Traumgruppe Anhang 2
[David Little] 1996-2007
Delusions, Love and Hate as Rubrics
Kent: will and understanding compose the inner aspects of the human
psyche. On this basis he said that love and hate were the deepest of human
emotions and central aspects of case taking.
This is similar to the philosophy of Empedocles who wrote that love and
hate were the powers responsible for the interaction of the five homœomeries.
When one loses their willpower and understanding they are subject to delusions
about the nature of reality that lead to misplaced attachments and aversions.
This makes delusion, loves and hates central concerns in homœopathic
psychology.
Delusions and dreams are very revealing of the psychological states
produced by homœopathic provings because they are controlled directly by the
unconscious. The images seen in delusions, hallucinations and dreams carry
archetypal information in the form of symbols.
For example, the Three Witch Drugs Belladonna, Hyoscyamus and
Stramonium. Remedies from the Solanaceae family share many similar symptoms yet
each has a unique remedy picture.
Belladonna has the following symptoms in the repertory extraction of the
Complete Repertory found in ReferenceWorks.
DELUSIONS, IMAGINATIONS: BATS,
OF (Jahr).
Delusions, imaginations:
beetles, worms, etc.
Delusions, imaginations: black,
on walls and furniture, sees.
DELUSIONS, IMAGINATIONS: BLACK OBJECTS
AND PEOPLE, SEES (Boenninghausen).
DELUSIONS, IMAGINATIONS: BULLS,
OF (Jahr).
Delusions, imaginations: cats,
sees: black.
DELUSIONS, IMAGINATIONS:
COCKROACHES: SWARMED ABOUT THE ROOM.
DELUSIONS, IMAGINATIONS: DOGS:
BLACK.
DELUSIONS, IMAGINATIONS: FIERCE,
WITH HORNS AND BUSHY HEADS (Knerr).
DELUSIONS, IMAGINATIONS: FIRE,
IN THE.
DELUSIONS, IMAGINATIONS:
INSECTS: SEES: SHINING. DELUSIONS, IMAGINATIONS: SNAKES: CRIMSON, OR, FASTENING
AROUND HIS NECK.
DELUSIONS, IMAGINATIONS:
UNCLEAN.
DELUSIONS, IMAGINATIONS:
BEAUTIFUL: IMAGES, PRESENTING THEMSELVES TO HER AS IF BY CHARM (Knerr).
DELUSIONS, IMAGINATIONS: DEAD:
CORPSE: TALL YELLOW, TRYING TO SHARE BED WITH HIM AND PROMPTLY EJECTED.
Delusions, imaginations: devils:
sees.
Delusions, imaginations: faces,
sees: hideous.
DELUSIONS, IMAGINATIONS:
FIGURES, SEES: DELIRIUM, DURING, FRIGHTFUL (Knerr ).
DELUSIONS, IMAGINATIONS:
FLOATING IN AIR: EVENING.
DELUSIONS, IMAGINATIONS: GIANTS,
SEES.
DELUSIONS, IMAGINATIONS: IMAGES,
PHANTOMS, SEES: DELIRIUM, IN, FRIGHTFUL (Knerr).
DELUSIONS, IMAGINATIONS:
MAGICIAN, IS A.
DELUSIONS, IMAGINATIONS:
SPECTRES, GHOSTS, SPIRITS, SEES: FIRE, IN.
DELUSIONS, IMAGINATIONS:
TALKING: SISTER, WITH HIS DEAD: CHURCHYARD, IN (Jahr).
DELUSIONS, IMAGINATIONS:
UNCLEAN.
Delusions; imaginations: wolves,
of.
The above symptoms come directly from the unconscious regions of the
psyche and reflect many archetypal images related to witches, wizards and
states of possession. Not so long ago many of the states produced by the Three
Witch drugs would have been considered possession by demons. Delusions have
both literal and symbolic interpretations. In the case of the literal
interpretation the person would actually experience the state related to the
delusion. In the case of Belladonna they would really see wolves, devils and
ghosts that are not present.
The symbolic interpretation of delusions has a much wider application
than a literal hallucination. Many forms of delusion are very subtle and
subjective in nature yet they affect the entire outlook of a person. In a
symbolic interpretation the patient may feel that the people around them act
like wolves, are devilish in their actions or have a ghostly personality. These
symbolic delusions are revealed through the patient’s word associations,
dreams, fantasies and mannerism. A Nat-m. patient stated she worked very hard
to buy her home, furniture and food and that most people tried to get whatever
they could get from her for nothing. She considered most people little more
than thieves. In this case the following rubric was considered essential.
MIND; DELUSIONS, imaginations;
thieves, robbers, sees; house, in: ars., cann-i., con., cupr-acet., lach.,
merc., nat-m., sil., sol-t-ae.
The Complete Repertory; R.
Zandvoort.
The idea that people were trying to steal what she had was essential to
the make-up of this patient’s psychology. There were no real cat burglars in
her house but she projected the idea that most people were thieves as
individuals and collective groups. Some of the reasons behind these projections
were that her former husband had left her and she had lost everything. She felt
that he took all the good she did in her youth away from her. She had to work
exceptionally hard to rebuild her life and was overly protective. The idea that
people are thieves permeated her entire view of the world.
A patient may feel that everyone is trying to cause them trouble when
this is not the case. In this situation the rubric like “delusions that they
feel persecuted” may be
of use. Sometimes a child is very needy of their parents and will not
take their eyes off them because they are under the delusion that they will be
deserted or forsaken.
The symbolic use of rubrics can transcend their literal interpretation.
Many delusions are very subtle and subjective in nature yet they affect the
entire outlook of a person.
Delusions come in different strengths and shapes. The parable of the
snake and rope is taken from Vedanta. This analogy has been used in a number of
ways throughout the centuries. For a person
to be afraid of a snake in their path is a common reaction. To not feel
fear would be strange, rare and peculiar. When a person sees the snake and
retreats that should be the end of the matter. If the feeling of fear still lingers
long afterwards, the individual is under the delusion that the snake can still
hurt them although it cannot. When a person sees a rope as a snake this is
predominantly a projection of their own internal fears. In this case, the fear
of snakes is in the subconscious mind waiting to be projected outward when
triggered. When a person sees a snake when there is absolutely nothing there,
this is a full-blown hallucination. In this situation the unconscious has such
a fixation on snakes that it is creating them. The three levels of delusion
are: being obsessed with something that can’t hurt you any more, projecting the
delusion on the objects or people around you, and creating the objective
appearance of a delusion mentally. These three levels of delusion represent
progressively deeper states of psychopathology.
The entire mental section of the repertory can be used as a reference
for these states of delusion. Kent called these affections of the will and
understanding and related them to the source of all other mental symptoms. The
more untrue, exaggerated, and foolish the mental state is, the more strange,
rare and peculiar its symptoms become. This makes these rubrics characteristic
of the individual and important when referring to the repertory.
To be afraid of snakes in the jungle is common but to be afraid of
snakes where there are none is a phobia. To see snakes in your room when there
are none is peculiar. When a person thinks everyone at work is a “snake” this
is a word association. In this case, fear of snakes or delusions of snakes
could be used as a rubric. In this way, the homœopath may use the doctrine of
analogy and correspondence to expand the usage of the rubrics of the mind,
delusions, dreams and sensations as if.
A person’s attractions and aversions are closely related to the
conditioned responses that reside in the subconscious mind. When a person feels
fearful, insecure, and uncomfortable when they are alone, and happy when they
are with people, this is a manifestation of their loves and hates. What lies
underneath this? Some people do not like bright colors while others feel like
crying when they listen to music. What do these things remind them of? Some
individuals feel more comfortable with strangers yet very irritable with close
friends. Why? Some individuals love to be noticed while others are very shy or
timid about being seen in public. Could one person be compensating for feelings
of worthlessness while the other is reacting to fear of failure?
All loves and hates are essential aspects of a person’s psychology and
characteristic of remedies. Such states are conditioned responses based on
unresolved mental conflicts. Aversion tends toward hatred, irritability, anger,
envy, resentment and revenge while attachments produce desires, misplaced love,
grief, sadness, loss, and pride. Everyone is a mixture of these emotional
polarities but certain negative tendencies predominate due to the underlying
fixations.
This process becomes much more abstruse because of the phenomena of
compensation. One who constantly speaks of being non-judgmental often has very
strong fixed opinions about various subjects. Some who constantly profess
progressive values and liberal views are often covering up resistance to change
and narrow-mindedness. The patient’s interactions with family, friends and
colleagues reveal aspects of their hidden personality.
At times the occupation of a person involves compensation. A preacher
whose sermons are of hell-fire and damnation speaks of Christian love but is
often filled with fear, guilt and anger. They say they hate the sin and not the
sinner but in truth their sin is hatred of others. A man who wishes to make
money becomes a doctor to “serve humanity”. A bully becomes a police officer to
“protect the peace”. A selfish person becomes a lawyer to “help the innocent”
through frivolous lawsuits. A thief speaks like the most honest individual, a
confidence man makes the best impressions, and a real sinner tries to appear as
the greatest saint.
The words people use to describe things are representative of a person’s
unconscious material. If a person thinks his boss is a snake in the grass, all
the other employees are trying to take his position, everyone is talking behind
his back, and his job is killing him, we already have several possible rubrics.
If his working situation is relatively normal then most of his experience is a
projection of his inner emotional complexes onto the world outside. The rubrics
we might use in such a case include; suspicious; mistrustful; fear of snakes;
delusions of snakes in and around her; delusions, sees thieves; delusions, is
going to be robbed; fear of robbers; delusions, he is persecuted; delusions, he
is pursued; delusions he would be murdered; and delusions, being injured; just
to name a few.
These rubrics should be underlined depending on how characteristic they
are of the inner state and by how distant they are from reality. These types of
rubrics would bring the homœopath to consider remedies like Lach. Ars. Stram.
Hyos. Lac-c. and Op. If one of these remedies was confirmed by the concomitant
symptoms one could consider that remedy a simillimum.
Dreams and Archetypes
Jung in Civilization in Transition (Collected Works, Vol. 10): dreams
are hidden door to the innermost recesses of the psyche. Dreams are a door that
opens into the cosmic night, which represented the psyche long before there was
an ego consciousness. Dreams are a portal to a more universal eternal mind
residing in the darkness of the primordial night that represents a whole that
is still one with nature. It was through his study of dreams that Jung began to
confirm that there were components of consciousness. Dreams have played a vital
role in assessing the nature of the psyche since the time of the ancient
Asclepiads. This is because dreams are beyond the conscious control of the ego
and represent the dynamic Gestalt-patterns of archetypes in the unconscious.
The dreamer lives in a secret world that is free from the repression that the
peer group and society impose on the persona. In the dream world one lives in a
secret realm hidden from the minds of others.
The Oriental philosophies teach that all life is a dream not just the
images seen in sleep. This image arises in an old American folksong that is
sung in rounds, “Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream. Merrily,
merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream!” This song is full of symbolic
meanings that go far beyond taking a boat ride. The Freudian view was that
dreams were basically a medium for the wish fulfillment of repressed complexes
and traumatic libido conflicts. People commonly see dreams as symbolic of their
hopes and fears. Individuals often speak of dreams in terms of their wishes for
this life. What is a hopeful expectation? What is a daydream? What is an idle fantasy?
What is a hallucination? What is a vision? How different are these from dreams
at night?
The conscious mind displays its hopes for a better life in linear terms
while dreams are irrational and full of synchronism. Dreams often reveal sides
of a person one would not guess existed from just talking to them. Dreams often
contain repressed fantasy and compensations for what the conscious persona
cannot express. This is why the interpretation of dreams held an important
place in Greek Asclepiums. The homœopath will also find this to be a fertile
field to investigate in many cases.
To understand dreams takes good knowledge of psychology, mythology,
comparative religion, fairy stories, folk tales, poetry and the visual arts.
Comprehending dreams includes attention to form, setting, pace, mood, rhythm,
color, themes, images, actors and emotional feeling tones. In “The Structure
and Dynamics of the Psyche” (Collected Works, Volume 8, par. 505) Jung wrote
that a dream is a spontaneous symbolic self-portrayal of the actual situation
in the unconscious.
Each component in the dream represents an aspect of a person’s
unconscious. In the classical Jungian method it is taught that the shadow
appears mostly as equisexual characters and the animus-animus appears as contrasexual
figures. The purposeful guiding element behind the process of dreaming is the
Self. Dreams are a medium for compensation and complementation of those areas
of the psyche that need integration.
In “The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche” (Collected Works, Vol. 8,
par. 509) Jung wrote that a dream is a theater in which the dreamer is the
scene, player, prompter, producer, author, public and critic. The motif of the
theater is an archetypal image that shows that life is a stage on which the
psyche takes the role of the composer, actors and audience. Dreams also have a
dramatic structure which includes exposition, peripeteia, crisis and lysis.
These four stages are the setting, development, climax and resolution of
the inner drama. The setting is represented by the geographic location in which
the dream opens. The setting establishes the foundation that helps put all that
follows into perspective. The peripeteia develops the movement, themes and
dynamics that expand on the potential of the dream. The crisis is the peak of
the dramatic movement of the peripeteia where maximum tension is reached.
The final stage is the lysis in which the crisis ends in resolution or
catastrophe. Thus dreams tend to follow the same four stages as the classical
Greek plays. In dreams, however, various stages may be lengthened or shortened
and may overlap. Some dreams seem to end at an impasse reminiscent of serials
that close with the words, “to be continued.” These types of dreams are often
continued in various ways at a later date.
Dreams present themselves in a language of images that may be understood
by allegory, symbols and rebus. An image is considered allegoric if the dream
message can be translated into rational concepts and symbolic when the meaning
cannot be conceived logically. A rebus is something that is represented by
phrases or pictures that suggest syllables, words or concise ideas. In order to
gain a deeper understanding of dream language the practitioner uses
associations, explanation and amplification.
Associations are any ideas, notions, memories, reactions and feelings
that arise in the dreamer’s mind when discussing a particular dream image.
Associations are invoked from the dreamer by asking questions like “What does
that remind you of?” The association that carries the biggest emotional charge
is the interpretation that is confirmed by the unconscious. This shows that the
association relates to the present or past psychological state. The process is
deepened by asking the seven universal questions; who, what, where, why, with
what, what modalities and when? Associations offer access to the subjective
regions of the psyche that lie behind the dream images.
Explanations are rationalizations that proceed from generally accepted
facts that are either objective-collective or subjective-individual. A pen is
an object that carries a collective definition in the mind of everyone. It does
not matter if the pen is used for writing or a weapon to stab a person. A pen
is a pen. In a subjective personal definition the pen may stand for creativity,
communication or a means of self-expression. Here the image of pen has a
greater meaning that goes beyond the pen as an object.
A pen can be either a prop during a dream or a starting point for the
further application of association. Such relationships can be accessed by
asking questions like, “What does that represent to you?” If the patient takes
such questions seriously it often begins a stream of associations. This is
further enhanced by the seven universal questions. Once again this can open a
wider field of the mental symptoms. If the pen is a prop it will not inspire
further emotional feeling tones but if the pen is pivotal it will lead to
deeper emotional-affect responses.
Amplification is the enlarging of the dream images with corresponding
motifs from fairy tales, mythology, metaphysics, alchemy and other storehouses
of archetypes. This process is most useful when the dreamer offers information
that involves the collective unconscious. To attempt to impose amplification of
the props found in a dream or images that offer rational explanations is
counter-productive. Archetypal motifs convey collective energy patterns that
represent the complexes that surround a person’s individual myth. These images
symbolize the way in which the dreamer responds to universal, spiritual,
philosophical, social, and ethical dilemmas that make up the transpersonal
grand themes of existence.
Some dreams are fairly mundane reenactments of the daily activities of
the persona. Other dreams are shadowy compensations in which the dreamer does
things they would never do in the waking state. There are also dreams that
include anima and animus figures, images from the collective unconscious and
messages from the Self. These take positive or negative forms depending on the
psychic contents within the unconscious psyche. The homœopath may use
association, explanation and amplification as a tool that reveals the greater
psychological profile of the patient.
Dreams have their literal and interpretative applications in Homœopathy.
When the patient repeatedly dreams of the ocean, looking up the symptoms
related to water is a literal interpretation.
This approach only offers the limited number of rubrics found in the
dream sections of the repertory and materia medica. The interpretive use of
association, explanation and amplification opens up the use of all the rubrics
found in homœopathic reference works. When the homœopath inquires into the
dreams of the client they are looking for clues that uncover the patient’s core
archetypal delusions and central loves and hates and their somatic
concomitants.
The most important dreams are those that have a strong effect on the
waking state of the person or have reoccurring themes. Dreams that are
repetitive contain areas of fixation in the unconscious and are characteristic
of their complexes. The different persons and objects seen in dreams are
symbolic representations of certain aspects of the psyche seeking expression. Physical,
general and particular symptoms can frequently be found in the locations,
sensations, modifications and concomitants of the dream body. The use of the
mentals, physical generals and particulars in relationship to the dream body
goes far beyond the rubrics in the section on dreams alone.
A patient dreams they are lost on a raft in a vast ocean with no one to
help to find the shore (setting). The ocean symbolizes the deepest aspects of
unconscious where most mental activity takes place well below the surface. In
the dream ego feeling alone and lost on the ocean brings up fears of sinking,
being attacked by sea monsters and drowning (development). The dream body feels
the cold winds and is chilled to the point of shaking and shivering. The
dreamer’s legs feel cold, achy, weak, numb and paralyzed and they fear they
will die (climax). Then the dreamer suddenly wakes up feeling fearful, chilly
and shaken during the day (to be continued). Such an experience may have a
strong effect on the conscious ego and may make them feel fearful of those
things that symbolize the oceanic unconscious.
Sometimes a fearful situation is transformed by hopeful symbols of life
that surface from the ocean of the unconscious. Maybe the dreamer surrenders to
their fate and some dolphins suddenly appear and show the dreamer the way
forward. Perhaps seagulls fly overhead showing that land is near. These are
images from the Self that are symbols of guidance and bring a sense of
completion (lysis). This opens the use of rubrics like > by company and
consolation and brings in states like exhilaration, exaltation and
cheerfulness. Now the dreamer wakes up feeling hopeful and inspired.
Perhaps the opposite closing scene takes place and the raft sinks
throwing the dream ego into the water causing a sinking feeling that wakes them
up (catastrophe). A positive lysis often carries a better prognosis about the
situation in the unconscious than the catastrophe. A catastrophe may be a sign
of a repressed death wish or that the complexes in the unconscious are
overwhelming for the ego structure. Death in a dream may also mean that a
certain part of the ego structure must die for individuation to take place.
Such dream riddles must be solved individually through association, explanation
and amplification.
Rubrics and sub-rubrics for dreams of water are in the repertory. This
is a literal interpretation of the dream. Through association, explanation and
amplification one can find more psychological components and general symptoms
from this dream. Perhaps under questioning the patient remembers that they
almost drowned when they were young and they have felt insecure and fearful
ever since. This is a rational explanation with a cause and effect line. Many
times there is no literal cause and association further elucidates the dream
symbolically.
Perhaps the dream reminds the dreamer of being a young child who was
overwhelmed by fearful images in the sea of darkness at night while alone in
the bedroom. Perhaps they felt lost and abandoned by their parents without
anything solid on which to support their existence. They could have felt as if
they were nearly drowned in an ocean of fearful images and attacked by monsters
from the unconscious. The image of being lost at sea is a mythological motif
that may be filled in by the specifics of the dreamer. Such images involve the
interpretive understanding of the dream through associations.
To be lost and afraid in the middle of the vast sea must be transferred
into the language of the repertory by analogy. Such images may lead to rubrics
like: delusions of water; fear of water; delusions of being lost, for
salvation; delusions he cannot succeed; delusions of being alone, castaway,
alone in this world; fear of being alone, least he die; fear of death;
delusions of being doomed; delusions of frightful animals; delusions he might
be injured; delusions sees frightful images, phantom, specters; delusions of
being injured; delusion he is being pursued, by enemies; delusion he is
sinking; feelings of being forsaken, isolated or not loved by his parents; fear
of dark, etc.
There are an infinite number of possibilities depending on the
associations, explanations, and amplifications related to the individual case.
Some remedies that have the major components of the water dream are Ars. Stram.
Merc. Verat. Hyos. Lach. Bell. Cann-i. Carc. Med. Nat-c. Sep. Lyss. etc. The
general symptoms demonstrated in this dream might be: < damp/cold/open air,
chills, trembling, trembling from fright, trembling from cold, chilblains,
gooseflesh, blueness of extremities etc. The particular symptoms might include
coldness of the extremities, numbness of the legs, weakness, paralysis, <
motion, < exertion, etc. Any physical symptoms experienced by the dream body
can be used as a general or particular symptom. These dream components should
then be compared with the symptoms of the waking state for confirmations.
If the dream remedies are also applicable to the symptoms of the case
that appear during the waking state the remedy is a deep simillimum. The interpretation
of dreams is a subjective art that may help to clarify certain remedies that
might be overlooked. The rubrics listed under dreams and delusions are similar
in nature as they are projections of subconscious material. Fantasy related to
mental states and sexuality is very revealing of some of the unconscious
contents of the mind. The mental, general and particular symptoms are sometimes
very useful in analyzing dreams, daydreams, fantasies, delusions, visions and
psychic impressions.
Dmitri Mendeleev sah in einem Traum wie die Elemente sich in das Periodensystem konfigurierten.
https://open.uct.ac.za/bitstream/item/15714/thesis_hum_1998_joyner_catherine.pdf?sequence=1
[Kate Joyner]
DREAMS, DESIRE AND ADDICTION: 'AN ARCHETYPAL ANALYSIS’
The word lithe is used many times in this text to give the following
word a broader range of interpretation = flexible in german/french/spanish.
Flessible in italien. Dobrável in portugese.
There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise.
The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and
spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power
of our unexpressed or unrecognised feeling. In order to perpetuate
itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power
within the culture· of the oppressed that can
provide energy for change.
For women, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered
source of power and information within our lives (Lorde 1989: 208)
If lithe erotic is read here to mean the instinctual, creative,
spiritual life, then this thesis seeks to demonstrate the value of clear
engagement with the depths of one's dream life as a vital facet of
this domain.
Consider that erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification
of love in all its aspects; born of Chaos, it epitomises creative power and
harmony.
My premise, then is that our dream-life is a vital and valuable part of
this creative flow.
In our age, however, the rational ethos of technological,
post-modernist, post-industrial socio-cultural constellation, which has been
produced by centuries of patriarchal domination, seems to have created an
enormously displaced hunger. This hunger has been variously identified (Woolger
1983, Moore 1992, Woodman 1993) as a craving for the soul-life. This displaced
spiritual craving appears
to be ritualised in the rampant addictions that ultimately devastate so
many modern lives. /+- key principle that
gives form to my critical feminist hermeneutic (= studie van de interpretatie
van (geschreven) teksten (literatuur, religie en recht. W aarschijnlijk
voor het eerst gebruikt door de Griekse dichter Homerus (circa 800 v.Chr.) en
betekent de uitleg en vertaling van berichten die door de goden der Griekse
mythologie aan mensen werden gegeven. Homerus beroept zich daarbij op de god Hermes.) of healing is the
growing understanding that our wounds are the source of our power. Healing the
fragmentation and divisions of our death-loving society requires a _ radical
transformation in both our understanding of the world, and our motivations for
action in it.
This thesis values and demonstrates the eclectic approach offered by
multi-disciplinary discourse, although the keynote throughout is feminist. The
nature of the feminist Eros forms a leitmotif of the
thesis, which aims to build an understanding of the value of, and need
for, more heart and the soul work best enabled by dream analysis.
The thesis examines the difficulties women experience in relation to
their embodiment and explores why. In this regard, ecofeminist critique raises
questions about the symbolism paralleling personal
and global issues. This in turn raises questions about displaced desires
- addiction and starvation, the language of the body and the symbolic language
of dream.
Thus the ecoferninist lens focuses on the links that can be made between
the denigration of both women and nature within the dominant patriarchal
ideology, and the real-life problems experienced
by women on earth today which reflect this deep background.
Aspects of the conceptual framework of the New Age healing field are
brought into relief in this endeavour, which concludes with a case study
intended to demonstrate the practical application
of this theory.
Chapter 1 proposes that dream analysis is valuable not only as a route
to individuation but also as a tool for psychic survival in our highly stressed
times.
A distinction is made between the theoretical perspectives of so-called
hard and soft thinking.
The assumption of many Westerners that waking reality is a fail-safe
position is contested.
Furthermore, it is argued that the art of dream analysis is structured
around the ability to circle, spiral and layer, rather than deployment of a
linear approach. The theoretical perspectives utilised are
primarily Jungian and ecofeminist, although these are clearly situated
within the broader debates raised by multi-disciplinary discourse on the role
of dreams within the psychology of religion.
Chapter 2 focuses on the methods of dream interpretation developed by
Carl Gustav Jung using the differences between the Jungian and the Freudian
approach as a starting-point.
It attempts to outline a comprehensive model of Jungian dream analysis
for interpretive purposes.
Key techniques, such as identification of the dramatic structure of
dreams and the phenomenon of compensation, are detailed, as is the skill of
amplifying free association.
The feminist Jungian debate around gender and soul and the place of the
anima and animus in psychotherapy are examined.
This chapter therefore delineates the technical infrastructure, which
will be brought to bear on the case study.
It concludes with an examination of parallels between Buddhist tantric
practices and the Jungian analytical process.
Other similarities and differences between Hindu, Buddhist and Jungian
perspectives are noted.
Chapter 3 employs Jungian methods to examine the archetypal patterns
which can be seen to form the underbelly of addictive behaviours.
It explores the figure of Dracula as a mythic theme and symbol for our
time, germane to the drivenness of the eating-disordered, alcoholic, drugging,
work-addicted or sex-addicted person.
This chapter aims to illuminate the nature of displaced desire and
foreshadows an understanding of incest in connection with demon lover and
father fixations.
Issues relating to a gendered study of cultural embodiment have become·
a significant field of discourse in religious studies over the past decade.
Historian Caroline Walker Bynum has charted the territory in her
exploration of the gendered meaning and function of the nature of ascetism in
the high Middle Ages and how it relates to
the question of the social, religious and psychological structures of
women's lives.
Chapter 4 focuses on how the violation of the feminine principle in
patriarchal times has impacted on our experience of embodiment and the feminist
Eros.
The ecofeminist and Jungian feminist theoretical focus aims to lift out
the symbolic links or examination, looking particularly at the damage done by
the sexual violation of children, since
this is critical to the case study.
From a Jungian perspective, the wounded desire and displaced hunger
which drives addictions are based in the negative mother complex.
The New Age view of the body as a vital diagnostic tool for disorders of
the psyche is also applied to this issue.
Chapter 5 last chapter comprises a case study focused on the dream life
of a talented 31-year-old woman, Alexandra, who is single and without
dependents.
For the past five years, Alex. has binged and purged almost daily.
Indeed, the longest binge-free period she has experienced in this period has
been 10 days.
Her ritualistic pattern used to be catalysed by feelings of anger
directed particularly towards her mother, but this seems to have shifted
recently to difficulties related to her sister.
The shift fits coherently with conscious changes she has made in her
understanding of her relationship with her mother and realisations about her
sister with which she has been forced recently
to come to terms.
The past pattern has been that Alex feels she will lose control if such
painful feelings are let out:
she becomes filled with an acute sense of despondency which precipitates
a compulsion to shut down her anger by bingeing.
Sweet substances like chocolate and biscuits comfort her, making her
feel secure. Later she has an increasing sense of dysphoria and induces vomiting
by putting her finger down her throat.
Guilt and remorse follow.
Alex and I met at G22, the psychotherapeutic milieu at Groote Schuur
Hospital, where I worked as an advanced psychiatry nursing student.
In our conversations it emerged that she was fascinated by her dreams
and eager to focus on her dream life and the wisdom it might offer.
I therefore engaged and paid for my own supervision in order to
facilitate such a process responsibly.
The supervisor of my thesis also played a clarifying role.
Alex found the process extremely valuable and illuminating, as did I.
It is hoped that the reader of this thesis will reach a similar
conclusion.
CHAPTER ONE: THE DREAM MOVEMENT
Introduction
Individuals in diverse cultures have long looked to dreams as a source
of spiritual insight and divine revelation (Jung, Collected Works, hereafter
referred to as CW; (Fromm 1951; Eliade 1964;
O’flaherty 1984; Bulkeley 1993).
Reflection on and interpretation of dreams is one of humanity's oldest hermeneutical
endeavours, predating by far the advent of psychoanalysis and all other modern
psychological theories.
The connection between religious perspectives on dreams and the insights
of modern psychology has long interested psychologists of religion, for dreams
offer uniquely fertile material for
comparing religious and psychological understandings of human
experience.
Certainly, dreams have proven to be invaluable therapeutic aids to
psychological healing and the growth of individuals, as this thesis seeks to
demonstrate.
The discovery of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep in 1953 catalysed a
second, post-Freudian revolution in the science of dreams. A serious interest
in Jungian psychology began to take hold
in the modern West and this interlinked with a broad-based popular
movement that was stimulated by Perls's Gestalt therapy techniques (1969) and
pioneered further by Ann Faraday,
Patricia Garfield, John Sanford, Montague Ullman and others.
Maguire (1989: 22) notes that this renewed interest in the therapeutic
use of dreams arose as a hybrid product of self-help, alternative health
therapy, consciousness-raising, and human potential
movements, w~lile Shafion (1996) observes that the -contemporary
approach to the therapeutic use of dreams emphasises the practical applications
of dream work, lucidity, spirituality in both
religious and non-religious senses, creativity and psychic events, as
well as the healing and insight of conventional therapy.
Through its encouragement of forms of deprofessionalised dreamwork, the
contemporary dream movement emphasises that dreams belong to dreamers in their
everyday lives and do not, in
most circumstances, require interpretation by professionals in clinical
scenarios (Hillman 1988).
Simultaneously, theoreticians, clinicians and experimenters have
contributed to and have also been influenced by these developments.
Framework and theoretical issues
The methodological tools utilised in this thesis are primarily Jungian
and ecofeminist, although parallels are drawn with New Age, Eastern and
postmodern thinking.
Such an interdisciplinary focus not only serves the aim of
socio-cultural relevance, but also reflects the fact that the academic field of
dream studies arose in the latter half of the 20th century,
as an outgrowth of research in diverse academic disciplines, including
neurophysiology, psychology, anthropology, literary criticism and religious
studies.
As Kelly Bulkeley (1996: 237) points out, however, this academic work
has been nourished by a surprisingly high level of focused interest in dreams
among the general public.
It is particularly noteworthy that in the West, long given to a
rationalist bias, large numbers of people are focusing on dreaming as a
distinct kind of experience, applying diverse research
methods to examine dreaming, and seeking dream answers to a broad
spectrum of practical and theoretical questions.
Through the centuries of patriarchal domination body and mind were split
asunder, in the quest for progress and civilisation. Chodorow (1984: 39)
discusses the patriarchal perception of the
instinctive body as a threat, representing the lower, animal aspects of
human nature. As the body's vitality was suppressed, so too was the receptive,
feminine principle. As objectivity, differentiation
and clarity were prized and pursued, so subjectivity, empathy and
wholistic encounter were sacrificed. Both the feminine and the body were
defined as "other" and relegated to the underworld
where, despised and rejected, they have become increasingly destructive
in the darkness of unconscious possession and projection.
According to Chodorow (1984: 39), Jung himself emphasised that the
Christian Holy Trinity represents the one-sided values of Western culture,
qualities that are masculine, disembodied, rational.
Qualities related to the feminine have been devalued, and the experience
of the body denied and repressed.
This thesis shares Chodorow's view (1984: 40) that the development of
the women's movement and the renaissance of attention to the life of our bodies
and of Mother Earth reveal the socio-cultural
beginnings of psychological awareness of the personal, cultural and
collective shadow. In Aion, Jung opines that the coming Aquarian Age will require
us to relate not only to new aspects of ourselves
and each other, but to a new God-image - a mandala of opposites that
includes feminine and masculine, body and spirit, good and evil.
This thesis centres around three key concepts: dreams, the body and the
soul.
At a collective level, the key diagnosis of the ills of the modern West
is loss of soul and loss of soul that is behind all the deritualised
interaction with each other and our environment that is such
a core part of deterioration in both individuals and the world around
them. Relying primarily on Jungian and ecofeminist arguments, this thesis seeks
to provide imaginative and spiritual resources
for the use of dreams· as a means to access soul and reunite it with
body.
It therefore examines how an understanding of dreams can contribute to
significant improvement in both individual lives and Society at large. Can
dreams be used as a vehicle for generating and
nurturing dialogue toward more effective treatment for addictions?
Can dreams be utilised in the solution of such social problems as ethnic
and racial strife, environmental degradation, sexual and substance abuse,
violent crime and the suffering lives of underprivileged children?
What other insights do dreams offer into the causes of the social ills
of the modern West?
What time-frame do they serve?
What healing opportunities do they suggest?
In particular, what can be learnt at the interfaces between the realms
of dream, desire and addiction?
How are eating disorders forms of addiction?
Can dream work form a constructive route to self-awareness and healing?
The thesis aims to build theoretical insights into dreams which are then
grounded in the practical example of the case study which concludes the thesis.
A theoretical tension needs to be raised at the outset.
A major methodological/theoretical stumbling-block for a work of this
nature is the assumption: Westerners tend to make that waking reality is a
fail-safe position. Wendy Doniger O’flaherty
(1984: 9) distinguishes two major Western approaches to the problem of
reality: "Most people think that reality is physical, public, external,
and somehow hard” and they think that what is not
real is mental, private, internal, and somehow “soft."
"Hard" thinkers define themselves within a context of scientific
research and rational planning and see dream studies, with their focus on
the "inner world" and subjective personal concerns, as far
removed from the practical, day-to-day concerns of waking life.
As Schroeder (1996: 37) observes, the very nature of dreams makes it
unlikely that they would be considered relevant to natural resource management
and other environmentally related
professions, for example. Jung (1964: 52) himself noted that dreams
manifest the subliminal "fringe of consciousness" in which logical
relationship and clarity of definition is lacking.
Dreams often seem to "evade definite information or omit the
decisive point". Clearly, the unpredictable and irrational qualities of
dreams seem totally contrary to the kind of logic, precision
and objectivity that is required by science.
It is therefore interesting that "irrational" processes such
as imagination and intuition have often played a crucial role in the creation
of new scientific theories. Schroeder (1996: 37) cites the
famous example of the chemist Kekule's dream, which led him to his
theory of the ring structure of the benzene molecule. This is one of numerous
examples attesting to the fact that the process
by which the end result of a scientific investigation is reached often
draws on and benefits from intuition, feelings and other irrational mental
processes.
As Michel (1973: 14-15) puts it: From the human point of view there
appear to be two forms of truth, poetic and scientific, and the two cannot always
be made strictly compatible. Scientific
facts emerge in the first instance as revelations from the unconscious
mind. Where these revelations can be shown to accord with what has already been
established, they are accepted.
Where they stand alone, they tend to be dismissed as fantasies ....
O’flaherty (1984: 311) explores a list of associations with the
"hard" / "soft" divide to emphasise how arbitrary such
categories actually are:
Hard |
Soft |
Real |
Illusionary |
Historical |
Mythical |
True |
False |
Public |
Private |
Inside |
Outside |
Western |
Eastern |
Scientific |
Religious |
Awake |
Asleep |
Present |
Past/Future (Memory/Prediction) |
Permanent |
Transient |
Sane |
Insane |
Male |
Female |
She suggests that "hard" thinkers believe that one should
always define what one thinks and that one should always continue to think it;
“soft” thinkers believe that one can play it by ear and shift one's
definitions as one's understanding grows.
Further, "hard" thinkers believe that one cannot entertain two
contradictory ideas at once; "soft" thinkers believe that one can.
As she points out, however, "hard" and “soft” are ridiculously
crude terms for dealing with the complexities of ontology. More importantly,
perhaps, the assumption implicit in the hard view,
that reality can be pinned down, is seriously questionable (1984: 9-10).
Decades ago, the livery hard" discipline of quantum physics pointed
to the fact that not even matter -at least at the quantum level- can be pinned
down. The following characteristics of
dreams enumerated by. Bulkeley (1996: 237-8) suggests that the
"softer" approach facilitates the development of a better honed
theoretical instrument:
- Dreaming exposes both the finitude and infinitude of human existence;
it reveals our embeddedness in the trivial, essential details of our daily
lives and it uncovers our freedom to imagine,
to create, to transcend ourselves and our waking world.
- Dreaming, in a ruthlessly accurate way, points back to the past and
forward to the future; dreaming dislodges memories of long-forgotten childhood
experiences and offers visions of new
possibilities lying ahead of us.
- Dreaming is both rational and irrational; dreams portray perfectly
reasonable, "lifelike” situations and utterly illogical, bizarre,
otherworldly happenings.
- Dreaming refers to both individual experience and to social reality;
it draws upon the personal life concerns of the dreamer and upon the customs,
common beliefs and language that
characterise the social world in which the dreamer lives.
- Dreaming shows both the evil and good within us; in dreams we find our
most violent, destructive urges and our most noble ideals.
- Dreaming concerns both mind and body; it is rooted in physiological
and psychological processes in the mental world of thoughts and beliefs and in
the physical world of urges, instincts
and bodily processes.
Nature within nature without
In a film made in the Umfolozi Game Reserve entitled Hlonipa - Journey
into the Wilderness, Jungian analyst Margaret Johnson comments:
But to experience what goes on inside oneself is not something that is
valued greatly in our society; to sit quietly and to experience yourself in
your inner musing.
People turn on the television set. That seems to me ... a way of
destroying your own inner wildness and natural resources.
Or to rush off to a movie, or, getting to rush hour traffic, turn on the
radio. Anything to shut out the inner wilderness. So we are doing it constantly
to· our inner selves ..
And it seems to me that's where the sense of sacred is really needed.
Similarly, Peter Ammann (1995: 1-2), in a lecture entitled "Nature Within
- Nature Without: A Jungian
Perspective of Nature", notes that human beings began about 2 500
years ago to establish star maps, to help navigate the oceans.
Birds, who for millennia have flown in a seasonal rhythm across
continents, already had this knowledge. Scientific research reveals that during
these long journeys, birds orientate
themselves largely according to the stellar constellations.
It seems that they somehow carry the star map inside themselves and,
therefore, by relating the outer stars to the inner stars, have instinctively
been able to find their way during their
remarkable migrations. In a sense this thesis explores the star maps of
our inner psychic territory, in the hope of illuminating route~ through some of
the dark and difficult areas.
The addictive modern West Western culture is a highly addictive one. The
nature of addiction is multi-faceted, including food, sex, romance, shopping,
power, control, television,
substances, sleep, gambling, destructive relationships, negative
thinking. From a Jungian perspective, the drive to addictive escapes arises
from the terror that we are unlovable,
which produces self-destructive behaviour and, at a macro level, global
self-destruction.
In The Fisher King and the Handless Maiden (1993), Johnson identifies
the problem as a wounding of our ability to "feel”, to express our
feelings or to give value to our experience
of life. He observes that it is extremely dangerous when a wound is so
common in a culture that scarcely anyone knows that there is a problem.
Although many feel a general
dissatisfaction with our way of life, few know where to look for its
origins.
We will see how the language of the body and the symbolic language of
dreams can be utilised as a potent diagnostic tool.
The ecofeminist theoretical frame operates from the premise that, like a
hologram in which any single part contains a picture of the whole, the
universe, although manifest in an infinite
number of forms, is nevertheless contained holographically in any particle.
Thus the paralytic denial experienced by the individual addict is also a
microcosm of the denial experienced
by our addictive age.
What is being denied, in the end, is that elusive concept,
"soul". Perhaps the most well-known contemporary advocate of
"soul" is Thomas Moore. In “Care of the Soul” (1992: xiv)
he examines the symptoms of distress which appear with increasing
frequency in modern psychological practice and notes:
All of these symptoms reflect a loss of soul and let us know what the
soul craves.
We yearn for entertainment, power, intimacy, sexual fulfilment and
material things, and we think we can find these things if we discover the right
relationship or job, the right church
or therapy. But without soul whatever we find will be unsatisfying, for
what we truly long for is the soul in each of these areas.
Moore (1992: 204) refers to a client who dreamt that her oesophagus was
made of plastic and wasn’t long enough to reach her stomach. He sees this image
as a perfect description
of one of the main problems of our modern age: our means of connecting
to our inner world do not reach deep enough.
Moore identifies the oesophagus as an excellent image of one of the
soulls chief functions:
to transfer material from the outer world into the interior.
For the dreamer, however, not only is the oesophagus too short but it is
also made of an unnatural substance - plastic, one that may be read as
representing the artificiality of our age.
It is in this context that writers such as King (1996: 227) note that
attention to the psyche is a growth industry in U.S. today.
In addition, numerous iridologists, numerologists, massage therapists,
aura readers, rebirthing experts and so on have swollen the ranks of those
offering care to the growing numbers
of unhappy Americans.
There is ample evidence that this trend has proliferated throughout the
First World War. For, as Norman Brown (1994) puts it in “Life Against Death”:
'the aim of psychoanalysis
-still unfulfilled and still only half-conscious- is _to return our
souls to our bodies, to return ourselves to ourselves, and thus to have
overcome the human state of self-alienation"
(cited in Matthews 1997: 11 ).
Balance according to the Chinese tradition of the Tao, maintaining
balance in the outer world requires that there also be balance within the human
psyche.
Vice-President of U.S. AI Gore (1992: 12) presents essentially the same
view in Earth in the Balance, portraying the global environmental crisis as
"an outer manifestation of an inner
crisis that is, for lack of a better word, spiritual".
He sees the human psyche as consisting of two impulses: one that tries
to conserve and protect the world, and another that seeks to manipulate and
physically transform it.
He argues that the manipulative impulse is dominant in Western culture,
an imbalance responsible for creating increasing ecological mayhem.
Ecofeminist thought extends this exploration of imbalance to include the
global devaluation of women as a mirror or analogy of the heartless Western
manipulation of Mother Earth.
An aspect of the patriarchal imbalance in relation to men and women -and
one of critical importance to both loss of soul and the related disconnection
of soul and body- is the
equation of male with culture and the mind, and female with nature and
the flesh.
Simone de Beauvoir (1952: 239) was an early explorer of the absurdity
and danger of this notion: But to say that Woman is Flesh, to say that Flesh is
Night and Death, or that
it is the splendour of the Cosmos, is to abandon terrestrial truth and
soar into an empty sky. For man also is flesh for woman; and woman is not
merely a carnal object; and the
flesh is clothed in special significance for each person and in each experience.
And likewise it is quite true that woman -like man- is a being rooted in
nature; her animality
is more manifest; but in her as in him the given traits are taken on
through the fact of existence, she belongs also to the human realm. To assimilate
her to Nature is simply to act
from prejudice.
An important figure among the many feminist scholars who have
subsequently developed this line of thought is Dorothy Dinnerstein, author of
“The Mermaid and the Minotaur”:
Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise (1976).
She argues that:
The relation between our sexual arrangements and our unresolved carnal
ambivalence begins with this fact:
when the child first discovers the mystical joys and the humiliating
constraints of carnality, it makes this discovery in contact with a woman.
The mix of feelings toward the body that forms at this early stage,
under female auspices, merges with our later acquired knowledge of the body's
transience (1976: 130).
In other words, it is because women “mother” that they have come to be
equated with the body and mortality. The patriarchal hatred of the body thus
becomes hatred of women
and 'one of the results is lithe self-contemptuous human impulse toward
worship of dead automatic things and disrespect for what lives" (Dinnerstein
1976: 218).
Clearly, balance is a metaphor that is meaningful in many areas of our
public and personal lives, pertaining to a complex range of practical, social,
emotional, ethical and spiritual
issues.
It is at the heart of the yin/yang coniunctio and, indeed, the key to
the spiritual disciplines of both East and West.
The Buddhist notion of “the Middle Way" and Christian counsel
against excess point equally to the central importance of balance.
The imbalances perpetuated by patriarchal thinking within social, and
consequently psychological, structures are therefore an important focus of this
thesis. Why dream analysis?
Jungian psychologists see dreams as performing a compensatory or
balancing role in the psyche.
That is, dreams help restore and maintain psychological balance by
complementing and compensating for distortions in the ego's waking view of
reality.
They offer "a counterpoint (often a more inclusive viewpoint) to
the attitude of the dominant ego-identity" (Hall 1983: 37).
This compensatory role of dreams is usually considered within the
framework of the psychological development of the individual. Equally
important, however, is the role dreams
may play in compensating for distortions and imbalances in our
collective, cultural views of the world.
Bulkeley (1991a, 1991b) points out that Western culture is unique in
restricting dreams to a strictly personal context and that indigenous cultures
almost universally look to dreams
for guidance in the affairs of the larger community.
Dreams point beyond the "dualistic categories and structures of our
daily lives to show us that we are all members of a web of being that extends
to the whole of the Cosmos"
(Bulkeley 1991b: 161).
Dream studies should therefore be included as one component of
environmental education programmes, since they could help to bring about the
transformation of consciousness
which many believe is necessary if the human species is to survive the
current escalating environmental crisis. Conversely, Schroeder (1996) suggests
that work with dreams in
therapy and other "personal growth" contexts could benefit by
drawing upon the scientific study of nature for amplifications of dream images
and the connection of individual
dreams with the larger world of nature and society.
Addictions as an aspect of imbalance
Marion Woodman suggests (1985: 99) that we are self-destructing
personally and globally because we have not engaged constructively with the
feminine aspect of the Divine.
Addicts manifest an extreme form of this self-destructiveness but, as we
shall see, they/we are also potential catalysts for the rebirth of the feminine
(Woodman 1985: 138).
Indeed, there are many signs that the repression of the feminine
principle, and the concomitant contempt for nature and the physical body which
has characterised patriarchal
systems world-wide and over millennia, is finally yielding to feminist
insight and discourse.
Particularly in the First World, the rhetoric of exploitation is giving
way to such concepts as the strategic handling of non-renewable resources and
sustainable economy, and in
many countries there is evidence of raised ecological consciousness, at
least in regard to the world around us. But there is also nature within, the
realm of the soul, and this inner
wilderness is also threatened by an attitude which tends to exploit, to
colonise and ultimately to destroy (Ammann 1995).
In a sense, this thesis is a quest for the soul, an attempt to chart the
inner wilderness.
A Jungian and ecofeminist framework provides the basis for the
exploration which moves on to utilise multi-disciplinary perspectives.
In Chapter 2, Eastern, Classical and Tibetan Buddhist systems are
contrasted with Jungian understandings of dreams. Embodiment and the feminist
Eros in her presidential address
to the American Academy of Religion's annual meeting in 1985, Wendy
Doniger O’fO’flaherty noted that the concurrent use of the head and heart
seemed to violate many of the
unspoken canons of scholarship, "particularly the rather nervous
scholarship of those of us who study religion" (1986: 232). Her view is
that the head and the heart can and should
nourish rather than sabotage each other.
The need, as Rita Nakashima Brock (1988: xv) puts it, is to "turn
patriarchy inside out, to reveal its ravaged, faint, fearful, broken heart, and
to illuminate the power that heals heart.
It is a power that allows the touching of heart to heart, a healing and
touching that guide us toward a greater experience of the sacred in life".
As a metaphor for the human Self and our capacity for intimacy,
"heart" involves the union of body, spirit, reason and passion
through heart knowledge, the deepest and fullest knowing
(Brock 1988: xiv).
On the mental and emotional levels, the realm of heart teaches us the
importance of forgiveness, self-acceptance and a non-judgmental attitude
towards ourselves and others. On the spiritual
level, the heart chakra is associated with the understanding that we are
all one (Pawlik & Chase 1988: 66-7).
Part of the challenge of being conscious in the modern world is
understanding that profound recognition of our primal interrelatedness is the
key to finding grace and to healing the wounds
to our deepest selves and our society (Brock 1988: 8).
These concepts are explored more deeply in Chapter 4, which includes an
examination of the themes of embodiment and the feminist Eros.
According to Trask (1986: 92-3), the feminist Eros integrates logos and
Eros and "encompasses the life force”, the unique human energy that
springs from the desire for existence with the
meaning, for a consciousness informed by feeling, for experience that
integrates the sensual and the rational, the spiritual and the political".
The affirmation of body, mind and spirit as integral to human well-being
has become common-sense in most cultures of alternative healing and other
"New Age" discourses. It is not insignificant
that the "New Age" followed the resurgence of feminist
consciousness in the 1960s, and Brock (1988: 22) is among those who argue that
the feminist emphasis on connectedness, wholeness
and affirmation of female bodies and life cycle was an essential
precursor to the broader quest for spiritual depth, relationship and power.
Ecofeminism
The primary aim of ecofeminism is non-violent, radical change both
within ourselves and in the world around us, through the transformation of
power. The ecofeminist notion of transformed
power refers not only to power as the discovery of our own innate strength,
but also to the paradoxical relational base of personal power. As Rita
Nakashima Brock (1988: 34) puts it, the route
to self-acceptance and self-awareness is via sustaining, nurturing
relationships that co-create us.
Thus, ecofeminists aim to move from the collective vision of power as a
commodity owned by individuals towards an understanding of it as the bonds
which create and nourish, and are
recreated and nourished by, our relational selves. Starhawk (1989: 174)
argues that while ecofeminism is a movement with an implicit and sometimes
explicit spiritual base, the term "spiritual"
can be misleading because the earth-based, body-embracing spirituality
of ecofeminism (Ecofeminists agree that the domination of women and the
domination of nature are fundamentally
connected and that environmental efforts are therefore integral with
work to overcome the oppression of women. Ecofeminists do not seek equality
with men as such, but aim for a liberation
of women as women. Central is recognition of the value of the activities
traditionally associated with women; childbirth, nurturing and the whole
domestic arena. Some feminists have criticized ecofeminism for reinforcing
oppressive stereotypes and for its tendency toward essentialism) is radically
unlike the patriarchal frameworks that divide spirit from, and exalt it above,
"matter".
Spretnak: points out that the Greek concept of pneuma referred to both
breath and spirit or soul, while the English "spirit" derives from
the Latin word lito breathe (1989: 127).
Susan Griffin makes the same point in a more lyrical vein: “know I am
made from this earth, as my mother's hands were made from this earth ... this
paper, these hands, this tongue speaking,
all that I know speaks to me through this earth and I long to tell you,
you who are earth too, and listen as we speak to each other of what we know;
the light is in us (1978: 226-7).
This wholistic quality of the ecofeminist vision of the sacred has
proved dramatically empowering for many women previously left unfulfilled +/o.
alienated by patriarchal approaches.
The integration of theory and action in reciprocal relation as a primary
motif in the feminist movement restores for many a profound sense of personal
integrity.
The simultaneous paradigm shift in the imaging of the sacred has proved
revolutionary.
Subservient, self-punitive approaches to the Divine are replaced by
authentic celebration of both the life process and the challenges posed by
one's part in it.
Common to Jungians, New Agers and ecofeminists, if in varying degree, is
the understanding that all life forms are part of one another and of our
universal environment. One of the necessary
implications of this concept is that healing one's personal
consciousness is a contribution to the healing of the planet as a whole.
Ecofeminist analysis goes further in offering a comprehensive analysis
of oppression, confirming the critical relation between individual and context,
and drawing on interdisciplinary studies
to demonstrate this.
In this regard it is noteworthy that ecofeminism sees racism as an
aspect of the exploitative way of being in the world which characterises
patriarchy.
If the subjugation of woman was the original sin of a system driven by
lust for "power over", then colonisation and the oppression of lithe
other were the inevitable sequels. Ecofeminist analysis
therefore offers a useful lens for viewing the lack of racial diversity'
in the dream professions and at dreamwork venues exposed by Shafton (1996: 74).
Ironically, Shafton has found that blacks tend to pay more attention to
their dreams than whites do in U.S. Moreover, blacks tend to interpret dreams
in terms of social milieu and spiritual
reality or "field", while whites incline to an intrapsychic
reading.
However, many professionals emphasise that blacks, pressed by
"reality" concerns, consider dreamwork within the contemporary dream
movement a luxury they can't afford, if they are even
aware of it.
Dream groups, together with other growth modalities, are viewed as (and distanced
as) white, middle-class pursuits (1996: 75).
"White" psychology has been justly criticised for its
"colour-blindness". Shafton (1996: 76) discusses the existence of
currents of social activism in Euro-American dream psychology,
notably in the tradition of "culturalism". Alfred Adler
(1958), one of the original "big three" of depth psychology, urged us
to reject many of the values of Western culture.
Erich Fromm (1955: 11) initiated a "critical evaluation of the
effects of Western culture [011] mental health and sanity".
Montague Ullman (1973, 1988) as "neoculturalist" drew on
Fromm's social ideas and Adler's advocacy of community outreach for his
analysis of "social myths".
A leading advocate of dream groups, Ullman points to the "emotional
fall-out from the social arrangements and institutions around US" (1988),
to "embedded kinds of ignorance"
and “power deprivation” (Ullmann & Zimmerman 1979: 184).
These all involve "social myths” embedded in the "social
unconscious" and appearing "inevitably" in dreams, where they
are accessible to dreamwork (Ullman 1973).
“To the extent that those involved in dreamwork remain impervious to the
deceptions and imperfections of the social order, the work itself will collude
with the dreamer's waking collusion
with that order" (Ullman 1992).
Shafton (1996: 77) concludes, however, that activism is not a concern of
contemporary white dream culture and that even exceptions like Ullman analysed
most dreams not for social
(much less racial) but for personal psychological content. Complicating
this contextual insensibility is what Shafton (1996: 79) reports to be a
prevailing view in black families themselves,
holding blacks to be inferior, if not from genetic, then from societal
causes (Banks 1980; Thomas & Sillen 1991).
True, black families have "real and definite problems associated
with racism and oppression” (Nobles 1978).
But often supposed "deficits" may actually refer to features
of the African family, adapted to an alien setting (Jackson 1980).
Features reported from both Africa and North America include: horizontal
kinship ties (partly replacing the nuclear family); "kin-like"
relations (informal adoption, care for the unrelated elderly);
"interchangeable" roles (children taking adult responsibilities,
genders exchanging earning and nurturing); and the prominence of the
mother-child bond (Nobles 1974).
In this regard it is noteworthy that, while the white single-parent home
has been legitimised, the black parallel is held to be pathological (White 1984).
Shafton (1996: 80) clarifies that such issues elucidate the reluctance
of blacks to bring their most intimate concerns into white settings where most
dreamwork is done. Although the average
African-American may not be aware of these anthropological perspectives,
they are sensitive to the disharmony between prevailing attitudes to black life
and their own, and are alienated from
white approaches to mental health by a "history of misdiagnoses and
stereotypes” (White 1984; see also Gross et al. 1969).
These are among the reasons why Bulkeley (1996: 238) argues that it is
vital to appreciate the historical and social context in which the field of
dream studies has emerged.
A salient feature of modern Western society he highlights is Descartes'
philosophical split between the rational individual and the rest of existence.
Indeed, many other fundamental conceptual
divisions have become defining features of modern Western society.
One of the most important of these splits was the division of humans
from nature, from the natural environment.
Descartes' philosophy helped to destroy the traditional knowledge that
humans are integrally connected to nature, that we participate in nature, that
nature is itself a subject. The philosophical
freedom that Descartes offered was, with regard to nature, taken as the
freedom to manipulate, exploit and plunder.
Nature was increasingly seen as nothing more than inert matter, a source
of raw material to serve human purposes and satisfy human desires (Bulkeley
1996: 240).
So what is the “New Age"?
The New Age is a term employed to describe a growing sense of unity of
purpose between many different groups and individuals around the planet. There
is no formal creed or structure,
since the New Age encompasses multiple life-styles and disciplines, but
there are common links to four primary themes. The 'first common theme is the
premise that each individual is
profoundly and personally responsible for her/his own circumstances, and
therefore aspects of life such as accidents and victimhood are seen to be
misnamed and misunderstood.
The latter point finds its echo in Jung's theory of synchronicity, while
the former has direct links with the ecofeminist call for action.
Wholism is another key New Age theme which interfaces with Jung's theory
of synchronicity. It refers to the concept that everything is interwoven, there
are no coincidences, and therefore,
by working with an awareness of this connectedness, we enhance the
healing or growth that is in process.
As will be seen, this is a crucial component of the ecofeminist
theoretical framework too.
3rd life is perceived to be a growth process, constantly
urging us towards greater aliveness. New Age healers argue that most people
misread the signals and struggle in the opposite direction,
but if they develop the inner sensitivity and courage to understand and
flow with the current of life, then they will manifest a reality that is more
coherent with their soul purpose.
4th the New Age is characterised by an emphasis on the power
of love - not the possessive neediness of soaps and songs but the unconditional
gift which empowers giver and receiver
alike.
These themes contain sub-themes common to much New Age thinking.
1st attempts are made to replace hierarchical authority
structures with communication systems that empower individuals and groups to
access their own authority while developing
awareness of the whole picture.
2nd it is argued that we cannot claim the power of personal responsibility
while blaming anyone else, past or present, for what has happened to us.
Therefore forgiveness is seen to be an essential healing dynamic for any
disease.
There is also an imperative towards accepting all people, paths and
circumstances in life, since an attitude of openness and gratitude is seen as
enabling identification of the healing message,
rather than one of judgement or resistance of the messenger.
Meditation is understood to be a crucial discipline, in order to
experience the true healing flow of one's life.
Many forms of meditation are practised, both individually and in groups.
This mirrors the ecofeminist call for relatedness as a forum for healing the
ills of our time.
Another point of convergence between New Agers and ecofeminists is broad
support for the Gaia hypothesis (Lovelock 1979), namely that the planet is
alive and that just as humans are on
a healing journey, so too is the planet.
It is crucial therefore to discern and work with planetary processes
rather than desperately trying to apply technological fixes.
In a study entitled “Worldviews in Transition”: An Investigation into
the New Age Movement in South Africa, Steyn (1994: 186) points out that
although some participants understood God
to be an androgynous being, "an energy which combines both male and
female in itself", all participants used exclusively male-oriented
language when referring to God.
She notes that despite the New Age of the West.
A teacher of Celtic Shamanism throughout Europe and the U.S., Matthews
notes that in recent times shamanism has become almost as widespread a practice
as it was long ago; teachers and practitioners have emerged throughout the West
and have begun to instruct people in the techniques of the inner journey and
co-operation with the spirits of that realm.
Concurrently, they have begun to re-educate people in the mysteries of
the land, which itself contains potential for healing.
Discussing the healing power of shamanistic techniques, Matthews (1997: 5)
notes the urgent contemporary need for stories that prompt one to question
one's present state of being, to identify
and acknowledge diverse wounds, and to actively seek healing for them
through the image of the story. The language of myth and folk/fairy tale is
arguably the language of the soul, and also
the language of symbol and dream. It is here that Matthews urges us to
look, again and again, for the images and signs of woundedness and for the hope
of a cure. An aspect of woundedness
we all experience derives from our failure to interact with our
environment, our assumption of complete authority over it, and more broadly in
our profound dislocation from the cosmos in which
we live.
Older cultures recognised this to be a primary source of sickness, both
of the soul and the body.
As Matthews (1997: 8) asks, if we become out of phase with the universe
of which we are an integral part, how can we be either whole or healthy?
A “mythic” story from the Sufi tradition elucidates the matter.
Jeremy Taylor (1996: 140-1) points out that although it is seemingly
about a distant, non-technological world of donkeys, camels and rural villages
where everyone knows everyone else, it is
also an ironic and accurate commentary on the contemporary Western
psycho-spiritual dilemma:
It seemed that the incomparable Mullah Nasrudin had lost his precious
gold-ring.
He wandered through the streets of his village staring at the ground,
searching for his lost treasure.
His friends and neighbours noticed his concentrated efforts, and soon
they all became involved in the search.
Finally one of them thought to ask Nasrudin, “Where do you last recall
having seen the ring on your finger?” Nasrudin casually responded that the last
time he could remember actually having
the ring on his finger was a while ago, when he was shovelling dung in
the course of cleaning the stable behind his house. “Oh” he said his friend,
“then we should concentrate our search there,
don’t you think?” “Oh, no” says Nasrudin, lithe light's much better for
looking out here” Taylor (1996: 141-2) observes that, read symbolically, the
Mullah Nasrudin is an archetypal trickster/fool,
representing human consciousness itself, who chooses to search for the
archetypal "lost treasure'" the "gold ring" which symbolises
depth, of commitment to and relationship with something
larger than oneself, in the comparatively clean and well-lit public
street, rather than in the odorous darkness of his own stable.
A vital symbolic theme of this story is that we humans are predisposed
to shy away from the work of looking at the dark, nasty (emotional/unconscious)
aspects of our individual and collective
problems, preferring to engage in repetitive intellectual examinations
of the external technical detail "where the light is better" - where
consciousness has less difficulty "seeing", but where the
lost treasure will not be found.
Indeed, the lost treasure of the soul can be found only by entering the
"unfamiliar land" within, as Woolger (1983: 108) puts it in lithe
Holy Grail: “Healing the Sexual Wound in the Western
Psyche": ... we must first go within, into that unfamiliar land
that we can reach in fantasy, dream, and meditation. And our first awareness
will be of dead areas and of the ailing, suffering
Grail Hero within. Of head and heart out of harmony with each other ...
a sense of sorrow, of loss, of guilt, of need for penitence.
Only if we can go beyond fear and strife ... within, and are ready to
redeem all the lost gentleness and kindness that are the distressed damsels and
loathly brides to be married in us all, only
then can we 'find the Grail.
Jungian theory
Always a controversial figure, Carl Jung has been appreciated by many as
one of the greatest explorers of the human psyche. He was the first to establish
the existence of the most meaningful
of all paradoxes, namely, that conscious and unconscious exist in a
profound state of interdependence with each other, the health of one being
impossible without the health of the other.
But the consciousness to which Jung referred was not the merely
intellectual and rational style of mind exalted by the logical positivists of
our day; rather it was the abiding and deepest
dream of the unconscious.
In his introduction to Jung and Tarot: “An Archetypal journey”, Van der
Post (Nichols 1984: xiv) discusses how as far back as we can trace the history
of the human spirit in myth and legend,
it incessantly strives to achieve greater awareness, including all sorts
of non-rational forms of perception and knowing.
In the Jungian view, the unconscious produces symbols as a tree produces
fruit; if a person has the sense to pick and eat this "fruit", s/he
can be nourished.
If s/he fails to recognise their meaning, however, the fruit will fall
and rot and s/he will starve.
In other words, the transforming symbol must be consciously recognised
if it is to be effective.
Only then can the combined energy of consciousness and unconsciousness
be activated, making possible a fundamental change of attitude.
If these transforming symbols arising from the depths of the psyche can
be discovered and realised, the individual is able to find a creative middle
way between the opposites.
Jung identified this lived integration of consciousness and
unconsciousness as the process of individuation. Individuation requires a
receptivity to the archetypal, for this is
what suffices life with meaning.
To put it differently, individuation requires a willingness on the part
of the ego or consciousness to encounter and seek to establish a relationship
with the shadow and other archetypes.
Jung believed that ultimate and universal spiritual realities stand
behind the symbols and images of myths and dreams, although he confined himself
in his work to what he described
as "the objective psyche".
His genius is perhaps most evident in his theoretical formulation of
such concepts as the collective versus the personal unconscious, the archetypes
and the individuation process.
However, Jung came under fire from the "hard" thinkers of the
scientific world for incorporating metaphysical concepts such as synchronicity,
the collective unconscious and archetypes
into his theory.
He was equally criticised by the religious establishment, which regarded
his far-ranging, comparative and syncretic explorations of the spiritual as
subversive.
Jung himself was of the view that the problem of each one of his
patients finally boiled down to a loss of religious meaning or soul, and he
insisted that the crucial feature of any
religion is its mythology, the provision of myths to live by, the
provision of a medium with which to make meaning of life.
Dreaming within a socia-political paradigm
The political is another level at which sensitivity to mythic themes in
everyday reality is valuable. A convincing argument is offered by Johanna King
(1996: 229) in her discussion
of Charlotte Beradt's “The Third Reich of Dreams”, which contains dozens
of dreams of people living in Germany between 1933 and 1939 - dreams that
directly addressed the rising
political power of Nazism.
Beradt (1968: 7) identifies these dream accounts as "parable[s] par
excellence on how submissive subjects of
totalitarian rule were produced" in Germany.
The dreams lucidly and dramatically record the dreamers psychological and
physical relationships to the rapidly changing socio-political milieu, and
expose an astute awareness
apparently absent from waking life.
The following is an example (Beradt 1968: 229):
I was sitting in a box at the opera, dressed in a new gown, and with my
hair beautifully done. It was a huge opera house with many, many tiers, and I
was enjoying considerable
attention. They were presenting my favourite opera, “The Magic Flute”.
When it came to the line, "that is the devil certainly", a squad of
policemen came stomping in and marched directly
up to me. A machine had registered the fact that I had thought of Hitler
on hearing the word "devil". I imploringly searched the festive crowd
for some sign of help, but they all just
sat there staring straight ahead, silent and expressionless, not one
showing even pity.
The old gentleman in an adjoining box looked kind and distinguished but
I, when I tried to catch his eye he spat at me. - - - - - -
This dream occurred in 1933, early in the Hitler era, and affords an
unnerving glimpse of life ahead (King 1996: 229-30).
The dream ego is already aware that beauty and wealth will not protect
her 'from the tyranny of fascism, and of the extreme cost of drawing attention
to herself and any personal resistance.
She envisions a spectrum of positions that members of the society, and
perhaps she herself, might take in an attempt to cope:
the expressionless passivity of the crowd; the hostile rejecting stance
of the old gentleman; the active identification of the policemen with the
military-political machine.
She does not explore in the dream the possibilities for active
resistance, as do some of Beradt's other dreamers.
King argues that the feelings and options for action (and failure to
act) so coherently reviewed in the dream make sense in relation to the
dreamer's psychological and physical embeddedness
in the socio-political context of her time, rather than as intrapsychic
elements to be "worked on". She maintains that to focus in an
unbalanced way on the intrapsychic would produce a sense
of paralysis and capitulation on the part of the dreamer, which would
leave little scope for the social action so desperately needed then and there.
In the face of this kind of evidence, Calvin Hall (1966) is somewhat
sweeping in asserting that:
"Dreams contain few ideas of a political or economic nature. They
have little or nothing to say about current events in the world of affairs ...
".
The stance adopted in this thesis is Bulkeley's (1996), namely, that at
particular times dreams do relate, clearly and directly, to the political
affairs of the community. Indeed, Bulkeley (1996: 189)
warns that regarding dreams as purely related to the personal life
concerns of the dreamer, and dismissively interpreting away political images in
dreams as nothing more than "symbols" of those
personal concerns, may be exacerbating the artificial and dangerous
separation of public from private life in First World society. The need, then,
is to "Iook to our dreams with an eye for
their political relevance (in addition to their psychological relevance)
in order to develop a better understanding of the intimate relationship between
the personal and the political realms
of our lives" (Bulkeley 1996: 190).
Taylor (1996: 140) is another powerful advocate of the potential of myth
and dream to address the psycho-spiritual imbalances of our age. He argues that
the stunning short-term econornic
and political success of our narrowly focused, conscious, abstract,
linear, time-limited, technological thinking has caused a secondary effect of
distracting us from our deeper, so-called
irrational, unconscious, psycho-spiritual experience.
In conquering the material world, we become alienated from two of the
oldest, most important and reliable sources of balance, sanity, and evolving
self-awareness - myth and dream.
He emphasises that "myth" is simply a name for somebody else’s
religion:
Dream and myth always address the deeper realities of our lives below
the surface of appearance.
Appearances can be measured; it is the immeasurability of the patterns
of meaning that lie beyond appearances, beyond the ability to be objective and
stand separate and quantify,
that has Whitmont and Perera (1989: 68) comment:
Often, the major content of the dream drama may include images posed as
protagonist and antagonist - juxtapositions of alternative tendencies,
emotions, styles, motives, and perspectives.
These portray oppositional factors within the dreamer's psychology that
need to be seen, consciously related to and, perhaps, brought into balance.
Such polarisations are often the basic
determinants of the dream meaning.
They may appear as separate from the dream-ego, or the dream-ego may
identify with one side and need to become conscious of the other. Or the
oppositions may be posited as problems to be
met appropriately. This may be by combat, yielding, befriending,
avoiding, etc., whatever the overall dream story implies for the purpose of
establishing or ending a relationship between the
dream-ego and those factors or figures. Jung concurred with Freud's view
that dreams often give expression to the unconscious contents that are causal
factors in neurosis, by giving an accurate
picture of the subjective state which the conscious mind denies or
recognises only grudgingly.
Jung regarded dreams as valuable diagnostic and prognostic tools. The
causalistic (Freudian) approach asks the question "Why?" and
concentrates entirely upon seeking reasons which are to be
dredged up from the past (eg. traumatic 'childhood events). This may
take several years and, during this time, issues of immediate importance in the
current daily life of the analysand tend to
recede into the background. Jung asks, "What for?“ thus
highlighting the compensatory and purposive function of dreams.
Compensation
Movement toward greater unification and wholeness, which seems to be the
intent of dreams, is part of the individuation process. Hall (1977: 125)
emphasises that this is quite different from
the regressive pull backward to the sense of unity of consciousness
which exists prior to the development of the ego.
Rather, the movement toward wholeness (always a direction, never an
achieved goal) is one in which conflicting forces are increasingly tolerated as
an essential part of the struggle towards
greater consciousness.
Compensation naturally aims at establishing psychological balance and
appears as a self-regulatory function of the psyche (CW 8:288-9).
According to Hall (1977: 125), this self-regulation does not imply
teleology (CW 7: 294), but it does emphasise that a point of view of finality
may be valid.
It is important to note that Jung rejected both an absolute belief in
causality and an absolute belief in teleology.
While Freud emphasised only the causal viewpoint, Jung attempted to
comprehend the ends, aims and purposes of the dream.
Thus, from Jung's perspective, we see the unconscious as a creative
force that can offer solutions to problems. Moreover, the unconscious contains
a moral component and can take account
of moral conflict, whereas for Freud the unconscious is amoral and
consists primarily of sexual wishes.
Jung borrowed the term “enantiodromia” from the philosophy of Heraclitus
and used it to designate the tendency of any extreme position to turn into its
opposite, exposing the concealed link
between a pair of opposites.
Enantiodromia is visible in the compensatory nature of dreams.
If the conscious position is excessively distorted in one direction, the
unconscious may express in dreams an equally exaggerated but opposite tendency.
A good clinical example of this is provided by Hall's (1977: 186-7)
discussion of dreams in depression. It is well-established that depression
interferes with sleep because of the accompanying
insomnia and early awakening.
Although awake more often during the night, depressed patients appear to
have a normal ratio between dream time and the amount of time spent in sleep
(Murray 1965).
Hartmann (1973) suggested that depression is characterised by a need for
more dream time.
An increase in dreaming has been reported to coincide with clinical
improvement in depression (Saer et a/1967). Saer and associates (1967) also
found that depressed patients had few dreams
relating to loss of self-esteem, and many had pleasant dreams in
contrast to their waking experiences of depression.
Amplification in the Jungian method of dream analysis, the amplification
of dream images is similar to free association but, as noted earlier, Jung
preferred to conceptualise the process as
circumambulation of the image.
He believed that the images themselves hold a great richness of meaning,
carrying critical messages from another world - both our own personal inner
world, or the personal unconscious, the
collective unconscious, and the universal realm of symbols and myths
that we share from the cultural heritage of humankind.
Since dreams come from the unconscious, they share the symbolic language
of myth, art, folklore and religious ritual, arising out of the imagination
which speaks to us across cultures and time.
Consequently, a form of amplification important to dream analysis is
finding the universal mythic themes that parallel the images found in dreams.
Consideration of dreams as a series is another source of amplification.
Jung understood that like nature, our psyche is a continuum. This perception he
relates to the importance of analysing
a dream series as opposed to isolated dreams, since one has more
evidence to recognise the important content and basic themes.
Jung compared this serial approach to the process employed by
philologists in interpreting unknown languages, since they also seek parallels,
for instance, parallel text passages, parallel
applications.
Similarly, different dreams offer brief glimpses or exposures of the
contents of the unconscious and it is necessary to read these film sequences
together in order to achieve an idea of the
whole dramatic statement.
Unlike Freud, Jung did not see dream symbolism (manifest content) as a
distorted disguise for the latent content (wish).
Jung maintained that the dream content says exactly what the unconscious
means about a situation. Therefore Jung saw his method of dream interpretation
as a strictly empirical one, which
starts with the dream data and does not impose an a priori
interpretation derived from a preconceived and dogmatic theory about the nature
of dreams.
However, Jung's claim to strict empiricism has been challenged on other
grounds.
Contemporary theorists have criticised the Jungian approach not for any
preconceptions about the nature of dreams, as in the case of Freud, but rather
for its blindness to critical issues surfaced
in the discourses of feminism, political activism, postmodernism and
cultural studies.
Bulkeley (1996) is among those who have critiqued what they see as an
overemphasis on the intra-personal. In "Political Dreaming: Dreams of the
1992 Presidential Election", Bulkeley (1996)
concludes that while the dreams he gathered definitely related to the
dreamers' personal lives and their inner worlds, they just as certainly related
to the dreamers' political lives and to the outer
world. ... dreams are not simply using political images to 'symbolise'
personal meanings.
A Freudian interpreter might argue that a 'manifest' dream about Bill
Clinton is only masking a 'latent' content having to do with the dreamer's
relationship with his or her father.
Similarly, a Jungian interpreter might claim that a nightmare of Ross Perot
is only symbolically expressing the dreamer's unconscious fears of the 'Ross
Perot-like' parts of him or herself.
I am emphatically opposed to such reductionistic, one-dimensional
views." (1996: 188)
Equally importantly, feminist scholars in particular have pointed to the
danger of, reliance on both material and processes in which patriarchal
prejudices and deformities are embedded.
Signell (1991: 15) notes for example, that much of the mythology and
folklore to which one might turn for amplification of dream imagery, reflects
the psychology and politics of the
dominant patriarchal ideology.
Rupprecht (19~6: 123) warns of the patriarchal power relations embedded
in the practice of, psychotherapy itself: , The very systems of psychiatry and
psychology, which almost alone among
professions throughout this century in the U.S. have made dreams a
central feature of their theory and practice, also took control of the meaning
of dreaming.
Power-brokering within these systems which offered dream interpretation
and application made them very specialised and expensive.
Rupprecht (1996: 123) argues as pertinently that the process of
determining dream meaning is infested with gender, race, class and cultural
biases, thus serving as an instrument of social control.
She claims that the restricted interpretive paradigms which have gained
professional sanction function as traps for the imagination, enforcing dominant
attitudes and behaviours, many of which
are products of the patriarchal order.
Dream content dealing with issues such as sexual orientation, which can
be threatening to the social values or self-perceptions of the dreamer or from
a feminist perspective, the most blatant flaw
in Jung's conceptual system is his unconscious androcentrism, which
necessarily skews the model for women.
An appropriate and necessary feminist response to this bias is the
application of a hermeneutic of suspicion. The task is to analyse the influence
of the patriarchal context and its inherent misogyny
on the dialectical relationship between the individual as social
construct and the individual as innate psyche. Among, the more obvious targets
for feminist attack is Jung's view that "Eros",
a quality of relatedness, characterises women's "diffuse"
consciousness, while the capacity for analytical thought, "Logos", is
an inherent characteristic of "focused" male consciousness.
- In men, Eros, the function of relationships, is usually less developed
than Logos.
In women, on the other hand, Eros is an expression of their true nature,
while their Logos is often only a regrettable accident (Jung, CW 9 (2): 29).
Jung's anima-animus model, is never clearly defined and is often used
with differing connotations.
Goldenberg (1976: 446) wryly refers to this as "a slippery quality
common to most Jungian concepts that serves to insulate them from much
questioning".
Critique of Jung's and post-Jungians' blindness to the social origins of
gender differences forms the basis of Demaris Wehr's analysis. She suggests
that an archetypal model of the psyche is
valuable only if accurately contextualised and hence deontologised
(1988: 36).
Wehr (1988: 114) argues that Jung's anima theory intersects with sexism
in its deepest form, exposing men's unconscious desire to escape their own
embodiment and passions (1988: 114).
The patristic teaching of concupiscence as the essence of sin and its
related view of the body as the instrument of sin seems to be deeply rooted
within the deformed sexuality of the patriarchal
mind-set. It is dependent upon, and mutually reinforcing of, the
monotheistic understanding of the Divine as an immaculate external male force.
The importance, both symbolic and material, of our bodies as vehicles
for, and channels of, life's energy has been perverted by this tradition.
A feminist Jungian perspective thus perceives men's fear of embodiment,
dependency, vulnerability and emotionality to have been. projected on to the
feminine and women, thereby damaging
the inner psychic world of both women and men, and simultaneously distorting
reality. As the soul-image of men's imaginations, the anima is often projected
on to women. Wehr (1988: 38)
insists that men must disentangle themselves 'from the anima in order to
relate to real women and to allow real women the space to be themselves.characteristic
of postmodern culture. Waugh
(1992: 342) suggests that the slogan "let us wage war on totality”
may be seen as the postmodern equivalent of the earlier feminist assertion that
lithe personal is political", noting that the
former implies a hostile attitude toward the ideals of collectivism and
community implicit in early feminist discourse. In the “Lenses of Gender”,
Sandra Bem identifies biological essentialism,
gender polarisation and androcentrism as root causes of many contemporary
social conflicts and ills. Bem alludes to but does not develop the theory that
as long as the basis for people's
behaviour is unconscious, they cannot be changed by cognitively steered
social programmes, by campaigns of rational persuasion, or even by legislation
or coercion from schools, social
agencies, churches, and other governing institutions (Rupprecht 1996:
125).
Ultimately gender depolarisation would require even· more than the
social revolution involved in rearranging social institutions and reframing
cultural discourses.
Gender depolarisation would also require a psychological revolution in
our most personal sense of who we are as males and females, a profound
alteration in our feelings about the meaning
of our biological sex and its relation to our psyche and our sexuality
(Bem 1993: 139). While Bem offers no guidance about the psychological
revolution she advocates, Rupprecht (1996: 126)
furnishes evidence that the dream can be a very effective instrument of
revolution. However, she insists on the need to generate a new discourse if we
are to avoid the replication in
dreamwork of all the currently limiting and problematic attitudes and
assumptions of patriarch ally constructed consciousness: To fully valorise
dreaming will force us to venture outside the
usual modalities through which we structure our world: chronological
time, dualism, causality, and linearity. For dreams, though they are certainly
shaped in part by contemporary social
conditions, are not rigidly time or culture-bound; they operate within
different paradigms which require a similarly unshackled discourse which we
have yet to generate. None of our current
terms
–isomorphism/interdependence/symbiosis/complementarity/reciprocity- is close to
depicting the subtle dynamism of the mental-physical, conscious-unconscious,
individual-social continuum.
But there are at least two concepts, rising out of dreamwork, which
begin to translate that complex dynamism into new, more comprehensible forms:
Jung's synchronicity and Mindell's dreambody
(Rupprecht, 1996: 127).
Jung's belief that the feminine as it appeared in works by men was a
replica of the feminine in actual women meant that he never considered the
masculine bias of the mythological and religious
material which he utilised to substantiate his theory of archetypes.
This is perhaps most evident in his conflation of the "anima", the
"contrasexual other" in the male psyche, with lithe feminine
principle", which he used to refer to both an archetype and women's
conscious way of being in the world.
Furthermore, as Wehr (1988: 106) points out, Jung's blindness to the
influence of the patriarchal context on men's anima images and women's sense of
self, seriously diminishes the value of his
analysis. She cites the following passage, which is part of Jung's
description of the anima, to highlight her point: Finally it should be remarked
that emptiness is a great feminine secret.
It is something absolutely alien to man; the chasm, the unplumbed
depths, the Yin. The pitifulness of this vacuous nonentity goes to this heart
(I speak here as a man), and one is tempted to
say that this constitutes the whole mystery of women (CW 9 (1): 98).
As Goldenberg (1979: 59) elucidates, Jung's formulation of the
anima/animus model reinforces stereotyped notions of what masculine and
feminine are by mystifying categories which, to a
considerable extent, are simply sodal constructs.
Polly Young-Eisendrath (1992: 151) defines anima and animus as gendered
complexes of not-I, emotionally charged collections of images, thoughts, habits
and actions of contrasexuality
that define and limit self. Contrasexual complexes are uniquely
meaningful because all known cultures divide people into two genders which are
inscribed differently (regard to status, authority
and power): I would like to restrict the use of anima and animus to a
gendered psychology in which the anima is a product of the imaginal and
relational life of male people, and the animus,
a product of female people.
Without this restriction, I believe we are confronted with a plethora of
definitions that confusedly overlap with other concepts such as soul, spirit,
animation, enthusiasm, transcendence, symbolic
bridging to the unconscious, and many other highly significant
psychological concepts whose meaning may be arbitrarily skewed by association
with them and leads to certain designations within
any discourse. These designations are likely to turn principally on the
significance of gender.
Designating anima as soul, referring to the soul as female, and then
assuming 'that men and women both have anima/soul experiences creates, in my
view, a condition that psychoanalyst Lacan
calls "mystification". Mystification is any effort to deny or
cover over the difficulty of absolute division between the sexes
(young-Eisendrath 1992: 152). Young-Eisendrath (1992: 153) explores
how anima images and symbols for woman which have been generated by men
have become images and symbols used women to represent their own sexuality and
experiences. These images of
negative and positive power often confuse women who may consequently
exclude themselves from both legitimate and other power. Further, women across
the world live in societies that marginalise
them and assume their inferiority. Young-Eisendrath insists that without
a gendered concept of anima, we tend to deny or mystify the power differences
between men and women and to forget the
centrality of "man-made" language in constituting all that
women are supposed to be.
Additionally, a gendered concept of anima problematises male fantasies
and fears of women by reading them as products of a complex psychology, rather
than as facts of biology or child-rearing
practices.
The danger of an attitude that is doctrinaire or unconscious of
assumptions is usefully highlighted by Patricia Berry in "An Approach to
the Dream" (1974: 58-9). She applies a range of interpretive
perspectives employed by various Jungian analysts to the same dream,
showing how individual biases, approaches and assumptions result in different
interpretations.
The dream is as follows:
I was lying on a bed in a room, alone apparently, but with the feeling
of turmoil around me. A middle-aged woman enters and hands me a key. Later a
man enters, helps me out of bed and leads me
upstairs to an unknown room. - - - -
The various interpretations offered are outlined below.
1. Ego-active analyst:
The whole dream is characterised by your ego passivity. You are
reclining, a rather unconscious position, which makes for the feeling of
unconscious turmoil. Without effort of your own, you take
what is handed to you. You are therefore led away by the animus, up into
yet another area of passive fantasy.
2. Animus-development analyst
When you confront your turmoil, it becomes the middle-aged woman, your
fear of growing old and unfruitful. But in that older woman you find the
creative key which then becomes the unknown
animus. Creative work can now take place.
3. Feminine earth-mother analyst
You were lying passive, naturally, in touch with your real feelings
(depressive position).
Now you can receive gifts from the feminine, the positive mother.
Unfortunately, as soon as the animus appears, you lose this connection by
following him up into the intellect.
4. Relationship-feeling analyst:
You're alone in a room, isolated and cut off from your marriage,
relationships, children. You don't express feeling for or make any real contact
with the other figures in the dream. Therefore you
are led into the upper regions with only your animus as companion, alone
and remote, the princess in the tower.
5. Introvert analyst
There you are, at last, alone with yourself, in the vessel. You now
receive inner help. Your inner femininity gives you the key, the key being
seclusion and facing the internal turmoil hitherto denied
by your extroverted defences and acting out. This leads you to the next
step, the animus figure who helps you out of bed and leads you to another
level.
6. Process-oriented analyst:
It is not so much the content of the dream that is important as the way
you have introduced it into our session (that you told it to me in such an
aggressive voice, that you waited until the end of
the hour, that you handed it to me neatly typed and then leaned back
passively waiting for an interpretation).
7. Transference-oriented analyst:
You are in a half-conscious sexual position, in which the turmoil
represents your unrecognised erotic projections. You fantasise various
solutions:
(a) the phallic mother,
or
(b) the man leading you upstairs to an unknown climax.
One of these (depending upon sex) refers to your projection of me as
your saviour.
The exercise dramatically illustrates the meaninglessless of a formulaic
approach to dreamwork and serves to underline the need to. undertake the
process of interpretation with an attitude of self-criticism and due regard for
all the factors outlined in this chapter.
In Chapter 5 I hope to demonstrate that revolutionary potential of
dreamwork lies in a critical alliance between analyst and dreamer, so that the
dreamers history and process contextualise
and amplify the images offered by the dream. The crux of the matter is
whether the dreamer finds the interpretation helpful and illuminating.
The closer the analyst is to understanding the intricacies of the
dreamer's life, the more accurate the insights offered are likely to be.
Parallels between Eastern and Jungian approaches
There are striking parallels between the Jungian system of working with
the psyche and the Tibetan Buddhist tantric method of meditating using
visualisation, mantra and chanting.
Much of the inspiration for this section was provided by a lecture on
"Archetypes and Tantra" given in Cape Town by Rob Nairn in 1994.
Originally a professor of criminology, Nairn underwent
a four-year retreat at the Samye Ling Buddhist Centre in Scotland,
following a protracted period of Jungian analysis.
A key feature of both Jungian and tantric systems is the awareness that
the rational mind is limited to the known, and that it is necessary to explore
energies that are not at the level of conscious
awareness.
Jung's discovery of hidden forces within the psyche which work very
powerfully within the mind but are not under its conscious control parallels
tantric practice. In fact, one might venture to suggest
that towards the end of his life, Jung had reached the point where
tantra begins. As Nairn discussed, Jung himself indicated at that time that his
recent contact with Zen Buddhism was causing
him to radically rework everything he had formulated to date. Although
both are elusive concepts, Jung's understanding of archetypes accurately
parallels the definition of deity used in the tantric
system. Characteristics shared by archetypes and tantric deities are as
follows:
• they are inherited parts of the psyche;
• they are structuring patterns of psychological performance and are
somehow linked to instinct;
• certain energies can collect around archetypes / tantric deities and grow
and be moulded according to the impulse of the archetype / deity;
• they are hypothetical entities, irreprasentable in themselves, evident
only through their manifestations;
• as primordial images in the unconscious, their main features are the
fact that they are numinous, unconscious and autonomous.
Another important parallel between the Jungian and tantric systems is
their agreement on the mandala as the crucial context within which
individuation occurs.
For Jung, the essential mandala is the circle with four cardinal points
which one enters and then moves around, encountering and integrating the
different energies. At its simplest, tantric practice
involves entering the mandala through the east and moving round it,
systematically visualising the deities who are stationed at the four cardinal
points.
Nairn argues that mandala is the nature of the human psyche, the
mystical structure of the human mind, and that is why Jung and the alchemists
came upon it and also why all the tantric Systems
essentially work with it.
In other words, when mandala arises, it is a spontaneous manifestation
of the deepest wisdom principle of the human mind, rather than a principle
which has been theoretically formulated. The
importance accorded to conscious pursuit of one's individuation process
is another point of convergence between the Jungian and tantric approaches. A
degree of personality integration is regarded
as necessary before embarking on tantric practices in order to sustain
the discipline and meet the stress encountered when one enters into the deeper
processes of psychological experience, where
symbols mediate between consciousness and unconsciousness.
Tantric practice is basically a formula, stated within a mandala, for
establishing a relationship between consciousness and this deepest principle.
Similarly, a Jungian analysis also requires a level of personality
integration. Nairn asserts that tantra transcends the Jungian system because it
offers a carefully structured formula whose outcome
is totally predictable, since a specific tantric deity or archetype is
invoked. The process of Jungian analysis, on the other hand, is more in the
nature of a net thrown into the depths of the self.
Neither analyst nor analysand can predict what will be encountered. Like
the tantric practitioner, however, the Jungian analyst knows that the
enterprise is fraught with danger, since the archetypes
are extremely powerful. The unwary explorer can become identified with
them, suffering inflation or the psychotic experience of being overwhelmed.
Wayman (1967: 11) observes that the Tibetan Buddhist use of repeated
incantation to evoke a deity implies that the bulk of lamaist iconography - the
peaceful and wrathful deities- amount to
a set of controlled dreams. He asserts that the production of an
artificial dream state is a major strategy addressed by the Buddhist tantras
and, indeed, in certain traditions is called “purifying
or exerting the dream”.
Relevant aspects of the Hindu and Buddhist traditions OlFO’fO’flaherty
(1984) observes that diverse Indian approaches to questions relating to reality
are woven in and out of a tradition spanning
3 000 years, reaching a climax in the masterpiece of Indian
philosophical narrative, the Yogavasistha. Four states of being are identified
in the Upanishads (. 700 BC): waking, dreaming and
dreamless sleep, all of which are natural states, and the supernatural,
transcendent fourth state, identity with Godhead.
These four states of being implicitly suggest a technique of realisation,
a way to approach enlightenment: if one can comprehend that one is actually
dreaming when one thinks that one
is awake, one can begin to move toward the true awakening that is
enlightenment - the fourth stage (01 FO’fO’flaherty 1984: 17).
In a crucial sense, this is the inverse of Tibetan dream yoga, where
dreamless sleep is understood to afford a glimpse of Brahman, the divine mind
that does not create, while dreaming sleep opens
a window on the god who creates by dreaming the world into existence.
Indian dream theory both blurs the line between dreaming and waking and
underlines the importance of dreaming as a form of mediator between the two
extremes of wakefulness and dreamless
sleep. O’fO’flaherty (1984: 18) opines that the Upanishadic fourth state
is the whole point of the analysis and the end stage to which the other three
point. Some Indian philosophers therefore regard
dreaming as more "real" than waking, and it is this liminal
nature of dreams that is the key to the material power they have in later
Indian texts.
Wayman (1967: 10) notes that certain of the later Upanishads took a
metaphysical and mystically physiological rather than philosophical turn,
producing the special viewpoints of the tantra.
Thus the four states are associated with four places in the body:
the waking state with the navel;
the dream state with. the neck;
dreamless sleep with the heart;
the fourth state of enlightenment with the head.
Many of the Upanishadic concepts persist in contemporary Indian medicine
as practised by Ayurvedic physicians or vaids: The vaids maintain that the
widely held belief that we are in the
waking state ("consciousness") during the daytime is
delusionary.
In fact, even while awake, dreaming is the predominant psychic activity.
Here they seem to be pre-empting Jung's important insight that we continually
dream but that consciousness while
waking makes such a noise that we do not "hear" the dream
(Kakar 1982: 246).
Buddhists in other than tantric schools have also given much attention to
the interpretation of dreams as well as to the problem of the relationship
between dreaming and waking.
Both the Sarvastivadins, Buddhist realists whose name reflects their
doctrine that "everything exists", and the more traditional
Theravadins dealt with the issue of the reality or non-reality
of dreams in depth (O’flaherty 1984: 35).
An understanding of dreams as projections runs as a major thread through
Eastern thought (O’flaherty 1984: 16), and this would appear to intersect
vitally with certain understandings
of the Jungian system of interpretation.
The verb srj, used to express projection, means literally to
"emit", and it frequently occurs in accounts of the process of
creation in which the Creator emits the entire universe in the way
a spider emits a web. So the dreamer also spins the dream: A man has two
conditions: in this world and the world beyond. But there is also a twilight
juncture: the condition of sleep
(or dream, svapna). In this twilight juncture one sees both of the other
conditions, this world and the other world ...
When someone falls asleep, he takes the stuff of the entire world and he
himself takes it apart, and he himself builds it up, and by his own bright
light he dreams ...
There are no ponds, lotus pools, or flowing streams there, but he emits
ponds, lotus pools, and flowing streams. For he is the Maker (Brhadaranyaka U
4.3.9 -10).
O’flaherty (1984: 16) notes that this text has not reached the extreme
idealism of later schools, such as Mahayana Buddhism, which suggest that all
perception is the result of projection.
Significantly, however, the same verb is used, here and throughout
Indian literature, to denote perception of both the outer and inner worlds: one
sees the world just as one sees a dream.
Furthermore, the same verb (Sf) is used to express the concept of
seminal emission (making people), creation (making worlds), speaking (making
words), imagining (making ideas), and
dreaming (making images). Interesting echoes of these ideas may be
discerned in the musings of Marie-Louise von Franz (1990: 18) in relation to a
dream Jung (1963: 355) had after
a severe illness in 1944, in which he is walking through a hilly, sunny
landscape when he comes to a small wayside chapel: The door was ajar and I went
in. To my surprise there was no
image of the Virgin on the altar, and no crucifix either, but only a
wonderful 'flower arrangement. But then I saw on the floor in front of the
altar, facing me, sat a yogi -in lotus posture,
in deep meditation. When I looked at him more closely, I realised that
he had my face.
I started in profound fright, and awoke with the thought: "Aha, so
he is the one who is meditating me. He has a dream and I am it”. I knew that
when he awakened, I would no longer be.
Von Franz observes a paradox in the lifelong quest for our deepest
being, urged upon us by the Self, for which we search, in turn. Jung himself
comments as follows (1963: 355):
My Self retires into meditation and meditates my earthly form. To put it
another way: it assumed human shape in order to enter three-dimensional
existence, as if someone were putting
on a diver's suit in order to dive into the sea. When it renounces
existence in the hereafter, the Self assumes a religious posture, as the chapel
in the dream shows. In earthly form it can
pass through the experiences of the three-dimensional world, and by
greater awareness take a further step toward realization.
Hall (1977: 141) asserts that perhaps the most remarkable achievement of
analytical psychology is its appreciation of the relativity of the ego.
More intensively than any other mental health physician, Jung examined
the vicissitudes and alterations experienced by the ego, describing them from a
neutral standpoint (in the language
of the complex theory) and in more experiential and existential terms
(in the language of shadow, persona, anima, animus, and Self). Some of the most
helpful of Jung's writings on the
relativity of the ego are found in his autobiographical Memories.
“Dreams and Reflections” (1963). Hall (1977:141) identifies that this dream and
two others provide examples of the
manner in which this insight was presented to Jung himself.
One is Jung's childhood dream of the underground phallus where he
vividly describes sitting on "his" rock, wondering "Am I the one
who is sitting on the stone or am I the stone on which
he is sitting?".
The other is a dream that occurred toward the closing years of his life,
after he had written on flying saucers (CW 10), startled Jung into wakefulness
with the realisation that the saucer
might be "projecting" him, turning upside down his notion that
flying saucers could themselves be projections of the dynamic centre of the
unconscious, experienced by the ego in the imagery
of the Self (Jung 1963: 323).
The tendency of the dream, writes Jung: is to effect a reversal of the
relationship between ego-consciousness and the unconscious, and to represent
the unconscious as the generator of the
empirical personality. This reversal suggests that in the opinion of the
"Other sidell, our unconscious existence is the real one and our conscious
world a kind of illusion, an apparent reality
constructed for a specific purpose ...
Unconscious wholeness therefore seems to me the true spiritus rector of
all biological and· psychic events, of total consciousness.
Attainment of consciousness is culture in the broadest sense. Jung notes
(1989: 324-5)s that the "Oriental" attributes divine significance to
the Self, and adds that, according to the ancient
Christian view, self-knowledge was the road to knowledge of God.
For Jung (1978, quoted by Ramsden 1997: 35) quotes Mechtilde as saying
that lithe innermost core of the soul is the sweetest thing. Jung's perspective
is that the “sweetest thing” corresponds
to the Self, which is indistinguishable from the God-image. Coming at
the issue from another angle, Meister Eckhart asserts that “God is born from
the soul”.
Shadow is a crucial part of the soul, and it is to the realm of shadow
that we turn in the next chapter, which examines addictions, the domain of the
demon lover.
Jung: the tendency of the dream, is to effect a reversal of the
relationship between ego-consciousness and the unconscious, and to represent
the unconscious as the generator of the empirical
personality. This reversal suggests that in the opinion of the
"Other side”, our unconscious existence is the real one and our conscious
world a kind of illusion, an apparent reality constructed
for a specific purpose ...
Unconscious wholeness therefore seems to me the true spiritus rector of
all biological and· psychic events, of total consciousness. Attainment of
consciousness is culture in the broadest sense.
Jung (1989: 324-5): The "Oriental" attributes divine
significance to the Self, and adds that, according to the ancient Christian
view, self-knowledge was the road to knowledge of God.
Jung (1978, quoted by Ramsden 1997: 35) quotes Mechtilde as saying that
lithe innermost core of the soul is the sweetest thing. Jung's perspective is
that the “sweetest thing” corresponds
to the Self, which is indistinguishable from the God-image. Coming at
the issue from another angle, Meister Eckhart asserts that “God is born from
the soul”.
Shadow is a crucial part of the soul, and it is to the realm of shadow that
we turn in the next chapter, which examines addictions, the domain of the demon
lover.
CHAPTER THREE: ADDICION AS DISPLACED SPIRITUAL HUNGER
From a Jungian perspective, addiction is the negative side of
creativity, since the creative energy is going in the wrong direction ..
Thus it is the analytical task to discover where it should be going and
how to redirect it. Discussing a workshop she attended by Marion Woodman on
"Addictions and Sacred Emptiness",
Abramovitz (1992: 57-8), notes Woodman's emphasis that it is vital to
relate to the archetype and not identify with it.
In the addictive ritual the addict is swallowed by the archetype. But if
the archetypal energy can be accessed and related to properly, then the
creative potential may be released. Most
survivors of abuse and neglect reach adulthood burdened by repressed
emotion and shame.
Sanford (1991: 68) discusses, once their psychic resources are exhausted
by the energy required to repress this material, they turn to the outside for
help. The coping mechanism often becomes
a regular dose of alcohol, food, drugs, sex, work, romance, shopping,
others' approval, gambling or television.
This serves to distract them from their internal reality, and in this
state they are usually as distanced from their feelings as they are from their
physical bodies. In this ungrounded state the
individual is particularly vulnerable to the lure of the demon lover.
Dracula as Demon Lover
Dracula is an archetypal symbol of addiction. Preceded by legend, it
first appeared in print as a novel by Bram Stoker in 1987.
Many adaptations and elaborations now exist, particularly on screen, and
as Linda Schierse Leonard (1986: 77) points out, the popularity of this story
in our culture and century suggests
that it expresses an archetypal message for our time. As Leonard
(1986:88) puts it: The story of Dracula tells a mythic truth. Its characters
are symbols of human experience; its actions
are our actions. We have within ourselves all these figures, struggling
with the forces of good and evil, the ultimate conflict of opposites at war in
human existence.
As such, Dracula, the Demon Lover in the psyche, is the epitome of the
ultimate obstacle on the way to the wedding.
Addiction is a powerful demonic force which masters the addict. It
possesses an incredible fascination, a lure which addicts cannot escape on
their own once they have been "bitten" and
surrender their will. As the current international data on mental health
services for addiction reveals, the recovery rate for those who fall under the
spell of this "vampire" and subsequently
become active members of the highly stigmatised Alcoholics Anonymous
(AA) or Narcotics Anonymous (NA) is a mere 2%. Members of these organisations
are required to admit their
powerlessness over the addicting substance and ask for the help of a
Higher Power.
This process is the work of the first three steps of the twelve-step
programme which is the lynch-pin of both AA and NA.
Leonard (1986: 107) argues that we all have to wage a battle against the
Demon Lover, whether it takes the form of an addiction or another. She argues
that while many "inhabitants"
of the psyche can be loved and transformed, Dracula must be destroyed if
healing is to occur.
One of the forms of the embrace of the Demon Lover is a negative
self-image, morbid self-doubt which results in the refusal of love. Smith
(1993: 157-62) notes that "sin” is traditionally
associated with disobedience and prideful self-love, and this belief has
kept many silenced in their own victimisation, since they believe that their
suffering is necessary and righteous.
The argument of this thesis however, is that the "sin" behind
addiction is not self-love but rather a lack of care for self.
The first step towards healing therefore is the turning of attention and
consciousness to the needs of the deeper self. The key facilitator in the
Dracula story, and in the symbolic interplay
which it represents, is Professor Van Helsing. As the hero he is a man
of faith and wisdom, who has an open mind, true and kind heart, self-command
and singleness of purpose.
He also has knowledge of metaphysics, medical science, philosophy,
mythology, literature and ancient lore, and knows that the greatest strength of
the vampire is that people will not
believe in him. It is Van Helsing who can distinguish between the person
of Lucy and the evil force which has possessed her. Moreover, he knows and uses
the power of symbols such
as the crucifix and the holy host, before which Dracula has no power.
Van Helsing is, in other words, a symbol of the healing power of dialogue
between conscious and unconscious,
drawing on both rationally acquired knowledge and reverence for the
mystery of the Divine in facing the demon. Leonard, herself a recovered
alcoholic, argues that AA and NA are
effective in combating addiction because, like Van Helsing, who uses all
the help he can summon, they muster the combined power of millions of addicts
who are recovering, who are
slaying their dragons, and who, by virtue of their own spiritual
progress and the love and communal compassion they extend to all addicts still
under the spell, provide an example for
hope of recovery, although a 2% success rate for complete recovery is a
slim inspiration. Leonard suggests that the central character in the Dracula
story is in fact Mina (1986: 93).
A person of integrity, she is that within us that gives birth through
the difficult work of love, who symbolises the human potential for creativity,
the one who must say no to Dracula
whenever he tries to possess us. In the original story, Mina carried the
secret for her fiance, but it was the men who did all the caring for her and
Lucy and the chasing and killing
of Dracula.
In the recent movie version, Mina plays a much more active role in her
salvation and is the one who ultimately slays Dracula.
If we look at the deeper symbolism of this version of the story, we see
how a transformation of her negative animus is accomplished. Dracula has
carried for her a love that was born in
hate, centuries earlier. He has also carried her rage, and has acted it
out. In the final event, she murders him as an act of love, transforming him
from a blood sucker to a spiritual
being, releasing him from the realm of the undead.
The character who gives Dracula access to what he craves is Renfield,
the lunatic who lives numerically and quantitatively, eats living things.
Renfield symbolises the wounded desire
in ourselves that sets up such craving, whether for power, money, drugs,
sex, alcohol, work - whatever addiction we have that invites the demon in to
possess the soul.
The crucial concept of wounded desire is at the core of a fairy tale
entitled lithe Red Shoes:
• ,Damaged instincts and the demonic’
Estes (1993: 214-55) looks at the demonic force behind addiction in her
version of the story variously known as lithe “Devil's Dancing Shoes",
lithe “Red Hot Shoes of the Devil"
and lithe “Red Shoes”
• A precis follows: Long ago there was an orphan who had no shoes.
Over time she found cloth scraps and made herself a crude pair of red
shoes that she loved because they made her feel rich in her own
resourcefulness.
One day as she was foraging for food, a gilded carriage stopped beside her
and the old woman inside told her she would like to take her home and treat her
as her own little daughter.
The child complied and soon found herself shiny clean and dressed in the
finest white and black garments. When she asked after her own clothes, the old
woman said the clothes
were so filthy and the shoes so ridiculous that she'd burnt them. The
little girl was heart-broken, for those humble red shoes made by her own hand
had made her deeply happy.
As she learnt' to obey all the old woman's rules, a secret fire was
ignited in her heart and she yearned constantly for her old red shoes. Since
the child was old enough to be confirmed
on the “Day of The Innocents”, the old woman took her to an old crippled
shoemaker to have a special pair of shoes made for the occasion. In the
shoemaker's cabinet she spied a pair
of red shoes made of the finest red leather which practically glowed.
Despite the fact that red shoes were scandalous for church, the girl, who chose
only with her hungry heart,
picked the red shoes. The old lady's eyesight was so impaired that she
was unaware of the colour and so paid for them.
The old shoemaker winked at the child as he wrapped up the shoes.
At church the members of the congregation were speechless over the shoes
that shone like polished apples on the child's feet. Everyone stared; even the
icons and the statues stared
disapprovingly at her shoes. But she loved the shoes all the more. After
discovering the colour of the shoes, the old lady forbade her to wear them
again, but the following Sunday the
child couldn’t help but choose the red shoes over the black. At the
church entrance was an old soldier with his arm in a sling. He bowed and asked
if he could brush the dust from the
little girls shoes. Doing so, he tapped the soles of her shoes to a
rhythm that made her feet itch. “Remember to stay for the dance”, he smiled,
and winked at her.
Again her bright shoes met with disparaging looks but they gave her so
much pleasure she didn’t care.
As they left the church, the injured soldier cried out, “What beautiful
dancing shoes”.
The child started to dance right then and there; down the lane and
across the field the shoes danced the child, they danced her into the dark and
gloomy forest. She hopped on one
foot and then the other trying to take off the shoes but to no avail.
So along the rivers, through the valleys and over the highest hills she
danced. In the sunlight, in the snow and in the rain, she danced. She danced
through the darkest night and
through sunrise and she was still dancing at twilight as well. But it
was terrible dancing, and there was no rest for her. In utter exhaustion and
horror, she arrived in a forest where
lived the town’s executioner. And it is said the axe on the wall began
to tremble as soon as it sensed her approaching.
"Help me, please" she implored the executioner as she danced
by his door. "Please cut off my shoes to free me from this horrid
fate."
But although the executioner cut off the straps he was unable to get the
shoes off her feet. And so she pleaded with him that her life was worth nothing
and that he should cut off
her feet, which he did. The red shoes with the feet in them kept on
dancing until they were out of sight. Now the unfortunate child was crippled,
and had to make her own way in
the world as a servant to others. She never again wished for red shoes.
This gruesome conclusion is typical of the ending of fairy tales in
which the spiritual protagonist cannot complete an attempted transformation.
Such brutal episodes evident world-wide
in folklore and myths, communicating an imperative psychic truth. Estes
(1993: 219) suggests that the psychological truth of "The Red Shoes"
is that a woman without connection to
the inner wilderness, the instinctual life, starves and becomes obsessed
with "feel betters", "leave me alone" and "love me
-please". In other words, it is a famine of the soul that underlies
the choices that will cause her to dance madly out of control, to lose
her footing and ultimately, perhaps, her feet / standpoint.
Unpacking the symbolism of the story, Estes (1993: 221-55) starts with
the child's handmade red shoes which can be seen to symbolise the creative
spirit and represent a significant step
toward integration of her resourceful feminine nature in everyday life.
Symbolically, shoes can be interpreted as a psychological metaphor; they
protect and defend the part of our body that grounds us. At an archetypal
level, feet represent freedom and
mobility so that to have shoes to protect the feet refers to having the
convictions of one's beliefs and the wherewithal to act on them. According to
Estes (1993: 224), the carriage in
archetypal symbolism can be understood as a literal image for he central
mood of the psyche that transports us from one place, thought or endeavour to
another. The fact that in this
story the carriage is gilded is reminiscent of the gilded cage, which
dazzles with its offer of comfort and security but is in reality a trap.
In fairy tale and dream interpretation, the owner of the "conveyor
of attitudes", the gilded carriage, is understood as the main value
pressing down upon and directing the psyche.
Here the negative, constricting values of the old woman forewarn that
vibrant, vital aspects of the psyche are about to be sacrificed to a lifeless
value system.
Estes (1993: 229) observes: To be in the state of ... a starved soul, is
to be made relentlessly hungry. Then a woman burns with a hunger for anything
that will make her feel alive again.
A woman who has been captured knows no better, and will take something,
anything, that seems similar to the original treasure, good or not.
A woman who is starved for her real soul-life may look "cleaned up
and combed" on the outside, but on the inside she is filled with dozens of
pleading hands and empty mouths.
Instinct is a difficult thing to define.
Psychologically, Jung speculated that the instincts arise from the
psychoid unconscious, that layer of the psyche where biology and spirit might
touch.
Estes (1993: 232) suggests that the creative instinct is as much the
lyrical language of the Self as is the symbology of dreams.
When the old woman see the child's creative work as refuse rather than
riches, she severs, the child from her creative spirit, from the life of her
soul. At the shoemaker's, a famished
hunger for the soul-life rushes to the surface of the psyche, and it
grabs what it can, knowing it will be repressed again soon. This dangerous
psychological sneaking happens when a
woman suppresses large parts of Self into the shadows of the psyche.
From the perspective of analytical psychology, the repression of both positive
and negative instincts, feelings
and urges into the unconscious causes them to inhabit a shadow realm.
We can presume that the child's first step to entrapment, entering the
gilded cage, resulted from ignorance and inexperience of life, as did her
letting go of her own handiwork.
Paradoxically, although her impulse toward new life is right and proper,
her craving for the shoes like burnished plums is an attempt to sneak a
counterfeit soul-life that cannot work.
In the story the little girl sneaks the shoes past the old woman with
failing eye-sight, a detail which confirms that the brittle, perfectionistic
value system represented by the crone is
devoid of the ability to see clearly, to be alert to what is going on.
This inability to notice the personal distress of the Self is typical of
the injured psyche and of the culture too. Estes (1993: 239) observes that
sneaking is helpful for a captured woman
only if she sneaks the right thing, only if that thing leads to her
liberation. The shoemaker foreshadows the destructive old soldier, for the
natural predator within the psyche is a shapechanger,
a force that is able to disguise itself, just as traps are disguised to
lure the unwary. Estes (1993: 240) argues that his in cohorts with the soldier,
who is the devil in disguise. The devil, soldier,
hunchback, shoemaker and others were images used in bygone times to
portray the negative forces in both the world at large and human natures. In
essence, lithe Red Shoes” teaches us that
the wilderness of the individual psyche, the well-spring of creative
energy, must be properly protected - by unequivocally valuing it ourselves, by
speaking out in its interest, by refusing to
submit to either the deadening collective or the seductive blandishments
which lead to psychic unhealth.
The wild needs a guardian at the gate, if it is not to be misused. Archetypal
patterns in addiction James Hillman (1976: 60), a leader in the field of
archetypal psychology, sums up the purpose
of studying the archetypal in order to understand the human: 'The deeper
a psychology can go with its understanding, i.e., into universal inner meanings
expressed by the archetypal speech
of mythical 'tellings', the more scientifically
Transformation: Imagery and Symbolism of Eating, Jackson (1996: 86) has
this to say: Just who is invited to the table is a thorny question. We prefer
to ask only those we feel comfortable
with, but those excluded can take offence and cause trouble. At the
wedding of Peleus and Thetis, honoured by the presence of the twelve Olympians,
Eris (Strife) was understandably left
out. She gate-crashed the party anyway and stirred up competitiveness
between Hera, Athene and Aphrodite, which led to the Trojan war. At the birth
feast of the princess in "Sleeping
Beauty”, only twelve wise women were summoned. The thirteenth arrived
uninvited and delivered her curse. The awkward element we ban from
consciousness has a way of popping up
at an inconvenient moment. Better to give it a seat at the party where
we can keep an eye on it.
Rilke (1992: 77) is expressing the same insight: How should we be able
to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the
myths about dragons that at the last moment
turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are
princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.
Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless
that wants help from us. O’Flaherty (1984: 302) points to the enduring
relevance of the archetypal figure in her observations
on the reality of created characters. Hamlet, for example, has continued
to exert an influence on European thinking after the death of Shakespeare.
In a crucial sense, the reality of such characters stems from the fact
that they are both found and made. In this regard, Herodotus remarked about the
Greek gods: Whence each of these
gods came into existence, or whether they were for ever, and what kind
of shape they were, was not known until the day before yesterday, if I may use
the expression: for I believe that
Homer and Hesiod were four hundred years before my time - and no more
than that. It is they who created for the Greeks their theogony, it is they who
gave to the gods the names derived
from their ancestors and divided among them their honours, their arts,
and their shapes (Herodotus, History 2.53; translated by David Grene).
Archetypal patterns underlying alcoholism:
a paradigm Bauer's (1982: 52-69) study of the archetypal patterns in
alcoholism, which can be extended to other substance addictions, focuses on
Dionysos and Apollo as contending opposites.
Dionysos is Apollo's half-brother. Through his mortal mother Semele and
his father Zeus, who gave birth to him from his thigh after Semele was consumed
by the blaze of her lover's
overwhelming divinity, Dionysos belongs to both heaven and earth.
However, some sources say that he was also an "outsider", a stranger
to Greece and originating in the east, from Phrygia
or Thrace (Bauer 1982: 53).
Otto (1965: 15) argues that Dionysos existed long before the
crystallisation of the story which had him entering Greece from outside.
However, Otto concedes that figuratively Dionysos
is an outsider, raised to Olympus only late in his career around the 5th
century BC, but always remaining antithetical, a stranger to the norms of the
official, structured Olympian cult.
Apollo was only an infant when he killed the dragon Delphyne (whose name
derives from “womb”) in order to make the oracular Delphic cave his own.
Psychologically, this symbolises the victory of solar consciousness over
the undifferentiated, devouring feminine, and of patriarchy over the old order.
The darker side of Apollo is also evident in the fact that he sent his
sister Artemis to slay his unfaithful mortal lover Koronis, let pestilence
devastate the land of her family, and ravished
women who rejected him (Bauer 1982: 52). “ln my oracles I shall reveal
to men the inexorable will of Zeus” (Kerenyi 1974: 134). So Apollo declared at
his birth, revealing himself to be
a spokesman of the patriarchal order from the distant and detached
heights of Olympus. Positive, from the point of view of the development of
consciousness and freedom from the
irrationality of the instincts and the suffocating power of the primal
feminine, he is nevertheless destructive in his one-sided masculine values that
scorn mere matter and can scorch to
death the new life and imaginative stirrings that need darkness and
moisture for growth.
Here we see how significant the everlasting tightrope between the
opposites is: the disastrous patriarchal project also has its necessity for the
growth of consciousness. Unlike Apollo, the baby Dionysos was not fed on
ambrosia and nectar, but suckled by nurses in the wild. Some records claim that
his wet nurse was Hipta, the Anatolian great goddess who was also the belief
divinity
of the legendary Amazons. Thus Dionysos, in his origins, is not a
representative of the patriarchal order like his half-brother but rather a god
of the pre-patriarchal order, suckled and attended
by women, accompanied by women in his wanderings and even to his death,
danced awake once again by women who usher in the cyclical rebirth of the god
who must die in order to be reborn.
Bauer (1982: 54) notes that Dionysos is described by many names,
attributes and appearances and seems to embody all the paradoxical forces and forms
of life and death on earth.
Kerenyi (1974: 272) observes that he is referred to as Loosener,
Deliverer, God of Many Joys, Delight of Mortals, Benefactor, Bestial and Wild
One, Eater of Raw Flesh, Render, Merciless,
Savage Destructor. Indeed, not only is Dionysos a god of women, but he
himself is called "Feminine Oneil and is said to be bisexual, thus
reflecting also in gender his pervasive duality.
It is noteworthy that, despite his patriarchal one-sidedness, Apollo
insisted on reverence for other deities and that he acknowledged Dionysos as
his brother. That the two gods, the one terrestrial,
the other celestial, could and did coexist side by side is confirmed in
the archaeological 'findings at Delphi, the place of Apollo's temple and his
oracle.
Within this sanctuary it seems that there was also a grove of Dionysos
as god of woods and the wild (Bauer 1982: 55).
Thus forest and temple, nature and civilisation, intertwined, reveal
symbolically how inseparable the two really are. Moreover, Apollo shared the
Delphic festival year with Dionysos, and the
pediments upon which his temple rests are inscribed on one side with
Dionysos and the Thyriads, a group of his women followers, and on the other
Apollo with the Muses (Bauer 1982: 55).
Bauer (1982: 55-6) notes that this coexistence of the Apollonian and the
Dionysian, in however distorted a form, is still present in the psychic reality
of contemporary Society, reminding
us that no one-sided point of view, however progressive, suffices to
explain or contain all.
In studies of alcoholism, the descriptions and particularly the values
of experts and non-experts alike are Apollonian ones; Dionysos appears mainly
as the illness, the problem, as "inferior, weak,
crazy ,sick". Bauer suggests that perhaps in alcoholism more than
in other areas of our culture, the archetypes are set at odds with each other,
fixed in irreconcilable opposition -sobriety versus
intoxication- rather than integrated in a complementary relationship.
This is evident both in - the manner in which alcoholism is described,
in terms of formulae and models, and in the actual content of the words used.
Thus the reasons given for drinking -to ease tension, fatigue, boredom;
to dull the pain of duty or personal relationships, to quell anxiety and so on-
all describe an escape from constricting
Apollonian standards.
They describe Dionysos as the Loosener, the Ecstatic and Untamed, one
who brings relief as his father Zeus decreed he would when he told Semele that
she was blessed, "for you will give
birth to intense joy for gods and men, for you have conceived a son who
brings forgetfulness to the sorrows of mortals" (Otto 1965: 95).
It is significant that the discovery of wine gave rise to the cult of
drama. The theatre of Dionysos in Athens was rebuilt in stone c. 342-326 to
replace the earlier wooden one where the plays
of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes were first
performed.
Thus we see the duality of the intoxicant itself, it not only soothes
and calms buy also can release creative energies and open' up new paths to the
Self. Crucially, however, Dionysian
miracles belong to the god, not mortals, and the wrong ~ attitude,
whether in the form of identification with the god or Unconsciousness of his
presence, may cause Dionysos to unleash
his darker side, becoming a god of madness and destruction, one form of
which may be alcoholism (Bauer 1982: 57).
The crucial issue, then, is one of balance.
Excessive use of Dionysian energies becomes abusive, and then the God has
you for breakfast!
Many case studies illustrate that intoxication is not only ecstasy, that
possession by the god can be a horrendous experience. These accounts always
demonstrate the influence of Apollonian
values that both precede and follow the descent into alcoholism.
When too dominant, these values provoke their opposite, whereas balance
between the Apollonian and Dionysian produces a healing process (Bauer 1982:
60).
Discussing the incest wounds of a case study, Schwartz-Salant (1989:
148) observes that the patient’s oedipal victory over her mother was a pyrrhic
victory that left her totally vulnerable
to psychic and emotional flooding by the energies that the mother and
the incest taboo normally check.
These intense energies are sexual, chthonic, violent and archetypal
energies often associated with Dionysos.
A wholesome relationship to this archetype, by contrast, can lead to
healing and renewal of the personality.
In antiquity, the mystery cults used these energies in this way.
Bauer (1982: 58) notes in regard to female, alcoholics that their
attitude towards alcohol is one of devotion to the bottle, and thus
symbolically to Dionysos.
Bauer argues that a woman who is focused on alcohol, buying it, hiding
it, finding excuses to drink it and having to find excuses after she drinks it,
is acting like a maenad, one of the
female followers of Dionysos. Protectors, adorers, muses, they nursed
him at birth, followed him into the wild and awoke him from his sleep-death
when he vanished into the underworld.
They became responsible for organising and performing the cult practices
and ecstatic dances in service of the god, and his passion became their own.
The bacchantes and maenads, following Dionysos as the Great Loosener,
could partake in his liberating powers (Otto 1965: 171).
To understand the woman alcoholic, therefore, Bauer (1982: 60) suggests
that one should begin by referring back to the original myth of Dionysos which,
as Otto (1965: 173) relates:
tells again and again how his fury ripped [women] loose from their
peaceful domesticity, from the humdrum orderly activities of their daily lives,
for the purposes of making them dancers
in the wilderness and the loneliness of the mountains where they find
him and rage through his revel rout ....
Bauer notes that contemporary alcoholics have predecessors not only in
the maenads, thyriads and bacchantes, but also in the royal daughters of
Proteus and Minyos, who were driven mad
when they attempted to resist Dionysos in fidelity to their Hera personas.
Otto (1965: 172-3) argues that Hera, Queen of Heaven, more than any
other deity, detests the wild actions of the god and his female followers
because they make a mockery of her whole
realm, the established bonds of marital duty and domestic rites.
Bauer (1982: 59-60) comments that the image of a woman leaving the role
assigned to her by an Olympian interpretation of woman's place is therefore an
archetypal one, and of particular
relevance today when paradigms for feminine being and behaviour darkness.
The sick flocked to Aesklepios's temple in Epidaurus where, directed by
his priests, they withdrew into the incubatorium to be alone, lito surrender to
the process at work within".
In principle, the cure was realised when the god appeared to them in a
dream (Kerenyi 1959: 17).
Kerenyi (1959: 22) describes a statue of Aesklepios thus:
The eyes seem to look upwards and into the distance without definite
aim. This, combined with the vivid movement, gives us an impression of a great
inner emotion, one might almost say
of suffering. This god does not stand before us in Olympian calm. He is
assailed as it were by the suffering of men which it is his vocation to
assuage. Clearly there are differences between
AA and the Epidaurian cult, but the similarities worth noticing are that
M provides a temenos, albeit a collective one, a protected place for the
alcoholic to come and find healing - just
as the temple at Epidaurus offered refuge from political and other sources
of conflict. AA is also a sort of borderline territory, a mid-zone, and many
alcoholics verbalise this by saying
that AA is a "bridge to life" (Bauer 1982: 71).
Bauer (1982: 116) notes in regard to women alcoholics that they are
first and foremost daughters of the father. Athena is a father's daughter par
excellence. Sprung from the head of Zeus,
"fully armed, with a mighty shout," she disowns any
relationship to a maternal source and refuses marriage as well, reserving
herself exclusively for her father.
On Olympus, she stands second to Zeus, before even Apollo, his favourite
son. If Apollo is the spokesman, Athena is Zeus's agent.
All her functions concern the establishment and maintenance of Father
Right. The question is why such women, secure in their father's preference and
in their role of creating and
maintaining his order, succumb to alcoholism.
Bauer (1972: 117) suggests that the answer lies in the fact that their
fathers are not very satisfactory Zeus figures. Real women, born with Athenian
temperaments into less-than-Olympian
Circumstances, are obliged to put all their energy into defending and
maintaining the collective masculine, more or less unmediated by the actual
father.
The strong but unsupported Athenian temperament is obliged to disguise
itself in a Hera persona and Apollonian animus because, in the modern world,
Athena is not a valued model
of the feminine.
Growing up in an emotionally difficult and unsupportive environment
drives such a woman to hang on to patriarchal values that are too general to be
related to her own life;
thus she is open to shadow attacks from the Dionysian energy she has
repressed or held at bay.
Another archetypal dimension to addiction that needs be considered, the
fact that a parallel process occurs in the psyche of the addict and the
creative person (Leonard 1990: xvi).
Both sink into the unfamiliar underworld of the unconscious and· are
fascinated by what they find there. Both encounter pain, suffering, death.
However, while the addict is dragged
down, often without choice, and held hostage by the addiction, the
creative person chooses to descend into that unknown realm and more frequently
has the means to ascend again.
For Leonard (1990: 10 - 11), who speaks from both her professional experience
as a Jungian analyst and her personal experience as an alcoholic writer, the
means to ascend from the
unconscious is engagement with the Creative Daimon. While this
necessitates living in the tension of the opposites, it also means being guided
by the wholeness of the psyche, leading
to a renewed relationship with the Self and the cosmos.
Archetypal patterns relating to the sacredness of the feminine in a
lecture entitled, "Journeying into Creativity", Estes retells the
ancient story of the Eleusinian mysteries to illustrate
that creativity can be enriched by being blocked, at least initially.
Demeter, the earth goddess, is rich, bountiful and full of potential.
Persephone, her daughter, symbolises that which is without direction,
that which plays within us.
One day as Persephone is idling in the fields, the earth cracks open,
and Hades, god of the underworld, abducts her in his chariot and vanishes with
her into the earth.
When Demeter discovers that her daughter is lost, she is grief-stricken and
loses her fertility. As a result, all the flora and fauna die and the earth
becomes a barren place, reflecting
Demeter's devastated inner psychic terrain. Bloody and bruised from her
grieving and her vain search for Persephone, Demeter comes upon Baubo, goddess
of female obscenity,
who dances a lewd dance and cracks jokes. Demeter begins to laugh and
this restores her energy. Lo and behold, another goddess appears, Hekate,
watcher of the cross-roads,
mediator between the living and the dead, the underworld and the topside
world, the rational and the irrational.
"Who do you think took your daughter?" Hekate asks, and it is
the first time that Demeter considers that question. Hekate suggests that they
visit Helios, the sun, because he sees
everything, and, indeed, Helios informs on Hades. According to Estes's
version of the myth, the people of Greece appeal to Zeus to restore Persephone
to Demeter because the barren
earth is causing starvation. It turns out that Zeus had conspired with
Hades, giving him permission to steal Persephone. He reconsiders and calls
Hades up, obliging him to return Persephone to
her mother. But, as in the tale of "Beauty and the Beast",
Hades doesn't want to because he has made Persephone his bride and she is a
marvellously warm creature of instincts and imagination.
So they strike a deal: if Persephone eats in the underworld she must
return. Hades puts a pomegranate in her mouth and she accidentally swallows six
seeds and is obliged to return to the underworld for six months each year.
This story has been told pastorally to explain the seasons. Estes's
essential point here is that creativity is' cyclical. It cannot be paradisical
and flow continuously. The nature of the process includes
loss and restoration. Thus Estes draws a striking parallel between
Hades’s rape of Persephone and the loss of an inspirational flow in the work of
a creative person. She argues that what is lost must
be sought in the unconscious, just as Demeter had to go underground to
negotiate for the return of her daughter.
Understanding Hades to be the inner critic, and therefore linked to the
negative mother +/o. father complexes, elucidates the parallels that operate
between the creative and addictive blockages.
The psychological mystery of Eleusis remains relevant to the soul today
(Hillman 1979: 48).
The Persephone experience grips us in sudden depressions, overwhelming
us with misery and a numbing sort of cold. Thus we become drawn downward out of
life by a force we cannot see,
from which we would flee, distractedly thrashing about for naturalistic
explanations and comforts for what is happening so darkly. We feel invaded from
below, assaulted, and we think of death.
Crucially, however, it is only in consequence of the abduction into the
underworld that one is able to experience one’s habitual modes of consciousness
as defences against initiation into a less
literal and more psychic sense of reality. This new sense is at one and
the same time an emptying and an enriching (Hillman 1979: 214).
It is worth noting, in regard to the loss of soul that characterises
modernity, that the Greek mysteries were not the exclusive preserve of
initiates but were accessible, to some degree, to popular
comprehension. Story, drama, grove and temple offered space for
reflection on timeless verities supplanted in our age by the siren call of the
twilight whisky bottle, other anaesthetics and the
soap opera. It is in this context that the Jungian and the New Age project
of enlarging access to mythology must be understood.
Technologies of the Self and the question of cultural embodiment
In “The Uses of Pleasure”, Michel Foucault (1985) developed the theory
of "technologies of the Self”. Essentially this refers to what people do
to construct themselves internally and socially.
Foucault did not explicitly address the issue of addiction in relation
to the technologies of the Self, perhaps because he would not see the illness
dimension as relevant. In fact, certain discourses,
notably feminist and postmodern critiques, seeking to repudiate
simplistic notions of voluntarity and involuntarity and dichotomised
normal/deviant, healthy/sick stereotypes of the medicalised
ideology of disease models, challenge the pathologising language that is
part of the thematic of addiction (Kosofsky-Sedgwick 1994).
For Foucault, an addiction is simply an extreme technology of the Self,
a destructive rather than a creative process.
But there is a level at which Foucault's theory is helpful in dissecting
the thematic of addiction. His notion that power manifests at a
micro-sociological level links clearly with our Jungian
ecofeminist theme.
For Foucault, the Self is, in fact, power-in-relation, with power seen
as a constructive process.
However, when utilising this perspective as a lens for gender analysis
one sees that power is anchored in the surplus-repression of the sexual
understructure - the pervasive
institution of
mothering, mandatory heterosexuality and asymmetrical gender relations
skewed in the favour of men.
Trask (1986: 147) comments that this power causes crude repression of
the sexual instincts, which rebound as aggression and conquest; the continued
political and social dominance of men;
and the subordinate position of women which is frequently sustained by
pervasive violence.
Yet Foucault ignores such aspects of power that differentially affect
women. Referring to Discipline and Punish, Bartky (1990: 65) muses:
Where [in Foucault's work] is the account of the disciplinary practices
that engender the "docile bodies" of women, bodies more docile than
the bodies of men? Women, like men, are subject
to many of the same disciplinary practices Foucault describes.
But he is blind to those disciplines that produce a modality of
embodiment that is peculiarly feminine.
Bartky (1990: 66-71) puts forward her own analysis of the social
practices that affect women differentially, concentrating on three social
practices that aim to discipline the female body:
constant dieting directed at keeping the body thin;
constriction of gestures and limitation of mobility which prevent the
body from taking up too much space;
and ornamentation which makes the body a pleasant sight.
All these practices have their roots in particular cultural definitions
of femininity. Allen (1996: 274) comments that Bartky's analysis of such
practices and of the understanding of femininity
they exemplify is an overt continuation and appropriation of Foucault's
account of disciplinary practices.
Further, as Allen (1996: 274-5) points out, Bartky highlights a crucial
feature of these social practices and the cultural concept of femininity in
which they are located. Referring to Foucault's
discussion of the Panopticon - which functions by convincing prisoners
that they may be under surveillance, thereby inducing them to monitor
themselves constantly, Bartky argues that women
are similarly compelled to discipline ourselves, through internalisation
of practices and understandings of femininity that reinforce the power
relations that oppress us. Allen insists that an account
of this internalisation by the dominated of mechanisms of domination is
vital for a feminist theory of power.
In Eros and Power: The Promise of Feminist Theory, Haunani-Kay Trask
(1986: 165) concludes:
Like feminist love, feminist power has meant a reclaiming of woman's
body from the ideology and institution of patriarchy.
In asserting their claims to control and enjoy their bodies, feminists
have had to fight an internal struggle against a colonising ideology which has
defined women in physical terms for the
benefit of men.
The struggle is akin to the Black struggle for identity in this one
masochism or dualism but, rather, efforts to gain power and give meaning".
Evaluating dualism and misogyny in the intellectual
traditions of mediaeval thought, Bynum (1992: 200-2) notes that
mediaeval thinkers associated the body with women and expected women’s physical
and physiological processes to be more
primary to their existence than those of men. Significantly, however,
they also associated the body with God, through the doctrine of the
Incarnation, and shunned marked soul/body
dichotomies more than did patristic or early modern theologians. Thus,
Bynum (1987: 204) concludes, the bodily experience of both sexes was imbued
with deep spiritual significance, and
cautions that the impact of medieval perceptions of woman and of the
body were far more complex than scholars have realised: we find that neither
medieval gender contrasts nor medieval
notions of soul and body were as dichotomous as we have been led to
think by projecting modern contrasts back onto them.
Thus, I would like to argue that we must consider not just the dichotomy
but also the mixing or fusing of the genders implicit in medieval assumptions
(1992: 204-5).
In a comment which sums up much of the relevance of these themes in the
contemporary setting, Jackson (1996: 115) notes: There are many layers to women’s
concern with their body
image which can be a major factor in a problematical relationship to
food. Among them are the ancient interaction between men's sexual response to
visual cues and the high value women
place on relationships; the contemporary emphasis on superficial
appearance as opposed to substance; women's search for a new inner image; and
the tendency of the body image to stand
in for self-image where the latter is negative or inadequate.
In the following chapter, we will examine the nature of embodiment and
desire from an ecofeminist perspective before focusing on specific issues
relating to the embodiment of desire
in survivors of childhood sexual abuse.
CHAPTER FOUR: BODY AND SOUL
Important themes emerge when we excavate history using a hermeneutical
lens that seeks to discover women's experience as distinct from the male frame
of reference which both names
and negates it.
Amongst Jungians, ecofeminists, New Agers and others, a new mythology
has arisen pertaining to the return of the Divine Feminine, who was revered for
millennia, long before the advent
of patriarchy and patriarchal religions. Those alive to her presence
stress the need to integrate this archetype into our modern frame of reference.
We could hypothesise that our collective
unconscious, anaesthetised for centuries by patriarchal domination, is
reawakening to the intrinsic value, majesty and danger of the
feminine_principle.
Jackson (1996: 116) suggests that eating disorders, like many other
distressing addictive symptoms, represent the psyche's need to be recognised,
revered and loved in its variety and wholeness.
_
The more the body is abused and manipulated through deprivation,
bingeing and purging, or other addictive behaviour, the deeper the feelings of
floundering and loss of control. When the
attention focuses on the inner reality, however desolate, unworthy or
terrifying this may feel at the outset, the unseen body the psyche begins to be
nourished, and the possibility of a new,
co-operative relationship with the physical body can manifest.
The impact of patriarchy on the experience of embodiment and the
feminist Eros Spretnak (1982: xii) observes that humanity’s earliest artefacts,
the multiple female figurines from the
Upper Paleolithic period, evidence the awe our ancestors felt for women
and their mysteries.
The elemental power of the female seems to have been the focus of such
cultures, which developed spiritual practices and sacred myths based on a
macrocosmic application of the mysteries
they observed at hand.
Rich (1982: 33) argues that the images of the prepatriarchal goddess
cults informed women that power, awesomeness and centrality were theirs by
nature, not by privilege or miracle;
the female was primary.
The male appears in earliest art, if at all, in the aspect of a child,
often tiny and helpless, carried horizontally in the arms, seated in the lap of
the Goddess, or suckling at her breast.
Under the patriarchal system, men who had perhaps felt more of a part of
the fundamental life processes, became outsiders witnessing the powerful flow
of nature in its procreative cycles.
Spretnak (1982: xii) suggests that their response to this alienation and
separation is at the root of misogyny. She argues that the objective of
patriarchy was and is to prevent women from
achieving, or even acknowledging, our potential: that we are powerful in
both body and mind. Such theorists are criticised for escaping into
anachronistic, separatist spiritual practices
that are accountable neither to their social context nor to the
socio-political realities of the "Third World"(Ackermann 1992).
Further, the theoretical gamut of the feminist excavation of a
matriarchate, and the responses produced, are seen to centre repetitively
around issues of power relations. The approaches
are seen to border on the concrete, implying or demanding absolutes, or
simply trivialising, interpreting matriarchy as patriarchy with an
"m". The main reformist critique of proponents
of the matriarchy is its idealisation as a golden age.
Yet, ironically, the very pulse and many of the themes of this
spirituality present themselves in ecofeminist theory. Here, grounded
empirically in the global crisis of our times, they are
recognised to be ideologically sound.
Kane (1989: 43) discusses the female’s change of status among the
Israelites, claiming that it was against the Moon Mother who had been
worshipped in Sinai before Jehovah that
Judaic monotheism fought its fiercest struggle.
The Feminine was more reviled in Judea than she ever was in Greece as
evidenced symbolically by the fact that the serpent, which used to be connected
conceptually with mystery and
numinous energy, became Eve's tempter. Eve slid from innocence to being
a mere woman, marked by sexual self-consciousness and bodily shame. Kane points
out that like Medusa,
she became lost in matter.
There is little recognition that Eve’s rebellion could be read as a spur
to spiritual progress. Joseph Campbell sees a historical rejection of the
Mother Goddess implicit in the Genesis
account of lithe “Fall”.
It seems that when the Hebrews came into Canaan
In Man-Made Language!
Dale Spender demonstrates the potency of sexist language as a tool of
patriarchal ideology.
"Intentionally or otherwise, men have formulated a semantic rule
positing themselves as the norm, and classifying the world from that reference
point, constructing a symbolic system
representing patriarchal order" (1980: 58). It is therefore highly
significant that certain contemporary linguistic philosophers believe that
language shapes our consciousness more than
it expresses it (Ackermann 1992).
Indeed, the relationship between thought and language has become a
critical issue within both feminist and psychological theory. It demands an
analysis of the interplay between
individual and social consciousness, and the effect of the social
context, including the culturally pervasive theological anthropologies and
ideologies, on individual development
as mediated through language itself.
Vygotsky, a post-revolutionary Russian psychologist, worked extensively
on the relationship between thought and language within personality development
and argued that words
are not only central to the development of thought, but also shape the
growth of consciousness (1962: 153). 'Thought not only finds expression in
words, it comes into existence
through them" (1962: 125); the child's mastery of sentence
structure creates the infrastructure of her/his thought. "Thought is
determined by language, by the linguistic tools of thought
and by the socio-cultural experience of the child" Vygotsky
concludes (1962: 51).
Building on the historical materialist psycho-linguistic analysis
exemplified by Vygotsky, feminist theologians have increasingly examined the
role language plays in organising, and to
a large extent formulating, spiritual experiences, knowledge,
expectations and inner states. Perhaps pre-eminent in this regard, and
controversial not the least for that reason, is Mary Daly,
whose ground-breaking “Beyond God the Father” (1973) unleashed a storm
in theological circles: Women have had the power of naming stolen from us. We
have not been free to use
our own power to name ourselves, the world, or God. The old naming was not
the product of dialogue - a fact inadvertently admitted in the Genesis story of
Adam's naming the animals
and the woman ...
To exist humanly is to name the self, the world, and God. The
"method" of the evolving spiritual consciousness of women is nothing
less than beginning to speak humanly - a reclaiming
of the right to name. The liberation of language is rooted in the
liberation of ourselves (Daly 1973: 8).
Informed by the sociology of knowledge which emphasises how humans
evolve through "ongoing conversation" between themselves and
significant others in their society, Demaris Wehr
(1988: 16-7) fleshes out the profound implications of androcentrism
perpetuated universally by the use of male generic language. A perniciously
oppressive power relation, androcentrism
drowns the voices and perceptions of women in its continual influx of
male perceptions on the world.
Wehr emphasises how this conveys the message of women's inferiority to
them on a far subtler, deeper level than negative treatment or belittlement
could. The use of male generic language
perpetuates the habit of androcentrism. Once women are defined and
treated as object and not subject, as not normative, and not fully adult, the
definition itself alienates women from a
sense of authenticity and subjecthood.
Definitions and categories exert great suggestive power since they tell
us what is in the nature of things ...
This is why liberationist groups have focused on the importance of
experience. By relying on their own experience, and not on what someone from
the ruling group tells them their
experience is (or should be), "minorities" have come
increasingly to trust themselves and, as a result, to be able to challenge
prevailing social definitions (Wehr 1988: 16-7).
It is in the context of this critical understanding that the thesis
argues for a therapeutic approach based on the insight that a valuable source
of empowerment in the alienated modern age
is to expand one's understanding of and engagement with one's personal
experience, both internal and external, and to develop a language that
harmonises with and facilitates active
involvement with one's dream life. Thus the realm of the inner life
comes into clearer relief, and the healing quest for soul may begin. Through
its misogynistic language, law, theology,
anthropology and ethics, patriarchy has consistently equated the very
nature of women with contemptible inadequacy.
Consequently, most people think in dualistic constructs which align
women and feminine aspects of nature with the "negative" half of all
pairs.
As Phyllis Chesler so artfully exposed in “Women and Madness” (1972),
most twentieth-century women who are psychiatrically labelled, privately
treated, and publicly hospitalised
are not mad. They may be profoundly unhappy, self-destructive,
economically powerless, and frigid - and so they remain the women they have
been conditioned to be.
Jackson (1996: 116) provides another variation on this theme, arguing
that new developments in feminine consciousness have been struggling to surface
for a long time, and that eating
problems have replaced hysteria as a medicalised expression of women's
malaise and need for transformation. While this is a collective problem,
insight and awareness can essentially only
be realised through the attempts of individuals to bring these psychic
forces to consciousness. She points out that a few centuries ago in various
cultures, the young woman who rejected
the option of marriage, or in whom the spiritual dimension took
precedence, had a socially acceptable alternative in celibate religious orders.
From a metaphorical perspective, today's non-menstruating anorexic, who
typically avoids sex as well as food, and the obese woman with her defensive,
protective layer of fat, may be
seeking that alternative in the body.
The impact of child sexual abuse on the experience of embodiment the
great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic
duplicity.
Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the
opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at
what brings you nothing but misfortune.
Our nervous system isn't just a fiction, it's part of our physical body,
and our soul exists in space and is inside us, like the teeth in our mouth. It
can't be violated forever with impunity
Pasternak “Dr Zhivago” (1959).
Therapists have likened the body to a museum which contains many
artefacts from childhood. A key premise of the New Age healing ethos is that
trauma is stored in the physical tissue
until the day it is expressed and resolved.
Most body and movement therapies are based on the assumption that the
body has a long memory.
The child who has been sexually abused learns that her body is not her
own, that other people's wishes for her body are more important than her own.
Thus she is denied the opportunity
of learning about and being in her body in a pleasurable and safe
manner. Indeed, as we shall see in our case study, the alienation from the body
is often profound, because it has caused
or is seen as having caused so much trauma that the result is a
split-off body complex. This thesis seeks to show that alienation from the body
leads to an alienation from the self and that
the language of both is communicated symbolically through the dream.
Greene (1984: 11-2) discusses how Jung was led by a dream in later life
to an indepth exploration of alchemy and its links to the psychic process of
individuation. Ultimately, he found
concealed in the ambiguous language of the alchemical tradition the
essence of his own personal myth. He identified strongly with the phases of
psychic and spiritual transformation
which he saw mirrored in the alchemists' apparent concern with the
transformation of material substances. Yet the material, the realm of
embodiment, was not scorned by Jung, who
nurtured and explored his rootedness in the physical world even when he
was most abstract and intuitive in his theoretical formulations. He loved to
play with water and earth, for
example, and he personally carved and laid the stone of his beloved
Bollingen, which Greene sees as "truly the incarnation of his own
soul". For Jung, body and psyche, spirit and matter,
the concrete and the intangible were not split or disconnected but
interfused with each other. Greene (1984: 12) points out that although he uses
the term "body" in the “Collected
Works”, it is often in the sense of a mystical or subtle body or as a
metaphor for something else, for example, the undifferentiated material one
brings to analysis. In lithe “Tavistock
Lectures," Jung (1950: 23) speaks of body as shadow: The body is a
most doubtful friend because it produces things we do not like: there are too
many things about the body which
cannot be mentioned. The body is very often the personification of this
shadow of the ego.
Sometimes it forms the skeleton in the cupboard, and everybody naturally
wants to get rid of such a thing. Pertinently, Jung lived at what one may hope
is the approaching end of
more than 4 000 years of patriarchal culture which as we have seen,
elevates spirit and denigrates the body, as dark, evil and loathsome.
Although Jung was writing before the emergence of the feminist and
certainly the New Age insight into the need for the body to be reclaimed and
integrated alongside psyche in the
therapeutic process, he is prophetic (1933: 253): c
The body lays claim to equal recognition; like the psyche it also exerts
fascination. If we are still caught by the old idea of an antithesis between
mind and matter, the present state of
affairs means an unbelievable contradiction; it may even divide us
against ourselves. But if we can reconcile ourselves to the mysterious truth
that the spirit is the living body seen from
within, and the body the outer manifestation of the living spirit -the
two being really one- then we can 'Understand why the striving to transcend the
present level of consciousness
through acceptance of the unconscious must give the body its due. Jung
concluded that the various bodily symptoms were messages from the psyche itself
and could therefore be
given a symbolic meaning, the key to which was most immediately
accessible in dream images. For Jung the dream functioned as an intermediary
between the physiological and
the psychic, yoking them together, just as projections pointing outwards
to objects were linked to symbols pointing inwards to Self.
Thus healing power resided in a conscious awareness of the symbolic nature
of the dream, which provided the psychic meaning of those body symptoms by
which the spirit struggled
to communicate its condition and its needs. Clearly therefore, the
individuation process can also be observed in the body. Woodman (1980: 60) concluded
in relation to her work with
eating-disordered patients that obesity had to be understood in terms of
its symbolic meaning ...
understanding lies in the approach to treatment and the possibility of
healing. Elaborating on this insight, Woodman (1989: 61) notes: Jung recognised
that the power of the complex
could have pathological results in the body ...
Repeatedly he emphasised that it was not the intellect but the emotions
that were the chief factor in determining these associations, and that "all
affective processes are more or less clearly
connected· with physical manifestations" (CW 2: par. 1080). Jung
defined a "complex" as a collection of imaginings, which in
consequence of (its) autonomy, is relatively independent of
the central control of consciousness, and at any moment liable to bend
or cross the intentions of the individual (CW 2: par. 1352).
It was Freud's investigations, however, that led the furthest of all
into the invisible reality of many women's lives, as Herman (1992: 18) highlights.
Profoundly offending patriarchal sensibilities, Freud's discovery of
childhood sexual exploitation at the roots of hysteria transgressed the
boundaries of social credibility and rendered
him ostracised within his profession. The publication of “The Aetiology
of Hysteria” in 1896, was met with an ubiquitous, stony silence.
Herman (1992: 18) how he wrote to Fliess shortly afterward, “I am as
isolated as you could wish me to be: the word has been given out to abandon me,
and a void is forming around me."
Freud's subsequent recasting of actual sexual trauma in terms of Oedipal
fantasy has become vilified and scandalised where it is not buried. Yet one is
inclined to agree with Herman
(1992: 18), "No matter how cogent his arguments or how valid his observations,
Freud's discovery could not gain acceptance in the absence of a political and
social context that would
support the investigation of hysteria, wherever it might lead”. Such a
context had never existed in Vienna and was fast disappearing in France.
Significantly, Freud's rival Janet, who
did not abandon his own traumatic theory of hysteria and who never
retreated from his hysterical patients, lived to see his works forgotten and
his ideas neglected. It has been largely
as a result of the feminist enterprise of deconstruction of patriarchal
frameworks that these ideas have gained current credence. Moreover, the New Age
recognition of the importance
of wholism has emphasised the feminist insight into the centrality of
the body as the site of both oppression and hidden wisdom. As Nadeau (1996: 58)
concludes: The body is much
more than a tool which we must periodically wake up, energise or refuel
in the educational process. Rather, it holds some of the keys to both analysis
of present circumstances and
identification of the future direction women can take to meet their
needs and regain control of their daily lives. In other words, becoming
conscious of one's bodily and subjective
states not only plugs one in to a source of readily available and renewable
energy, but also offers an accessible focus for demystifying the political
context which constructs individual
experience.
Nadeau thus argues for an understanding of what she calls lithe
political economy of the body", proposing this as a feminist theoretical
tool for finding concrete starting-points for
women to develop a gender analysis of global restructuring (1996: 58).
Abramovitz (1992: 57) In addictions, the body often carries the
psychotic corner, and consequently body work has to be handled with great
sensitivity: Often in the process of analysis
the person becomes ill ... The body is suddenly faced with the pain of a
lifetime that has been hiding in the cells, and bringing that to consciousness
is agonising. Because the soul is
huddled in the body, in hiding, it is experienced as emptiness. But this
is a sacred emptiness, because this is where the abandoned soul is. So until we
learn to value the betrayed
feminine parts, the intuitive, the irrational, the spontaneous, we will
continue to betray the soul. And we will experience the sense of guilt so often
found in the psyches of addicts,
where they know they will be punished but they don’t know what the crime
was.
Estes (1993: 200) discusses the instinctive psyche’s view of the body as
an information network, a messenger with multiple communication systems in the
physical, intuitive and
emotional realms. Conversely, in the imaginal realm, the body is a
potent vehicle, a spirit who accompanies us, a prayer of life in its own right.
She points out that in fairy tales, represented by magical objects that
have superhuman abilities and qualities, the body is represented as having two
pairs of ears, one for hearing
the mundane world, the other for hearing the soul; two pairs of eyes,
one for normal vision, the other for far-seeing; two forms of strength, the
power of physical stamina and
the indomitable vitality of the soul.
Narrowing the focus for such insights, Kane (1989: 152) observes that
healing in incest survivors is often heralded by the beginning of regular
menstruation, and that a few have
remarked that they bleed less at menstruation.
One patient explained that, now she was ready to express her anger, she
no longer needed to bleed so much from her womb.
Kane's (1989: 152) it is this part of her body that holds the hurt done
to her.
Overcoming the trauma of childhood sexual abuse
Child sexual abuse emerged as a major theme in the case study discussed
in Chapter 5.
Alex: Examining the parallel between bulimia and the molestation,
provides clear examples of the theoretical links practitioners make:
When sexual arousal takes place, after a point it is like a
roller-coaster downhill. It cannot be stopped until it reaches the end.
Although initially I really was forced, and all the way
through was held down and forced, I felt guilty that my body found even
a crumb of arousal and response to the stimulation. Enormous guilt and
self-disgust and total feeling of
being out of control. Similarly, with the bulimia once I've started
eating and even if I have just a taste of a "forbidden" food, I feel
"out of control" and feel like I'll just have to let
go and let it happen. A tremendous sense of panic, false joy (if I'm in
company), a sense of urgency and then total passivity to the inevitable binge -
right until it has reached its end
(like the roller-coaster).
Importantly, it's strange that I use the word roller-coaster but it's
very relevant: all happening far too fast, many different disordered out of
control feelings all rushing up at once.
Inability to rationalise them and honestly just no time to. There's
nothing I can do, I am on it, strapped in, and it's roaring so fast, and I
can't get off.
I want to because I feel uncomfortable with all those feelings ...
Obviously when the roller-coaster ride is finished, after physically
recovering from the shock and numbness and forgetting about it and secretly
vowing never, ever to get involved in that again
(as with sex, with bingeing). Ferenczi was Freud's closest analytic
colleague for over 20 years, and in his last paper, "Confusion of
Tongues”, he "explained that the child's desire for tenderness
can be exploited by an adult's need for sexual gratification at any
price; if this abuse occurs, the child becomes paralysed by fear” (Kane 1989:
23).
For Ferenczi it is clear that such seduction is hatred, not love, and
that the love/hate split is still foreign to the child's consciousness. The
child brings to bear in the traumatic situation a "pathogenic
defence mechanism" which Ferenczi was the first to· name -
"identification with the aggressor”. The aggressor disappears as external
reality and becomes intrapsychic. We will see this clearly articulated by Alex
in the following chapter.
The intrapsychic phenomenon can be shaped into positive or negative
hallucinations and through the accompanying trance-like state the child
maintains her pre-incestuous trust at the expense of
trust in her own senses, so losing her hold on reality.
Moreover, the victimised child takes on the victimiser's guilt, since no
one her operations gradually, and indeed I would have thee do the same: let thy
imagination be guided wholly by nature.
And observe according to nature, through whom the substances regenerate
themselves in the bowels of the earth.
And imagine this with true and not with fantastic imagination (CW XII,
par. 218, emphasis added).
From a Jungian perspective, imagination is the authentic power of the
soul to create images, whereas fantasy is insubstantial, deformed, often
ridiculous. Jung (CW XII: 219)
describes imagination as the: active evocation of (inner) images
secundum naturam, an authentic feat of thought or ideation, which does not spin
aimless and groundless fantasies into the blue
- does not, that is to say, just play with its objects, but tries to
grasp the inner facts and portray then in images true to their nature.
Kane (1989: 25) observes that sexually abused women have surrendered to
the ~ realm of fantasy, abandoned themselves to the unconscious, primarily
because their bodies, and hence their vitally
important childhood and adolescent egos, have been stolen away from
them. Robbed of imagination, in addition, they have been robbed of soul. Kane
highlights that the seriousness of this
dilemma is extremely difficult to appreciate in a society that does not
value imagination, and where the distinction between fantasy and imagination is
rarely articulated.
Kane (1989: 7) comments on the incestuous nature of the archetypal
patriarchal families embodied in Greek mythology. These are not sacred
marriages of feminine and masculine, or of culture
and nature. Rather they are based on the rape of the feminine, decimation
of mother wisdom and invasion of the mother-daughter bond. In the same vein;
Susan Griffin, author of “Pornography
and Silence: Culture's Revenge Against Nature”, outlines the disastrous
consequences of the separation of culture and nature, mind and body, and the
concomitant identification of the male
with mind and culture, and the female with nature and the body.
The exaltation of the male pole of this duality necessarily constructs
the female as the enemy: Perhaps here is the clue to why daughters who face the
same human condition, and must have the
same desire to master nature, move toward self-punishment and
self-diminishment rather than to dominance and sadism. For the daughter is
taught by culture to identify the "dark and inaccessible"
within herself. She herself is culture's lost self; she is the power
that is both denied and feared. Hers is the nature that must inevitably imperil
not only those around her, but even herself
(Griffin 1981: 148).
Thus, to state the issue in bold terms, childhood sexual abuse takes
place in a context that, on an all but explicit level, constructs rape as the
normative sexual experience. One must recall in
this regard that it was only very recently that rape in marriage became
a criminal offence. Moreover, it is woman herself who is culpable in her
assigned role of chthonic temptress, corrupter of the
lofty male spirit. Overlain with such injurious motifs, the more
primitive bodily wounding of the sexually abused girl child necessarily
presents peculiar difficulties and opaqueness during adult
attempts at healing.
Jane Milton: In "Abuser and Abused: Perverse Solutions Following
Childhood Abuse", observes: A woman who has been sexually abused in
childhood as distinct from one who has been subject
to some other kinds of violence, will have experienced various sorts of
intimate bodily invasion, that are beyond, and importantly distinct from, those
experienced in the service of feeding and
care in infancy ...
The mental representation of the body is likely to be affected in
serious ways. What can result in a sense, in severe cases a delusion, that the
insides of the body, particularly the womb, have
become dirty and diseased. Milton (1994: 251) points out that in early
infancy the self is primarily a body-self and that the infant has no frame for
sorting out emotionally or factually what the
differences are between the places food, urine and faeces go.
Sexual abuse, particularly if it occurs early, can inhibit the emotional
resolution of such issues, and will feed into, concretise and prevent the
modification of, primitive phantasy about the body
orifices and spaces. Milton concludes that there is a crucial connection
between eating disorders and sexual abuse, over and above the undeniable links to
a disturbed relationship to the feeding
mother. The quality of the body contact within the primal relationship
significantly determines whether the child will have an essentially positive
attitude toward herself and others. Self-mutilating
or abusing attacks in such patients may serve the double purpose of
producing further addictive, perverse excitement, and also a punitive assault
on the "bad" internal organs which have become
contaminated by identification with the intrusive, excited organs of the
abuser.
Referring to Welldon's (1988) contestation of the pervasive belief that
frank perversions are less common in women, Milton (1994: 244-5) argues that
for women, more than for men, the whole
body is involved in sexual functioning. Women therefore have great scope
for perverse functioning, including in their relationship to their wombs and
their children. The expression of perverse
attitudes, in syndromes of self-injury and in eating disorders occurs
much more frequently in women than in men, and the severity of such disorders
often fluctuates with the menstrual cycle.
The negative mother complex lithe dark core,"
Virginia Woolf named it, writing of her mother. The dark core.
It is beyond personality; beyond who loves or hates us. We begin out of the
void, out of darkness and emptiness. It is part of the cycle understood by the
old pagan religions, that materialism denies.
Out of death, rebirth; out of nothing, something. The void is the
creatrix, the matrix. It is not mere hollowness and anarchy. But in women it
has been identified with lovelessness, barrenness,
sterility. We have been urged to fill our "emptiness" with
children. We are not supposed to go down into the darkness of the core.
Yet, if we can risk it, the something born of that nothing is the
beginning of our truth (Rich 1980: 191). The symbol of the source of all being
as mother resonates deeply with our pan human
experience of this primal bond.
In contradistinction to the prevailing separatist, authoritarian notions
of a "Father God", many contemporary feminists perceive the symbol of
the Goddess to be an essential affirmation of the
authenticity of female power as beneficent and independent. Published
first in 1955, The Great Mother is a classic early Jungian text in which analytical
psychologist Erich Neumann attempts
a structural analysis of the "inner growth and dynamic" of the
archetype, and its manifestations in the myths, symbols and art of human
history.
Neumann (1963: xlii) prioritised the depth psychology of the feminine
within his own work because lithe peril of present-day mankind springs in large
part from the one-sidedly patriarchal
development of the male intellectual consciousness, which is no longer
kept in balance by the matriarchal world of the psyche".
Downing (1987: 8) points out that Neumann's analysis is severely limited
by the fact that it is written from the perspective of the son's image of the
mother, and therefore has more relevance
to an understanding of male psychology and the male's initiation into
matriarchal consciousness, than to the inner dynamics of the female psyche.
Ontologisation of archetypes is clearly exhibited in the paradigm
Neumann uses in his mandala of the female principle, which involves four
manifestations of the archetypes as an inner psychic
image:
1. the Good Mother (connected to childbearing, vegetation mysteries and
rebirth);
2. the Terrible Mother (associated with disease, death, dismemberment
and extinction);
3. the Positive Transformation Goddess (linked to vision, wisdom,
ecstasy, and inspiration mysteries);
4. the Negative Transformation Goddess (related to deprivation,
intoxication, insanity and impotence).
Neumann identifies the primary symbol of the elemental mother as the
vessel which represents her own body.
Depending on whether the personification is positive or negative, it may
appear as cave, coffin, grail or cauldron. In her positive elementary aspect
she conceives and nourishes a child, and
then births and rears it. She frequently appears mythologically as the
sorrowing mother who, deprived of her child, achieves phenomenal feats in order
to be reunited with it. This myth had
such a powerful hold on the Greek imagination that it became the basis
for the Eleusinian mysteries.
Similarly, Egyptians cherished the Isiac mysteries surrounding Isis,
Osiris, and Horus (Engelsman 1979: 21).
The devouring, destructive power of the mother is personified as Gorgon,
Hecate, Kali or Medea who appear terrifying in their mercilessness.
Importantly, this aspect is also shadow: enraged Demeter, capricious
Isis, destructive Lilith. The transformative mode has its roots in the bodily
transformations which occur within women
during menstruation, pregnancy and lactation. Neumann terms these the
blood and milk mysteries, connected to the hidden and magical powers of women.
Despite the comprehensive
quality of his work, Neumann's reduction of the feminine to two axes,
the maternal and the transformative, each with a creative and destructive side,
sets up a rigid opposition which
polarises the positive and negative aspects.
This theory is clearly too tidy to reflect the complexity of feminine
endeavour and experience. In an article entitled, "Visual Images by Women:
A Test Case for the Theory of Archetypes”,
Estella Lauter (1985) explores how the image of the mother looks to
women themselves. In asking how the ideal of female nurturance is treated in
works by women, she restores the image
to an historical context that has been largely ignored. Ultimately she
argues, that it is the reification of Renaissance, Romantic and Victorian
ideologies, rather than the archetype of the
mother, that we need to contest (1985: 60).
In the images of the mother created by twentieth-century women artists,
Lauter identifies both strength and vulnerability. Behind the many strengths
portrayed, she points to the "binding"
forces shared: the internal wound, the vulnerability to violence, the
machine, the mask, the stereotype, the straitjacket, the inability to act
directly (1985: 61). It seems that, particularly in
addicts, the most devastating wound is the absence of the mother. In an
essay entitled “The Roots of Addiction", Julian David (1997: 11) notes
that primal damage is caused by lithe
state of unwantedness".
Alone in nature human children physically survive the absence of good
mothering ..
But they survive as deeply traumatised people characterised by fragile
boundaries and borderline personalities. She may find that her hunger will lead
her back to the severed root of her
connection to the archetypal Great Mother, whose healing and nourishment
is endless. Van Veelen construes this process as a dark and traumatic
initiation into the mystery of the feminine,
one requiring many sacrifices. For the animus-ridden woman the most
difficult sacrifice to make is the hope of being loved sufficiently by someone
in the outer world. Normal human loving
cannot assuage the deep hunger of a woman with this degree of emotional
deprivation. She has to turn within, to the healing powers of her own psyche.
As the subject of our case study remarks, "I actually find it very
difficult to believe that I am loved. I doubt people’s “love for me”.
Kane (1989: 154) makes the same point: For the suffering soul of incest
to heal, she must be joined with the Great Mother, in those deep dark places of
silent and excruciating transformation.
The woman on her underworld healing journey must meet the wise woman who
teaches her to listen to her own heart and to connect with the centre point of
Self - her inner priceless pearl.
It is a tragic fact that the meaning of this form of human suffering is
frequently missed in contemporary treatment centres, where an emphasis on
cognitive-behavioural and other empirical
approaches all too often results in loss of the depth dimension, the
profoundly symbolic avenues available for exploration.
The defences of the patient are systematically and subtly removed and
the negative mother complex responsible for the problem is re-constellated
within the hospital setting and team itself.
Here is another example, if peculiarly tragic and ironic, of the outer
mirroring the inner.
The treatment team, limited in vision and “ heart", fails to
contain the deepest of the patient's desperation, much of which, in eating disorders
particularly, is often related to experiences of
childhood sexual abuse, as we shall see.
Eating disorders and the negative mother complex
A secure sense of being contained by caring people is the basis of
personality formation. When this is shattered, the person so traumatised loses
her sense of herself. Another way of putting
this simple but critical truth is to say that the growing child's
positive sense of self is dependent on the caregiver's wise use of power. As
Herman observes (1992: 52-3), sexual abuse violates
personal autonomy at the level of basic bodily integrity.
The body is invaded, hurt, defiled. Woodman (1985: 119) argues that in
most eating disorders the body is ill with the poison of the negative mother
complex. The way out of this is to confront
the complex.
The negative mother complex constellates a fear of the psyche as well as
a morbid fascination, which takes the form of an addiction which both soothes
and feeds a bottomless pit of anxiety.
"In the absence of the nourishing mother, whether personal or
archetypal, people try to concretise her in things, as if to make present what
they know is absent” (Woodman 1993:44).
Extending the insight from the individual to the collective level,
Jackson (1996: 114) wonders whether lithe obsessive pursuit of slimness in our
society is part of an expression of our revulsion
at the grossness and psychic inflation of our materialistic age.
Certainly one may read the modern consumerist frenzy in the First World
as an analogy of the bulimic binge, the consequence of a macro negative mother
complex reflecting the lack of attention
to the soul's life in our time.
Jackson (1996: 114) comments: The extreme abstention demonstrated by
sufferers of anorexia nervosa recreates or parodies the world-denying
asceticism which in the past has been practised
for spiritual development. Plato has located in the stomach region that
part of the soul which reiated to the appetitive or desirous nature, seen as a
beast of necessity, a beast to be fed in order
that nobler aspects of human nature could function. Sometimes a secret
longing for a more spiritualised life lurks in the flight from body weight and
the instinctual demands of the gut.
Descent and transformation
The patriarchal ego of both men and women, to earn its
instinct-disciplining, striving, progressive, and heroic stance, has fled from
the goddess, or tried to slay her, or at least dismember
and thus depotentiate her. But it is toward her, and especially toward
her culturally repressed aspects -chthonic chaotic, ineluctable depths- that
the new individuating, yin-yang balanced
ego must return to find its matrix and the flexible strength to be both
active and vulnerable, assertive and empathic (Perera 1985: 139).
Perera notes that dream images of the abysmal goddess are common during
phases of analysis where the conscious ideal is about to undergo mortification
and be radically transformed.
One woman dreamt the following: I am on a subway platform, trying to
scrape up a package of hamburger meat that has fallen and spilled. Nearby looms
a giant, black-robed, cold, sadistic
woman who watches. She is like a queen cobra. She has the amoral face of
darkness. She can do anything; she's not interested in life or being nice.
She's objective, efficient, of this solid earth
and as ruthless as it takes - - - - - (1985: 152).
This dream presaged a depression in which the patient's grandiose
ego-ideal was ground down and she was forced to accept the positive shadow's
previously feared, calm strength. She made
significant changes in her life and later dreamed that the dark woman
had moved into her housekeeper's room, replacing a nice, homely, ineffective
woman (1985: 153).
Perera discusses how this underworld aspect of the feminine emerges in analysis
when animus-identified puella women descend into what the idealistic animus has
labelled evil, sick, ugly
or loathsome.
The introversion or regression is often so slow and deep that it may
turn into a profound deathlike depression, which can be terrifying if there is
no orientation to its archetypal meanings
and pattern. In fact many myths exist about the descent of and to the
goddess, including the stories of the Japanese Izanami, the Greek
Persephone-Kore, the Roman Psyche, and the fairy-tale
heroines who go to Saba Vaga, Mother Hulda, or the gingerbread house
witch (Perera 1985: 137).
The oldest known statement of this motif, was inscribed on clay tablets
in Sumeria in the third millennium aCE.
However, Perera is among those who believe that the myth is much older,
dating from preliterate times. Usually known as lithe Descent of Inanna".
For Inanna/lshtar forms a multi-faceted symbol, a wholeness pattern, of
the feminine which extends beyond the merely maternal. Sumerian mythology was
populated by great sea and
earth mothers, but Inanna was hailed as Queen of Heaven and Earth. She
was also goddess of war, order, sexual love and fertility, healing, emotions
and song. She was, in short, the Great
Goddess.
As this thesis has tried to show, the loss of this wholistic feminine
archetype under patriarchy is perhaps the single most critical factor in the
pathologies of our time, both individual and
collective. As Perera (1995: 148) notes, lithe joy of the feminine into
and return from the abyss of the dark goddess. Inanna shows the way and she is
the first to sacrifice herself in the
pursuit of wisdom and atonement. She descends, submits and dies.
Perera (1985: 142) suggests that this openness to being acted upon is
the essence of creative human experience of the transpersonal.
David (1997: 15) expresses the same essential idea in his reply to the
question of how addictive problems can be addressed:
"There is no human fate that cannot be faced. There is no human
fate that is not better faced. Jung called it the unconditional acceptance of
one’s own fate, which includes, above all, who
one is and what has shaped one."
From a Jungian perspective, connecting to these levels of consciousness
entails a sacrifice of the upperworld aspects of the Self to and for the sake
of the dark, different, or altered-state
aspects. It means sacrifice to and for the repressed, undifferentiated
ground of being in the hope of re-emergence with a deeper, more resonant
awareness. From this perspective, the story
of Inanna’s descent is the revelation of an initiation ritual, and it is
directly relevant to the crisis of the feminine today:
Thirdly, the myth delineates a pattern of psychological health for the
feminine, in women and men, providing a model of the incarnation-ascension
rhythm of the healthy soul, and also
of a process which promotes healing (Perera 1985: 143).
Inanna's descent reveals the purpose of retrieving repressed values and
of uniting above and below, conscious and unconscious, in a new pattern. It is
absolutely critical for the healing of
the wounded feminine that the voluntary death embodied in the myth of
Inanna's descent is distinguished from an imposed death experience.
Confusion in this regard is both reflected by and may be ascribed to, in
part at least, the later Greek myth of Persephone / Kore. Persephone does not
voluntarily descend to the underworld;
she is abducted and raped by Hades. Arguably a patriarchal deformation
of the Inanna motif, the Persephone story constructs rape as not only normative
but also as essential to feminine
development: to become an adult woman, the daughter must be seized from
play with her friends and from the care of the mother and subjected to the
violence of rape.
What is more, Persephone herself is held responsible -significantly,
through her eating of a few pomegranate seeds- for the fact that for half of
the rest of her life she is compelled to
live with her rapist. Support for this admittedly controversial reading may
be discerned in the clinical experience of practitioners working with victims
of sexual abuse.
Kane (1989: 33) notes, for example, I have come to realise that the
sexual assault is an imposed death experience for the victim. That is, the
victim experiences her life as having been
taken by somebody else.
Paradoxically, until the victim is strengthened through a fully
conscious psychic death-experience, she is never free to enter a relationship -
either with an inner or outer male (animus)
figure.
Kane notes that the subversion of an experience that should be willing
and conscious is at the root of much of the masochistic behaviour of victims.
The victim knows the need for a
conscious experience of death but if the descent is to be healing, it
must be activated and supported by Self - not by the memory of coerced death.
In a sense, only the individual
can really see his or her own voluntary death process.
The therapist can at best intuit the process and support it. But the
inner witness needs to have come of age.
The inner child of the abused adult needs releasing into life, love,
spontaneous playfulness and centred discipline in order to grow up sufficiently
to becomes that adult witness of
conscious disintegration.
(Kane (1989: 34). In a crucial admonition to practitioners, Kane (1989:
35) adds: The abused woman's desperate flight into the world of the patriarchal
ego could be nothing but exacerbated
by a therapist unable to willingly join with the woman in death, without
considering this a female seduction. In reality, the woman needs her therapist
to help her descend into her own body
and to let her old self die. The end goal of this arduous experience,
the archetypal heroine's journey, is not the slaying of the hideous dragon /
snake / Gorgon invented by patriarchy.
It is a connection with the true and intimate feminine in whatever form
she may disclose herself. Then it may be possible to withdraw from the
compulsive mothering +/o. compulsive
shadow-sexuality of the prostitute which so often characterise survivors
of abuse. Therapist and patient may then witness the emergence of the energy of
the sacred harlot, what Kane
(1989: 151) calls lithe archetype of profound heart consciousness so
deeply repressed in our society personality, and we shall revisit this theme in
the next chapter. A statistically significant
proportion of the subjects of the German study reported the identical
fantasy. They were in a dark place and under attack from something like a book.
It subsequently emerged, through systematic research, that all these
individuals had been the object of an attempted abortion. They were seriously
unwanted, in other words, and David
insists, as noted earlier, that it is this state of unwantedness that
was responsible for the damage to the personality and the ensuing addiction.
Woodman (1985: 117) suggests that the abandoned one at the heart of
addiction is the soul of the potentially conscious woman who needs to feed
herself with creative imagination.
Developing this theme years later, Woodman (1993: 46-7) notes that it is
important to recognise that on some level, in some peculiar way, we are all in
the same mess, whether we are
alcoholic, children of alcoholics, anorexic, workaholic, or drug or
money addicted.
Supporting the diagnosis of global spiritual hunger made in this thesis,
Woodman insists that addicts are trying to run away from God as fast as
possible but, paradoxically, we are running
straight into her arms. The soul is trying to lead us into the presence
of the divine and our task is to seek to understand the symbolism inherent in
the substance or behaviour to which we
are addicted.
A luminous example of wounded desire transformed was Bertha Pappenheim,
better known perhaps as Breuer's patient Anna 0, who was the only one of the
early investigators who carried
the exploration of hysteria to its logical conclusion (Herman 1992: 19).
After terminating therapy with Breuer, Pappenheim remained ill for some
years.
Thereafter the mute hysteric who had invented the "talking
cure" found her voice and sanity in the women's liberation movement.
Disguised by a pseudonym, Paul Berthold, she translated
into German Mary Wollstonecraft's Classic treatise, a “Vindication of
the Rights of Women”, and authored a play, “Women's Rights”. Using her own
name, Pappenheim subsequently became
a prominent feminist social worker, organiser and intellectual. During a
lengthy, fruitful career she founded a feminist organisation for Jewish women,
directed an orphanage for girls, and
travelled throughout Europe and the Middle East to campaign against the
sexual exploitation of children and women.
Herman (1992: 19) quotes a colleague: ...
A volcano lived in this woman ... her fight against the abuse of women
and children was almost a physically felt pain for her."
At her death, the philosopher Martin Buber commemorated her: "I not
only admired her but loved her, and will love her until the day I die.
There are people of spirit and there are people of passion, both less
common 'than one might think. Rarer still are the people of spirit and passion.
But rarest of all is a passionate spirit”.
Embodiment, ecofeminism and the feminist Eros
The early feminist insight that the personal is political can be seen as
a contemporary restatement of the ancient occult proverb attributed to Hermes
Trismagistus: “As above, so below”.
Be that as it may, it is now surely beyond argument that the feminist
critique of power relations continues to be pertinent to problems escalating
most obviously on the ecological level.
For example, feminists point out to ecologists that overpopulation is a
product of social structures that deny women both power over their own bodies
and options for their lives other
than breeding (Starhawk 1989: 181).
In lithe “Origin of the Family" published
in “Toward an Anthropology of Women” (1975), Kathleen Gough identifies eight
characteristics of male power within patriarchal social history.
Rich (1981: 10-12) elaborates, detailing the extent of power which men
have appropriated over women.
Ecofeminists extend this type of radical analysis to patriarchal
domination and exploitation of nature. A summary of Rich's (1981) analysis
follows, a shocking catalogue of the consequences
of the destruction of the feminist Eros.
1. The denial of women's sexuality: by means of clitoridectomy,
infibulation; chastity belts; psychoanalytic denial of the clitoris; closing of
archives and destruction of documents relating to
lesbian existence; punishment, including death, for adultery and lesbian
sexuality.
2. The forcing of male sexuality upon them: the socialisation of women
to feel male sexual "drive" amounts to a right; rape, including
marital rape; wife beating; incest; child marriage; pornographic
depictions of women responding pleasurably to sexual violence and
humiliation.
3. The exploitation of women's labour and control of their produce: the
role of marriage and motherhood as unpaid production; male control of
contraception, abortion and the malpractice of
male obstetrics; enforced sterilisation; pimping; the horizontal
segregation of women in paid employment; the decoy of the upwardly mobile token
woman.
4. The control or theft of their children: the use of mother to
genitally mutilate, or bind the daughter's feet (or mind) for marriage; female
infanticide; the seizure of the children of lesbian
mothers by the courts.
5. Physical confinement and prevention of movement: haute couture;
"feminine" dress codes; foot-binding; the veil; sexual harassment on
the streets; rape as terrorism; horizontal segregation
of women in employment; prescriptions for "full-time"
mothering; enforced economic dependence of wives.
6. Using women as objects in male transactions: lobola; arranged marriages;
the use of women as entertainers to facilitate male deals viz. wife-hostess,
cocktail waitresses required to dress for
male titillation, call girls, "bunnies”, kisaeng prostitutes,
geisha, secretaries.
7. Cramping their creativeness: definition of male pursuits as more
valuable than female within any culture so that cultural values become the
embodiment of male subjectivity; witch persecutions
as pogrom against independent, unassimilated women; restriction of
female self-fullfillment to marriage and motherhood; the social and economic
disruption of women's creative aspirations;
erasure of female traditions.
8. Withholding from them large areas of society's knowledge and cultural
attainments: the "Great Silence" regarding women and particularly
lesbian existence in history and culture; non-education
of females; male social/professional bonding against women in the
professions. It is in this truly diabolical context, in which the doom inherent
in the patriarchal project is ever more vividly
inscribed on both the body of woman and the body of the world itself,
that the quest for a feminist Eros emerged as crucial.
Haunani-Kay Trask (1986) provides a useful summary of, notions of Eros
and power in feminist theory, surveying writers such as Rich and Daly, who
implicitly use a concept of Eros in their
work, and those such as Griffin and Lorde who explicitly identify the
erotic as a form of power.
Brock (1988: 112) argues that Eros as power has a sacred dimension which
leads to an understanding of incarnate Spirit.
Trask (1986: 110) singles out Daly for her stunningly original
contribution to the quest for a feminist Eros, commending her attempt in
Gyn/Ecology to construct a new symbolic for women,
complete with its own unique analysis, feminist language and metaphor.
Daly gives the name of Gyn/Ecology to the feminist Eros of generative love and
power, defining it as the “reclaiming
of life-loving energy”.
Championing this concept of a feminist Eros, Carter Heyward (1988: 2)
locates the meaning of justice within the realm of radical relationality.
She observes that “justice is right relation and right relation is
mutual relation in which all persons are more fully empowered to experience
themselves and one another as intrinsically precious,
valuable, good, irreplaceable earth-creatures, sources and resources of
joy and love in relation to one another” Alice Walker adds a powerfully lyrical
dimension to this idea in her classic,
“The Colour Purple”, where Shug describes her vision of God to Celie in
these words: God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the
world with God. But only them that
search for it inside find it ...
My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds.
Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a
motherless child, which I was, it come to me:
that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all (1983:
167).
The feminist Eros is thus grounded in the relational lives of women and
in a critical, self-aware consciousness that unites the psychological and
political spheres of life, combining love and
power. Crucially, this is not "power over", but what Starhawk
(1989) identifies as personal power or "power from within". Erotic
power, in short, is the power of primal interrelatedness
(Brock 1985: 26).
Conversely, erotic power denied and crushed produces dominance and
control.
Supporting the feminist emphasis on relationality, Susan Griffin (1981)
describes Eros as the basic yearning for others and for discovery of our
deepest selves. Our hearts seek the intimate
relationships towards which Eros draws us; the domination and consequent
isolation which are the negation of Eros are not of the heart's seeking.
Similarly, in Audre Lorde's analysis, the
erotic facilitates the surfacing and connecting of our deepest needs
while it also provides a basis for sharing with others. In this way, the erotic
is a response to alienation, to the patriarchal
separation of mind and body, "life" and "work," love
and power.
Knowledge of our erotic selves is therefore empowering since,
"Connected to our erotic life force, we are in a position of strength. We
can rebuild relationships and whole societies because
we have rebuilt ourselves, returned to an inner source of strength"
(Trask 1986: 161).
Quest for the soul the tools of the human potential aspect of the New
Age movement range from the techniques of traditional psychotherapy through
various forms of body work to the
esoteric techniques of the wisdom traditions and mystery schools. A
significant feature of New Age culture is thus an intertwining of
psychotherapeutic, somatic and spiritual approaches.
The wholistic New Age model of health has reintroduced study of the
relationship between body, mind and spirit or soul. It recognises the influence
of psychological, emotional and spiritual
factors, thus redefining the nature of the healing process.
Myss (1991: 81) asserts that studies in this area clearly indicate that
any healing process must be extended to include attention to the inner life of
the human being. In other words, attempts
at healing must take account of the SOUL. Pre-eminent among contemporary
Jungian expounders of soul is James Hillman, also known as the founder of
archetypal psychology.
He notes that Heraclitus (Frg. x) provides the first record connecting
the concepts psyche, logos, and bathun ("depth”): “You could not find the
ends of the soul though you travelled
every way, so deep is its logos”, and reports Snell's vital insight: “In
Heraclitus the image of depth is designed to throw light on the outstanding
trait of the soul and its realm: that it has
its own dimension, that it is not extended in space” (Hillman 1979: 25).
Hillman comments that from Heraclitus onwards, depth became the quality,
direction and dimension of the psyche. Indeed, the term depth psychology says
quite clearly: to study soul,
we must go deep, and when we go deep, soul becomes involved. The logos
of the soul, psychology, implies the act of travelling the soul's endless
labyrinth. According to Aristotle,
Heraclit took soul as his first principle, which qualifies him as the
first depth psychologist in our tradition.
Clearly, Heraclit's statement about the depth of the soul also intimates
that visibilities are never enough for the soul because it desires to go
beyond, to go ever inward and deeper.
This, he says (Frg. 54 in Hillman 1979: 26), is because "Invisible
connection is stronger than visible". In other words, to arrive at an
understanding of anything, we must go into its darkness.
Why? Because lithe real constitution of each thing is accustomed to hide
itself" (Heraclit Frg.123). Hillman (1979: 26) concludes that since what
is hidden is the true nature of all things,
including nature itself, then only the way of the soul can lead us to
true (deep) insight
Significantly for our purposes, therefore, soul may be understood as
involving a process of penetrating or exploring depths, a process which, in a
sense, creates soul as it proceeds.
Coming at the issue from another angle, Hillman defines soul as an
unknown component that makes meaning possible. Soul gives life and death
meaning and purpose, the purpose of
life being the recovery of the perspective of soul. Soul
"works" through the metaphor of deepening, deepening events into
experiences; and it has a special relationship with the underworld
and death. Soul is communicated in love; is at the heart of religious
concern; and is the imagination possible in our natures - the ability to
experience through reflective speculation, dream
image and fantasy.
The language of soul is image. Soul is the middle ground between body
and spirit/mind.
Bleakley (1989: 10) sees soul, which in Greek is psyche and in Latin
anima, as the proper subject of the study of psychology.
Soul itself is the medium through which we are able to reflect on our
existence, although much of contemporary psychology would diminish soul to
“mind” - or the physiology of the brain.
Bleakley adds that “soul is that which is in motion”, motion which may
be ordered or chaotic. He cites the view of Proclus that the soul often shows
through number, rhythm and periodicity:
the soul “must move in periods”, and “what moves perpetually will return
to its starting-point, so as to constitute a period”
• Noting Proclus's assertion that “every soul is indestructible and
imperishable”, and the Platonic view that soul is the unknown factor which
makes memory possible, Bleakley concludes
that psychology is properly the giving of meaning and speech to soul.
Kakar (1983: 181) expresses surprise at how few Western psychologists
believe in the psyche as a condition of human existence.
He refers to a traditionally Indian, South Asian Eastern perspective on
the phenomenon of the occult which, assuming the existence of the psyche and
psychic reality, is more able to accept
psychic products, including the mind-created goddesses and gods.
As Jung (1977: xxxiv) notes in his "Psychological Commentary"
which introduces Evan-Wentz's version of “The Tibetan Book of the Dead”:
"Psychic reality" is a controversial concept,
like "psyche" or "mind".
By the latter terms some understand consciousness and its contents,
others allow the existence of "dark" or "subconscious"
representations.
Some include instincts in the psychic realm, others exclude them. The
vast majority consider the psyche to be a result of bio-chemical processes in
the brain cells. A few conjecture that
it is the psyche that makes the cortical cells function.
Some identify "life" with psyche. But only an insignificant
minority regard the psychic phenomenon as a category of existence per se and
draws the necessary conclusions. It is, in my view,
a tragedy of almost incalculable dimension that the perception of the
psyche and psychic events as "a result of biochemical processes in the
brain cells" retains hegemony in the Western
medical and particularly the psychiatric establishment.
The consequence is that literally millions of people now depend on
chemical "fixes" to insulate them from the suffering that should be
construed as a cry of the soul. Those who combine
such psychiatric prescriptions with engagement in a therapeutic process
which admits the soul may arrive at the meaning of their pain, and so heal. For
the rest, perpetual numbing seems
to be the best they can hope for.
Turning to the issue of embodiment of soul, Rupprecht (1996: 128)
describes how Mindell's concept of the "dream body" functions to
dissolve boundaries imposed between inner and outer
worlds, expressing eloquently what the term psycho-physical really
entails. Like synchronicities, dreambody communication occurs continuously. It
"hovers between body sensation and
mythical visualisation" (Mindell 1982: 8).
The "drearnbody" is defined as a "multi-channelled sender
asking you to receive its message in many ways and noticing how its information
appears over and over again in dreams and
symptoms" (Mindell 1982: 8).
It is the term for the total, multi-channelled personality and thus
makes no distinctions or value judgements between signals from the body and
from the mind:
symptoms and symbols are both crucial components of the dreambody's
language, which includes the organic and inorganic. Mindell (1982: 3) insists
that it is not only the mind that
dreams and individuates, seeking growth; the body also wants to become
all that it can be. This individual rnind/body/dream complex is located within
the universal, using an ecofeminist
lens.
Mindell (1985: 71) says, "Your dream body is yours, yet it is not
yours. It's a collective phenomenon, belonging to nature and the world around
you". The "dreambody" idea is obviously
related to the far older notion of the "subtle body". In his discussion
of lithe Subtle Body and Imaginal Experiences in the Interactive Field",
Schwartz-Sal ant (1989: 132) states that the
subtle body is akin to what was known in Newton’s day as the aether, a
concept not discarded until the advent of Einsteinian thinking. It is the
archetypal forerunner of the 'field concept
in physics and of the interactive field concept in psychotherapy.
Introducing “The Doctrine of the Subtle Body in Western Tradition”, Mead (1919)
comments: lithe notion that the physical
body of man [sic] is as it were the exteriorization of an invisible
subtle embodiment of the life of the mind is a very ancient belief.
II
Jung reviews the value of the subtle-body concept in “Psychology and
Alchemy” (1.953, par. 39411.) but he develops the concept more fully in his
unpublished Seminars on Nietzsche’s
“Thus Spoke Zarathustra”. Jung argues that projections from the psyche
are transmitted through the medium of the subtle body (1934-1939, Vol. 3,
p.139) and manifested in psychic and
physical transmissions from one person to another (1934-1939, Vol. 10,
p.144).
In essence, however the subtle body appears to refer to the unconscious
as it is experienced in the body:
It is marvellous to encounter [the subtle body concept] in a text which
naively comes from the wholeness of man ...
Zarathustra is one of those books that is written with blood, and
anything written with blood contains the notion of the subtle body, the
equivalent of the somatic unconscious” (1934-1939,
Vol. 3, pp. 151-2).
Schwartz-Salant (1989: 138) notes that the professional pressure Jung
was under to be scientific caused him to underplay the subtle-body concept in
his “Collected Works”.
Jung details its significance in alchemy and the process reveals a great
deal, not least the significant fact that the process of imaginatio is
conceived of as “half-spiritual, half-physical”
• In “Psychology and Religion”, Jung (1937: par.13) writes: Our usual
materialistic conception of the psyche is, I am afraid, not particularly
helpful in cases of neurosis, if only the soul
were endowed with a subtle body, then one could at least say that this
breath or vapour-body was suffering 'from a real though somewhat ethereal
cancer, in the same way that the gross
material body can succumb to a cancerous disease
ll (1937, par. 13). He adds later (1937: par. 36): “I have often felt
tempted to advise my patients to think of the psyche as a subtle body in which
subtle tumours can grow”. Embodiment
and the nature of desire Body awareness has become a vital focus in
Marion Woodman's analytic practice because of her experience with women and men
who, despite sincere commitment
to a process of engagement with their dreams, are still unable to trust
the process. She sees their souls as dislocated in bodies so wounded that the
ego's willingness in itself is simply not
enough. (1991: 130-1) She argues that the faster the ego advances, the
more terrorised the body becomes. The task then is to create a way of returning
to the point of the wounding to
reconnect with the abandoned child.
The body, like the child, tells the truth - through movement or lack
thereof.
Woodman (1991: 131) asserts that a trained observer can discern whether
the soul resides in the body, or whether the body image is so intolerable that
the flesh is barely inhabited.
Invoking Hillman's observation that "the image by which the flesh
lives is the ultimate ruling necessity", she concludes that what is at
stake is the integration of body, spirit and soul.
The psyche is enacted through the medium of the body, which William
Blake described as "that portion of the Soul discerned by the five
Senses". Woodman explicitly assumes that the
soul is much more than the bodily "portion" of itself, nor is
it limited to manifesting in the physical body since it manifests also in the
infinite "body" of the imagination, a body that includes
the entire visionary world of the arts - poetry, dance, music, painting,
architecture, sculpture, and so on. That the soul may act in yet another world,
of which the arts are an expression,
a zone of immortality, is one of the oldest speculations of humankind.
Vorwort/Suchen. Zeichen/Abkürzungen. Impressum.