Tag Archives: Carl Jung

Voting, Jonathan Haidt, and e e cummings

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A couple days ago I blogged about the research of Jonathan Haidt which suggested that we vote more in accordance with our feelings than with reason.  Given my poetry-flooded mind and heart, I recalled a quip from e e cummings, “he who pays attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you.” I “felt” this was relevant but did not see how so I did note quote it in that post.  Now I understand. 

First, I should explain that cummings was such a recalcitrant that he would not comply with the simple rules of grammar like capitalization, punctuation, the spacialization of the page, and even “proper” use of words and images.  YET, in so doing his poetry conveyed profound wisdom and beauty to those whose mind/heart is “squishy” enough to be open to poetry.  But “wholly kissing” someone really pinged me, understanding that to kiss someone whole heartedly entails an ability to throw oneself into the intense passion of the moment so that he…in some sense…”forgets”… restraint, or concern for “syntax” or structure.  In other words, in that moment of passionate embrace, everything else is put aside. 

The feeling dimension of voting is important because it is very human.  But those who “wholly kiss” their candidate can easily lose respect for the “syntax” or structure and will be willing to overrule any and all other considerations in the election process.  The feeling function in their heart is so intense that they too closely identify with the candidate; in some sense they have melded with him so that he embodies the hidden desires and wishes of their heart.  They have pledged their heart to him, “lock, stock, and barrel” so that he knows he could tell them, “I could shoot someone in the middle of the street in Manhattan and my poll numbers would not fall.” 

This “feeling function,” (see Carl Jung) is a very important dimension of the human heart but can lead to catastrophe if it is not balanced by the “thinking function.”  But it is very easy to find oneself encumbered with tyrannical thinking patterns and motifs that are not subject to the internal dialogue that comes from employment of the feeling function. Thinking and feeling are not allowed to work in tandem, a cooperation which makes us a human and keeps us from becoming a mere ideologue. 

“Well Worn Words and Ready Phrases….

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…Build Comfortable Walls Against the Wilderness.” This quip from poet Conrad Aiken has captivated me for decades now as his work and that of other poets continue to erode my “comfortable walls.”

I was born into poetry but the hyper-conservative, linear-thinking community in which I found myself disallowed any consideration of a nuanced way of perceiving and organizing my world.  That is not to assign blame; if I had to assign blame, I would have to blame myself for lamely imbibing into the depths of my heart the world view and experience that was proffered me; I did not even try to find my own voice. I desperately felt the need to fit in, to belong, which is a very human “need.” But my desperation to obtain this belonging-ness probably created a sense of dis-ease with many of my classmates.  Decades later I would learn the label for this existential malaise was “alienation.” 

But in the mid-eighties, the breath of life breached my endungeoned heart when a friend gave me a copy of W. H. Auden poetry and I fell upon a copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets.  I have quoted Kafka on the resulting experience often before, citing his note that literature is like a pick-axe that “fractures the frozen sea within.”  And that “fracturing” of my soul was painful, and continues to be…and will always be…as the “einfall” of Carl Jung will often be. (Jung employed the German term for an irruption into a person’s psyche of what had been excluded.)

Language is not static…though static hearts can attempt to “static” it, or “staticize” it, and often succeed at least temporarily.  But poetry, or some visit from the arts, will often breach the walls of the stale prison of thinking inside a bubble, even if the bubble is inside one’s own head!  But when the bubble takes place in a group, the value of language itself is threatened as words will be used merely for perpetuating group think and the language itself will die spiritually. Here is a poem by an Irish poet, W. R. Rodgers that addresses this issue and poignantly notes the “death” that hides in a sterile language. 

WORDS (an excerpt) 

By W. R. Rodgers 

Once words were unthinking things, signaling 

Artlessly the heart’s secret screech or roar, 

Its foremost ardour or its farthest wish, 

Its actual ache or naked rancour. 

And once they were the gangways for anger, 

Overriding the minds qualms and quagmires. 

Wires that through weary miles of slow surmise 

Carried the feverish message of fact 

In their effortless core.  Once they were these, 

But now they are the life-like skins and screens 

Stretched skillfully on frames and formulae, 

To terrify or tame, cynical shows 

Meant only to deter or draw men on, 

The tricks and tags of every demagogue, 

Mere scarecrow proverbs, rhetorical decoys, 

Face-savers, salves, facades, the shields and shells 

Of shored decay behind which cave minds sleep 

And sprawl like gangsters behind bodyguards. 

“Within Be Rich, Without Be Fed No More”

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That Shakespearean quip is a succinct summary of what Carl Jung offered us decades ago:

If you remain within arbitrary and artificially created boundaries, you will walk as between two high walls: you do not see the immensity of the world. But if you break down the walls that confine your view, and if the immensity and its endless uncertainty inspire you with fear, then the ancient sleeper awakens in you, whose messenger is the white bird.

Then you need the message of the old tamer of chaos. There in the whirl of chaos dwells eternal wonder. Your world begins to become wonderful. Man belongs not only to an ordered world, he also belongs in the wonder-world of his soul. Consequently, you must make your ordered world horrible, so that you are put off by being too much outside yourself.

Your soul is in great need, because drought weighs on its world. If you look outside yourselves, you see the far-off forest and mountains, and above them your vision climbs to the realms of the stars. And if you look into yourselves, you will see on the other hand the nearby as far-off and infinite, since the world of the inner is as infinite as the world of the outer.

Just as you become a part of the manifold essence of the world through your bodies, so you become a part of the manifold essence of the inner world through your soul. This inner world is truly infinite, in no way poorer than the outer one. Man lives in two worlds. A fool lives here or there, but never here and there.“ ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 264 |

Specious Reality Gets a “Reality Check” Here and There

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My focus here recently has been reality, as in “reality.”  My emphasis is the vulnerability that “reality” faces, as it is something other than the basic assumptions that we take for granted.  Here, I am putting on the table something that cannot actually be put “on the table.”  For “reality” is subtle to the point that we can never fully grasp it with our feeble, pea-sized brain but only with a discerning heart that can understand these subtleties, or at least understand that they can only be inferred.  In this effort I make it very complicated…because it is complicated, infinitely so…but it can be simply presented by borrowing from the Apostle Paul, “We see through a glass darkly.”

It is this “darkliness” that is imperiled with the term I employed days ago, “the judgement of God.”  Psychologist Carl Jung used the word “einfall” to describe this irruption into our consciousness, an intrusion which often rattles our cage beyond our comfort zone.  Another term I’d like to introduce here is the “black swan” popularized several years ago by Nassim Nicholas Tasseb with his book, “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.”  Tasseb uses the aberration of a swan being black rather than white to introduce the shock of cognitive dissonance, the “catastrophe” of realizing that things are not as we see them.  According to Wikipedia, Tasseb’s metaphor “lies in its analogy to the fragility of any system of thought.  A set of conclusions is potentially undone once any of its fundamental postulates is disproved.”

Our world is now being shaken to the core, with many “fundamental postulates” jeopardized.  Any country worth its salt will have leaders who will avoid blaming anyone, will focus on the problem as it applies to its own people, and offer a well thought out strategy for this perilous moment in history.  The image of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, confined to a wheelchair, calmly guiding us through the Great Depression and into the 2nd World War came to my mind.  What courage, fortitude, and faith.  He knew it was not all about him.

An Exploration of Trump’s “deity”

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I’ve long noted a rock-solid “belief” that many Trump supports have in him, so firm it is almost like he is a god.  I do think that divinity is an issue with him, though it is a dark divinity.  Carl Jung pointed out that the notion of god, if explored deeply and honestly, would always expose the ambivalence of the heart.  A theological term, aseity, is relevant.  This term means “in and of and for itself.”  In Christian theology this is often called the pleroma or the god-head.  This is the god who is the prime mover, able to move others but incapable of being moved by anyone or anything outside of himself. This is a valuable term for an exploration of Deity but when it is discovered in a human being, to any degree it will be malignant narcissism and catastrophic in its consequences.

This Trumpian darkness has been present throughout Trump’s life.  For example, in 1995 walking into the dressing room of Ms. Teen USA beauty pageant where young girls were in various stages of undress or nude.  He explained later, “Well, I owned the pageant.”  And he frequently voiced in public…video is still available… his lascivious designs on his daughter Ivanka.  God’s can even intrude into the incestuous realm.  In the 2016 campaign he avowed, “I can stand in the streets of Manhattan and shoot someone” and not lose my support base; this is being proven almost daily.  In the impeachment furor currently underway, his minions are speaking in explicit terms of Trump’s invincibility and inviolability, Lindsey Graham declaring earlier in the week, “All I can tell you is from the president’s point of view, he did nothing wrong in his mind.”  Someone quipped on Twitter, so astutely, that the same could be said of Jeffrey Dahmer.  Then yesterday Alan Dershowitz contributed to the aseity-complex demonstration, declaring that as President there are no limits for Trump, adding that if he deems his re-election as President is best for the country he can do what he needs to obtain that re-election.

Group-think has enveloped the Republican Party and is threatening the entire country.  Their investment, their “faith” in this dark “savior” is so intense that they’ve pledged more loyalty to him than they have any awareness of.  They have “drank the Trumpian kool-aid” and it is more deadly, in the long run, than the Jim Jones flavor.  People who have been devoured by group-think have lost the ability to “think” and are completely subservient to premises which they will not dare to look at.  This reminds me of an intense argument I had decades ago when I was in college with a girl friend who was studying law.  My argumentation was proving too much for her and she suddenly, in exasperation declared, “You are arguing to make a point and I’m arguing to stay alive.”  We later explored that exchange and I learned she meant that she was arguing to “stay on top” or win the argument and found herself in dispute with someone who merely wanted to make a point. She could not handle “losing” the argument though winning/losing was not on any agenda I had in mind.

The problem in Congress on display here…reflecting a problem in the American soul…is that the GOP is “arguing to stay on top” making compromise impossible.  If they did not suffer from that Trumpian insistence on “being right” as in “not being able to concede the possibility of ‘being wrong’”, they would be able to see that there are national interests that supersede this fracas and focus on any of these problems would diminish the internecine hostilities.  But this is not a matter of reason.  They have “dug in” with Trump, dug in so deep they cannot get out, and he knows it.  Their judgement is impaired and you can’t reason with someone or “someones” whose judgement is impaired in this fashion.  On a lighter note, but actually not so light, they might wonder at some point, “Hey, putting a man who is so insecure about his penis size that he had to reassure the entire world about the matter on Tv was not such a good idea.”

Greta Thunberg is More Wise Than Steven Mnuchin.

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Today U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin took a swipe at the climate change heroine Greta Thunberg, saying she is in no position to give advice on the matter since she has not been to college yet.  Well, let me point out he has been to college yet he works for a man who is so insecure that he had to reassure the nation and the world about the size of his penis and lacked self-awareness to the extent that there are numerous recordings of him clearly voicing his lecherous designs on his own daughter.  And these are but two “trivial” examples of Trump’s impaired judgement. Sometimes human judgement is less impaired when one has yet to be ensconced in the comfort zone of a group think that constitutes reality in her/his culture.  And yes, she is “autistic” and thus can be described as “mentally ill” given the “authority” of the DSM-V, but “mentally ill” is not so “mentally ill” in a culture that puts a mentally ill man at the helm of its government.  This brings to mind a note by Carl Jung, “If you find a sane man, bring him to me and I will cure him.”  Jung knew well that there was a “psychopathology to everyday life” that could produce madmen who would pass as “sane.”  From Thunberg’s “seclusion” in her very private world, she has not lost the ability to peer out and look upon this human comedy and offer critique, not unlike Shakespeare who noted so famously that, “Tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in its petty pace to the last syllable of recorded time. Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”  Shakespeare saw the lunacy of his day and brought it to the attention of his fellow-travelers in 16th century England.  This lovely young 17- year old lady has the courage to offer a similar critique to our day; a prophetic vision always comes from beyond the pale.

The “Wounded Healer” and Its Pitfalls

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A couple of friends today introduced me to the work of a “wounded healer” that I had not run across, Marsha Linehan.  Linehan is a noted mental health professional, a professor of psychology, psychiatry, and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington who suffered severe mental health issues of her own earlier in her life.  Her turn around was the result of a mystical religious experience which, to cynics can admittedly be credited to “mental illness.”  I am not one of those critics.

The “wounded healer” is one who is not a detached “caring soul” who is offering an aloof “care” to someone who is suffering.  The “wounded healer” is one who has, and is, suffering her/himself and does not draw the distinction between “me and thee” that the aloof, detached care givers offer.  To those who are ensconced in the aloof, detached comfort zone…their mind and heart teeming with clinical lore…this patient or client is a “thing”.  Absent is the awareness of the relationship, the consciousness and experience that “there go I but by the grace of God.”  The wounded healer has seen, experienced, and owned his/her pain and can offer an empathy that those without that woundedness can offer.

However, the pitfall of the wounded healer is the inability to set boundaries.  If that person cannot recognize that even with that powerful empathy there is not simultaneously a distinction between “me and thee” he he/she will be sucked into a morass of self-indulgence in which he/she and the patient is done great harm.  You might want to check out the following link:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/evil-deeds/201112/linehan-and-jung-wounded-healers

 

The Challenge of “Naming Our Demons”

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Early in my clinical career a client of mine was a young truck driver who was dealing with substance abuse.  Shortly after the therapy began, I asked him to share about his family life as a child.  As he complied and described life in a working-class Arkansas family, he recalled his mother one time flashing her boobs at him when he was about four years of age; this event shamed him greatly and he had carried it with him into adulthood.  Not long after, as the work of therapy progressed, he suddenly told me he had recently had a homosexual encounter.  When he shared this, he immediately burst into laughter, uproarious laughter as if a burden had been lifted by the simple disclosure of these two events by which he had been shamed.  He must have intuitively sensed an, “unconditional positive regard” that was available in the clinical framework that I offered;  he felt free to share these two events, and others, without the fear of being judged.

It is shame that binds us into a self-defeating life, often with tragic outcomes.  Suddenly this young man found freedom from this shame bind and could only laugh that he had been tyrannized for most of his twenty-something years.  There is power in saying the unsayable, in admitting that which is too painful to admit.  There is power in putting subjective anguish into speech, “speaking words that give shape to our anguish” as George Eliot described it.  But speaking openly and honestly about what is going on in our heart, especially if we have been raised in a culture where this is verboten.  Many children learn to “shut down” even before they can verbalize, for they have certainly been very aware of the “tyranny of the shoulds” abounding in the household.  The reach of this tyranny is most lethal in early childhood as it shapes attitudes, the ability to trust others and one’s own subjective experience.

Here is relevant wisdom from Lauren van der Post: “There is nothing in your life too terrible or too sad that will not be your friend when you find the right name to call it, and calling it by its own name hastening it will come upright to your side.” As Carl Jung would say, “The shadow is to be embraced, not denied”; or in the words of poet Ranier Rilke, “The heart has its beastly little treasures.”

 

Jorie Graham Offers an “Incarnated Word”

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Jorie Graham is one of my favorite contemporary poets.  In the following poem she exquisitely explores the vulnerability of human subjective experience, a dimension of experience which is often blocked in our Western world of compulsive linear thinking.  This vein of thinking, described by Carl Jung as “directed thinking” is intentional with the intention being to comply with the expectations of the external world into which we have been born.  Jorie writes from, and certainly lives from what Julia Kristeva describes as the “semiotic” dimension of human experience.  This is the realm that W. H. Auden described as “flesh and mind” having been “delivered from mistrust.”  I see this as an incarnated experience where one has found the power to speak freely from the heart with consideration for his/her context but not a slavish consideration.  This is when truth and wisdom are presented to our world.

Self-Portrait: May I Touch You

Jorie Graham

here. May I touch your
name. Your
capital. May I
touch outcome, kindness, slur down my caresses to
throat, eyes, end of the tunnel. Come out. Now your name is changed. How do I reach
right name, right bandage – the character that you will be for now
in the dark, where there is need – is there still need? – can you be for this short time
singular? You need to be singular. There you are changing again. These words are
furrows. Now they are
arrows. Don’t touch where it says no. It says no everywhere. Where is the spot where you
are faking it. That spot. So well. Can you tell. Doesn’t work for you. What works for you.
The rouge you have applied to see who you would be for a while. You
change your mind. You change the shade. You recognise yourself for a while
then it grows old. The pupae in the mud grow old. They’ve slicked it smooth as skin with
perfect perforations. All entrances and exits. The only way, right way, the pupae morph
to their winged
stage and grow. They exit not to return. Those who laid them do not return. They
change from
unborn to being here now, 67 degrees under the eaves as they come out. I watch. Nothing
can change out here in the given. It is given and it is received. If ants find the pupae
they eat the nest through. Sometimes they get to live their life. I know you need to be
a significant player in
the creation of
your veri-
similitude. Abide abide. Do you do nude. Can I touch your apparition, your attitude,
multitude, your eternally misunderstood solitude – do you do adulthood, husbandhood,
motherhood – listen: sap in the dogwood – not like blood, crude, flood, lassitude – I want you
to come unglued – clad in nothing but blood – in it – dripping wet – appearing always re-
reappearing,
of course wearing your camouflage – whatever you currently identify as – clad in your
surface your newest reason – may I touch it – your phantom your place-
holder, undelivered, always in the birth canal, undiscovered – your personal claim on
the future, residue of all the choices you’ve made thus far, also the purchases, invoices, in
voice where your change resides, in vice where it settles – skin – a win win – the management
wishes to express concern – can I touch there where you appear in the mirror – where you lay
your simulacra down – lave the mercurial glass – bypass being – hardly a pingwhere you
boomerang – here you are back outside – ghost money –
do you not want to feel
the fierce tenacity of
the only body you can sacrifice – the place where it is indeed your
fault – there in the fault – no heartsearching? Me with my hands on the looking glass
where your life for the taking has risen, where you can shatter into your million pieces –
all appareled refusal. What are you a sample of today –
what people.

Ash Wednesday Thoughts: “Dust Balls” Are We.

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In my youth, Catholicism was the epitome of “them.”  It was a given that Catholics were not even Christian for they “believed in Mary.”  But as I’ve aged I have increasing respect for them, not unrelated to my discovery of a Franciscan priest in Albuquerque, NM, Richard Rohr.  I received via email yesterday an email from a blogging friend in Australia which included a powerful poem about “Ash Wednesday” which I will share at the end of this post.

I have faint memories of the term “Ash Wednesday” from my youth and young adulthood but these memories were tainted by the anti-Catholicism.   This brings to mind another blogging friend who I kidded with the label “Dust ball” in reference to her interest in “Mother Earth” and the biblical notion of us being “dust of the earth.”  For we are all “dust balls” bouncing around on this granite “dust ball” for a few decades with the innate, egoic tendency to take ourselves more seriously than we are.  This absence of humility fails to appreciate the emphasis that the Catholics offer with this Lent season event, symbolized with a smudge of ash on the forehead.

Humility is often confused with cravenness.  But this is related to what Carl Jung noted as two extremes of the same human egoic complex—ego inflation and ego deflation.  The “inflation” is taking our selves too seriously, but the “deflation” is not taking ourselves seriously enough, failing to respect the glory of just “being” here.  But in each instance the emphasis is on our “self” as in our ego.  The alternative would be true humility, “a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.”  Human nature is prone to focus on what we know to be reality, always a self-serving endeavor, failing to recognize that this “knowing” usually excludes so many who lie beyond that culturally contrived pale.  Humility involves letting that “pale,” i.e. “boundary,” dissolve a bit so that we can include some of those that we have heretofore excluded.  Sounds a bit like Jesus, huh?

Blessing the Dust
A Blessing for Ash Wednesday

All those days
you felt like dust,
like dirt,
as if all you had to do
was turn your face
toward the wind
and be scattered
to the four corners

or swept away
by the smallest breath
as insubstantial—

Did you not know
what the Holy One
can do with dust?

This is the day
we freely say
we are scorched.

This is the hour
we are marked
by what has made it
through the burning.

This is the moment
we ask for the blessing
that lives within
the ancient ashes,
that makes its home
inside the soil of
this sacred earth.

So let us be marked
not for sorrow.
And let us be marked
not for shame.
Let us be marked
not for false humility
or for thinking
we are less
than we are

but for claiming
what God can do
within the dust,
within the dirt,
within the stuff
of which the world
is made,
and the stars that blaze
in our bones,
and the galaxies that spiral
inside the smudge
we bear.

–Jan Richardson