"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.

- Dan Lindley, PhD, LCSW (Jungianthology Podcast, 1/1/18)


See also:
House
Child
Ocean
Journey


Links:
Dan Lindley, PhD, LCSW (CG Jung Institute of Chicago)
"Ulysses," by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
"Four Quartets," by T.S. Eliot
"Little Gidding," T.S. Eliot

The Archimedian point

Do things happen accidentally, or do we call them to us? An easy, and true answer, is yes to both; to only believe that one is true is to become one-sided, the great sin of the psyche.

Another good, and true, answer is to say yes... but it’s not in a blaming way. If we call negative experiences to us then it’s not our conscious, not our ego (“ourselves”) that’s doing it but another part of us, one which is as alien and other as another person entirely.

The other thing, and probably most important thing, is that these opposites - “It’s all your fault if bad things happen to you!” And “How dare you say it’s someone’s fault! Are you saying an innocent child asks for bad things to happen to them?????” - these opposites are secretly united. This is why, for example, Erykah Badu’s response that even Hitler has something good about him both irritated but also failed to arouse the truly strong, almost violent, reactions that others got. The sinner and the righteous warrior of goodness and purity are two halves of the same whole. The light, by it’s very existence, calls darkness into existence. One half can never defeat its other half... or if it does it risks self-annihilation. This why we must find a dialectical solution, one which gets beyond the pair of opposites. An Archimedean point outside the battle. It’s only when you get beyond sinner and saint that a true peace can be attained.

Status update

Apologies! I lost track of what was going on here due to school stuff. I noticed there have been several comments and I would like to thank everyone for taking the time to write.

I have several projects in the works: amazing excerpts from some of my favorite books, and more symbol posts. The problem is, everything takes so much time! ;_;

In the mean time, I'm trying to post smaller things while I work on these other projects. And I will be sure to respond to your comments!

The golden shadow

I've been thinking about the shadow, thinking of all the ways that we fail. How most people refuse to face the truth of what they've done/are doing. That is the shadow, the thing that most people are so terrified of that they can't admit that it exists (even though everyone around us is quite aware of our failings.)

The shadow isn't evil, it's just weak and stupid and selfish, helpless and incompetent. It's just human; it is, in fact the most human part of us. The heroic side of us isn't our brightness, it's our clumsy, awkward shadow. To accept our shadow - to admit that it is a part of us - is to feel our full humanity, to embrace it. To embrace our own humanity is to embrace the humanity of others. Whatever your weakness is, to embrace it is to embrace the childishness of our full humanity... the child of all humanity, the Golden Child. The Golden Child - the new God we've been waiting for - isn't a perfect hero, he's a fragile child, the weakest and least able of us. He doesn't save us by rescuing us, he saves us though our compassion. And we can only have compassion for others if we first have compassion, and acceptance, for our own weakness and frailty.

To open to, to embrace and fully accept, our shadow side is to relax into our totality. Every part of us, not just the commendable part. To seek glory and perfection is to fall into ego; it's precisely the thing we don't need. Being judgmental and perfectionistic are poison. To accept our imperfections, and those of others, is the only way out... but only by facing, accepting, and lovingly embracing our own imperfections can we do the same for others. The hero is the devil, and the devil is the savior. When we accept the devil, we finally see his true face; the Child. This is why the Child has snakes in his basket.

Our shadow is the sacred Child who lives inside each of us. The path to God - that is, wholeness - is accepting this Child.


Links:

Glossary: Inferior Function
Symbolism: Child