Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition

Thomas Moore

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780062483911
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Emotions in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

"Thoughtful, eloquent, inspiring."— San Francisco Chronicle

A special 25th anniversary edition of Thomas Moore's #1 New York Times bestseller, with a new introduction by the author. More timely than ever, this classic work provides a powerful spiritual message for our troubled times.

In Care of the Soul, readers are presented with a revolutionary approach to thinking about daily life—everyday activities, events, problems, and creative opportunities—and a therapeutic lifestyle is proposed that focuses on looking more deeply into emotional problems and learning how to sense sacredness in ordinary things.

Basing his writing on the ancient model of "care of the soul"—which provided a religious context for viewing the everyday events of life—Moore brings "care of the soul" into the twenty-first century. Promising to deepen and broaden the readers' perspectives on their life experiences, Moore draws on his own life as a therapist practicing "care of the soul, " as well as his studies of the world's religions and his work in music and art, to create this inspirational guide that examines the connections between spirituality and the problems of individuals and society.

CARE OF THE SOUL IN EVERYDAY LIFE

Nature and God—I neither knew Yet Both so well knew me They startled, like Executors of My identity.

EMILY DICKINSON

CHAPTER 2

The Myth of Family and Childhood

“Eternity is in love with the productions of time,” says William Blake. The soul prospers in an environment that is concrete, particular, and vernacular. It feeds on the details of life, on its variety, its quirks, and its idiosyncrasies. Therefore, nothing is more suitable for care of the soul than family, because the experience of family includes so much of the particulars of life. In a family you live close to people that otherwise you might not even want to talk to. Over time you get to know them intimately. You learn their most minuscule, most private habits and characteristics. Family life is full of major and minor crises—the ups and downs of health, success and failure in career, marriage, and divorce—and all kinds of characters. It is tied to places and events and histories. With all of these felt details, life etches itself into memory and personality. It’s difficult to imagine anything more nourishing to the soul.

When things go wrong in society, we immediately inquire into the condition of family life. When we see society torn apart by crime, we cry, “If only we could return to the good old days when family was sacred.” But were the good old days so good? Was the family ever free of violence? Many people who come to therapy today were raised in the so-called golden age of the family, and yet they tell stories of abuse, neglect, and terrifying moralistic demands and pressures. Looked at coldly, the family of any era is both good and bad, offering both support and threat. This is why adults are so often ambivalent about visiting their families and spending time with them: they want the emotional rewards of the sense of connection, but they also want distance from painful memories and difficult relationships.

Today professionals are preoccupied with the “dysfunctional family.” But to some extent all families are dysfunctional. No family is perfect, and most have serious problems. A family is a microcosm, reflecting the nature of the world, which runs on both virtue and evil. We may be tempted at times to imagine the family as full of innocence and good will, but actual family life resists such romanticism. Usually it presents the full range of human potential, including evil, hatred, violence, sexual confusion, and insanity. In other words, the dynamics of actual family life reveal the soul’s complexity and unpredictability, and any attempts to place a veil of simplistic sentimentality over the family image will break down.

When I see those three letters “dys-” in “dysfunctional,” I think of “Dis,” the old Roman name for the mythological underworld. Soul enters life from below, through the cracks, finding an opening into life at the points where smooth functioning breaks down. We bring the Dis-functions of family into the therapy room as problems to be solved or as explanations for current difficulties because intuitively we know that the family is one of the chief abodes of soul. In psychology there is much talk about family, and “family therapy” has become a major form of counseling. By “getting to the root” of present problems in family background, we hope to understand what is going on, and in that understanding we hope to find a cure. But care of the soul doesn’t require fixing the family or becoming free of it or interpreting its pathology. We may need simply to recover soul by reflecting deeply on the soul events that have taken place in the crucible of the family.

According to the Bible, Adam was formed out of the mud of the earth. His parentage, his “family,” was earthy, moist, dirty, even slimy. Starting with Adam, at our very root, we are not fashioned out of light or fire; we are children of mud. Scholars say that “Adam” means red earth. Our own families recapitulate this mythic origin of our humanity by being close to the earth, ordinary, a veritable weed patch of human foibles. In studying the mythologies of the world, you always find evil characters and some sort of underworld; the same is true of the family. It always has its shadow, no matter how much we wish otherwise. Its functioning is always soiled by Dis. If we don’t grasp this mystery, the soulfulness that family has to offer each of us will be spirited away in hygienic notions of what a family should be. The sentimental image of family that we present publicly is a defense against the pain of proclaiming the family for what it is—a sometimes comforting, sometimes devastating house of life and memory.

At a certain level, then, it doesn’t matter whether one’s family has been largely happy, comforting, and supportive, or if there has been abuse and neglect. I’m not saying that these failures are not significant and painful or that they do not leave horrifying scars. At a deep level, however, family is most truly family in its complexity, including its failures and weaknesses. In my own family, the uncle who was my ideal source of wisdom and morality was also the one who drank excessively and who scandalized the rest by refusing to go to church. In my practice I’ve worked with many men and women whose families were intolerably violent and abusive, and yet all that pain has been redeemable, able to become the source of much wisdom and transformation. When we encounter the family from the point of view of the soul, accepting its shadows and its failure to meet our idealistic expectations, we are faced with mysteries that resist our moralism and sentimentality. We are taken down to the earth, where principle gives way to life in all its beauty and horror.

Family has many meanings, depending on the context. The sociologist thinks of it as a social group or construct. The psychologist imagines a fount from which personality flows. The politician talks about the family in an idealized way, using the idea of family to represent his traditional program and values. But we all know the family in its particulars. This is the nest in which soul is born, nurtured, and released into life. It has an elaborate history and ancestry and a network of unpredictable personalities—grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins. Its stories tell of happy times and tragedies. It has moments of pride and skeletons in its closets. It has its professed values and its carefully constructed image, as well as its secret transgressions and follies.

It is remarkable how often the family is experienced on two levels: the façade of happiness and normality, and the behind-the-scenes reality of craziness and abuse. I have heard many stories over the years of families that are picture-book perfect on the surface—family camping, Sunday dinners, trips, gifts, and play. But beneath it all is the remote father, the hidden alcohol, the abuse of a sister, and midnight violence. Television presents this bifurcation with sit-coms of sweet and successful families followed by news reports of family savagery. Some people believe the images of normality and maintain the secret of their family’s corruption, wishing they had been born elsewhere in a land of bliss. But recovery of soul begins when we can take to heart our own family fate and find in it the raw material, the alchemical prima materia, for our own soul work.

For this purpose, “family therapy” might take the form of simply telling stories of family life, free of any concern for cause and effect or sociological influence. These stories generate a grand local, personal mythology. The family is to the individual what the origins of human life are to the race. Its history provides a matrix of images by which a person is saturated all through adult life. What the Greek, Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, and African mythologies are to the society—its formative mythology—stories of the family, good and bad, are to the individual. When we talk about family, we are talking about the characters and themes that have woven together to form our identities, which are intricately textured. We might imagine family therapy more as a process of exploring the complexity of our sense of life than of making it simple and intelligible. Care of the soul is not about understanding, figuring out, and making better; rather, it resuscitates images of family life as an enrichment of identity.

To care for the soul of the family, it is necessary to shift from causal thinking to an appreciation for story and character, to allow grandparents and uncles to be transformed into figures of myth and to watch certain familiar family stories become canonical through repeated tellings. We are so affected by the scientific tone in education and in the media that without thinking we have become anthropologists and sociologists in our own families. Often I will ask a patient about the family, and the answer I get is pure social psychology. “My father drank, and as a child of an alcoholic I am prone to . . .” Instead of stories, one hears analysis. The family has been “etherized upon a table.” Even worse is the social worker or psychologist who begins talking about a patient with a singsong list of social influences: “The subject is a male who was raised in Judeo-Christian family, with a narcissistic mother and a codependent father.” The soul of the family evaporates in the thin air of this kind of reduction. It takes extreme diligence and concentration to think differently about the family: to appreciate its shadow as well as its virtue and simply to allow stories to be told without slipping into interpretations, analysis, and conclusions. Professionals think it is their job to understand and correct the family without allowing themselves to be introduced fully to its genius—its unique formative spirit.

If we were to observe the soul in the family by honoring its stories and by not running away from its shadow, then we might not feel so inescapably determined by family influences. Strongly influenced by developmental psychology, we assume we are ineluctably who we are because of the family in which we grew up. What if we thought of the family less as the determining influence by which we are formed and more the raw material from which we can make a life? In therapy, when I hear a story of an abusing father or uncle, I usually ask for details about this person’s life. Is there a story behind his violence? What were other members of the family doing? What stories do they tell and what secrets do they harbor?

A young man, David, once consulted me with the complaint that he just couldn’t get along with his mother. I call him a young man because his “eternal youth” was his most noticeable characteristic. When I first met him he was twenty-eight years old but he looked about sixteen. He lived in an apartment by himself but spent the weekends “at home” with his mother. Yet, when he was home, he always felt his mother was prying into his affairs, telling him how to live, and trying to get him to clean up his room. “You’re just like your father,” she said to him regularly. She had been divorced for several years.

“Are you just like your father?” I asked.

He looked surprised. “My mother’s the problem,” he said, “not my father.”

“Tell me about your father anyway,” I said.

“He’ll never settle down. I see him rarely, when he’s passing through. He’s always on the road, always with a new woman.”

“Are you just like your father?”

“No, I don’t even have one woman in my life.”

“Not even one?”

“Well, my mother.”

He went on to tell me something I hear from the majority of my patients.

“I don’t want to be like my father.”

We may have suffered the excesses of one or both of our parents, and so we make the resolution that I am not going to be that way. We make every effort to avoid this parental influence. But the avoidance of parental influence and identification is a sure way to become a carbon copy—the return of the repressed. Usually when we make every effort not to be like our mother or father, there is some particular quality that we want to avoid, having known it too well as a son or daughter. But repression tends to make a wide swath; it’s not very precise in its work of ridding the personality of some unwanted quality. David tried not to be like his father. Not wanting to have many intimate relationships, he had none. Not wanting to wander around the country aimlessly, he couldn’t move far from home. Not wanting to be like his father, he had little trace of fathering of any kind in his own life.

I talked to him about his father without making the broad criticisms and judgments that he made continually and which kept his affections toward his parents split. I encouraged stories about his father, and over time a complicated picture emerged of a man who had a childhood much like David’s. We began to make sense of his father’s wandering, for all its neuroticism. In life David made some efforts to meet with his father and talk to him about his experiences. Discussing it afterward, we discovered that his father was trying, too, to keep a distance from his son. Eventually, motivated in part, I think, by a new interest in his father’s life, the son insisted on contact and conversation.

By not cutting himself off from his father, David could look at himself more directly. Whether he liked it or not, his father’s spirit was in him. Out of this spirit he could make a life. He would no longer have to be impoverished by his negative efforts to remain untainted by the family myth. In general, when we try to escape the family’s “dysfunctions,” we fall into complicated, paradoxical tangles. The wish for escape might well be balanced by a relentless bondage to the family, the unconscious assumption, for example, that “home” is where mother is.

A renewed entry into the family, embracing what has previously been denied, often leads to an unexpected alchemy in which even the most difficult family relationships shift enough to make a significant difference. Heroic efforts to make families work according to some norm get in the way of this alchemy. It is usually best, when caring for the soul, to sit with what is there and let your own imagination move, instead of making empty wishes or attempting heroic changes. Although we talk about the family as though it were a simple literal reality, it is always what we imagine it to be. This imagination can deepen and change over a period of time and unleash some of the soul that has been bound up in resentment and rigidity. I am convinced that David’s stories about his father and mother had an effect on his relationship with them. His new, deeper imagining allowed him to pass through his former fixed views so that he could reconnect with his mother and father in ways he had not known before. They were still the same people, but David found a way to be that was less self-protective and therefore more open to his parents.

When we tell stories about the family without judgment and without instant analysis, the literal persons turn into characters in a drama and isolated episodes reveal themselves as themes in a great saga. Family history is transformed into myth. Whether we know it or not, our ideas about the family are rooted in the ways we imagine the family. That personal family, which seems so concrete, is always an imaginal entity. Part of our alchemical work with soul is to extract myth from the hard details of family history and memory on the principle that increase of imagination is always an increase in soul.

With this principle in mind, I want to look at family members as imaginal figures and to offer some suggestions for finding the myths in the ordinary roles of family life. For each individual, the myth will be different, and yet certain characteristics are constant. Every family member evokes the archetypal family, the myth in everyday life. The imagination of father, mother and child is vast, and so I can only give some hints toward a way of developing a family imagination, including some references to literature and mythology that offer a path toward understanding the family more imaginally.

Father

One of the most extraordinary mythic stories from our own collective past, a story as sacred as any in religious literature, is about a man trying to reclaim his fatherhood, a wife longing for her husband, and a son out in search of his lost father. At the beginning of Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus is sitting on the seashore in the midst of his unplanned travels following a long, difficult war, wishing to be home with his son, his father, and the mother of his children. In his longing and melancholy he asks a famous question: “Does any person know who his father is?” It’s a question many men and women ask in various forms. If my father is dead, or if he was absent and cold, or if he was a tyrant, or if he abused me, or if he was wonderful but is not there for me now, then who is my father now? Where do I get those feelings of protection, authority, confidence, know-how, and wisdom that I need in order to live my life? How can I evoke a fatherly myth in a way that will give my life the governance it needs?

The story of Odysseus gives us many clues toward finding that elusive father. However, it does not begin, as one might expect, with the father in the throes of his adventures, but with the son, Telemachus, distraught at the havoc created in his house by suitors vying for his mother’s affections. The story gives us first an image of “absent-father neurosis.” Without the father there is chaos, conflict, and sadness. On the other hand, by starting with the unhappiness of Telemachus, the story teaches us that the experience of father includes his absence and the longing for his return. For at the very moment Telemachus is bewailing his situation, Odysseus is on another beach on the same sea, pining for the same conclusion. If we understand The Odyssey as one of the stories of the soul’s fatherhood, then at that...