Book of Days: asher553

Last night my friend E. took me to the monthly event presented by the Oregon Friends of Jung. This month's program is called "Jung Embodied", featuring Meg Wilbur and Tina Stromsted. Tina - a blonde, willowy dancer - described the dual levels of communication in her intellectual but dysfunctional family of origin; that was how she became interested in body language and body expression. Meg (with short brown hair, looking bookish but with an occasional mischievous gleam in the eye) rebutted the popular belief that (paraphrasing) "Jungians don't do body". She asserted that Carl Jung himself maintained an active interest in the mind/body relationship but did not have the chance to fully explore it, and quoted several passages from CJ to that effect. (Something I didn't know: CJ collaborated with Wolfgang Pauli during the 1930s and 40s.) Jung compared the mind/body continuum to a spectrum, with the body at the "red" end and the spirit at the "violet" end; elsewhere, he used the image of mind and spirit as two cones whose tips do not touch. This second metaphor is important because it conveys the incompleteness of our present knowledge of this relationship, which CJ recognized. That the two are inseparable, however, he never doubted. Neither did he doubt the existence of something beyond the individual soul: "Below or aside one's psyche is another kind of intelligence, on which one depends," he said. And: "It is not I who live. It lives me."

Picking up where Jung left off, the speakers explained, is an explicitly feminist stream of psychoanalysis that seeks to reaffirm what Meg called the "unholy trinity" of body/shadow/feminine - unholy because they represent things that are repressed by modern civilization. While Jungians generally believe that "dreams are the closest link to the unconscious", nevertheless, they argued, the unconscious also manifests itself in physical ways, such as bodily tics and mannerisms, physical illnesses, eating disorders, and addictions. Meg cited the pioneering work of Marion Woodman, who argued that this approach is especially relevant for women because "it's not possible for women to ignore the body". (Even more forcefully, Woodman asserted that "pretending there is no body is pretending there is no Shadow".)

The final part of the event was remarkable: it consisted of Tina and Meg putting on masks they had constructed in workshops, and channeling personalities that they believed lived inside of them. It was fun to watch, and definitely a break from the "lecture" format. Still, I wasn't entirely sure how I felt about this last part. For one thing, isn't the goal of psychoanalysis to integrate the personality? To me, it seems like hanging onto these "spare personalities" is a step backwards. But I'm not a psychologist or anything.

The other thing that struck me about the mask performance was that both speakers used the personas of "working-class" characters to access certain aspects of themselves. For Tina it was an African-American woman named Geraldine; for Meg, an English charwoman named Dolly. The character of Geraldine had originally been named "EarthHeart"; Tina explained that EarthHeart/Geraldine was the maid who swept the church at night. Dolly, according to Meg, was the lady who cleaned the Jung Institute building in Los Angeles. (Remember, both of these characters are the creation of the psychologists' imaginations.)

Now, notice that both personas are described as being "maids" of some sort, tasked with cleaning sacred buildings. Both (when Meg and Tina were "in character") spoke with suitable accents. Geraldine could sing - I mean, she really could sing! It was lovely. Dolly's job was to dispense homely, down-to-earth wisdom when Meg got too academic.

One of the things African-American writers consistently notice about whites is that whites tend to see them (black Americans) as the possessors of some earthy, "feeling" quality that they themselves have lost (or imagine that they have lost). I get the feeling that black Americans are often conscious of having the dominant, white culture's repressed side projected onto them; I'm tempted to say, of being the "shadow side" of white culture.

Any society larger than a nomadic tribe is going to have to incorporate some form of "division of labor" with different people doing different kinds of work. Some kinds of work are, frankly, more "work-like" than others, and this is what we call labor. Somebody's gotta do it. Nobody wants go to back to the days of feudal Europe or the Old South; and attempts to artificially impose a "classless society" or a "workers' paradise" have generally had the opposite effect. So whatever the shortcomings of the market economy might be, I'd venture that this offers, at least, a "least-worst" option where the individual is treated as an individual and can - in theory - advance from one level to the next. Yeah, call me a capitalist pig.

So, what about the parts of our psyche that live, so to speak, amongst the dirt and dust? Is it better to compartmentalize them, like the servant class in any caste system, fated to a life of menial servitude? Or should we treat them as simply aspects of a single integrated personality, parts of our "self" no less noble than the higher cognitive functions that write graduate papers and deliver eloquent speeches?

One final note, in fairness to Tina Stromsted: Tina noted that the persona of "Geraldine" was becoming more humanized and individuated over time. This was signalled by the change of name from the somewhat generic "EarthHeart" to the more personal "Geraldine". She also disclosed that she'd learned that her own mother, growing up in the South, had had an African-American wetnurse, and that this woman was probably the prototype for her "Geraldine". I like this. And I think Tina is on the right track in learning more about her family of origin, especially this woman (whose real name is still unknown) who played such an important part in her own mother's life.

{Part 2 follows at the link.}
http://asher63.livejournal.com/39607.html

Right now, on top of the bookshelf in front of me, there sits a clock. It has an elegantly curved wooden case, about eight inches high and eighteen inches long. The brand name "Sessions" appears in the lower part of the stained, burnished face. The hours are marked on the face in classic, Arabic numerals and the crystal is on a hinged door that allows you to open it to wind the clock. You wind the clock with a key (the key sits atop the bookshelf next to the clock) which fits into two separate holes, one to wind the clock itself and another to wind the striker mechanism. The clock chimes on the hour with the appropriate number of strokes, and once on the half-hour as well.

The clock is ticking. It says the correct time and it keeps time reliably, as it has done as long as I can remember. This is the clock my parents kept in the living room of our house the whole time I was growing up. I'm told that my father bought it when my parents bought the house.

Once when I was a kid - I was twelve years old - I hid something in the clock. It was a secret. It was a piece of notebook paper with some magic writing on it. My parents were out of the house, perhaps shopping, and I was home alone. I must have stood on a chair to reach the clock (it sat on top of a bookcase then, too). I tucked the paper back in the corner of the clock case, where no one would be likely to find it. I don't believe anyone ever did. As far as I know, it has been my secret alone until this moment.

Last night I was chatting with a friend who's a Jung geek. Our conversation brought to mind my mother's old psychology books. (Mom was a brilliant, deeply troubled, self-educated intellectual.) Among her books was Carl Jung's "Memories, Dreams, Reflections", which is now on the bookcase below the clock. Re-reading an early chapter ("First Years") last night, I came across young Carl's fascination with a mannikin that he carved from a ruler at about ten years of age and then hid in a pencil box.

Secretly I took the case to the forbidden attic at the top of the house (forbidden because the floorboards were worm-eaten and rotten) and hid it with great satisfaction on one of the beams under the roof - for no one must ever see it! I knew that not a soul would find it there. No one could discover my secret and destroy it.

The figure is linked in the boy's mind with the memory of a rock on which he would sit and meditate, losing his sense of self. The passage is worth reading in its entirety (not least because of the distinctly homoerotic undertones of both the rock and the mannikn). For me, there was a flash of recognition with the magic talisman in the clock.

I retrieved the paper from the clock after my mother passed away. (In fact, it was one of the first things I remembered to do.) It records the date I placed it in the clock (March 31, 1975); I was 12 years and two months old at the time.

Why do I save all this stuff? Does it give my life meaning that it otherwise might not have? Does it help me to convince myself that all of us, even my parents, perhaps even I myself, are worthy of such minute attention? Do I hope to understand myself better, perhaps the better to unravel the troubling riddles of my own life, by delving deep into the relics of my origins?

I don't know what I was hoping to accomplish by putting the magic paper in the family clock. Maybe it was a promise made to my future self: come back, remember, do not forget me.

The clock is still ticking, and I am still alive. I have not forgotten.