Two Birds in a Tree: "The Fate of Depth Psychology in the New Millenium"

Analytical psychology is a celebration of becoming. I believe that the image for becoming is the child, and I propose that in this image is to be found our future, and the hope of our work. I’ve been thinking about the child as reality, as image, and as archetype for some time now. This is because I am working on connections I have with my own childhood home, a house on the Connecticut shore where my mother still lives, and where she and her parents spent each summer after her 12th birthday. Where my father courted her. Where my grandmother and my parents and I and my children made four generations together year after year. A house in which I have spent at least a part of every one of the 64 summers since the year after my birth. And this returning and returning and returning of mine has as well a parallel in our work, in the ongoing and returning pattern of analysis.

I go through the front door of my mother’s house and I am surrounded by a slightly sweet, slightly musty atmosphere that has never changed. I walk into my analyst’s office and sit down and begin to enter a timeless realm, sealed off from ordinariness, from the press of things and obligations. Or, a person in my practice finds my office inhabited by her past, the same constant atmosphere, the same air laden with projection, and memory, and image. I walk into the summer house and, if the door to the terrace is open, I can feel the salt breeze from the sound and I can hear small waves breaking and dissolving into foam among the tangles of seaweed and rocks that line the shore just below the house. In the space of analysis the sea, the tides, the wind, the sun rising and setting are the rhythms underneath the work, we go out and we return from dark to light to dark. A child such as I was returning each summer to the same place becomes lost in sameness. I made my own time as an only child will because my parents had their own life more fun and more rewarding for them than a small boy was. So I created a world for myself and then lived in it quite happily. What I was missing went into the dark in the ways you all know so well. Time stopped and the moment of the house stretched out the past of school and schedules was gone and the future became unnecessary or irrelevant all summer long. As in analysis a dream is constellated from a timeless place, it hangs timelessly in the air between two people. It may excite or frighten or seem crazily useless, it may open a deep space. We fall into a shock the surprise of the utterly new.

In the house a storm, in fact a hurricane in 1938, shook the walls wind and rain stripped the leaves from the trees and plastered the south side of the house with them. A gigantic willow tree fell. Gales peeled shingles off the roof and water streamed into the attic and then the bedroom and living room ceilings. Waves and the high tide bent the terrace doors and sea water washed through the hall. We could not hear ourselves over the voices in the wind. The storm passed, the repairs were made. The house like psyche itself is both unchanging and vulnerable, safe and threatened, moving and unmoved. I the child and the timeless realm of summer dropped into the timeless archetypal ground, but that same child growing and exploring this unvarying space found himself caught up in the inexorable flow of time represented by learning to swim, learning to ride a two wheeler, learning to drive, to kiss. One summer an aunt sleeping peacefully died. A few summers later my grandfather, surrounded by medicines and IVs, died in another upstairs room. Years later when my father, a lover of landscapes and gardens, lay dying in that same room he could see outside his window a maple tree I’d just had planted for him. It flourishes now, shading the terrace. Oh, as I was young and easy under the apple boughs time held me green and dying though I sang in my chains like the sea. So in our work we go in and out of time, and thus in every session the child in us experiences both inexorable change and eternal presence. Each year I grew older but each year the tide pools among the rocks filled and emptied, each year the sun sets into the sound beyond Griswold Island or Hatchett's Point. And each year in the gathering darkness the herring gulls and the black crowned night herons squawked their nightly choruses from distant rocks and from a rookery on a nearby hill, shrieking and innocent, and then quieting mysteriously only to start again. Each year lying in the dark with the bedroom window open to the air I listened and wondered. In our work we descend into such dark, timeless realms and we return to the mundane daylight. We provide a place where this is safe and, indeed, honored work. We provide the safety of return together with the threat and the reality of moving toward something as yet unknown to us and to the people with whom we work. We are trained to find these things out for ourselves with necessary help. Tennyson’s Ulysses speaks to us:

“Something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

And here is TS Elliot describing a world both inner and other, a world to be forever explored:

“The river is within us, the sea is all about us;
The sea is the land's edge also, the granite
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation:

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated, the dead and the living. Here and there does not matter; we must be still and still moving into another intensity, for further union and deeper communion, through the dark cold and the empty desolation.

"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."

We know these things. This is what we honor in our work. We provide a space both safe and hazardous, known and unknown, all at once; a space charged with all the contradiction and opposites but nevertheless humane and sympathetic, a space in which the gestures and images of the inner life are honored and sustained, the whole informed by an idea of order. It is the space we deserved as children but seldom, if ever, had. Such a space has unmeasurable value. We provide it; this is why we have a future.