Carl Jung and Soul Psychology

Donald Lathrop, E Mark Stern, Karen Gibson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317773924
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Alternative & Complementary Medicine

Psychotherapy is profoundly indebted to Carl Jung, who among others, discovered the mappings of soul psychology. Carl Jung and Soul Psychology is a fascinating exploration of the identity and unifying work of soul psychology. The editors have met a monumental challenge in enlisting the scope of wisdom represented in this unique book.

Janet Dallett

When the Spirits Come Back^*

I was punished for being a Kindergarten tattletale, which effectively silenced me for almost half a century. When I became an analyst, professional sanctions and esoterica surrounding the notion of secrecy conveniently supported my childhood neurosis. At 52, I feel entitled to begin to be who I am, a born tattletale, just like the teacher said. This paper is the beginning. Some facts, including my home town, have been altered to protect Sarah.

c/o Karen Gibson 111 West Curling Drive Boise, Idaho 83702

The American presents a strange picture: a European with Negro behavior and an Indian soul. He shares the fate of all usurpers of foreign soil. Certain Australian primitives assert that one cannot conquer foreign soil, because in it there dwell strange ancestor-spirits who reincarnate themselves in the newborn. There is a great psychological truth in this. The foreign land assimilates its conqueror…. Thus, in the American, there is a discrepancy between conscious and unconscious that is not found in the European, a tension between an extremely high conscious level of culture and an unconscious primitivity…. Alienation from the unconscious and from its historical conditions spells rootlessness. That is the danger that lies in wait for the conqueror of foreign lands, and for every individual who… loses touch with the dark, maternal, earthy ground of his being.

CG. JUNG (1961, p. 248)

This is Sarah's story but it is also mine. I met Sarah late in 1984. A year and a half earlier I left behind a busy analytical psychology prac-tice in Los Angeles, along with teaching and other professional responsibilities at the C. G. Jung Institute there, and moved to Seal Harbor, a small town in the Pacific Northwest. I had no plans. I put aside preconceptions about what my life would be and waited, listening for the inner and outer voices that would tell me what might be required of me here. I walked a lot; watched my dreams; noticed my thoughts and fantasies; and talked with many people, paying attention to whose paths crossed mine, who attracted me, how I was moved to spend my time when I could do anything I chose.

My last year in Los Angeles had been a nightmare of growing dis-illusion with professional life. I cared about the psyche, about dreams, about people, but found myself increasingly enmeshed in considerations of status and power that had nothing to do with my deeper concerns. In fact, the more “successful” I became, the less able I felt to serve life or soul. More than once I dreamed that my environment was filled with poison. Soon after dreaming of a funeral at the Jung Institute, I decided to leave.

Now, with unlimited time and space for the first time in many years, it was not long before I began to experience the impact of what is buried in the earth of this country. Without knowing at first what affected me so deeply, I was touched by aspects of Native American tribal consciousness that appeared to seep through the soles of my feet. While talking with a psychologist friend one day, I “saw” behind his eyes an immense Indian chief, gazing at me with longing, yearning to be set free from imprisonment in an alien white body. The same week I noticed the designation “Redman's Cemetery” on a local map and spent several days searching for it, convinced that I would find something of great importance, but at that location were only traditional, marble headstones with names like McGuire, O'Meara, Larson, and Scott. Confused, I looked at a different map and found this same spot labeled “Rectman's Cemetery.”

A month later a visiting psychic told me she saw Indians in my house and in the surrounding forest. Still later, a mediumistic friend dreamed that she met me on the street and saw earth on my face. I looked, she said, like an old Indian woman.

I remembered the dream that my student Joseph had told me soon after he dropped out of the analyst training program. He was working on an archeological dig in his dream, apparently alone, not seeing much of what was going on at first, only a piece of bone here, a shard there. As the dream went on, however, he became aware that others were digging too, in many different places not necessarily visible from where he stood. By the end of the dream he had been given the perspective to see the scope of the project in which he was involved, the excavation of the skeleton of an enormous animal that extended from one coast to the other. Even at that time I wondered if the animal buried between the coasts of this continent might be connected to Native American consciousness.

Responding to the hints I was given, I began to learn what I could about the people who first occupied this land, a subject of previous indifference. I spent hours in anthropological museums and hiked for many miles to experience the power spots people told me about when they learned of my interest. Meanwhile I read, finding out what I could about native ways of life, legends, art, and healing practices. I was struck by the respect for truth, for nature, and for the heart in what I learned of the tribal consciousness that was here before it collided with European values. I discovered in it a humility and capacity to live with other human beings that is profoundly lacking in the superimposed culture. I saw in native ways an integration of both healing and art into life, a refusal to cut apart threads that are woven together simply and naturally into unified patterns of living.

Immersion in this land and in the material it opened me to took me inexorably deeper into mistrust of the profession that had previously contained me. Although my consciousness was too developed just to imitate Native American practices, neither could I continue naively to emulate the professional forms I had been taught. Six weeks after moving I resigned from the professional organization to which I belonged. Two months later I had a terrifying dream:

”I awake knowing that sometime in the night, somewhere the Bomb has dropped. I have been near the epicenter and am contaminated with radiation. A few people are reaching toward me, wanting to touch me. Most avoid me, knowing that if they touch me they will be irreversibly contaminated.”

Following this dream 1 found myself unexpectedly and precipitously terminating the analytical relationship I had maintained for several years with a good friend and colleague. What erupted between us then also virtually severed our personal and collegial connections.

Suddenly I was without strong professional connections, more or less alone with a terrible need to break old molds, along with the terrible guilt entailed. Seeking friends with whom I could talk about the psyche, I found more psychological depth, good instincts, and emotional support among “ordinary people,” particularly artists of various persuasions, than among members of my own profession. I began to value the human con-dition in a new way and to deplore the exaggerated sense of specialness that adheres to the professional practitioner. Slowly absorbing my radioactivity, I reflected about the separation that exists between life and the practice of analysis.

Professional analysis carries the bias of the Judeo-Christian era, wherein a great deal of attention has been paid to the tree of knowledge but the tree of life has fallen into the unconscious. That is to say, the profession values understanding but may not necessarily promote the process of living. All too often analysis “understands” life out of existence before it has a chance to happen. Many of the forms of analysis protect the analyst from certain hard things, but do not necessarily serve either the patient or the psyche. Instead, they foster an arrogance of professionalism that must be left behind if we are to grow beyond the isolation of power and the power of isolation into the eros hidden in the human condition.

For example, professional sanctions against maligning our colleagues serve an important function up to a point, but are too often carried far beyond that point and used to protect analyst prestige inappropriately. In the process, an enormous split is created in the collective psyche of the profession. On the one hand, being human we do gossip, but when we gather together in professional groups we pretend we have not said or heard the things we have. Therefore, many matters of importance are discussed behind backs but are never confronted openly. In addition to creating whited sepulchres, this strange pretense deprives us of healthy ways to defuse and to integrate the things we dislike about each other, and of a social function that would otherwise help to control conditions like psychopathy and psychological inflation that are undesirable for both the individual and the group.

The Kwakiutl Indians brought the human need to gossip into the realm of the sacred, providing ceremonially for its vital psychological and social functions. My patient Colette connected me to this information through a dream in which she was given a small box containing, of all things, a mouth! The image quite mystified me until I saw an exhibit of Kwakiutl masks in Seattle. There in a glass case was Colette's dream mouth, a carved wooden object called Talking Mouth. In Kwakiutl custom only certain people have the privilege of the mouth which, held between the owner's teeth, represents the right to speak about, “call down,” or criticize other people publicly. The remarks themselves are made by a speaker standing beside the wearer of the mouth. Offense may not be taken at the comments of anyone who wears Talking Mouth (Molm, 1972, p. 52). The custom would serve professional psychology well!

Some version of the Nootka Indian practice of clowning would also add immensely to professional life. In a short story, Anne Cameron (1981) describes the clown through the eyes of Granny, an old Nootka woman:

A clown was like a newspaper, or a magazine, or one of those people who write an article to tell you if a book or a movie is worth botherin’ with. They made comment on everythin’, every day. all the time. If a clown thought that what the tribal council was getting’ ready to do was foolish, why the clown would just show up at the council and imitate every move every one of the leaders made. Only the clown would imitate it in such a way every little wart on that person would show, every hole in their idea would suddenly look real big… Everythin’ you did, the clown did. And nobody would ever dare blow up at the clown! If you did that, well, you were just totally shamed. A clown didn't do what a clown did to hurt you or make fun of you or be mean, it was to show you what you looked like to other people….

If you thought every word you spoke was gospel, the clown would just stroll along behind you babbling’ away like a simple-mind or a baby. Every up and down of your voice, the clown's voice would go up and down until you finally heard what an ass you were bein’ Or maybe you had a bad temper and yelled a lot when you got mad, or hadn't learned any self control or something’ like that. Well, the clown would just have fits. Every time you turned around there'd be the clown bashin’ away with a stick on the sand or kickin’ like a fool at a big rock, or yellin' insults back at the gulls, and just generally lookin' real stupid.

We need our clowns, and we used ‘em to help us all learn the best ways to get along with each other. Bein’ an individual is real good, but sometimes we're so busy bein' individuals we forget we gotta live with a lot of other people who all got the right to be individuals too, and the clowns could show us if we were getting' a bit pushy, or startin' to take ourselves too serious. Wasn't nothing' sacred to a clown. Sometimes a clown would find another clown taggin' along behind, imitatin', and then the first one knew that maybe something' was getting' out of hand, and maybe the clown was bein' mean or usin' her position as a clown to push people around and sharpen her own axe for her own reasons. But mostly the clowns were very serious about what they did. (pp. 109–110)

I look forward, probably with more optimism than is warranted, to a time when we may all be freer to speak openly about one another and even to mock each other a little, clown style. What we see in others may hurt, but if spoken and received openly it need not injure. There is no point in thinking we are too important to let our shortcomings be seen. They are quite visible anyway, often to everyone but ourselves. We who most need the humanizing effects of what others see, because professional status gives us so much power, are just the ones whom professionalism unfortunately protects. The doctor-patient archetype does, after all, have two poles that are bound together within the healthy person. The analyst who identifies too much with “doctor,” forgetting that he or she is also “patient,” all too often fails to constellate the psyche's healing power in outer-world patients because of an unconscious need to have them remain sick.

Rooted in European tradition, psychoanalytic forms, including the Jungian, have a precarious existence on this soil, unconnected as they are to the native psyche. The psyche behaves as if it wants to bridge the gap, not to regress to so-called primitive forms but to decrease the disparity between analysis as it is practiced and life as it is here. Seeking to serve that impulse, 6 months after moving to the Pacific Northwest I began to work with five carefully selected patients under conditions designed to push the limits of traditional models, and specifically to experiment with integrating the work more deeply with everyday life.

For each of these five people I set aside a full afternoon or evening rather than a 50-minute hour, working until we agree that we have gone as far as we can with the material at hand. Sessions run from one to four or more hours, depending on the person, the material, and how each of us feels on a particular day. The people I picked to work with in this way all know each other and are also either my friends or people whose friendship I would not hesitate to seek. Except when there has been a special reason to do so, I have not promised these people a totally confidential analytic relationship. As in any human connection, more harm is sometimes done by keeping silent than by telling the right person the right thing at the right time, and I have found it important to explore the parameters of this dimension of psychological work. I have charged some of these people no money at all, but arranged for barter on a straight hour-for-hour basis, whether the trade be housecleaning, art, or medical help. When it has been important to charge some money for psycho-logical reasons, I have kept the amounts small.

More than the usual amount of care, ethical sensitivity, psychological honesty, and inner strength is called upon to deal with the human p...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foundations for A Soul Psychology
• Psychotherapy and Soul
• Soul Psychology: A Native American and Jungian Dance
• But to the Vision Opposite in Space
• Soul and Spirit
• When the Spirits Come Back
• The Lumen Naturae: Soul of the Psychotherapeutic Relationship
• What if…. Religion and the Undiscovered Self
• The Personal and Anonymous “I”
• Pathos and Soul-Making
• Creativity and the Healing of the Soul
• Soul-Loss and Restoration: A Study in Countertransference
• We the Alchemists of the Soul
• Toward a Freud-Jung Reconciliation
• C. G. Jung and the Boston Psychopathologists, 1902–1912*
• The Wandering Uterus: Dream and the Pathologized Image
• Stepping Out of the Great Code
• The Pelican and the Flamingo: A Therapist's Dreams in the Process of Self-Exploration
• A Vital Person in My Life and An Experience of Synchronicity
• The Incest Wound and the Marriage Archetype*
• Missed Appointment