Tag Archives: emotions

My Marriage and “Einfall”

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Several times I have referenced my participation in a local reading group of Karl Jung. One of his notions is that sometimes the depths of the unconscious will spontaneously break forth into one’s consciousness, almost like an invasion. He used the term “einfall” for this experience. (I will include a link to some very witty, and insightful, cartoons about this experience.)

My “einfall” is still underway and has mercifully been piece-meal, my Source knowing that I could not take it all in one fell swoop like the Apostle Paul on the Damascus Road or Eckhart Tolle on a park bench. One pivotal event in this process was getting married which I blogged about yesterday, marriage definitely being an “invasion” into my pristine, narcissistic world of Paul Tillich’s “empty self-relatedness.” A very interesting anecdote illustrates the impact this marriage was having on me just about the time of our first anniversary in the spring of 1990. One beautiful, cool, dewy spring morning I discovered the first tulip bloom in our yard and I knelt down to pick it and take it to Claire. Immediately afterward a wisp of thought fluttered through my mind, “I don’t know if I was plucking or being plucked.”

A light bulb turned on in my heart. I didn’t know as much as I do now about object-relations theory and the subject-object distinction but I realized that this “wisp of thought” illustrated that my boundaries were in transition and that this was very much related to having finally gotten married, and to the “work” of marriage described so vividly in the Wendell Berry poem provided yesterday.

Now, let me share a related thought that later came to mind. Some clinicians hearing this report of “not knowing if I was being plucked or being plucked” would be alarmed and think, “Uh oh. Psychotic break approaching! Danger, danger, Will Robinson!” And, spiritual growth is a coming apart as with a psychotic break but for some mysterious reason…which I can only describe as the grace of God…I knew there was nothing to be alarmed about, that something beautiful was underway. “Coming apart” is necessary at some point in our life so that we can be reintegrated as a more authentic person than we thought we were. This is very much related to the pithy wisdom of Fritz Perls who advised, “Let go of your mind and come to your senses” for he knew that senses or “feeling” will provide the redemptive healing that all hearts need.

 

(NOTE: I could not capture the link for “einfall.” But if you will simply google “einfall” you will see a selection entitled “images of einfall” which you can open. It is very funny…and illustrative of the idea.  Also, the reference to “Will Robinson” was from a stupid 1960s sci-fi tv show, “Lost in Space.”)

Poetic Thoughts re Intense Emotion Running Amok

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In Hamlet, Laertes knows that his daughter is “palling around” with that wastrel Hamlet and cautions her, knowing something himself about masculine rapacity:

Fear it, Ophelia, fear it, my dear sister,
And keep you in the rear of your affection,
Out of the shot and danger of desire.

Laertes did not want his daughter to give into emotions, but to “stand in the rear” like he did and keep her distance. For, he feared that letting go of that detachment would lead to overwhelming emotion and take her totally out of control, just as he feared it would do to him. Laertes was speaking of an “observing ego” which he knew monitors our impulses and keeps them from running amok.

For, Shakespeare knew that “feelings know no discretion but their own.” (W. H. Auden) When feelings predominate…and begin to tyrannize…they cannot submit to “monitoring” and insist on fulfillment of their own needs and desires. Adrienne Rich wrote of this immersion in emotion when she said, “when we enter touch, we enter touch completely.” And e e cummings agreed with Rich, noting that, “since feeling comes first, he who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you.”

I suggest some balance is needed. (Yes, my “observing ego” is doing its magic today!) We need intense emotion, we need to be “carried away” with passion, but the “balancer” must not be discarded. When this “balancer” or “observing ego” is discarded, or lost due to neurological impairment, Shakespeare might note of us, “The expedition of his violent love outruns the pauser reason.” Or, to put it in my words, “expression of his passionate intensity outruns the pauser reason.”