JULY: Patricia Damery and Naomi Ruth Lowinsky: Marked by Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way.
“This life is the way, the long sought after way to the unfathomable which we call divine.” C.G. Jung, The Red Book
Each of us has a story about how we found our way to Jung, or to Depth Psychology. Often it is a story about a life crisis: something or someone has died, the old structure falls apart, life as we knew it doesn’t work anymore. We are disoriented, confused, depressed. And then, something surprising happens, something new is born-- in a dream we discover a room in our house we never knew was there. These life altering experiences are our personal versions of Jung’s “confrontation with the unconscious” which he recorded in The Red Book. His courage has encouraged us all.
When Mel Mathews of Fisher King Press asked us to collaborate on an anthology, we knew we wanted a collection stories about the lived experience of the “Jungian Way.” We invited Jungian analysts and teachers to write personally about their own soulful paths, and how the fire marked them. The people we chose were able to do just that, following that trail of mystery Soul presents. Marked by Fire is the result.
We are pleased to be able to converse with you who are members of the Depth Psychology Alliance’s Book Club about Marked by Fire. It is our hope that you’ll feel inspired to reflect on your own life journey, and to share some of it with us.
Marked by Fire is divided into five sections. During our four weeks together in July we plan to focus on each section. We have four groups of questions for you which we will present at the beginning of each week. They correspond with the structure of the book.
We’ll likely add more questions as our conversation sparks them.
First Week:
Please read the first three stories by Patricia Damery, Jerome Bernstein, and Claire Douglas, all of whose writings come under the Section Heading: The Might of the Earth.
The land is alive, sacred and essential in these stories. Patricia Damery awakened to soul on the farm where she was raised. Jerome Bernstein, a city boy, had an experience of merger with the land when he began working with the Navajo. Claire Douglas credits a farm she had in Oregon with saving her soul. That terrain nourished and cultivated her, and helped her find her circuitous way to Jung.
Question: Has the Earth spoken to you on your own soulful path? Are there riddles you have been required to “live”? Have the ancestors of the land upon which you live influenced and/or helped you? Do you have an early memory or dream that foreshadows your life’s concerns and passions?
Replies
Dear Patricia and Ruth – I have only just gotten to read parts of Marked by Fire, and I am so taken with the experience and setting you have engaged with in the compilation of the book – thank you for prefacing the book and each section with the anchor of the land alive and speaking through images.
I love Truchas NM and have memories of times outside in the surrounds that still bring delight. Reading Patricia’s chapter has elucidated the reason why. It has do with sharing the feeling of the experience of eternity in nature with another person or alone.
I wonder if that mysterious word you experienced “manitou” indicates this feeling state of eternity in nature?
Is this a specifically feminine way of approaching life?
Does the experience of Manitou have any qualities or states that you would care to describe or elaborate from your experience?
Your remark (p. 14) on setting the (manitou) stone, as establishing the intention of harmonious balance between earth and sky is beautiful – now I recall all the standing stones I have seen in my hikes around New Mexico!
I am also struck by Robert Romanyshyn’s quotation of Rilke, on p. 138: “Earth, isn’t this what you want: an invisible re-arising in us?”
IS there something of the emergence of the archetypal hinted at in this quote?
Reading parts of Marked by Fire has given me a feeling of kinship with the Jungian way as described by so many of the authors. Thank you for the gold, and the encouragement to continue with the effort of exploring and expressing psyche – that of the Earth and all of us. I look forward to seeing you at the DPA gathering for your book signing this Saturday.
Julie
Dear Julie,
Thank you for your comments. I do think the experience of what may be manitou is an experience of eternity. I think of it as an absolute presence that is at once objective and personal. It really is an experience that is hard to put into words because it is so beyond language. In my dream, the manitou was mysterious, compelling, but also dark and wingless, like a penguin. It is a combination of the sky and earth, perhaps the dark light of alchemy. And Robert's comment is very appropriate here: an invisible re-arising , something once known, I suspect, but now known in another way.
And I am glad that you share the feeling of the numinous of Truchas. It too is dark and light, full of presence and pain. The landscape is spare, full of mysterious history and otherness.
It's curious that I read The Sister from Below not long ago, at Smoky Zeidel's insistence, and never connected your male muse with the animus. I'll look for McNeely's book. Thank you!
Great questions Yvette. I haven't thought much about it in connection with Jung and von Franz, but I certainly know the animus to be a very important guide, beloved and companion in my own life. I write about animus as muse in the last chapter of The Sister from Below. There is also an interesting new book on the animus, which takes a much more positive view. It's called Animus Aeternus, by Deldon Ann McNeely. She uses poetry, her own and that of many others, to elucidate the animus.
I hope you have conversations with both Jung and von Franz and challenge them on this.
I'm moved, Rebecca,, by how you express this feeling of not being held in the non-ordinary dimension, it being narrowed and seen as only internal. I remember that exact feeling, just "bereft" as you put it, when I returned from a trip to India where I had felt held in the living numinosity of divinity-- alive with gods. It felt so empty, so bland and stale here, in America. I wrote about this in my chapter on India in The Sister from Below.
I think Jung lived in that non-ordinary dimension while he was working on The Red Book. But then, to be taken seriously, as Patricia has pointed out, he needed to put on his suit and act like a professor who was, as he always declared, an empirical scientist. Sadly, in our culture, so few have the experience you describe, that those of us who live there can feel marginalized and/or pathologized.
I hope you do talk to Jung and find out how he sees these things now.
I would like to ask Jung why he wrote so little about the animus and why it was mostly in negative terms. It's easy to say that he was a product of his time, but is that the only answer? His thinking was largely unparalleled, except by a few philosophers, and so were his methods, so it's not as if he was not used to thinking outside the box, so to speak. And he was surrounded by brilliant women, yet even they, for the most part, bought into the negative portrayals of both the animus and women. I'd also like to ask Marie-Louise von Franz why she wrote so negatively about the animus in her various books on fairly tales when she clearly did not fit with that flighty, untrustworthy imagery.
Perhaps you have read Vine Deloria Jr.'s book, C. G. Jung and the Sioux Traditions, ed. by Jerome Bernstein (one of the authors in Marked by Fire) and Deloria's son. He takes up some questions around this issue you are bringing up, the narrowness of the mainly psychological approach to the psyche, and Jung's confusion with it. Jung defines archetypal in several ways, depending on his life's experience, I think. His ideas developed as he faced death and studied alchemy. He was so cautious about appearing mystical, wanting to be accepted broadly by the psychological community (and he was edited!). It has impacted us to this day. I wish you could have this conversation with Jung as well. I too
wonder what he would say in 2012?
I have much enjoyed following this discussion through the weeks and chapters. I met the works of Jung after already being steeped in a more shamanic view of the world and psyche. Even with the soulful focus on psyche, I found that through the rigorous and narrowed attention to soul/psyche as psychological and thus internal, during my Master's degree program in depth psychology, I began to feel bereft of the experience of being held and supported through shamanic practices and visitations that took place in what I would describe as an external nonordinary dimension. Is this the psychoidal? I would love to discuss this with Jung, and to ask his thoughts about developments in what we understand archetypal to mean and its role in individuals and culture.
Yvette, you have been through an amazing initiatory experience, one guided by mysterious forces within and without. Your drawings are probably be food for a lifetime, as Jung's Septum Sermones roughly sketched the arc of his life's work. I don't know about spiritual possession, but you certainly experienced communion with Spirit and it sounds like your life will never be the same.
For our last week with Marked by Fire we'd like you to read the final section: "Writing the Fire." In it Dennis Slattery, Robert Romanyshyn and I tell of our struggles to make room for the poet. Slattery wrestled with mainstream academic psychology. Romanyshyn was torn between two intense callings: philosophy and poetry. I work out my breach with Jung, who was suspicious of artists. At the suggestion of The Sister from Below I engage Jung in active imagination. We become drinking buddies by the primordial fire.
Each of us tells a story of how we first met Jung. Romanyshyn begins his essay:
I first met Carl Jung in front of the chimpanzee cages at the Berlin Zoo in the summer of 1965. Of course, he had already died, and so the meeting was a bit peculiar for someone like myself who, at 22, did not have much experience with the dead.
Slattery writes of being disappointed with what mainstream psychology had to offer the soul. When a friend in graduate school urged him to read C.G. Jung's Modern Man in Search of a Soul his world was transformed.
When did you first meet Jung? How did that meeting affect you?
I engage a reluctant Jung in active imagination. He insists I remember that he is a fantasy. But we do have a dialogue about poetry and soul that heals my breach with him.
What would you want to speak to Jung about?
-
1
-
2
-
3
-
4
of 4 Next