mirroring world that helps shape you and the trajectory of your life's path.

There is a constant communication between your consciousness, your unconscious, the collective unconscious, and the universal consciousness. All is flowing through you. It is of you. It is creating you. It is writing your living story, and you are not only its most important character, you are its cocreator. All you need to do is pay attention.

To experience psyche in this way is to live soulfully, creatively, and mythopoetically. The world around you becomes a rich tapestry. The challenges—even the tragedies—become teachers and guideposts along your path. You may step out your door and into a world that, by definition, you belong in, because it and you arise from the same psychic stuff and are partners in creating the story of your soul's journey.

____________________

References

Jung, C. G. (1971). On synchronicity. In J. Campbell (Ed.) (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.), The portable Jung (pp. 505-518). New York: Viking Penguin (Original work published 1951)

A Cowboy in the Boat of Ra

2010-09-19T17:21:00.000-07:00

Thus it is that the sun is the father of all creatures. —Vaisampayana

A few months ago, the first line of Ishmael Reed's famous 1970 poem mysteriously emerged into my awareness with powerful resonance:

I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra

The poem must have made quite an impression on me when I first encountered it as an undergrad in the early 1980s. It leapt up into my psyche with fresh emotion almost 30 years after I had read it.

I could not remember any other line in the poem, so I dug it up and reread it in its entirety. Reed expertly intermingles pop culture imagery, African mythology, and political propaganda into a poem that powerfully evokes a people's struggle against social oppression.

For an Italian-Irish American born in 1963 in an upper-middle-class suburb, the poem has a cultural and temporal specificity that does not speak to my direct experience. But the first line, "I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra," continues to reverberate in my mind, becoming an unlikely daily mantra. Why?

The mythic references, of course, would explain the psychic resonance. The myth of American individualism juxtaposed with ancient Egypt's sun god packs a wallop that the intellect might have trouble reconciling but that the soul immediately embraces. The lone, brave man venturing out into virgin wilderness in a vessel fashioned by the god of the sun cuts right to the heart of every hero's mythic vision of himself.

I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra.

This daily affirmation, as it has now become, came into my awareness along with a few interesting synchronicities. I believe it began with my partner Robert. Robert is a Leo, a fire sign, and the sun is a symbol that follows him everywhere. He has several sun tattoos and his favorite flower is the sunflower. (I now see an inordinate amount of sunflowers on my travels for work in Harlem, the Bronx, and Brooklyn. I had never seen them before.) One day while riding into Manhattan on the el from Robert's apartment in Queens, I looked up and saw this store-front sign: "The Ra Nail Salon." I continue to notice that the letters "RA" frequently show up on billboards and in business names, and just last week I saw these letters on the back of a car: ELAN RA (the "T" had fallen off a Ford Elantra parked at the curb).

A similar phenomenon has followed me since 2006, when a shaman retrieved my power animal, a white crane, during a healing. I found soon after (and continue to find) white feathers at my toe everywhere I walk.

I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra: I am watched over by the god of the sun, the giver of life and light, as I navigate waters in a boat that he has fashioned just for me.

I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra. The image drops me into the moment and into my body. It settles me onto the Earth. My diaphragm relaxes, and a wonderful exhale issues from my lungs. The harshness around me as I travel to appointments doing outreach to individuals with mental illness, substance abuse, and chronic homelessness is softened and made less threatening. I am now fearless, heroic, god-touched. I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra.

The image widens out my perspective. I am no longer rushing to a crisis but journeying through uncharted territory, bold and with great purpose. I am walking upon the Earth, not traipsing through the South Bronx. The sky is now big, my step slow and sure-footed, the terrain rife with signposts and secret messages. I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra.

I find this mythic perspective no less valid than the ones that my culture has adopted and accepted as "fact." Commerce, science, technology, religion—these are the soulless myths that many in my community follow in 2010 New York. I, however, cannot walk through my day as if I were watched over by the gods of commerce or technology. Instead, each day in East Harlem will be my vision quest; each challenge will bring an initiatory wound or an epiphany. There are messages in sunflower oases behind chain-link fences and white feathers under the el.

I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra.
_________________

References

Reed, I. (1970). I am a cowboy in the boat of ra. In Catechism of d neoamerican hoodoo church. United Kingdom: P. Breman

The Heart of Stone

2010-08-08T17:25:00.000-07:00

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself. —Bertrand Russell

When I did my first vision quest in the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico in 2007, my teacher and guide, Sparrow Hart, told me about rock divination, an ancient ritual that works like this: Ask the universe a deep question, then scan the stones that are strewn about in your path. Pick up a stone that catches your eye and study it. You will find the answer to your question in the stone.

I performed this ritual on the second day of my quest. My question to the universe was this: "How can I develop a consistent and fruitful meditation practice?" This was a big question to me at the time. I had been unable to meditate on a consistent basis because I found meditating very difficult. It required me to sit with the conflict in my mind, which was as unpleasant a task as anyone could drum up. For me, meditating was at times maddening, at times boring, and at other times simply too much trouble for the pay-off (which was always elusive to me to begin with).

After I put the question to the beautiful landscape around me, I walked around a bit, looking down at the stones that were scattered about. A red stone, perfectly shaped like a heart, caught my eye. I had my answer! I must bring heart to my practice. I cannot approach meditation as a dry and detached endeavor. The meditation cushion must be approached with heart—a courageous heart, a loving heart, a human heart.

What makes stone so sacred to the lives of human beings? It has been used in sacred circles and altarpieces for millennia. My good friend and fellow alum of Pacifica Graduate Institute, Evie Bodine (2010), asked this question: "What is the process that the psyche uses to turn an ordinary stone into something sacred?" (p. 1). Bodine went on to say that Aniela Jaffé, a close collaborator of Carl Jung, speculated that religion and art were woven together in history due to the fact that “man, with his symbol-making propensity, unconsciously transforms objects or forms into symbols (thereby endowing them with great psychological importance)” (as cited in Bodine, 2010, p. 11). Jaffé also said that the presence and nature of stone as a recurring motif in art was apparent from the “earliest expressions of human consciousness to the 12 most sophisticated forms of 20th-century art” which demonstrate stone’s “enduring psychological significance” (as cited in Bodine, 2010, p. 11).

That is to say, psyche speaks to us in the language of images and symbols, and, since everything is experienced within the realm of psyche, the image-symbol has a psychological power that moves us deeply, acts upon us and through us, and carries a creative power that is revealed in art, religion, and all forms of human expression. It is no wonder that stone, the very stuff of Mother Earth herself, the material best suited for fashioning tools and weapons by early man and for building homes and temples by Egyptians, Greeks, and other ancient peoples, would be spontaneously endowed by psyche with the properties we associate with the sacred.

The sacred, by any definition, inspires in human beings awe, surrender, humility, and reverence. The great temples, monuments, and incomparable works of sculpture fashioned in stone throughout the ages inspire those qualities in human beings, regardless of one's religious or spiritual point of view. It is as if psyche must imbue stone with the qualities of the sacred. Jaffé said, "The animation of the stone must be explained as the projection of a more or less distinct content of the unconscious into the stone" (as cited in Bodine, 2010, p. 12).

I began carving stone in 2000, and I have found that there is something ineffable yet self-evident about this relationship between stone and the sacred. In fashioning stone into human or abstract shapes, the spirit of the rock is drawn out, or, perhaps, infused with the spirit of the human psyche, transmitted through the hands of the artist. Explain it as you will, but something is transferred, something is revealed, something intangible yet immediately apparent is expressed through this dialogue between artist and stone.

I took home the heart-shaped stone that I found in the Gila that day and placed it on my altar, where it lived for three years. Then one morning in 2010, I gave it to my partner Robert as a symbol of my commitment to our relationship. Through that stone, a sacred thread continues to weave through my life—from the sacred vision quest, to the sacred energies on my altar, and on to the sacred relationship between me and my partner. The stone is alive—there is no other word for it—and it carries a sacred purpose: one that exists through a co-creative process between psyche and stone.
_____________

References

Bodine, E. (2010). Journey of self through stone. Unpublished master's thesis, Pacifica Graduate Institute, Carpinteria, CA.

The Puer in Gay Urban Culture

2010-07-21T19:41:00.000-07:00

If growing up means it would be beneath my dignity to climb a tree, I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me! --J. M. Barrie

The archetype of the puer aeternus, the boy who does not grow up, is ubiquitous in myth, literature, and pop culture. From Ovid's child-god Iacchus, to Peter Pan, to Michael Jackson, this archetype has a powerful hold on the male psyche, for it captures not only the irresistible wish to live in a world of play, fantasy, and instant gratification, but also to be parented by another and unaccountable for one's lot in life.

The charms of a man gripped by the puer are indisputable: he is affectionate, romantic, and creative; his need for gentle parenting is endearing; and his ready access to childlike qualities can appear refreshing. There is a lost quality in his demeanor. Since his wounds are generally not hidden, he invites the healer and caretaker in us to respond. He may give himself over to insouciance or despair at a moment's notice, and his long association with Dionysos and Eros make him alluring to all of us--gay, straight, male, and female.

The pervasive presence of the puer in New York City's gay subculture is apparent to any of us who have bar-hopped over the years in Chelsea and the West Village. How many tired encounters have we all suffered with forty-something club kids and other middle-aged brats? While the dominant male culture also has a shortage of men among male adults, the same problem in gay urban subcultures appears even more concentrated. Why so?

The problem begins with our American culture's lack of initiatory rites that are required to transform a boy into a man. There are remnants of puberty rites of passage in our culture, such as bar mitzvahs and confirmations, but they have lost their power to create deep change in the hearts of many who participate in them. The terrors and ecstasies of a ritual properly carried out give a rite of passage its transformative power. In the puberty rites of the Australian Yuin, for example, young men have their incisors knocked out with a hammer and chisel (Eliade, 1958), serving to shock the novice out of his ordinary way of being so that a new and expanded consciousness can emerge. Afterwards, the initiate is welcomed into a community of elder men who understand his ordeal and welcome him into their hearts. Puberty rites of this kind are found in indigenous cultures all over the world, for both boys and girls, and they successfully create an inner transformation that propels a child into adulthood.

But in our modern, work-a-day culture, we have lost our connection to ritual and have thus lost one of the deepest expressions of our humanity. As Michael Meade (1958) commented: “Without a ritual to contain and inform the wounds of life, pain and suffering increase, yet meaningful change doesn’t occur” (p. xxi). Adolescent boys in American culture have no ritual to give context to the pain and suffering they experience on their way to becoming adults. They also do not have a coherent elder community of men to usher them into manhood.

While there is no shortage of puers in the straight male community, the puer in gay culture has been a particularly maddening breed for myself and other queer men that I know. Of course, the presence of the puer in our culture is an understandable outgrowth of our history. When many of us would-be men were in our twenties, we fled the suburbs for the freedom and anonymity of urban life, where hedonism ruled. Those irresistible gods of play--Dionysus and Eros--were waiting for us in Christopher Street bars and sex shops on the Castro. How else would a 25-year-old puer respond? Indulgence in the pleasures of the city after a lifetime of closeted agony in the suburbs was a welcome oasis in the desert that had been our lives.

From the outset, our puer nature found root: still boys in our twenties because no rite of passage into manhood was ever offered to us, we then transplanted ourselves into an urban wonderland of fun and pleasure where the puer could run wild. While fun and pleasure in and of themselves are beautiful things, they stunt our psychological growth when they become addictive, and they are often misguided attempts to find love, meaning, and parental acceptance. And it is not just hedonism and self-indulgence that are the salient characteristics of the gay urban puer. Materialism, "looks-ism"--the requirement to be good-looking enough to be approached in a bar or gym--and the notion that a general demeanor of superficial bitchiness is clever and desirable have created patterns of childish behavior that have made many of my brothers absolutely unbearable to be around.

Many gay men in their thirties, forties, and beyond are still caught in the circular nature of this trap: the inner child's yearning for love in a culture that keeps him infantilized has sixty-somethings sitting on the same bar stool they have been visiting for the past 30 years. When our elders are stuck in their boyhood, what chance is there for gay teens to become men?

If we look deeper, though, we see something even more troubling than addiction, bitchiness, and superficiality. The puer, gay or straight, avoids responsibility for his own actions and his own feelings. We can think of responsibility as the ability to respond, and we see that the puer is often powerless to respond to life's challenges and to the undoing of the destructive patterns that have gripped him for so many years. It is as if he is unconsciously embracing his own emasculation because doing so gives him an out. To become a man--to step up to the plate with courage enough to own your feelings, your actions, and your very life--is a terrifying prospect to one's inner child.

Gay urban men do not have the responsibility of marriage and children thrust upon them in the same way that our straight counterparts do; we are not forced into adulthood by the dominant culture's expectations. We are freer in this respect, but without coherent rituals of our own to give structure to life's transitions, the gay puer is easily lost in that freedom, at sea and rudderless. How can older gay men begin a dialogue on our cultural infantilization?
_______________________

References

Eliade, M. (1958). Rites and symbols of initiation: The mysteries of birth and rebirth (W. R. Trask, Trans.). Putnam, CT: Spring.

Mead, M. (1958). Introduction. In M. Eliade, Rites and symbols of initiation: The mysteries of birth and rebirth (W. R. Trask, Trans.). Putnam, CT: Spring.

The Calling: Discovering Our Soul's Work

2010-07-04T17:19:00.000-07:00

Who is the storyteller creating your biography?
—James Hillman

Discovering my soul’s work and how to make meaning out of my life has been an ongoing pursuit throughout my adulthood. Like many people in our culture, I had been working at a job that was not congruent with who I was, and I yearned to integrate my heart’s desire with a good living. Though the struggle had been going on for decades, it was not until 2006 that a sense of urgency and determination came over me to make the integration of my soul and my work a reality. How do we change our lives as we explore the questions "Who am I?" and "How shall I make meaning out of my life?"

By 2006, I had been part of the work force for 20 years, working in various positions in the publishing field. When the Internet came along in the mid-1990s, I became interested in web development. I took an opportunity to change my career track at my company from editing and production to web software engineering. However, I was deeply unsatisfied with the corporate culture, and, in 1999, I decided to start my own business doing graphic design and web development. I held onto my corporate job as I built up a steady clientele, and, in 2004, I segued into a part-time position at my day job while continuing to grow the business.

After two years, though, it was clear that running a business was not making me happy. I enjoyed the creative aspects of the work—the graphic design was fun and the creative problem-solving that is required of computer programming was satisfying. But marketing, creating a business plan, drumming up clients, and all the other MBA-related skills required of a good entrepreneur were not part of my skill-set and brought me no joy whatsoever. It became clear that I was not going to build the business to the point where I could quit my day job and sustain myself, so I returned to my corporate job full time at a pleasing six-figure salary.

It was then that I began to work with a career counselor in New York, Allie Roth, who had developed a program called "Discovering Your Soul’s Work." Through the program, I delved into my childhood, examined my belief system, recounted times of crisis and growth in my life, journaled, drew mandalas, meditated, visualized—all with the intent of discovering and articulating who I was, regardless of the skill-sets that I had developed in print and electronic publishing over the past 20 years. By doing this kind of inner work, I was forced to wrestle with the question of who I really am and how I might make meaning out of my life. The work culminated in the following personal mission statement that I used as a guide for a new career: "Every day I will engage with others as we explore what it means to be fully human."

I had narrowed down my career options to three fields: art therapy, the healing arts, and psychotherapy. Of the three, it was the last one with which I had had the most personal experience. By 2006, I had been in therapy four times, beginning at the age of 17, the longest stretch lasting nine years. Having experienced remarkable transformations as a client, I could bring an intuitive understanding to the work of psychotherapy that I could not bring to the other fields. In addition, spirituality played a central role in my life, and I resolved to build a career that combined spirituality with psychotherapy, which, of course, fit nicely with my mission "to explore what it means to be fully human." Having settled on this path, I began to look at schools that could offer me the opportunity to explore spiritual aspects of psychotherapy, and I eventually settled on Pacifica Graduate Institute.

Interestingly, it was through Allie that I had first heard of James Hillman’s The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling (1996). This book was a turning point in how I approached the question of work and identity. The notion that I had a daimon at my side who had been with me since birth was intriguing. Along my spiritual path, I had already identified a higher self or inner guru, so this new term "daimon" fit perfectly with a familiar inner experience. In addition, the acorn theory expanded my understanding of this inner guru—the notion that the oak-to-be was present at birth broadened my frame of reference for who I was and the path that I was on. Hillman said that the acorn theory "holds that each person bears a uniqueness that asks to be lived and that is already present before it can be lived" (p. 6). He went on to say that "the soul of each of us is given a unique daimon before we are born" (p. 8). The idea that my daimon and I chose the circumstances into which I was born would allow a complete reframing of the events of my childhood. While I cannot say with unwavering certainty that he and I made such a choice, it allows me to reconsider how I frame the past. For example, rather than bemoan my depression and anxiety as an adolescent or the pain of suffering abuse, I can see these trials as necessary groundwork in becoming an empathetic and authentic therapist. What appeared as unjust victimization was, in fact, the experience needed to answer my calling. The impact of this cognitive shift was huge; how I defined myself and my life would change completely.

Having left a six-figure salary at the age of 45 to pursue a career as a therapist, I was excited to read the following in Thomas Moore’s A Life at Work: The Joy of Discovering What You Were Born To Do (2008):

His willingness to leave a corporation that has the resources to keep him financially comfortable for a long time suggests that he is following a different kind of guidance. He is determined to seek his own destiny, and that conviction is a sure sign of a daimon. (p. 128)

In addition, some family members thought my decision was misguided, so I was happy to see that at least Moore understood me when he said: "When you consider the spiritual aspects of work, you have to use a logic that is different than the world’s reasoning" (p. 158). Taking this bold plunge by defying convention and watching it all come to fruition is a deeply satisfying part of this journey. Many people are bound by cultural expectations and are therefore perpetually frustrated and unfulfilled.

Connecting to one’s daimon is perhaps the key component in extricating oneself from a soul-numbing job in order to embark on a meaningful path. Unfortunately, the tyranny of technology, religion, and materialism can conspire to cut us off from our innermost selves. Whether it is alienated teens in suburbia or alcoholic bread-winners high on the corporate ladder, many individuals often try to squeeze their souls into a cultural reality that does not allow them to be who they are. To connect to the daimon requires the courage to shine a light on one’s inner world, with all its unpleasant humanness. It takes practice and rigor to listen closely to one’s inner life so that the connection to one’s calling (or callings) can be recognized and teased out. If one lives in a culture which does not support or understand this kind of work, one may never make time for it.

Still, for many there is an irrepressible force within them that will not be silent in the face of cultural impediments. Or, pathologies will begin to show up in the individual, acting as a springboard to self-examination, inner work, and questions about meaning and fulfillment. Yet each of us can think of individuals we have known who never seemed to answer their calling. Either they did not have the tools to engage in inner work, or the risks involved in bringing their unique gifts to the world appeared too frightening. As joyous as the experience might be, the daimon challenges the ego to step up and be accountable for being a powerful presence in the world.

In addition, we should be careful about how we judge work as "meaningful." For example, if one’s life-path is devotion to mindfulness and seeing deeply into the nature of things, we would have to concede that scrubbing a toilet is as much an opportunity for meditation as living in an ashram. In this respect, it may not be what one does but the spirit in which one does it that the daimon’s power is manifested.

How one connects with his or her calling will vary from individual to individual. It may be through therapy, spiritual practice, or experiential work of various stripes. It may be a slow unfolding or a sudden realization. Whatever form it takes, connecting to the daimon’s mysterious power and manifesting its directives is perhaps the most exciting journey a human being can take.
_____________________________

References

Hillman, J. (1996). The soul’s code: In search of character and calling. New York: Warner Books.

Moore, T. (2008). A life at work: The joy of discovering what you were born to do. New York: Broadway Books.

Mythic Realms: James Hillman

2010-06-12T07:45:00.000-07:00

Only in mythology does pathology receive an adequate mirror, since myths speak with the same distorted, fantastic language. —James Hillman

In Re-Visioning Psychology, James Hillman (1975), a pioneer of imaginal psychology, explored the relationship between polytheism, archetypal psychology, and soul-making. He pointed out that by considering the personified archetypes as gods “they become now recognizable as persons, each with styles of consciousness” (p. 35). He went on to say that “these persons, by governing my complexes, govern my life” (p. 35). The archetypes, he claimed, are not concepts or abstractions but rather are structures of consciousness from which concepts can be derived (p. 36). The Greeks, he said, discovered these gods through their unwritten mythology, whereas people today discover them through their lived psychology (p. 36). The gods, heroes, and daemons of classical mythology are directly analogous to the archetypal structures that are experienced via the unconscious (p 36).

Although welcoming of the gods into his theory of archetypal psychology, Hillman (1975) was quick to point out that such a polytheistic psychology is not a religion (p. 167). Hillman’s plea for soul-making in psychology necessarily omits religion, because he believed that the soul’s inherent multiplicity is at odds with religion’s insistence on monism (pp. 167-168). Hillman said that polytheistic thinking removes the dualistic conflicts that arise from monotheism (secular versus religious, theology versus psychology, divine versus human) (p. 168). He said, “Archetypal psychology’s concern is not with the revival of religion, but with the survival of soul” (p. 170). Soul-making and soul-tending, therefore, cannot exclude one’s participation in the realm of the gods, for the gods “are cosmic perspectives in which the soul participates. They are the lords of its realms of being” (p. 169). He concluded that “all psychic reality is governed by one or another archetypal fantasy, given sanction by a God” (p. 170).
________________

References

Hillman, J. (1975). Re-visioning psychology. New York: HarperCollins.

Psychosis and Depth Psychology: A Case Study

2010-06-09T18:43:00.000-07:00

At bottom we discover nothing new and unknown in the mentally ill; rather, we encounter the substratum of our own natures. —Carl Jung

Since beginning my studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute, I have been fascinated by schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders as viewed through the lens of depth psychology. Depth psychology recognizes that the archetypal characters and motifs that show up in the delusions of schizophrenics are the same as those that are revealed in the dreams, myths, and fantasies of nonschizophrenics. Just as archetypal material from the collective unconscious is revealed through the psychic wounds and complexes of people without psychosis, the delusions of schizophrenics also serve as containers and reflectors of emotional wounding. This article describes some of the presenting issues of a man with schizophrenia, “Mr. C,” that I counseled not long ago, interpreted from a depth psychological perspective.

Mr. C., born in 1949, is an African American gay man who has been in and out of psychiatric facilities for most of his life. He currently lives in a congregate housing facility in New York City. Mr. C. is pleasant and respectful. He presents himself as a cultured gentleman who enjoys classical music and fine wine. Mr. C.’s daily living skills are very good, and his interaction with others is generally coherent and polite. Mr. C. does not believe that he has a mental illness. He has said that doctors in the past have told him that he has schizophrenia but that he does not believe them.

Mr. C.’s history is difficult to piece together. He was born while his mother was in a psychiatric ward. Mr. C. has said that she treated him like a “sex object,” though it is unclear if she herself sexually abused him or if she allowed others to. Mr. C. was in foster care for most of his childhood and reports a suicide attempt in 1969. He served in Vietnam and says that he had completed some college courses but never earned a degree. He says that he worked sporadically in his twenties.

There are several recurring themes that show up in Mr. C.’s hallucinations and delusions. First, Mr. C. believes, as many schizophrenics do, that he comes from royal heritage. Religious personages also play a prominent role in his fantasies, as do mythological figures, such as witches, feathered serpents, and goddesses. Fertility and motherhood are prominent motifs in Mr. C.’s fantasies, as is the notion that impostors are out to trick him. I will take each of these separately in discussing their depth implications and how they might serve Mr. C.’s emotional and psychological needs.

As to the issue of royal heritage, Mr. C. believes that he was born a white woman hundreds of years ago to Queen Victoria of England and King Richard of Denmark. The saga of his life in that incarnation is rife with deceit and intrigue, culminating in the king and queen putting Mr. C. in “suspended animation” until 1949, at which time he was made to come back a black man. The king and queen now visit Mr. C. nightly through his television and argue over him, which causes Mr. C. great distress (an increase in his medication has helped reduce these episodes). Given that Mr. C. is poor, black, gay, and HIV positive—that is, on one of the lowest rungs of society’s ladder—his belief in a white royal heritage is compensatory; it helps him cope with his very unpleasant circumstances. (It is interesting to note that Mr. C. refers to black people as “colored.”) Further, the fact that the king and queen argue over him has an interesting telos. I believe that the fantasy serves as an outlet for Mr. C.’s own anger—it is his anger coming through the television set. Further, it provides a container for his anger in a meaningful way. The fantasy offers him two parental figures giving him a great deal of their time, energy, and attention. Though the episodes are distressful, I suspect that they fulfill Mr. C.’s unconscious wish to have emotionally engaged parents who care enough to fight over him.

Motherhood and fertility are two common themes in Mr. C.’s delusions, revealing a mother complex. Mr. C. says that there are two kinds of mothers—birth mothers and donor mothers. He says that he himself is a donor mother—he has fallopian tubes through which many babies have passed into the wombs of birth mothers. He also says that he is the fertility goddess of the Earth and is responsible for the flora and fauna of the planet. Though we do not know much about Mr. C.’s relationship with his mother, we do know that she was poor and black, that she suffered from psychiatric problems, and that she is responsible for wounding him sexually in some way. We also know that Mr. C. does not acknowledge her as his rightful mother—he maintains that Queen Victoria is his true mother. (Mr. C. says that his biological mother “intercepted” him in the hospital in 1949.) When asked about his biological mother, Mr. C. gets quiet and guarded. Given her psychiatric problems and his history in foster care, it is safe to say that he experienced very poor attachment to his mother, if not severe emotional wounding at her hands. Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that Mr. C. is carrying a great deal of anger toward his mother. Not only do his fantasies serve to dissociate him from her, they have him surpassing her in importance—he is a white, wealthy woman, he is a donor mother with dozens of children, he is a fertility goddess. That is, he is superior to his mother in every way. In this respect, his mother complex is filtered through fantasies which serve to elevate him and compensate for his wounding at his mother’s hands. June Singer (1949) pointed out that “complexes interweave in their nuclei the archetypal roots of the personality” (p. 69), and, for Mr. C., the mother archetype has firmly planted itself at the center of this complex.

Mr. C. also believes that there is a witch in his room steeling his possessions. Archetypally, witches are expressions of the dark feminine, and, given Mr. C.’s overidentification with whiteness, royalty, and his status as a goddess, it is no surprise that the shadow of his own feminine nature would need expression in a way that he could tolerate. Singer (1994) said that the shadow is everything that we are ashamed of and “it also has its collective aspects which are expressed mythologically, for example, as the devil or a witch” (p. 165). I believe that the witch in Mr. C.’s room is his own unconscious anger, deviousness, and feminine shadow. It may also incorporate the internalized presence of his biological mother.

Religious personages abound in Mr. C.’s fantasies. At our first meeting, he asked me if I was “associated” with St. Paul. He went on to explain that there were three St. Pauls: one was his father, one was his brother, and one was his son. Mr. C. says that he himself is St. Anne, which is consistent with his mother complex, since St. Anne was the mother of the Virgin Mary. Here again Mr. C. elevates himself to a very important station with the emphasis on purity and motherhood, consistent with his identification with the light feminine archetype.

Mr. C. told me that he gets messages from flying serpents whom he calls serpentiles. The feathered serpent is a figure that shows up in the mythology of many ancient cultures. As an archetype, the feathered serpent is the connector of earth and heaven. Its reptilian nature makes it at home in dark, earthy places, while its status as a winged creature makes it equally at home in the air. It can therefore be seen as a bridge between the unconscious and the ego, the feminine and masculine principles, or intuition and intellect. The serpentiles, then, could be inner voices from Mr. C.’s unconscious or intuitive side communicating with his conscious ego. As messengers who deliver useful information, they could serve to allay Mr. C.’s fear of the unknown.

Mr. C.’s ongoing experience of impostors in his life resonates archetypally with the trickster deity. The salient qualities of the trickster archetype are satisfying one’s appetites, setting traps (and often getting trapped), crossing boundaries, wandering alone, and forcing the tension of opposites. Like trickster, Mr. C.’s impostors are rogue figures, disconnected from his community but pretending to be part of it. One day, I would not give Mr. C. cigarette money, which made him very angry. Weeks later, he told me there was someone walking around pretending to be me. He said that I had earlier agreed to give him cigarette money but that later an impostor showed up and refused to do so. Since trickster is associated with appetites, it is interesting that this incident began with an addiction, segued into a trap (the promise of cigarette money), and forced Mr. C. into the impossible situation of holding the tension of opposites: liking someone and being angry with them at the same time. Mr. C. probably does not have the ego strength to assimilate anger and love simultaneously; therefore, trickster shows up as an evil impostor out to dupe him. The impostors in Mr. C.’s life are also containers for more of his own shadow material. Carl Jung (1890/1965) recognized the relationship between trickster and shadow when he said, “The trickster is a collective shadow figure, an epitome of all the inferior traits of character in individuals” (p. 209).

On the topic of dreams, Mr. C. experiences his sleeping dreams as concretely as he does his waking hallucinations, though he says they have a different quality; he describes his sleeping dreams as out-of-body experiences. When relating events of the past, Mr. C. does not specify whether a particular experience happened while he was awake or asleep unless directly asked. It appears that his sleeping dreams, his hallucinations, and his waking reality all have equal weight in their emotional and cognitive impact. This would suggest that the stuff of hallucinations and delusions are not pathological—they are made of the same psychic content that everyone else’s dreams and fantasies are made of. Rather, it is Mr. C.’s inability to organize and delineate psychic events that is the anomaly.

To assess Mr. C. from a depth perspective begs the question, “Can people with schizophrenia engage in and benefit from long-term depth psychotherapy?” This will vary from client to client depending on the individual’s ability to self-reflect, endure internal conflict, assimilate new ideas, and be a witness to his fantasies—Mr. C. would not be such a candidate. But assuming for the moment that Mr. C. was treatable from a depth orientation, what exactly would we identify as the symptoms? Singer (1994) noted that depth psychotherapy “does not focus primarily on immediate problems, but seeks to use the presenting symptoms as keys to understanding whole persons in the fullness of their beings” (p. 358). For the depth psychotherapist, symptoms carry messages from the Self that need to be understood and reintegrated into the personality so that transformation can occur. In the case of Mr. C., then, the symptoms are not the delusions but rather the underlying complexes. If Mr. C. were not schizophrenic and suffered from a mother complex, he would be no less symptomatic—his symptoms would simply reveal themselves in different ways. In this respect, a delusion is not a symptom but rather a vehicle for the expression of a symptom. Just as a bad marriage might reveal a mother complex, a delusion can be a window into an individual’s underlying pathology. Or, as Jung discovered through his work with schizophrenics:

Paranoid ideas and hallucinations contain a germ of meaning. A personality, a life history, a pattern of hopes and desires lie behind the psychosis. . . . A general psychology of the personality lies concealed within psychosis, and. . . here we come upon the old human conflicts. (1961/1965, p. 127)

Identifying the delusion as the symptom, as the medical model does, halts any attempt at re-forming and reintegrating underlying complexes into the client’s consciousness so that he might deepen his understanding of who he is. While in some ways the medical model of schizophrenia has been helpful to Mr. C.—an increase in his Zyprexa has reduced his pain and suffering—it has also engendered shame and embarrassment over his condition and does little to encourage psychotherapy as part of his treatment. It is true that many people with schizophrenia would not be candidates for Jungian analysis, particularly if they are easily overwhelmed by dreams and fantasies. But for those who have the ego strength to do so, I would imagine the experience would be very rich. A schizophrenic’s connection to fantasy, mythic archetypes, and imagery—that is, the language of psyche—appears to be more vivid and accessible than many of us are able to enjoy. Jung affirmed that the language of psyche is the same for psychotics and nonpsychotics alike when he said, “At bottom we discover nothing new and unknown in the mentally ill; rather, we encounter the substratum of our own natures” (1961/1965, p. 127).

In my sessions with Mr. C., my focus was on building trust, tracking and mirroring the emotional content of his delusions, probing for historical information about his upbringing, and gently testing his ability to hold disagreement about his experiences. His attendance in therapy was fairly regular, and he acknowledged that the sessions helped. Our sessions may have been one of the few times Mr. C. had someone listen to him from the point of view of his own experience—something that every client deserves from his therapist.
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References

Jung, C. G. (1956). On the psychology of the trickster figure. In P. Radin The trickster: A study in American Indian mythology. New York: Schocken Books. (Original work published 1890).

Jung, C. G. (1965). Memories, dreams, reflections. (A. Jaffe, Ed.) (R. & C. Winston, Trans.). New York: Vintage Books. (Original work published 1961).

Singer, June. (1994). Boundaries of the soul: The practice of Jung’s psychology. New York: Anchor Books.

Mythic Realms: Otto Rank

2010-05-19T06:08:00.000-07:00

Myth's archaic function was to tell us the deepest truths of the world in story form. —Sam Keen

The psychologist and philosopher Otto Rank (1909/1914) noted that the common motifs in the hero myths of Moses, Kyros, Hercules, Jesus, Perseus, and Oedipus, among others, reflected the wishful fantasies of the childhood ego as it struggles to overthrow or supersede its parents. The hero of myth is usually descended from royal or exalted lineage but is raised by lowly parents and suffers trials and persecutions in his attempt to return to his original parents (or rightful station) (p. 61). Rank said that the two pairs of parents in myths correspond to the real and imaginary parents of a child’s fantasy (p. 68). Hostility toward the father, in particular, is a ubiquitous motif in hero myths, and Rank said that “the entire endeavor to replace the real father with a more distinguished one is merely the expression of the child’s longing for the vanished happy time, when his father still appeared to be the strongest and greatest man” (p. 67). In myths, revolt against the father is usually instigated by the father’s hostility, which, Rank said, is in fact a projection that places the child’s hostility onto the father, thereby justifying the child’s rebellion against him (p. 75).

Rank (1909/1914) characterized the hero myth as having a “paranoid structure” (p. 75), as evidenced by the aforementioned projection mechanism and “the property of separating and dissociating what is fused in the imagination” (p. 75). He noted that the recurring themes in the hero myth—the creation of two sets of parents and the projection of one’s own hostility onto an authority figure—show up in the fantasies of paranoid psychotics. A common delusion among psychotic individuals is that their birth parents are not their real parents, that their rightful progenitors are of royal or exalted descent, and that their enemies wish to keep them in their lowly station and deny them the rightful claim to their riches or royal standing (p. 91). Rank noted “the egotistical character of the entire system” (p. 92) and said that the true hero of the hero myth is the ego (p. 81).

Not only did Rank (1909/1914) observe the uncanny parallels between psychotic delusions, the fantasies of the childhood ego, and the hero myth, but he also acknowledged the relationship between myths and dreams: “The manifestation of the intimate relationship between dream and myth . . . entirely justifies the interpretation of the myth as a dream of the masses of the people” (p. 6). Rank discussed the theories of his day that attempted to explain the recurring motifs that show up in these various psychic phenomena. One such theory was that of elementary thoughts, which stated that the unanimity of myths is a necessary sequence of the uniform disposition of the human mind (p. 1). Rank found this theory more justifiable in explaining the concurrence of psychic events among disparate peoples than other theories of his day (pp. 5-6).

Rank (1909/1914) demonstrated that common psychic motifs are revealed in what might at first appear to be different types of experiences. Psychosis, fantasy, myth, and dream, although all very different experiences for a given individual, in fact come from the same psychic stuff. By shedding light on the common language of these different psychic events, Rank provided an understanding of the relationship between psychology and mythology.

References

Rank, O. (1914). The myth of the birth of the hero: A psychological exploration of myth (F. Robbins & S. E. Jelliffe, Trans.). New York: Nervous and Mental Disease. (Original work published 1909)

Mythic Realms: Carl G. Jung

2010-05-15T09:02:00.000-07:00

Myths contain unconscious material in a disguised form to be absorbed and internalized by the listener for use in his or her personal life. —Amit Bhattacharyya

Carl G. Jung (1927/1983), the father of analytic psychology, distinguished three psychic levels: (a) consciousness, (b) the personal unconscious, and (c) the collective unconscious. He maintained that the collective unconscious is part of human beings’ ancestral heritage. Claiming that it is common to all humans, perhaps even to all animals, Jung said that the collective unconscious is the true basis of the individual psyche (p. 67).

Jung proposed that archetypes are the contents of the collective unconscious (1957/1983b, p. 91). Archetypes can be regarded as primordial images deep in the collective unconscious that give rise to certain ever-recurring psychic experiences (1921/1998, pp. 68-69). Archetypes are figures and motifs that reign over the psychic realm and reveal themselves in dreams, fantasies, and visions as well as in legends, fairy tales, myth, and religion (1951/1998b, p. 65). Jung also recognized them in the psychotic delusions of schizophrenics (1957/1983a, p. 65). In fact, in 1909, Jung began studying mythology to better understand the symbolism in the latent psychoses of his patients (1961/1965, p.131). He hypothesized not only that archetypes are impressions of ever-repeated typical experiences, but that they have a certain influence or power that can impel one to action (1917/1983, p. 71). Importantly, Jung maintained that the collective unconscious and its archetypes are autonomous (1951/1983, p. 117).

Jung wrote at length about the relationship between myth and the archetypal contents of the collective unconscious, saying that “the archetype is a kind of readiness to produce over and over again the same or similar mythical ideas” (1917/1983, p. 70). He remarked upon the “truly amazing phenomenon that certain motifs from myths and legends repeat themselves the world over in identical forms” (1917/1998, p. 62) and noted that “the collective unconscious . . . appears to consist of mythological motifs and primordial images, for which reason the myths of all nations are its real exponents” (1927/1998, p. 79).

What is the function of these archetypal, mythic motifs in relation to an individual’s psychology and personal soul-tending? Proposing that the root of all neuroses is the disassociation between the conscious and the unconscious, Jung explained that the retelling of myths and fairy tales gives expression to unconscious processes so that the connection between conscious and unconscious can be re-established (1951/1998a, pp. 88-89). In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung (1961/1965) theorized that modern-day neurotics are divided against themselves because they are no longer linked to myth, to the ancestors, and to nature (p. 143). Had they lived in a time when myth was a living experience, he said, they would have been spared this division within themselves (p. 144).

Jung (1939/1983) used the term individuation to describe the process by which unconscious material comes into consciousness as the individual moves toward psychological wholeness (p. 212). The conscious and unconscious remain divided when they are in conflict or when one is suppressed and injured by the other (p. 225). Inasmuch as unconscious processes are involved in the totality of the individual, the individual is not made whole so long as these processes are in conflict with the conscious ego. Individuation, then, is the process by which an individual is made whole (p. 212).

Myths, like dreams, are an intermediary that allow the conscious ego to encounter the unconscious so that an individual can move toward psychological wholeness. It is no surprise that mythmaking and storytelling stretch back to prehistoric times—they touch upon ancient and powerful psychic energies within us. Jung understood the numinous experience of encountering the realm of the unconscious through myth.
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References

Jung, C. G. (1965). Memories, dreams, reflections (A. Jaffe, Ed.) (R. Winston & C. Winston, Trans.) (Rev. ed.). New York: Pantheon Books. (Original work published 1961)

Jung, C. G. (1983). Conscious, unconscious, and individuation. In A. Storr (Ed.) (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.), The essential Jung (pp. 212-226). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1939)

Jung, C. G. (1983). On the psychology of the unconscious. In A. Storr (Ed.) (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.), The essential Jung (pp. 68-71). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1917)

Jung, C. G. (1983a). Recent thoughts on schizophrenia. In A. Storr (Ed.) (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.), The essential Jung (p. 65). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1957)

Jung, C. G. (1983b). The shadow. In A. Storr (Ed.) (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.), The essential Jung (pp. 91-93). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1957)

Jung, C. G. (1983). The structure of the psyche. In A. Storr (Ed.) (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.), The essential Jung (pp. 66-67). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1927)

Jung, C. G. (1983). The syzygy: Anima and animus. In A. Storr (Ed.) (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.), The essential Jung (pp. 109-117). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1951)

Jung, C. G. (1998a). Background to the psychology of Christian alchemical symbolism. In R. Segal (Ed.) (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.), Jung on mythology (pp. 88-89). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1951)

Jung, C. G. (1998). Definitions. In R. Segal (Ed.) (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.), Jung on mythology (pp. 68-69). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1921)

Jung, C. G. (1998b). Fundamental questions of psychotherapy. In R. Segal (Ed.) (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.), Jung on mythology (pp. 64-66). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1951)

Jung, C. G. (1998). On the psychology of the unconscious. In R. Segal (Ed.) (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.), Jung on mythology (p. 62). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1917)

Jung, C. G. (1998). The structure of the psyche. In R. Segal (Ed.) (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.) Jung on mythology (p. 79). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1927)

Drumbeats: Alchemy, Inc.

2010-05-15T07:57:00.001-07:00

Kwame Scruggs and Kwame Williams

Myths are our self-interpretation of our inner selves in relation to the outside world. —Rollo May

On May 11, 2010, I had the great fortune of attending a workshop hosted by the C. G. Jung Foundation in New York City titled "Jung, Myth, and the prima materia—a Black, Blacker than Black: Using Myth to Extract the Gold Inherent in Urban Male Adolescents."

The workshop was presented by G. Kwame Scruggs, founder of Alchemy, Inc., and his brother-in-myth, Jerry Kwame Williams. Kwame and Kwame demonstrated how they use myth and storytelling to help young black males define themselves and overcome the numerous challenges they face in the cultures in which they live.

As the two men described their work to the 50 or so people who attended, they sat with drums between their legs, which they often played as they spoke. When Kwame Williams launched into the myth "The City Where People Are Mended," the rhythmic drumbeats crescendoed, and his voice carried us away into a rich and multilayered story about wounding and healing. Typical of any myth or fairy tale, the story reverberated in the listeners on many levels. Kwame Scruggs invited the attendants to share what resonated for them in the story, demonstrating the same method he uses with the boys and young men he works with.

Even when Kwame and Kwame were not beating their drums, the drumbeat remained an undercurrent in the room. The beat of a drum awakens us to our ancestral origins, when storytelling and mythmaking poured out from our collective psyche to teach us about ourselves and to connect us to our world and to each other. Mythic storytelling by ancient peoples was an essential part of their lives: tales of the hunt, stories of the ancestors, and myths about gods and goddesses reinforced the community’s understanding of its place in the universe, taught lessons about the inner and outer life of the individual, addressed the mystery of death, and offered remedies for the suffering and struggles of a harsh existence.

The loss of this mythic sensibility in our modern Western culture translates into a loss of soul. The absence of soul in our lives is seen in the inane programs we see on television, the disconnectedness that our technologies can often foster, and the immoral political and social policies that reward greed and materialism. Likening the loss of myth to a moral catastrophe, Carl Jung said that myths do not merely represent, they are the psychic life of the tribe, which will fall to pieces if it loses its mythological heritage, like one who has lost one’s soul (1940/1959, p. 154).

A person or a culture without mythic connections to the ancestors is like a tree without roots: like trees, people cannot grow skyward if they do not grow down—down into the depths of the primordial realms of the collective unconscious, that they might begin to understand the nourishing, healing, and creative powers of Psyche. By inviting urban adolescent males to touch the primal realms of soul through the drumbeats of the ancestors, Kwame Scruggs and Kwame Williams provide a catalyst for the personal awakening of young men struggling in an often hostile and inhumane world.

To learn more about Alchemy, Inc., please visit its website at http://www.alchemyinc.net.
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References

Jung, C. G. (1959). The psychology of the child archetype. In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.) (2nd ed., Vol. 9i, pp. 151-181). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1940)

Photo: Copyright 2010, Alchemy, Inc.

Mythic Realms: Christine Downing

2010-05-14T07:01:00.000-07:00

Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of human life. —Joseph Campbell

The most concise synthesis of myth, ritual, and talk therapy that I have found is by Freudian scholar and American mythologist Christine Downing (2006a) in her essay “May the Gods Be Present: Therapy as Ritual.” She begins:

Honoring the sacred and numinous dimension of therapy means inviting in the gods and goddesses associated with liminality, with the crossing of the border between the profane and the sacred, between upperworld and lower world. It means attending to how Hades and Persephone, Hekate and Hermes, Asclepius and Dionysos, Athene and Aphrodite make their presence felt in the consulting room. (p. 209)

Downing found parallels between the experience of analysis and the classic hero myth. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, mythologist Joseph Campbell (1949) noted that all the great hero myths that have come down through the ages have a single, basic structure, which he called the monomyth. Broadly speaking, the phases of the monomyth begin with the departure (p. 49), or the call to adventure, in which the hero leaves his community or the homeostasis of his life to fulfill some mission. He then encounters initiation (p. 97), where he battles dark, monstrous, or otherwise terrifying primal forces. The final phase of the journey is the return (p. 193), when the hero returns to his community changed in some way or with new gifts to bring to his people.

Robert Atkinson (1995), a specialist in human development, noted that this overarching structure conforms to the rites of passage of indigenous peoples recognized by folklorist Arnold van Gennep (p. 31). Parallel to Campbell’s (1949) notion of departure, initiation, and return, van Gennep (1909/1960) noted that rites of passage can be subdivided into three categories: rites of separation, rites of transition, and rites of incorporation (p. 11). This intermingling of myth and ritual reinforces the felt experience of the sacred nature of our human journey. As Campbell observed, both mythology and rite “supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward” (p. 11).

Downing (2006a) likened the experience of analysis to both the hero’s journey and initiatory rites. She noted that the characteristics of therapy have the ritual pattern of separation from the profane world, followed by initiation into a radically different, transformative, and sacred realm, then a return to the profane world in some way changed (p. 209). This compares to the monomyth as described by Campbell (1949) (departure, initiation, and return) and to the initiatory rites of passage observed by van Gennep (1909/1960) (separation, transition, and incorporation). In “The Wounded Healer,” Downing (2006b) noted that shamanic healers take the same journey: they learn how to access the healing gifts of the underworld for their own initiatory transformation and for the healing of others in the ordinary realm (p. 59).

Downing (2006a) pointed out other parallels between psychoanalysis and initiatory rites: nakedness (one free associates without censorship, judgment, or the expectation of making sense); radical isolation (one is cut off from others during analysis and does not share the experience outside the consulting room); and starvation (the analyst refuses to gratify the patient’s hunger) (p. 212). An interesting comparison to Downing’s concepts of isolation, starvation, and nakedness can be found in the description of a shamanic vision quest by author Steven Foster (1992). Regarding the isolation of a quest, he recalled,

I went into the desert alone, not knowing why, searching for something I had lost, or could find: something, someone, some revelation waiting for me at the bend of the dry river bed, some face-to-face encounter with what I feared, and desired, most. (p. 3)

On starvation, Foster observed that the requisite fasting process of a vision quest “is one of readying the soil for a seed to be planted in it. The seeker empties the body so that the spirit may be cleansed and filled” (p. 45). Regarding nakedness, Foster quoted the Essene Gospel of St. John, capturing the quality of surrender in the shaman’s quest: “Put off your shoes and your clothing and suffer the angel of air to embrace your whole body” (as cited in Foster, p. 45).

Downing (2006a) cited another ritual aspect of psychoanalysis, namely repetition, referring to the power of transference in the therapeutic relationship through which analysands experience the repetition of old patterns, old expectations, and old fears in their new relationships (p. 212). Like all ritual repetition, that which is inherent in transference is what Downing called transformative repetition, explaining that “in analysis we are given the possibility of seeing, of experiencing, how the past lives on in the present and thus here repetition may become effective, transformative” (p. 213).

Downing (2006a) remarked at length on the mythic sensibility inherent in both depth psychology and the consulting room. Journeying to the underworld and “thus into a sacred realm and engagement with gods and goddesses” (p. 209) is the analysand’s initiation into an “underworld experience that may stir up complex, ambivalent, ambiguous, contradictory fears and longings” (p. 216). The analysand enters “a mysterious realm, an unknown and yet strangely familiar world, the unconscious” (p. 216). Downing acknowledged that entering this realm is terrifying, because the analysand, like the mythic hero, must do battle with primal forces that he or she barely understands; yet, in therapy, one enters that realm “willingly, out of a longing for depth, soul, transformation” (p. 209).
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References

Atkinson, R. (1995). The gift of stories: Practical and spiritual applications of autobiography, life stories, and personal mythmaking. Westport, CT: Bergin.

Campbell, J. (1949). The hero with a thousand faces. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Downing, C. (2006a). May the gods be present: Therapy as ritual. In Gleanings: Essays 1982–2006 (pp. 209-217). Lincoln, NE: iUniverse.

Downing, C. (2006b). The wounded healer. In Gleanings: Essays 1982–2006 (pp. 59-77). Lincoln, NE: iUniverse.

Foster, S. (with Little, M.). (1992). The book of the vision quest: Personal transformation in the wilderness. (Rev. ed.). New York: Fireside.

Gennep, A. van. (1960). The rites of passage (M. Vizedom & G. Caffee, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1909)

Mythic Realms: Sigmund Freud

2010-05-12T18:18:00.000-07:00

The theory of instincts is so to say our mythology. Instincts are mythical entities. —Sigmund Freud

The connection between mythic themes and individual psychology, particularly as they apply to the unconscious, is first encountered in the work of Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis. In “Repression” (1915/1989a) and “The Unconscious” (1915/1989b), Freud unraveled the relationship between unconscious material and neurotic symptoms. He developed psychoanalysis as a method by which one makes the unconscious conscious—a prescription for psychological healing.

In writing about the unconscious, Freud often used the language of myth. He drew on such mythological figures as Oedipus (1918/1989, p. 392), Eros (1920/1989, p. 620), Aphrodite (1913/1989, p. 507), Narcissus (1910/1989, p. 463), and countless others to amplify his understanding of psychic processes. Freud (1933/1965) said, “The theory of instincts is so to say our mythology. Instincts are mythical entities” (p. 118).

Discussing the relationship between myth and the psyche, Freud acknowledged that “it is only a step from the phantasies of individual neurotics to the imaginative creations . . . as we find them in myths, legends, and fairy tales” (1925/1989, p. 41). Speaking of the creative imagination, Freud noted again that the writer’s material is derived from “the popular treasure-house of myths, legends, and fairy tales” (1907/1989, p. 442). He also remarked upon the collective nature of myth in the context of group psychology, stating that “myths . . . are distorted vestiges of the wishful phantasies of whole nations” (p. 442).

The account of one of Freud’s patients, the poet H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1974), and other sources document that in his office Freud kept figurines of gods and goddesses such as Osiris, Isis, Athené, Vishnu, and many others (p. 147). Biographer Peter Gay (1989), discussing the relationship between Freud and Carl G. Jung, remarked that in addition to Freud’s own passion for archaeology and prehistory, “surely, too, Jung’s interest in mythology was stimulus to Freud’s speculations” (p. 481). In his work Totem and Taboo, Freud (1913/1989) explored the nature of myth, indigenous ritual, and individual and cultural psychology. He connected the individual’s psychological problem of the Oedipus complex to the broader mythic themes of father-deities, mother-goddesses, and ritual killing of the primal father that show up in totemic religions (pp. 509-510). Freud also spoke of a collective mind, which allows psychic processes to continue from one generation to another (p. 511), an idea that reverberates with Jung’s notion of a collective unconscious.

Religious historian Mircea Eliade (trans. 1963) observed that two of Freud’s ideas find parallels to mythic motifs that appear in indigenous cultures. The first is Freud’s idea of the bliss of a human being’s beginnings—that is, the time in infancy before a baby is weaned. This time of paradise, followed by a fall (when the developing child discovers his or her separateness and suffering), parallels the creation myths of India, Iran, Greece, and Judeo-Christianity, which speak to the bliss of humanity’s origins followed by an event which throws human beings into suffering (p. 78).

The second idea put forth by Freud that Eliade (trans. 1963) observed in myths and rituals all over the world is the notion of going back to decisive childhood events in order to find healing (pp. 78-84). Eliade said that rites of initiation include a return to the primordial events described in the myths of the culture, constituting a collective going-back. Through this return to the origin, initiates can experience a new birth, which is not a repetition of the first, physical birth, but “a mystical rebirth, spiritual in nature” (p. 81).

So it is in the work of Freud that the connection between myth and modern psychology is first articulated. The use of mythic language, the understanding of the unconscious, and the recognition of ritual aspects of psychological healing all find expression in Freudian thought. As Christine Downing (2006) said, “Freud . . . supports our longing to bring the unconscious to consciousness, to recover its contents, to gain access to its mythopoetic faculty” (p. 227).

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References

Doolittle, H. (1974). Tribute to Freud. New York: New Directions.

Downing, C. (2006). Instincts and archetypes. In Gleanings: Essays 1982–2006 (pp. 218-237). Lincoln, NE: iUniverse.

Eliade, M. (1963). Myth and reality (W. R. Trask, Trans.). Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.

Freud, S. (1965). New introductory lectures (J. Strachey, Trans.). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1933)

Freud, S. (1989). A special type of choice of object made by men (Contributions to the psychology of love I). In P. Gay (Ed.), The Freud reader (J. Strachey, Trans.) (pp. 387-394). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1918)

Freud, S. (1989). An autobiographical study. In P. Gay (Ed.), The Freud reader (J. Strachey, Trans.) (pp. 3-41). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1925)

Freud, S. (1989). Beyond the pleasure principle. In P. Gay (Ed.), The Freud reader (J. Strachey, Trans.) (pp. 594-626). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1920)

Freud, S. (1989). Creative writers and day-dreaming. In P. Gay (Ed.), The Freud reader (J. Strachey, Trans.) (pp. 436-443). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1907)

Freud, S. (1989). Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood. In P. Gay (Ed.), The Freud reader (J. Strachey, Trans.) (pp. 441-481). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1910)

Freud, S. (1989a). Repression. In P. Gay (Ed.), The Freud reader (J. Strachey, Trans.) (pp. 568-572). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1915)

Freud, S. (1989). Totem and taboo. In P. Gay (Ed.), The Freud reader (J. Strachey, Trans.) (pp. 481-513). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1913)

Freud, S. (1989b). The unconscious. In P. Gay (Ed.), The Freud reader (J. Strachey, Trans.) (pp. 572-584). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1915)

Gay, P. (1989). Introduction to S. Freud, “Totem and taboo.” In P. Gay (Ed.), The Freud reader (pp. 481-482). New York: Norton.

Mythic Realms: An Introduction

2010-05-05T17:49:00.000-07:00

What we are to our inward vision . . . can only be expressed by way of myth. —Carl G. Jung

There is a long-standing relationship between mythology and depth psychology. Depth psychology addresses such questions as, “Why has the human psyche expressed itself through myth since prehistoric times? How is mythmaking evidence of psyche’s need to make itself known? Can myth be a catalyst for therapeutic healing?”

Myth and modern psychology first found expression in the work of the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Freud also might be considered the father of depth psychology, since he was the first to explore the unconscious in a methodical, scientific way and to recognize the role that the unconscious plays when psychological symptoms present themselves. Throughout his writings, Freud drew on mythic themes to capture the language of the unconscious. After him, Otto Rank (1884-1939), Carl G. Jung (1875-1961), Bruno Bettelheim (1903-1990), Marie-Louise von Franz (1915-1998), James Hillman (b. 1926), Christine Downing (b. 1931), and other analysts and scholars drew on the foundations of depth psychology to further explore the relationship between myth and the therapeutic experience.

A common thread to be found among these pillars of modern psychology might best be summed up thus: as an expression of energies within the unconscious, myth acts as a catalyst between the unconscious and the conscious, and, in the experience of integrating unconscious content into consciousness, psychological healing occurs. Or, put more succinctly, myth is a catalyst for therapeutic healing.

The articles in this series, “Mythic Realms,” will take a brief look at each of the above scholars and how they explored the relationship between myth, psychology, and the therapeutic experience. These authors captured the indisputable relationship between myth and the human psyche. By understanding the language of psyche and the archetypal content therein, they paved the way for the journey into the self, offering a greater understanding of the inner world of human beings and how they are connected to one another. These writers understood the healing and numinous experience of integrating unconscious material into consciousness, and they recognized that myth is a universal catalyst for that process.

Tending to Soul

2010-05-01T12:43:00.000-07:00

And then the day came when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk of blooming.—Anaïs Nin

There is a certain amount of pressure that one feels when writing the very first article of one's very first blog. Attempts to capture succinctly the spirit of something which has not yet begun does not come easily. Though my initial intentions for this blog may change over time as I wander down the myriad roads of depth psychology, I will attempt in this first article to articulate the purpose of this blog and why it is so important to me.

Depth psychology emphasizes the ongoing awakening of the conscious ego to the seemingly limitless depths of the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. It focuses on the integration of unconscious content into consciousness, which becomes a prescription for psychological healing. As we awaken to our deeper selves and integrate what was previously fragmented or dissociated in our psyches, we heal wounds, enrich our inner experience, see ourselves in others, and discover who we are.

In depth psychology, the original meaning of the term "psychotherapy," as defined by its Greek root meaning, is emphasized. As Jungian analyst and scholar Edward Edinger (1997) explained, psyche originally meant “soul” or “life spirit” (p. 10), and the Greek verb therapeuein means to tend or render service. Psychotherapy, then, is the act of tending to soul.

This notion is at odds with the pharmacological view of abnormal psychology, the ubiquitous clichés of pop psychology inundating our culture, and the idea that psychotherapy is somehow a mental process, not a soulful endeavor. My passion for this blog comes from, in part, outrage at modern Western society's habit of pathologizing the human spirit as it struggles to fully express itself in a culture that does not support or nurture it.

In Re-Visioning Psychology, James Hillman (1975), a pioneer of archetypal psychology, inspired us to think of soul-making as the proper goal of our human efforts. Awakening to oneself through soul-making and soul-tending is not only a prescription for personal healing, it is a prescription for collective healing. By tending to our individual souls, we tend to Anima Mundi, the Soul of the World.

The articles on this blog will elucidate concepts and practices of depth psychology as ways of delving into soul. Art, culture, spirituality, mythology, and psychotherapeutic modalities designed to unearth and integrate unconscious content will be some of the topics explored. Much thanks and respect to my friends and family, my Pacifica cohort, and my partner Robert for their unwavering love and support as I embark on this venture.
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References

Edinger, E. (1997). The vocation of depth psychotherapy. Psychological Perspectives, 35, 8-22.

Hillman, J. (1975). Re-visioning psychology. New York: HarperCollins.