Imagination - Blogs - Depth Psychology Alliance
2024-03-28T22:42:47Z
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Interview: Jungian Analyst Carol McRae on Her Drumming and Ally Work
https://depthpsychologyalliance.com/profiles/blogs/interview-jungian-analyst-carol-mcrae-on-her-drumming-and-ally
2014-02-02T00:34:07.000Z
2014-02-02T00:34:07.000Z
Patricia Damery
https://depthpsychologyalliance.com/members/PatriciaDamery
<div><p><span style="font-family:Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>On February 22, 2014, the <b>C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco</b> will offer the first of a series of eco-psychology seminars and workshops on the environment crisis. These workshops will be from differing perspectives but of one piece: the necessary crisis of consciousness in earth changes and what we can/must do. In this first workshop, <a href="http://www.eventbrite.com/e/indwelling-our-human-participation-in-the-dream-of-the-earth-registration-7406756809">Indwelling: Our Human Participation in the Dream of the Earth</a>, analysts Carol McRae and Barbara Holifield will lead participants into active imagination states through drumming and authentic movement. Following is an interview with one of the seminar leaders, analyst Carol McRae, PhD. </i></span><br /> <br /> <b>Carol, You approach the psyche in a particular way, using drumming and ally work. Could you say how you came to these practices? </b><br /> <br /> My shamanic emphasis with drumming and ally work began in 1979 with a dream of a snake jumping at my heart. I tried to deflect the snake, caught it behind its head. The next day I was to be diagnosed with breast cancer and I was afraid. I tried to find someone to help me understand what to do. I looked for help in an academic setting (through thinking) but found no help there. Further work with the dream in active imagination led me to direct conversation with the snake, who called herself Rosie. I have been guided by Rosie ever since. Drumming comes from work I did with a Lakota woman teacher at Rosie's urging. Ally work comes from the work of another Jungian Analyst, Jeff Raff, who has written <i>The Practice of Ally Work</i>.<br /> <br /> <b>Could you explain what you mean by ally work? </b><br /> <br /> Ally work is an extension of Jung's active imagination, which invites the unconscious to come forward to consciousness in whatever form it chooses. To find an ally, one develops this capacity of receptivity with a particular focus, that of finding an inner guide, a wisdom figure and connection to the Divine. Rosie is that figure for me.<br /> <br /> <b>How do you use drumming in this work?</b><br /> <br /> I drum as the Lakota drum, at the rate of double the human heartbeat. This constant sound creates an altered state over time. From the state achieved, images, feelings, whole stories can emerge. A traditional shaman uses drumming to help her/him in journeying to the underworld, which bears a striking similarity to Jung's active imagination. The shaman goes deeply into this state FOR the healing of the patient she/he is helping. I go deeply into this state WITH the person(s) I am helping.<br /> <br /> <b>Who have been some of your important mentors along the way?</b><br /> <br /> Rosie, of course, is a mentor, a teacher of the highest order. As with Jung's relationship with Philemon, his Ally, I discovered quickly that Rosie is not me. She knows more than I know and can teach me from her wisdom. Other mentors include Don Sandner, who I consider my spiritual father; Steve Wong, who taught me a combination of psychotherapy and shamanic practice; and Pansy Hawkwing, my Lakota spiritual guide.<br /> <br /> <b>What happens in ally work that is potent? How is it different from other ways of approaching the unconscious?</b><br /> <br /> Ally work is particularly powerful because It calls up one figure to dialog with again and again. This figure may first appear in a dream as she did with me. The ally may also come forward in active imagination itself. By setting an intention or focus before opening to the unconscious, one can ask for an ally. Jeff Raff has outlined a helpful approach to this process in his book on ally work, which I use in my classes for helping people to find their own allies. As Jeff says, "An ally is a divine being, a face of God that is unique to each human being. Every one of us has an ally with whom we could live, but of course most people are unaware of this fact, largely because they have been cut off from the imagination." (<i>The Practice of Ally Work</i>, p. 3) Active imagination is a broader form of contacting the unconscious which is receptive to whatever emerges from the unconscious. Dreams offer invitations from the unconscious to become conscious of particular material which it conveys. Art and dance offer ways to express unconscious material without words and may lead to greater understanding of particular personal material if approached as active imagination, an invitation to unconscious material to come into consciousness.<br /> <br /> <b>Do you have stories that you would like to share about your own work?</b><br /> <br /> My work with Rosie has had its dramatic moments, although much of it concerns my everyday learning. During my first vision quest, in this case a 24 hour time by myself in a forest, I had a particularly powerful experience with a woodpecker. For six hours he pecked on trees surrounding where I sat, moving in a clockwise direction beginning in front of me and ending six hours later in the same location at which point he was joined by a female woodpecker and flew away. I considered him a spirit guide (not an Ally, because he was a member of a species, not an individual like Rosie). Ten years later at a new home shaded by live oak trees, a woodpecker flew into a window in a direct line to where I was sitting and died. When I asked him why he had come (in active imagination), he said he had been sent to tell me to take this work seriously. I was to get up each night when I heard a bird song which imitated a woodpecker's pecking and go outside and speak with Rosie. I did this practice for about an hour each night around 3AM for three years. The woodpecker as a spiritual helper specializes in helping me get through difficult places. He opens a new space with his pecking.<br /> <br /> <b>Why do you think these approaches can help us in the crisis of the earth changes? </b><br /> <br /> This question is very important to me. I am very concerned about the crisis of climate change. It offers us both a horrifying possibility, the loss of much of the human race because we are destroying the earth system that sustains us, and an opportunity to develop a deep connection to the earth and a sustainable relationship to all that is in it. I feel ally work offers a way for everyone to feel a deep connection within themselves and to recognize all of earth and the beings on earth as related to them in a giant pattern of allies, our connection with the Divine. One of the major maladies of Western Civilization is loneliness, a break in connection with anything beyond oneself. Ally work offers a constant connection and a deep ongoing relationship. One is never alone again. Furthermore, the Ally, often an animal, connects one more deeply with the earth. Earth connection is what is lacking in our culture. We have thought of the earth as something to harness for our own purposes rather than a being to respect and relate to, to cherish even. All kinds of attention to the unconscious: dreamwork, art, dance, Jungian Analysis help to heal the split we feel between and within ourselves. For me, ally work, in particular, offers a way to heal and to dialog about what we can do to make this planet a sustainable environment again.<br /> <br /> <b>What advice do you have for those who would like to begin these kinds of work? </b><br /> I recommend reading Jeff Raff's book and doing the exercises he describes. This can lead you to a sense of deep connectedness. The process is not always easy. He describes the resistances that may come up at each stage. It helps to join— or form— a group of people committed to exploring in this way. You can share difficulties and discoveries together. I encourage you to keep at the process; it may take time to access the ally and to stay connected to Her/Him. It's worth the effort. Don't forget how connected we all are to each other and to the earth and all its beings.<br /> <br /></p></div>
The Environmental Crisis: What We Can Do
https://depthpsychologyalliance.com/profiles/blogs/the-environmental-crisis-what-we-can-do
2014-01-13T17:26:32.000Z
2014-01-13T17:26:32.000Z
Patricia Damery
https://depthpsychologyalliance.com/members/PatriciaDamery
<div><table align="center" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;text-align:center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align:center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WaxsTU4D2Xo/UtQeR87R3CI/AAAAAAAACYM/3P-hhLH1Opc/s1600/naturesfirstgreenART_4967+(1).tiff" style="margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WaxsTU4D2Xo/UtQeR87R3CI/AAAAAAAACYM/3P-hhLH1Opc/s1600/naturesfirstgreenART_4967+(1).tiff" height="188" width="400" alt="naturesfirstgreenART_4967+(1).tiff" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align:center;">Some of the reasons I am willing to suffer knowledge of my participation in climate change.</td></tr></tbody></table><p><br />When I think of the best approach to the issues we have created in our environment, I think of the old Buddhist adage: <i>Show up. Pay attention. Tell the truth. Detach from outcome.</i> The problem lies in being so overwhelmed that we cannot show up to pay attention. Then we deny the truth, effectively participating in a horrible outcome! It is critical that we are not paralyzed into denial by our fear.<br /><br />In the recently published <i>Sacred Agriculture: The Alchemy of Biodynamics</i> (Lindisfarne Books, 2013), Dennis Klocek emphasizes the importance of this "showing up." It is important that we acknowledge our vulnerability to the earth, he says, versus feeling in control and <i>above it</i>. "The only way I can turn my soul from existential guilt into the willingness to imagine my role in the Earth's destiny is through active imagination (110)."<br /><br />On February 22, 2014, the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco will offer the first of a series of eco-psychology seminars and workshops on the environment crisis. These workshops will be from differing perspectives but of one piece: the necessary crisis of consciousness in earth changes and what we can/must do. In this first workshop, <a href="http://www.eventbrite.com/e/indwelling-our-human-participation-in-the-dream-of-the-earth-registration-7406756809">Indwelling: Our Human Participation in the Dream of the Earth</a>, analysts Carol McRae and Barbara Holifield will lead participants into active imagination states through drumming and authentic movement. "We will allow what emerges to build on Thomas Berry’s idea that hope for our future lies in our human participation in the dream of the earth."</p><div><br />This workshop will be followed by on October 18, 2014, by <i>The Spiritualized Earth and the Birth of the New Consciousness: Jung's Analytical Psychology and Steiner's Biodynamic Agriculture: What Might Save Us.</i> I will present the common root of both and what Biodynamic agriculture offers.</div><div><br />This will be followed by a workshop on November 15, 2014, with a writing workshop, <i>Wounded Earth, Wounded Psyche: On Solastagia and Nature Deficit Disorder,</i> in which participants will be encouraged to find language for what is unbearable and unfathomable. This will be lead by four of us, poets Naomi Lowinsky, Leah Shelleda, Francis Hatfield, and by me, Patricia. Again, more about this later. </div><div><br />These seminars are very reasonably priced ($35 for the first, $25 for graduate students) and are a really good way to gather with others in aligning to address what we <i>can</i> do.<br /><br /><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:115%;text-align:center;"></div></div></div>
My Green May Be Your Red: Perceiving Subtle Energies
https://depthpsychologyalliance.com/profiles/blogs/my-green-may-be-your-red-perceiving-subtle-energies
2014-01-04T20:00:00.000Z
2014-01-04T20:00:00.000Z
Patricia Damery
https://depthpsychologyalliance.com/members/PatriciaDamery
<div><p>Many years ago when we were first learning Biodynamics we worked with a consultant who I've called B.B. in my recollection of that time (<i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Farming-Soul-A-Tale-Initiation/dp/1926715012/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1388865200&sr=8-1&keywords=farming+soul+by+patricia+damery">Farming Soul: A Tale of Initiation</a></i>. Soon to be republished by Leaping Goat Press, 2014<i>.</i>) He helped us on many levels, giving us tips and how-to’s about the practicalities of biodynamic farming but also direction in learning to perceive spiritual/subtle energies.</p><p><br /> One morning as B.B. and I were walking in the vineyard, B.B. was pointing out things that I normally paid little attention to. <i>See those birds flying in a spiraling circle?</i> he asked. <i>The diva there is orchestrating that, showing you something. </i><br /> <br /> As we walked on he pointed out an energy spout across the valley. I saw a kind of shimmering rainbow of color, which he explained was the work of the nature spirits trying to integrate energy into the valley.<br /> <br /> At one point he described tiny swirls of energy around the vines. We had sprayed the biodynamic preparation 501 that morning (horned quartz, or silica,) and he told me these were the sylphs (air spirits) at work. <i>Close your eyes for 30 seconds to clear them and then look</i>, he instructed. As I opened my eyes, an orangish red surrounded the vines momentarily, then was gone.</p><div>I will always remember what he said next: <i>One person may look and see red, and another see green, but the meaning will be the same. My green may be your red. It is just coming through a different observer. </i><br /> <br /> What is important is that we learn to observe in these ways and <i>to trust what we see</i>. Then we can dream on what it might mean. There may well be an objective reality to what we are seeing, but it is colored by our own personal psyche. It is critical that we come to notice and accept our own perception and not override it with what we think we are seeing or what we think we <i>should</i> see.<br /> <br /> C. G. Jung talked about the period called The Enlightenment as a period in which we became more rational and less open to this way of perceiving. While our intellect developed, use of our imaginative abilities atrophied, abilities that are critical in the perception of subtle energies. The alchemists, he said, used the age-old method of the imagination to perceive and work with subtle energies in the creation of the alchemists' philosophical stone, or the Self.</div><div><br /> One of the more important tasks in farming or in analytic work is to approach the other as if for the first time, to forget what we think we know, and truly <i>listen</i> and <i>see.</i> Unfortunately we too often use our intellect in a dogmatic way, forgetting this other way of taking in information about the other that may actually be a dialogue. For myself, I have had to remember and often learn again these more playful, open ways of taking in information and communicating with the other.</div><div><br /> What are the little dogmas in your own life that override this other way of seeing?<div style="font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:14px;min-height:16px;"></div><br /><div style="font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:14px;min-height:16px;"><br /></div></div></div>
Goethe and the Art of Seeing
https://depthpsychologyalliance.com/profiles/blogs/goethe-and-the-art-of-seeing
2014-04-15T16:30:11.000Z
2014-04-15T16:30:11.000Z
Patricia Damery
https://depthpsychologyalliance.com/members/PatriciaDamery
<div><div class="separator" style="clear:both;text-align:center;"></div><p><i>After the <a href="http://www.patriciadamery.com/2014/03/tucson-april-4-5-environmental-crisis.html">Tucson lecture and workshop, April 4-5, 2014, Friends of Jung, Tucson, Arizona </a>,</i><br /> <i>The Environmental Crisis: Birth of a New Consciousness?</i></p><table cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float:right;margin-left:1em;text-align:right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align:center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TI0WNEpjWno/U0LGZKHjnqI/AAAAAAAACnU/l6XVgzFO2Mc/s3200/Strasbourg_Cathedral_Exterior_-_Diliff.jpg" style="clear:right;margin-bottom:1em;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TI0WNEpjWno/U0LGZKHjnqI/AAAAAAAACnU/l6XVgzFO2Mc/s3200/Strasbourg_Cathedral_Exterior_-_Diliff.jpg" height="320" width="250" alt="Strasbourg_Cathedral_Exterior_-_Diliff.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption">Goethe:"sublimely towering, wide-spreading tree of God"<br /><div style="text-align:center;">Strasbourg Cathedral, from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strasbourg_Cathedral">Wikipedia</a></div></td></tr></tbody></table><div><span style="font-style:italic;"> </span><i><br /></i>I am home after a weekend with a great group of people in Tucson. The members and participants are a varied, informed group with great hospitality and depth. Thank you! <br /> <br /> On Saturday one of the members asked a question that raised more questions. I had just related a story it is said Rudolf Steiner enjoyed telling, a story illustrating what Goethe called “disciplined imaginative observation.” <br /> <br /> As a young man Goethe had an important experience at the cathedral of Strasbourg, using what he called <i>art of seeing</i>. He used this method not only to study plants but, in this case, the cathedral as well. After several days of climbing its tower over and over (to rid himself of vertigo) and sketching the cathedral from every angle, Goethe announced that the cathedral was incomplete. His friends studied the plans, then questioned him about how he knew. Goethe replied that the cathedral itself had told him. “I observed it so long and so attentively and I bestowed on it so much affection that it decided in the end to reveal to me its manifest secret” (<i>Rudolf Steiner: An Introduction to His Life and Works</i>, by Gary Lachman, p. 43). <br /><div class="separator" style="clear:both;text-align:center;"></div><br /> The question in Tucson came from a man with a developed spiritual sense himself. Was Goethe communicating with the Spirit of the cathedral, or was he communicating with the Spirits of the designers and builders of this 800 year old cathedral? <br /> <br /> I continue to ponder this question. Certainly for Goethe, and then for both Rudolf Steiner and Carl Jung, the imagination was a most important tool, imagination in concert, of course, with a disciplined thinking. For Jung this involved the development of the tool of active imagination. Steiner too saw use of the imagination in the style of Goethe’s <i>art of seeing</i> as key to meeting the world in any lively fashion. Truth resides in the meeting of the inner world and the outer, that liminal zone, or even, perhaps, as Jung would state, the transcendent. Is this zone humanity's growing edge?<br /> <br /> Who told Goethe the cathedral was incomplete? He says the cathedral itself did, but is this personification of material that can only be reduced to the idea of individualized Spirit, given how mired in materiality we have become? What are your own thoughts here?</div></div>
Why I Believe in Santa Claus
https://depthpsychologyalliance.com/profiles/blogs/why-i-believe-in-santa-claus
2013-12-19T14:30:00.000Z
2013-12-19T14:30:00.000Z
Patricia Damery
https://depthpsychologyalliance.com/members/PatriciaDamery
<div><table cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float:right;margin-left:1em;text-align:right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align:center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qrP6U112IfQ/TuTQJLzBugI/AAAAAAAAAfY/PicJhSUKM2g/s1600/IMG_2280.JPG" style="clear:right;margin-bottom:1em;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qrP6U112IfQ/TuTQJLzBugI/AAAAAAAAAfY/PicJhSUKM2g/s320/IMG_2280.JPG" width="320" alt="IMG_2280.JPG" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align:center;">Santa greeting children and adults alike in Petaluma, CA</td></tr></tbody></table><p><br /> I have been thinking about Santa Claus, that jolly old Christmas saint of giving. To me he is as sparkly as Christmas lights, one of the few mysteries we participate in collectively.<br /> <br /> As a young child I remember being taken to the “real” Santa who arrived in a parade the day after Thanksgiving and took up residence in a yearly assembled Christmas house in the center of town. We stood in long lines to see him, always a little intimidated when we finally got to sit on his lap. My mother told me that the Santas we saw on street corners and other places were not the real Santa, only his helpers, and this made sense to me.<br /> <br /> Christmas eve we were instructed to go to sleep “so Santa Claus could come.” This was torture! I remember trying to sleep and my mother coming to the door to check on me. Once I thought I heard sleigh bells and this panicked me even more.<br /> <br /> Eventually, though, I slept, and then my sister and I woke early. We peered into the darkened living room to check if Santa had been there yet, (<i>Yes, he had!</i>) and then raced to wake my parents.<br /> <br /> We were not a wealthy family, getting “big” toys only for Christmas or, to a lesser degree, our birthdays. So to rush into the living room and see the very thing we had asked for was a most amazing experience! Those years the ultimate toy was a doll, one we perused the Sears Christmas catalogue to choose, and here she was! Our grandmother made complete wardrobes for these dolls. (She was another of Santa’s helpers, my mother explained.)<br /> <br /> There were other gifts too: a stocking full of doll baby bottles, doll shoes, candy cane, and a red delicious apple on the top, a variety my mother never bought because it was too expensive.<br /> <br /> I believed in Santa until I was six when one of my first grade classmates told me my parents were really Santa. When I asked my mother about this, she pulled me aside so my younger sister would not hear and told me that moms and dads are the helpers and that Santa Claus is a spirit. I don’t remember being particularly devastated, but I didn’t tell my younger sister, who believed in Santa until she was nine. Christmas was not quite the same after I found out. This transition to spirit Santa involved a kind of coming-of-age, the mantle of which I more fully accepted when we “played Santa” for our own sons.<br /> <br /> This year Santa came to Petaluma, California, on a tug boat, which blasted down the river into the center of town. He and Mrs. Claus stood by the mast waving to the crowds as the tug, horn booming, streamed by. Suddenly I felt overcome with emotion! I felt the crowd’s excitement as Santa disembarked the tug and walked through a long receiving line to his temporary strip mall office.<br /> <br /> The phenomenon of Santa Claus is a collective imagining of a saint of giving, most popular in United States, but with 2000 year old European ancestors in Saint Nicholas (a bishop living in 300 A.D. Patara, now Turkey), Father Christmas (England), and Kris Kringle (Germany). It is said that the first Dutch settlers coming to United States had a figure of St. Nicholas on the bow of their ships, much like in Petaluma!<br /> <br /> Santa is vulnerable to being hijacked by commercial interests, or by intellectual reasoning. Yes, there is a let-down in the news of the lack of concreteness of his identity, but that does not negate the importance of his reality as an inhabitant of the mystery of the season. (Einstein held that <i>imagination is more important than knowledge.</i>) Santa inspires awe, and generosity, opening us to Spirit of timelessness and hope, but he may also serve as an initiator for children and adults alike— into a more mature version of the imaginal realm.</p><p></p><p>What are your own thoughts about the mysteries of this time and the importance in our collective participation?</p></div>
Don't Know What You're Doing? You're On the Right Track
https://depthpsychologyalliance.com/profiles/blogs/don-t-know-what-you-re-doing-you-re-on-the-right-track
2013-03-24T19:56:17.000Z
2013-03-24T19:56:17.000Z
Kim Hermanson, Ph.D.
https://depthpsychologyalliance.com/members/KimHermansonPhD
<div><p><span>When I started teaching professionally, I was faced with a dilemma: Present information in the conventional manner and try to look and act the part of “The Expert,” or on the other hand, honor the inspiration of my own unique creative process. I tried my best to do the first option and it didn't fit me at all. I can't follow a schedule no matter how hard I try, and I spend way too much time musing about odd things when I should be working. My mind and heart do not operate on a linear path, and frankly, doing things in a prescribed way is just not interesting to me.</span><br /><br /><span>Developing the ability to simultaneously be “Teacher” and “Authentically Me” has been a path of challenge and growth, and my teaching work became a practice of showing up and walking my talk. I ultimately wrote a book to help guide me through the rapids.</span><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Messy-Imagination-Teachers-Trainers/dp/0578011905/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1364153841&sr=8-1&keywords=getting+messy" target="_blank">Getting Messy: A Guide to Taking Risks and Opening the Imagination</a></i><span> gave me a way to understand how to play and work as a creative person in a traditional service profession. My intent was to know what boundaries and edges I could cross with my students so that they would be comfortable, yet challenged and inspired by what I knew I could offer them.</span><br /><br /><span>In case you’re wondering, “messy” doesn’t mean literal mess. (I’m actually a neatnik.) Messy means plunging into the unknown--befriending things and people that don’t follow established rules, navigating through confusion and perplexity. Contrary to sane reasoning, I feel most alive when I’m in situations where I don’t know what I’m doing. Perplexing situations give my rational mind an opportunity to “get lost,” which in turn opens space for something more imaginative to come through. When I’m confused or don’t see a clear path, I get to rely on something greater than myself. That’s when I feel most alive.</span><br /><br /><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Messy-Imagination-Teachers-Trainers/dp/0578011905/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1364153841&sr=8-1&keywords=getting+messy" target="_blank">Getting Messy</a></i><span> offers those of us in service professions a way to stay in the juice, inspiration, and “messy muck” (for lack of a better word) and still hold the title of “teacher” (or counselor, coach, therapist, mentor, manager.) But after I finished it a funny thing happened. I realized that </span><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Messy-Imagination-Teachers-Trainers/dp/0578011905/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1364153841&sr=8-1&keywords=getting+messy" target="_blank">Getting Messy</a></i><span> wasn’t just for teachers. It’s for anyone who wants to live an interesting, creative life. From the responses I've received, it takes people to places they haven't been before and offers a warm foundation to support and inspire creative journeys. It offers sanity in the face of new possibilities.</span><br /><br /><span>As teachers, mentors, coaches, counselors, and trainers what we point to is more important than what we actually say. Good teaching is not about "look at me"; it's about "look beyond me." ... Thank goodness.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></p></div>
She’s certainly not about the ordinary business of life
https://depthpsychologyalliance.com/profiles/blogs/she-s-certainly-not-about-the-ordinary-business-of-life
2012-02-11T20:30:00.000Z
2012-02-11T20:30:00.000Z
Fisher King Press
https://depthpsychologyalliance.com/members/FisherKingPress
<div><div style="text-align:left;"><br /> <a href="http://fisherkingpress.com/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=10&products_id=11" style="clear:left;float:left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em;" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5289955051535271778" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_66tG-ibjAoU/SWmyF4yLB2I/AAAAAAAAAHI/bAF_B7r5IHQ/s320/9780981034423.jpg" style="float:left;height:320px;margin:0pt 10px 10px 0pt;width:206px;" name="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5289955051535271778" /></a></div><p style="text-align:left;"><strong><a href="http://fisherkingpress.com/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=10&products_id=11" target="_blank">The Sister from Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way<img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=wwwmalcolmclc-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=098103442X" style="border:medium none;margin:0px;padding:0px;" width="1" /></a></strong><br /> <br /> a Jungian Perspective by Naomi Ruth Lowinsky</p><p style="text-align:left;"><strong><em>The Sister speaks to all those who want to cultivate an unlived promise—those on a spiritual path, those who are filled with the urgency of poems that have to be written, paintings that must be painted, journeys that yearn to be taken…</em></strong><br /> <br /> Who is She, this Sister from Below? She’s certainly not about the ordinary business of life: work, shopping, making dinner. She speaks from other realms. If you’ll allow, She’ll whisper in your ear, lead your thoughts astray, fill you with strange yearnings, get you hot and bothered, send you off on some wild goose chase of a daydream, eat up hours of your time. She’s a siren, a seductress, a shape-shifter . . . Why listen to such a troublemaker? Because She is essential to the creative process: She holds the keys to the doors of our imaginations and deeper life—the evolution of Soul.<br /> <br /> The Sister emerges out of reverie, dream, a fleeting memory, a difficult emotion—she is the moment of inspiration—the muse. Naomi Ruth Lowinsky writes of nine manifestations in which the muse visits her, stirring up creative ferment, filling her with ghosts, mysteries, erotic teachings, the old religion—bringing forth her voice as a poet. Among these forms of the muse are the “Sister from Below,” the inner poet who has spoken for the soul since language began. The muse also appears as the ghost of a grandmother Naomi never met, who died in the Shoah—a grandmother with ‘unfinished business.’ She visits in the form of Old Mother India, whose culture Naomi visited as a young woman. She cracks open her Western mind, flooding her with many gods and goddesses. She appears as Sappho, the great lyric poet of the ancient world, who engages her in a lovely midlife fantasy. She comes as “Die Ür Naomi,” an old woman from the biblical story for which Naomi was named, who insists on telling Her version of the Book of Ruth. And in the end, surprisingly, the muse appears in the form of a man, a long dead poet whom Naomi loved in her youth.<br /> <br /> <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://fisherkingpress.com/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=10&products_id=11" target="_blank">The Sister from Below</a></span> is a personal story, yet universal, of giving up a creative calling because of life’s obligations, and being called back to it in later life. This forthcoming Fisher King Press publication describes the intricate patterns of a rich inner life; it is a traveler’s memoir, with outer journeys to Italy, India and a Neolithic cave in Bulgaria, and inward journeys to biblical Canaan and Sappho’s Greece; it is filled with mythic experience, a poet’s story told. The Sister conveys the lived experience of the creative life, a life in which active imagination—the Jungian technique of engaging with inner figures—is an essential practice.<br /> <br /> The Sister speaks to all those who want to cultivate an unlived promise—those on a spiritual path, those who are filled with the urgency of poems that have to be written, paintings that must be painted, journeys that yearn to be taken…<br /> <br /> <strong><a href="http://fisherkingpress.com/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=10&products_id=11" target="_blank">eBook, Paperback, Download a Free PDF Sample at the Fisher King Press Online Bookstore.</a></strong><br /> <br /> Naomi Ruth Lowinsky is the author of <a href="http://fisherkingpress.com/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=10&products_id=13" target="_blank"><span style="font-style:italic;">The Motherline<img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=wwwmalcolmclc-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0981034462" style="border:medium none;margin:0px;padding:0px;" width="1" />: Every Woman’s Journey to Find Her Female Roots</span></a> (2008) and numerous prose essays, many of which have been published in <span style="font-style:italic;">Psychological Perspectives</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">The Jung Journal</span>. She has had poetry published in many literary magazines and anthologies, among them <span style="font-style:italic;">After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">Weber Studies</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">Rattle, Atlanta Review</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">Tiferet</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">Asheville Poetry Review</span>. Naomi has three published poetry collections, <i><a href="http://fisherkingpress.com/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=11&products_id=23" target="_blank">Adagio and Lamentation</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=wwwmalcolmclc-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=1926715055" style="border:medium none;margin:0px;padding:0px;" width="1" /></i>, <span style="font-style:italic;">red clay is talking</span> (2000) and <span style="font-style:italic;">crimes of the dreamer</span>. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize three times. Naomi is a Jungian analyst in private practice, poetry and fiction editor of <span style="font-style:italic;">Psychological Perspectives</span>, and a grandmother many times over.<br /> <br /> The cover image "Phases of the Moon" is an oil painting by Bianca Daalder-van Iersel, an artist and Jungian analyst practicing in Los Angeles, California. You can learn more about the artist and her work at <a href="http://www.bdaalder.com/">www.bdaalder.com</a>.</p><div style="text-align:center;"><br /> <span style="font-style:italic;font-weight:bold;"><a href="http://fisherkingpress.com/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=10&products_id=11" target="_blank">The Sister from Below : When the Muse Gets Her Way</a></span><br /> —by Naomi Ruth Lowinsky<br /> <span style="font-size:85%;">ISBN 978-0-9810344-2-3</span></div><div style="text-align:center;"><span style="font-size:85%;">On Sale now for $18.95</span></div></div>
Suspended Animation and The Spirit of Active Imagination
https://depthpsychologyalliance.com/profiles/blogs/suspended-animation-and-the
2011-03-24T01:09:25.000Z
2011-03-24T01:09:25.000Z
Fisher King Press
https://depthpsychologyalliance.com/members/FisherKingPress
<div><div style="text-align:right;"><span style="font-size:85%;">by Lawrence H. Staples</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">author of <span style="font-style:italic;">Guilt with a Twist</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">The Creative Soul</span></span></div><span style="font-weight:bold;">Active Imagination - What it is:</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align:justify;">Active imagination is a technique developed by Jung to help amplify, interpret, and integrate the contents of dreams and creative works of art. When approached by way of writing, active imagination is like writing a play. One takes, for example, a figure that has appeared in one's dreams or creative writings. Usually, these figures express a viewpoint quite the opposite of one's normal conscious view. Sometimes it is a male, <span style="font-style:italic;">shadow</span> figure. At other times, it may be a feminine, <span style="font-style:italic;">anima</span>, or maternal figure. One starts to converse with the figure in writing. One challenges the dream figure and lets him/her challenge the dreamer. The dreamer asks the figure why he appeared in the dream. He asks the figure what it wants from him. Then, the ego, like a playwright, puts himself as best he can into the figure's shoes and tries to express it and defend its viewpoint. There ensues an iterative dialogue between the writer and the opposite figure in his dream or piece of writing. With practice one can become accomplished at expressing both viewpoints, just as a playwright does. One gets better at this the more one does it, just as the playwright does. The technique of active imagination tends to detach the qualities and traits that are first seen in a dream or in a story as belonging to external persons, and coming to see them as belonging to one's self. Active imagination, then, helps the writer become conscious of his opposite qualities by forcing him to give voice to figures, like <span style="font-style:italic;">shadow</span> figures, that carry qualities opposite those of his ego. These qualities personify the rejected opposites that are present in the unconscious. This technique helps recover these rejected opposites and make them available to the ego and consciousness without necessarily having to act them out.</div><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Example of Active Imagination:</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align:justify;">Following is an impressive and rich example of the power of this technique to affect and even shape our lives. It's an active imagination done by a man in his late thirties. He was an extremely successful salesman who was, nevertheless, unhappy with his work and life. Despite his high income, work had lost its meaning for him. He had entered Jungian analysis in order to help him out of his suffocating existence and find a new and different way. He had a powerful dream that he took to his analyst. His analyst suggested he do active imagination with one of the figures in the dream. His is a beautiful example of active imagination that led to much more than a dialogue. It became the seed of a creative life that grew and flourished into a wholly new career. Out of his active imagination came a novel, <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Chronicles-Wandering-Soul-Book-LeRoi/dp/1926715330?ie=UTF8&tag=wwwmalcolmclc-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969" target="_blank">LeRoi</a><img border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=wwwmalcolmclc-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=1926715330" style="border:medium none;margin:0px;padding:0px;" width="1" alt="ir?t=wwwmalcolmclc-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=1926715330" /></span>, which was then followed by two other novels, <span style="font-style:italic;">SamSara<img border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=wwwmalcolmclc-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0977607623" style="border:medium none;margin:0px;padding:0px;" width="1" alt="ir?t=wwwmalcolmclc-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0977607623" /></span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">Menopause Man<img border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=wwwmalcolmclc-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0977607615" style="border:medium none;margin:0px;padding:0px;" width="1" alt="ir?t=wwwmalcolmclc-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0977607615" /></span>. All have been published as the The Chronicles of a Wandering Soul series. He is living today as a successful writer. He has written still more books that are waiting in the wings to be published. His name is Mel Mathews. The power of the active imagination is seen in the fact that it unearthed in him some deep hidden spring of creativity that suddenly gushed forth. Apparently, he had been living a life of suspended animation that lay there until some psychic prince awoke it.</div><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">The Dream:</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align:justify;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Chronicles-Wandering-Soul-Book-LeRoi/dp/1926715330?ie=UTF8&tag=wwwmalcolmclc-20&link_code=bil&camp=213689&creative=392969" style="clear:right;float:right;margin-bottom:1em;margin-left:1em;" target="_blank"><img alt="The Chronicles of a Wandering Soul: Book One - LeRoi" src="http://ws.amazon.com/widgets/q?MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&ID=AsinImage&WS=1&Format=_SL160_&ASIN=1926715330&tag=wwwmalcolmclc-20" /></a>Mel's book <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Chronicles-Wandering-Soul-Book-LeRoi/dp/1926715330?ie=UTF8&tag=wwwmalcolmclc-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969" target="_blank">LeRoi</a><img border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=wwwmalcolmclc-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=1926715330" style="border-style:none;margin:0px;padding:0px;" width="1" alt="ir?t=wwwmalcolmclc-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=1926715330" /></span> was literally born from a dream and the active imagination he did with the<img border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=wwwmalcolmclc-20&l=bil&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=1926715330" style="border:none;margin:0px;padding:0px;" width="1" alt="ir?t=wwwmalcolmclc-20&l=bil&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=1926715330" /> dream. He had the following dream: A woman was sitting in a diner, in a booth smoking. " Excuse me, I wonder if you could put your cigarette out?" I asked. She ignored me. A few minutes later she lit up again. I stood up, walked around to her booth, grabbed her pack of smokes and the ashtray and walked out the front door. I dumped the ashtray and stepped on her lit smoke; then, I dropped her pack and stomped them as well. I walked back inside, slammed the empty ashtray down on the coffee counter and sat down. A petite pony-tailed brunette walked up with the iced tea pitcher to refill my glass. "Can I have some more ice please?" " Sure", she answered, " I'm sure (Flo) the boss-lady will be out in a minute", the brunette said, as she turned around with my ice. "What does she want?" " You'll have to ask her yourself."<br /><br />Mel discussed the dream with his analyst who suggested a dialogue with the boss-lady.<br /><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Dialogue with the Boss-Lady:</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align:justify;">Here is his active imagination with Flo, the name of the boss-lady. This brief dialogue is to his novel what an acorn is to an oak tree. This brief dialogue apparently contained all the genetic codes necessary to make a novel just as an acorn has the genetic codes that lead to an oak tree.</div><br />Flo: Howdy<br /><br />Mel: Hi<br /><br />Flo: Purdy hot day, huh?<br /><br />Mel: I can stand the heat. It's the stray cigarette smoke that sets me off.<br /><br />Flo: So that gives you the right to run off one of my regulars.<br /><br />Mel: I asked her to put it out.<br /><br />Flo: Did you ask her or did you beat around the bush with some rude indirect comment?<br /><br />Mel: Lady, I don't know who you are or what's on your mind, but I really don't need any more crap today.<br /><br />Flo: Well kid right now you're in my diner and you're runnin' off my patrons.<br /><br />Mel: Oh great.<br /><br />Flo: I've dealt with your kind for years so let's just cut to the quick.<br /><br />Mel: Look, lady, I'm sorry if I offended anybody here, but I've got some problems. My MG is broken down across the street.<br /><br />Flo: So what?<br /><br />Mel: Things just aren't falling into place today.<br /><br />Flo: Would you like some chocolate milk little boy, or how about your ass wiped? In this café, the world doesn't revolve around you. . .<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">The Creative Seed</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align:justify;">While the creative process is different for each individual, one can sometimes discern similarities. The seed that unleashed Mel's creative process was a dream and a few sentences associated with the dream. His process bears some resemblance to the process by which Isak Dineson created her work.<br /><br />Isak Dineson, a Danish novelist, had quite a reputation as a storyteller, and following dinner her guests usually asked her to tell a story. She complied, but stipulated that her guests must supply her with the opening sentence. Using this sentence as her starting point, she would then spin tales that were hours long.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Creative-Soul-Art-Quest-Wholeness/dp/0981034446?ie=UTF8&tag=wwwmalcolmclc-20&link_code=bil&camp=213689&creative=392969" style="clear:left;float:left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em;" target="_blank"><img alt="The Creative Soul: Art and the Quest for Wholeness" height="200" src="http://ws.amazon.com/widgets/q?MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&ID=AsinImage&WS=1&Format=_SL160_&ASIN=0981034446&tag=wwwmalcolmclc-20" width="130" /></a>She had a way of forming and telling stories that is, perhaps, a microcosmic example of the macrocosmic processes of all creation. I could see that, like a verdant and luxurious garden, all creation must first be seeded before it can produce a crop. In Dineson's case, the opening sentence given by the guest was the impregnating seed that she took into her imagination to create the story, like an acorn taken into the earth creates a tree. She began with a word (her acorn) that unfolded from itself a string of words connected to each other by some associative bond that produced a coherent creation. It is as if the opening sentence contained all the genetic codes that knew from the beginning where they were going and how they would get there. The mother is not conscious of the code; it operates invisibly and unconsciously once the seed is fertilized. The mystery is that such a simple, tiny seed can produce such a large and complicated product. It is as if the story develops in accordance with its own processes once the seed is planted in fertile soil. The tale was the crop that grew out of the seed. A mundane analogy to this process is the unwinding of a spool of yarn. The key is to find the tiny end, and then with that small piece in our hand we pull and find that attached to it is a long string that yields the totality of the yarn. We often refer to tales and stories as yarns.<img border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=wwwmalcolmclc-20&l=bil&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0981034446" style="border:medium none;margin:0px;padding:0px;" width="1" alt="ir?t=wwwmalcolmclc-20&l=bil&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0981034446" /><br /><br />Psychologists are familiar with these processes that are triggered by a single word, suggestion, or thought and that can appear in the verbal outpourings of their patients. They notice that words that belong together are part of an unconscious chain or string that is formed by a process that they called "association". Jung's work on his Association Experiments demonstrates the power of a word to stimulate the unconscious to produce other words that are meaningfully connected by association. Freud pioneered the use of "free association" to bring to consciousness a patient's unconscious complexes. In "free association" all the words that belong together in that string are revealed just as all the yarn is revealed when the spool is spun and then unrolled.<br /><br />A book like Faulkner's <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sound and the Fury</span> is written in the style of free association, where words with an associative connection appear as if they were spilled upon the page. Some people read it and see it as meaningless or, at best, as loosely connected gibberish. Others experience it as great literature. The Nobel Prize Committee apparently agreed with the latter. James Joyce's <span style="font-style:italic;">Ulysses</span> and many other books have had similar mixed receptions. Some point to Jackson Pollock's process of painting as equivalent to Faulkner's writing, but in the case of Pollock it is drops of paint rather than words that are spilled. The works of both artists contain thousands of fragments (words or specks of paint) that have an associative coherence. In a sense, a novel is a big yarn, a long string that contains the bits and pieces that through association are attached to and belong with each other. If we think about it, we may suspect that there is some kind of "unconscious knowingness" behind this creative process. We can also suspect there is some kind of word (or note, or color or form) magnet in our psyche that draws to itself and coheres words, notes and colors that previously existed in isolation but, eventually, belong together.</div><div style="text-align:justify;"></div><div style="text-align:justify;"></div><div style="text-align:justify;"><div></div><p> </p><div><strong>About the Author</strong><br /> Lawrence Staples is a 78 year-old psychoanalyst, still actively practicing in Washington, DC. After receiving AB and MBA degrees from Harvard, Lawrence spent the next 22 years with a Fortune 500 company, where he became an officer and a corporate vice president. When he was 50, he made a midlife career change and entered the C.G. Jung Institute, Zurich, Switzerland, where he spent nine years in training to become a psychoanalyst. Lawrence has a Ph.D. in psychology and a Diploma in Analytical Psychology from the Zurich Institute. Learn more about Lawrence Staples' publications <b><i><a href="http://fisherkingpress.com/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=2_10&products_id=12">The Creative Soul</a></i></b> and <b><i><a href="http://fisherkingpress.com/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=2_10&products_id=3">Guilt with a Twist</a></i></b> at <strong><a href="http://www.fisherkingpress.com/">www.fisherkingpress.com</a></strong>. </div></div><br /><a href="http://www.fisherkingpress.com/" style="clear:right;display:inline;float:right;margin-bottom:1em;margin-left:1em;"><img border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5393483198773291202" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_66tG-ibjAoU/StmAZLTraMI/AAAAAAAAASs/kmBy84VNLJ8/s200/fkplogo110x100.jpg" style="display:block;height:100px;margin-bottom:10px;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;margin-top:0px;width:110px;" name="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5393483198773291202" alt="fkplogo110x100.jpg" /></a>Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting Edge Fiction, and a growing list of alternative titles.<br /><ul><li><strong>Free Shipping</strong> in the U.S. for orders of $25 or more.</li><li>Discounted shipping for International orders of $25 or more.</li><li>Visit the Fisher King Press <a target="_blank" href="http://www.fisherkingpress.com">Online Bookstore</a></li><li>We Ship Worldwide.</li><li>Credit Cards Accepted.</li><li>Phone Orders Welcomed. </li><li>Call <strong>Toll free</strong> in the US & Canada: 1-800-228-9316 International +1-831-238-7799 <strong>skype</strong>: fisher_king_press</li></ul></div>
When the Moon Casts a Woman Off
https://depthpsychologyalliance.com/profiles/blogs/when-the-moon-casts-a-woman
2010-07-06T04:30:00.000Z
2010-07-06T04:30:00.000Z
Fisher King Press
https://depthpsychologyalliance.com/members/FisherKingPress
<div><div style="text-align:left;"><span style="font-size:x-small;">article by Naomi Ruth Lowinsky</span></div><br /><blockquote><i>The moon and then</i><br /> <i>the Pleiades</i><br /><i>go down</i><br /><br /><i>The night is now</i><br /><i>half-gone; youth</i><br /><i>goes; I am</i><i><br /></i> <br /><i>in bed alone</i><br />—Sappho (1)</blockquote><br /><b>When the Moon Casts a Woman Off</b><br /><br />The muse is erotic. This is well known to the men who adore her. For me, her erotic nature can show up unexpectedly, as it did in India, or as it did during that powerful transition in a woman’s life—menopause. <br /><br />When the moon has cast a woman off, and she is running hot and cold in a confusion of purposes, body and soul fighting over the terms of their engagement, she may find herself lost, wandering about in a flat landscape, emptied of the drama of her cycles, unfamiliar to herself. When her soul, having lived in all the female places, isn’t sure where she lives anymore; when her mind loses track of itself and falls through the cracks in the floor of her brain; when her spirit is short of breath, confused by the weather, by sudden surges of heat that lack any erotic purpose; and her womb that has been telling time, keeping her in tune with the sea and its tides, goes silent, keeping its secrets inside; she may find herself thrown back to what called her before her first blood flowered, as though soul, mind, spirit, need to root themselves again in her beginnings; her life needs to come full circle. For me, that circle brings me back to a reverie about my early sexual stirrings, and a fantasy about Sappho.<br /><br />Sappho. Have you heard of Sappho? She lived 2600 years ago, in a time when the division between the erotic and the sacred had not yet hardened, when a young woman’s education included the arts of love as well as of poetry, dance and music. How is it she suddenly fills me with her presence, as though I’ve always known her; as though I can remember my time with her as a young woman on Lesbos: the temple to Aphrodite, the meadows with flowers we maidens wove into one another’s hair; what we sang around the altar in the moonlight; as though Sappho was my teacher, my priestess, my wild older woman crush.<br /><br />How can I claim to remember Sappho? She is a revered ancestor in my poetic lineage. But all we have of her poems are fragments, all we can gather of her life are glimpses, pottery shards, passages in Longinus and Demetrius. Yet even those fragments, those glimpses, give us a lot. They say she is a great lyric poet, perhaps the greatest of all time. They say that she, like Socrates, taught the young. The aristocrats of 5th century B.C. Greece, sent their daughters to Sappho, to her thiasos, where she initiated them into the mysteries of love; taught them ritual, poetry, dance, officiated at their weddings.<br /><br />The Greeks did not divide sexuality up as do we. Young women learned love, their bodily and emotional responses, from other women. Some of them went on to marry men and live what we call heterosexual lives. Others stayed in the temple, as priestesses. Some, it is clear from Sappho’s work, preferred to stay with women. <br /><br />As Judy Grahn points out in a powerful evocation of Sappho in her book of essays, The Highest Apple, Sappho was born into a now lost lineage of women poets that stretched behind her for a thousand years.(2) She lived in changing times. Already by her time, Greek women were oppressed and controlled by the patriarchy; they could not own property; they belonged to their husbands. But on Lesbos, in Sappho’s thiasos, we catch a glimpse of a world where, in Grahn’s words “women were central to themselves.” I long to have access to such wholeness of female being, such authority of voice and image.<br /><br /><blockquote>I took my lyre and said:<br /> Come now, my heavenly<br />tortoise shell: become<br />a speaking instrument(3)</blockquote><br />Would I could be such a speaking instrument. Would I could summon such elegance and clarity. In Sappho female flesh becomes word. Her poems are personal, embodied, full of desire and of sensuous physical detail: descriptions of beautiful clothes, advise on what flowers a girl should wear in her hair. They are luminous. <br /><br />H.D. brought Sapphic lucidity back into the language, describes Sappho’s poetry as: “containing fire and light and warmth, yet in its essence differing from all these, as if the brittle crescent-moon gave heat to us, or some splendid scintillating star turned warm suddenly in our hand like a jewel, sent by the beloved.”(4)<br /><br />I wish I could study poetry with Sappho; learn to speak from female passion as did Sappho; I wish I could be on as intimate terms with Aphrodite, know the altar, know the ritual. <br /><br /><blockquote>You know the place: then<br /> <br />Leave Crete and come to us<br />waiting where the grove is<br />pleasantest, by precincts<br /><br />sacred to you; incense<br />smokes on the altar, cold<br /><br />streams murmur through the<br />apple branches, a young<br /><br />rose thicket shades the ground<br />and quivering leaves pour<br /><br />down deep sleep; in meadows<br />where horses have grown sleek<br />among spring flowers, dill<br /><br />scents the air. Queen! Cyprian!<br />Fill our gold cups with love<br />stirred into clear nectar(5)</blockquote><br />But wait a minute. Is this the time to be invoking Aphrodite? At midlife, dealing with hot flashes and memory loss, struggling to keep track of many obligations, is this the time of life for Sappho to be stirring in me? Sappho who loved young women, sang of their beauty, taught them the erotic mysteries? Where was she when I needed her, when I had never heard of her, when I was a young woman, overcome by a confusion of passions? <br /><br />I came of age in a time when it was believed that young women should be sexually initiated by men. The ancient practice of a woman learning the responses of her body in the hands of an older woman, had been mostly forgotten. There was an archetype missing (still is, for the most part), one the Greeks knew well: the archetype of sacred sexuality. In my day, a young woman’s passion was dangerous; if she expressed it, terrible things could happen to her. There were names: clinical names, colloquial names. Nymphomaniac. Slut. There were dangerous consequences. Pregnancies. Illegal abortions. Doors slammed for life. Shutters closed on her sense of self.<br /><br />In the 1960s, some of us got wind of Sappho’s energy, without really knowing much about her. We saw that women had to learn to love women instead of only valuing our relationships with men. We formed circles of women and talked personally, about sex, our bodies, our passionate lives. In such a group, “consciousness raising” we called it, I remember wondering what menopause would be like. We asked an older woman some of us knew to write a letter about her experience. I can’t remember what she said. I do remember her tone, wise, funny, amazed and pleased to be asked. If I were to write such a letter now I’d have to say that nothing has prepared me for the power of change. It’s archetypal, like going through puberty, or becoming a mother. <br /><br />And then it occurs to me: no wonder I’m fantasizing about Sappho. It’s not just that she’s a priestess of Aphrodite; she’s a priestess who facilitates archetypal change, and she does it in the voice of a woman-centered woman. As Judy Grahn says, when we lose access to our ceremonial stories “we fall out of history . . . out of mythic time . . . out of poetry except as the objects of it . . . out of meaning into a kind of slavery, a no-world, a no-place . . . ” How then can we make sense of female initiation, profound bodily changes? We need Sappho. We need her to teach us the lore of the body, the creative process, the invocation of the divine. <br /><br />And I say to myself, why not try to invoke Sappho? What would it hurt? At worst she won’t come. At best, we’ll have an experience of the imagination. <br /><br /><b>The Tenth Muse</b><br /><br />Imagine that we knew Sappho when we were young. Imagine that we can remember the island in the middle of the blue Aegean, near Turkey as it was 2600 years ago, a landscape of olive trees and apple orchards. The scholar of Greek lyric poetry, C.M. Bowra, describes it thus: “an abundance of natural springs fills the valleys with plane trees and lush grass; in the spring the ground is covered with anemones, orchids and wild tulips.”(6) The poet Alcaeus, a contemporary of Sappho, describes her as: “violet-tressed, holy, sweetly smiling Sappho . . .” (7)<br /><br /><br /><blockquote><b>invocation</b><br /> <br />tell me, Sappho,<br />whose delicate fingers<br />wove the violets into your hair?<br />whose soft seashell ears burned <br />at your song?<br /><br />and would you take her back<br />after the years<br />she forgot you<br /><br />opened her body <br />to his song<br /><br />would you come to the tip<br />of her tongue<br />leap<br />to her image making <br />mind?<br /><br />would you send for her <br />the very chariot <br />that carried the goddess<br />she of the doves<br />and the smile that is<br />evening star?<br /><br />lady of Lesbos<br />we gather<br />pieces of you<br />out of the mouths <br />of buried vases<br /><br />i wish it were mine<br />to remember<br />how we danced<br />around the altar in full<br />moonlight<br />our tender young women feet <br />crushing the grass<br /><br />holy Sappho<br />make a place for me now<br />the moon is waning<br />we whom the tides<br />have released<br />long for a fragment<br />of you— (8)</blockquote><br />She’s come. Can you see her? She is so vivid, as though she’s always been here, just under the surface, energetic, curious, intense, showing off her dark skin in bright clothing. She’s wearing the purple and yellow outfit she described in a poem. Listen to her beloved Atthis:<br /><br /><blockquote>Sappho, if you will not get<br /> up and let us look at you<br />I shall never love you again!<br /><br />Get up, unleash your suppleness,<br />lift off your Chian nightdress<br />and, like a lily leaning into<br /><br />a spring, bathe in the water.<br />Cleis is bringing your best<br />purple frock and the yellow<br /><br />tunic down from the clothes chest;<br />you will have a cloak thrown over<br />you and flowers crowning your hair… (9)</blockquote><br />She stands before a white temple, the blue Aegean glowing behind her. She’s smiling at us. Sappho, speak to us!<br /><br /><i>You wonder where I’ve been. I say, where have you been? I’ve been here all along, the old voice of female poetry, glad to be released at last from all those tiresome, bookish discussions about me. You’ve read all that nonsense. Was I short and dark? Did I die for love? Was I married to a man called Kerkylas, a wealthy merchant, or was this an obscene pun in an Attic comedy, because Kerkylas can mean “prick from the Isle of Man”(10) Was I a love priestess? Did I have jealous fights with my rivals for love or for power? Finally you stopped reading all that scholarship that just chops me up into smaller fragments, fits me into small categories that break up my wholeness. How can you separate body from love from soul from ritual from poetry? It is only in what’s left of my work that you can know me, and in the imagination of poets. There are those in your time who know me. H.D. knows me, as:</i> <br /><i><br /></i> <br /><blockquote><i>an island, a country, a continent, a planet, a world of emotion, differing entirely from any present day imaginable world of emotion…</i><br /> <i>A song, a spirit, a white star that moves across the heaven to mark the end of a world epoch or to presage some coming glory.</i><br /><i>Yet she is embodied–terribly a human being, a woman, a personality as the most impersonal become when they confront their fellow beings.</i></blockquote><i><br /></i> <br /><i>Judy Grahn knows me, and traces her lesbian poetic lineage through H.D. and Emily Dickinson straight back to me. (11)</i><br /><i><br /></i> <br /><i>You can know me, not only as a particular poet of 6th c. B.C. Greece, but as the fragmented voice of woman, the ghost of the wholeness of woman that’s been ripped into shreds. What woman has written straight out of her body, her feeling, since I did, until now, in your time? My voice is the passion of woman for woman, the passion for the goddess. Every woman needs to know this passion, whether she sleeps with women or with men. Then she can express for herself what Freud found so mysterious: what a woman wants.</i> <br /><i><br /></i> <br /><i>Why do you suppose you’ve been so consumed by poetry recently? It hasn’t occurred to you that I might have had something to do with that? For two millenia I was a sleepy spirit. But I’ve been right under the surface, waiting to be invoked. I have not been forgotten, but my poems, what has become of my poems? I wrote them down. I wanted them to last forever. It looked like they would. The Alexandrians published me a few centuries after my death. My work survived for a thousand years. I was known as the tenth muse, first among lyric poets, the queen of poetry. Once, everyone knew my poetry by heart. My words were ripe fruit on the tongue of every cultivated person. Now, all that’s left are fragments.</i><br /><i><br /></i> <br /><i>Don’t think because I’m a shade, I don’t mourn the loss of my work. Don’t think it doesn’t humiliate me, even in death, that my voice got torn to shreds of papyrus, that handwritten copies of my work were used to stuff a coffin, mummify a crocodile. Why did my books disappear? I have not been forgotten, but my poems are lost. I have not been forgotten, but for two thousand years who has written in my tradition? I have been quoted but the whole shape and luster of my work has been lost. Who has invoked me intimately, as I did Aphrodite, as you just did me? Why has it taken you so long? I’ve been knocking at the door of your consciousness most of your little life!</i> <br /><i><br /></i> <br /><i>Dead poets long to be read. We long for our living audience, for the poets we influence, the poems that carry on our tradition, bring it into new territory. Suddenly your time is full of women poets, as though a fire swept through old woods releasing seeds that haven’t sprouted for 2600 years! You’re waking me up, exciting me, calling on me to return.</i> <br /><i><br /></i> <br /><i>Now you want me to help you in this second rite of passage, in the Lesbos of your imagination. But I need your help. Events keep tearing you away from me. Important meetings. Conferences. Telephone calls. I say: come to Lesbos; make time for solitude; be alone with me. Imagine yourself in the grove of apple trees. The apples are reddening, growing ripe. The breeze in the trees has more to say to you than any group of colleagues. What do they know of your essence, your struggle to release your spirit from other people’s purposes? If I am to help you find the self you left behind, I need your full attention, your ear to my voice, your mind to the flow of images. Most of all I need your body!</i><br /><br />You want my body?<br /><br /><i>No, I’m not propositioning you, not in the usual sense. I’m a ghost, a spirit. What I want is words for your body’s experience, your desire, your longing. When young women came to me on Lesbos I prepared them for the changing of the gods in their bodies. I called down Aphrodite. I taught them the pleasure of their bodies, what flowers to wear in their hair, what would make the blood run hot under their soft skin. Here they were, young and so lovely, breasts just blossoming. How could I not fall in love? I who was teaching them to cultivate the goddess of love, to make her incarnate in their own flesh, was cultivating my own body of love.</i><br /><i><br /></i> <br /><i>I brought girls from childhood to womanhood, teaching them to sing and to dance, to cultivate the subtle play of blood and fire in their loins, the connection to their feet, to know what colors to wear, how a dress should drape.</i><br /><i><br /></i> <br /><i>If I had known you when you were young, you would have known your own beauty. You would have learned to express your own passion, in words. No matter how overcome with passion a woman may be, if she can make a poem of her experience—she retains herself—has made a vessel for herself. I did this time and again.</i><br /><br /><blockquote>He is a god in my eyes<br /> the man who is allowed<br />to sit beside you—he<br />who listens intimately<br />to the sweet murmur of <br />your voice, the enticing<br />laughter that makes my own<br />heart beat fast… (12)</blockquote><br /><i>Can you imagine how it is to love a young woman, train her in the erotic arts, and then have to officiate at her marriage? Making poems held me together, as making poems has been holding you together in the change of life. What you need is some of our ancient Greek love for our bodies. We did not suffer from that post Christian fear of the body which has caused the fragmentation of my voice. Nor had we any desire to “rise above” our bodies. We knew what you need to remember: the body is where the gods speak to us. Your body is speaking to you, in hot flashes, in memory lapses, in a deep disorientation from the moon. You need me to help you in this change of the gods. I need you to give poetic voice to the change.</i> <br /><br />There is something I don’t understand. Do you not know about the change? Didn’t women of your time live past menopause? <br /><br /><i>Of course. Women have always known about menopause. In the ancient world we had our secret rituals, we knew the herbal remedies, all the lore of the wise blood. But none of this was valued, or written down. And as the men took over, and women’s spiritual practices were deemed dangerous, witchcraft, you forgot what we once knew. It got lost, like the poems of the poets before me, lost like the mysteries of Eleusis, like the many forms of the goddess.</i> <br /><br /><a target="_blank" style="clear:left;float:left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em;" href="http://www.amazon.com/Sister-Below-When-Muse-Gets/dp/098103442X?ie=UTF8&tag=widgetsamazon-20&link_code=bil&camp=213689&creative=392969"><img src="http://ws.amazon.com/widgets/q?MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&ID=AsinImage&WS=1&Format=_SL160_&ASIN=098103442X&tag=widgetsamazon-20" alt="The Sister from Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way" /></a><img width="1" height="1" border="0" style="border:medium none;margin:0px;padding:0px;" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=widgetsamazon-20&l=bil&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=098103442X" alt="ir?t=widgetsamazon-20&l=bil&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=098103442X" /><br />The previous article is an excerpt from<br />The Sister From Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way<br />by Naomi Ruth Lowinsky<br /><br /><br />Naomi Lowinsky is the author of <a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/Sister-Below-When-Muse-Gets/dp/098103442X?ie=UTF8&tag=widgetsamazon-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969">The Sister From Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way</a><img width="1" height="1" border="0" style="border:medium none;margin:0px;padding:0px;" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=widgetsamazon-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=098103442X" alt="ir?t=widgetsamazon-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=098103442X" />, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/Motherline-Every-Womans-Journey-Female/dp/0981034462?ie=UTF8&tag=widgetsamazon-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969">The Motherline: Every Woman's Journey to Find Her Female Roots</a><img width="1" height="1" border="0" style="border:medium none;margin:0px;padding:0px;" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=widgetsamazon-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0981034462" alt="ir?t=widgetsamazon-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0981034462" />, and the just published book of poems, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/Adagio-Lamentation-Naomi-Ruth-Lowinsky/dp/1926715055?ie=UTF8&tag=widgetsamazon-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969">Adagio and Lamentation</a><img width="1" height="1" border="0" style="border:medium none;margin:0px;padding:0px;" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=widgetsamazon-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=1926715055" alt="ir?t=widgetsamazon-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=1926715055" />. She has authored numerous prose essays, many of which have been published in Psychological Perspectives and The Jung Journal. Her two previous poetry collections, red clay is talking (2000) and <a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/Crimes-Dreamer-Naomi-Ruth-Lowinsky/dp/0967022487?ie=UTF8&tag=widgetsamazon-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969">crimes of the dreamer</a><img width="1" height="1" border="0" style="border:medium none;margin:0px;padding:0px;" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=widgetsamazon-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0967022487" alt="ir?t=widgetsamazon-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0967022487" /> (2005) were published by Scarlet Tanager Books. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize three times and is the recent recipient of the Obama Millennium Poetry awarded for "Madelyn Dunham, Passing On.” Naomi is a Jungian analyst in private practice, poetry and fiction editor of Psychological Perspectives.<br /><br />Naomi’s publications are available from The Pacifica Graduate Institute Bookstore and directly from Fisher King Press. Phone orders welcomed, Credit Cards accepted. 1-800-228-9316 toll free in the US and Canada, International +1-831-238-7799.<br /><br />Below are links to download the FKP newsletter, current catalog, and price list/order form:<br /><br /><a href="http://www.fisherkingpress.com/newsletter.pdf">Fisher King Press Newsletter</a> <br /><a href="http://www.fisherkingpress.com/catalog.pdf">Fisher King Press Catalog of Publications</a> <br /><a href="http://www.fisherkingpress.com/pricelist.pdf">Fisher King Press Price List and Order Form</a> <br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:x-small;">(1) Sappho, Barnard trans., fragment #64.</span><br /><span style="font-size:x-small;">(2) Judy Grahn, The Highest Apple : Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition, p. 7.</span><br /><span style="font-size:x-small;">(3) Sappho, fragment #8.</span><br /><span style="font-size:x-small;">(4) Hilda.Doolittle. (H.D.), Notes on Thought and Vision and The Wise Sappho, pp. 57-58.</span><br /><span style="font-size:x-small;">(5) Sappho, fragment #37.</span><br /><span style="font-size:x-small;">(6) C.M. Bowra, Greek Lyric Poetry, p. 130.</span><br /><span style="font-size:x-small;">(7) Alcaeus, Greek Lyric Poetry, p. 239.</span><br /><span style="font-size:x-small;">(8) Lowinsky, unpublished poem.</span><br /><span style="font-size:x-small;">(9) Sappho, fragment #43.</span><br /><span style="font-size:x-small;">(10) Sappho, The Poems and Fragments of Sappho, translated by Jim Powell, p. 33.</span><br /><span style="font-size:x-small;">(11) H.D., The Wise Sappho, pp. 58-59.</span><br /><span style="font-size:x-small;">(12) Sappho, fragment #39.</span><br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align:center;"><span style="font-size:x-small;">Copyright 2010 © Fisher King Press - Permission to reprint is granted.</span></div></div>
Opposites, the Creative Instinct, and Our Unique Identity, article by Lawrence H. Staples
https://depthpsychologyalliance.com/profiles/blogs/opposites-the-creative
2010-05-16T00:30:00.000Z
2010-05-16T00:30:00.000Z
Fisher King Press
https://depthpsychologyalliance.com/members/FisherKingPress
<div><span style="font-size:x-small;">article by Lawrence H. Staples</span><br /><br /><b>the problem of the opposites</b><br /><br /><div style="text-align:justify;">Jung recognized that the problem of the opposites is one of the most formidable obstacles to psychic integration. Even when we are able to integrate opposites there remains substantial tension between them. If the integration is so complete that the opposites literally merge, consciousness, as we know it, disappears. Consciousness of life depends upon the tension of opposites. So the problem is to bring them close together without a total merger in which one or the other of the opposites would lose its identity. This is indeed a challenging task.</div><br /><div style="text-align:justify;">To complicate, but also clarify, the problem of the opposites, I would like to share with you a quote from Jung that contains what for me is his most profound insight on the subject of guilt and its relationship to human existence. Jung said, “The one-after-another is a bearable prelude to the deepest knowledge of the side-by-side, for this is an incomparably more difficult problem. Again, the view that good and evil are spiritual forces outside us, and that man is caught in the conflict between them, is more bearable by far than the insight that the opposites are the ineradicable and indispensable precondition of all psychic life, so much so that life itself is guilt.”<span style="font-size:x-small;">(1)</span> It is important here to note that “side-by-side” for Jung does not mean a merger, mutual absorption, or synthesis of opposites.</div><a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/Guilt-Twist-Promethean-Lawrence-Staples/dp/097760764X?ie=UTF8&tag=wwwmalcolmclc-20&link_code=bil&camp=213689&creative=392969"><img class="align-right" width="104" src="http://ws.amazon.com/widgets/q?MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&ID=AsinImage&WS=1&Format=_SL160_&ASIN=097760764X&tag=wwwmalcolmclc-20&width=104" alt="q?MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&ID=AsinImage&WS=1&Format=_SL160_&ASIN=097760764X&tag=wwwmalcolmclc-20&width=104" /></a><img width="1" height="1" border="0" style="border:medium none;margin:0px;padding:0px;" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=wwwmalcolmclc-20&l=bil&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=097760764X" alt="ir?t=wwwmalcolmclc-20&l=bil&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=097760764X" /><br /><div style="text-align:justify;">The idea that life itself is guilt is based upon conceptions of how human consciousness works. As noted earlier, consciousness itself depends on the existence of polar opposites. Guilt, therefore, which attempts to keep us from our “evil other,” is closely related to the formation of the opposites in our psychic anatomy.</div><br /><b>the creative instinct</b><br /><br /><div style="text-align:justify;">Fortunately, there is a powerful tool that can help us resolve the problem of the opposites. This tool is creative work. Creative production in art, as in life, depends upon bringing two opposites, the masculine and the feminine, into close enough proximity to produce a “child”(i.e., a book, a symphony, a painting, etc.) without losing the identity of the opposites that created the “child.” When we begin to do creative work, we connect to the deepest forces that govern all creation. It connects us to God, to the self within, to put it in Jungian terms. Reflected in our language is the Judaeo/Christian idea and belief that God and the creator and sustainer of all existence are one. The words God and Creator are in fact interchangeable in English as well as in other Western languages, such as French and German. The ultimate product of this process of psychological, inner creation is a stronger ego that increasingly approximates a reflected image of the Archetypal Self, which is whole and contains all of the opposites.</div><br /><div style="text-align:justify;">The Archetypal Self, or God, represents the totality; no stone is left out, all the stones are included in this totality. But a colossal lie stands in the way of achieving this totality. This is not about the existence or non-existence of the opposites, the dark and the light. We know they exist. The lie is in labeling one side exclusively good and the other side exclusively bad, as we tend to do. We know that creation is enabled by the existence of, masculine and feminine opposites. If we make one side good and the other side bad, we reject one of the essential players in the creative drama.</div><br /><div style="text-align:justify;">There is an instinct deep within us, although difficult to access consciously, that tells us that embracing the one-sided formulas for salvation, including the Christian advocacy of the exclusive primacy of love, will actually keep us from the totality of our selves. It is an instinct that actually is our salvation. It emanates from our duality. It tells us that we must love and hate everything at the same time. We must love the dark and the light and we must hate the dark and the light. Wired as we are, light has no meaning without the dark and dark has no meaning without the light. Each of these depends on the other for its existence. Without the one, there can be no consciousness of the other, and nothing exists for an individual if he is not conscious of it. If we are unable to maintain simultaneously in consciousness both our hate and love feelings, we cannot protect ourselves if we are abused—physically, psychologically, or sexually—by those whom we deeply love and those whom we need to trust.</div><br /><div style="text-align:justify;">It is our duality that causes us to be drawn inexorably to movies (e.g., Crash, Lawrence of Arabia, or A Civil Action) or to great art, literature, or music (e.g., the opera Tosca or the play Hamlet).<span style="font-size:x-small;">(2)</span> In Tosca,<span style="font-size:x-small;">(3)</span> we see Scarpia, on his knees, praying in church, while leering lustfully at Tosca. In the movie, Crash,<span style="font-size:x-small;">(4)</span> a policeman saves the life of a black woman whom just days before he had humiliated and mistreated. We see Hamlet indecisive and cowardly one day, and the next brave and sure. In Lawrence of Arabia,<span style="font-size:x-small;">(5)</span> Lawrence risks his life to save a man who he deliberately kills shortly thereafter. In A Civil Action,<span style="font-size:x-small;">(6)</span> a greedy, money-driven, ambulance-chasing lawyer finds a cause for which he is willing to sacrifice his career and fortune. And then there is Peter loving Christ one moment and denying him the next. There is a Jekyll and Hyde in all of us, in all people. We are drawn, as if against our wills, to these conflicting portraits. We are drawn to them and have feeling for them because we see ourselves in them, whether we know it or not. We are drawn to images that reflect ourselves, but protect us from the direct experience. To know that we have the same base feelings in us as Scarpia, right along side all of our goodness, is difficult to bear. We are drawn, nevertheless, to these characters and images because nature seems to have planted deep within us a developmental process that, through the agency of feeling, attracts us irresistibly closer and closer to our opposites. It attracts us to our opposites so that we can come together with them, side by side, in an embrace of creativity that leads us eventually to wholeness. As we experience in literature, art, and life, we are ineluctably attracted to realness, to three dimensionality, to wholeness.</div><br /><div style="text-align:justify;">Life might be easier, simpler, and less painful if our one-sidedness could be a sustainable reality instead of a wish. But, there are always two sides, regardless of whether we are conscious of them. The solution to this dilemma involves finding a way to honor both sides of ourselves in consciousness. This is the answer, but it is not easy to hold on to it. It involves a creative solution to one of life’s most difficult problems. The answer lies in a creation that depends upon intimate contact of two opposites without either being lost or subsumed by the other.</div><br /><b>our unique identity</b><br /><br /><div style="text-align:justify;">Ultimately, the creative act of self-development results in the formation of our unique identity. It is the most particular manifestation of our self. We all have a unique identity, not just Picasso or Einstein or Beethoven or Frank Lloyd Wright. We are not conscious of our unique identity until we have done a lot of work on our selves. People who study art, music, literature, or architecture can identify the painter’s, composer’s, author’s, or architect’s work without seeing a signature. They know that the painting was by Caravaggio or Manet, or that a piece of music was written by Stravinsky or Wagner, or a book by Hemingway, or that a building was designed by Louis Kahn or Frank Lloyd Wright. The creative product of the artist is his signature, and we recognize it because we have studied his work.</div><br /><div style="text-align:justify;">Each of us also has a unique signature. But, we must pay attention to our selves and do our own work in depth, if we are to recognize our own signature. We must do this for the same reason we must study artists to know their works. Thus, an important part of the work of discovering our selves is creative production and in-depth analysis. With time and effort we can come to know and recognize our own special signatures. Our physical identity is more readily visible and accessible than our psychic identity. There is always something unique in our physical identity; for example, the parents and siblings of identical twins can usually tell them apart. We have mirrors and can see our physical selves.</div><br /><div style="text-align:justify;">It is far more difficult to “see” our psychic selves. There are no psychic mirrors readily available to us, unless we had exceptional parents who could fully, without harsh judgment, reflect our selves back to us. We may still be able to see our psychic selves if we find a therapist who will do for us what our parents could not. <br /> <br />Creative work can also help us see our selves. Creative work is a mirror that can reflect our selves back to us if we pay enough attention. Therapists can help us in this regard, by helping us interpret our creative work.</div><br /><div style="text-align:justify;">In his book, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/Restoration-Self-Heinz-Kohut/dp/0226450139?ie=UTF8&tag=wwwmalcolmclc-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969">The Restoration of the Self</a><img width="1" height="1" border="0" style="border:medium none;margin:0px;padding:0px;" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=wwwmalcolmclc-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0226450139" alt="ir?t=wwwmalcolmclc-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0226450139" />,<span style="font-size:x-small;">(7)</span> Heinz Kohut wrote at length about psychically wounded people and the therapeutic methods he used to help them. He found none more effective, or so essential, as creative work. He found, importantly, that it made no difference whether the creative work was deemed good or artistic by any standards. The simple process of doing creative work helped restore the self. It is as if nature plants within us a built-in remedy for our worst affliction, the affliction of being separated from large parts of ourselves. We experience this separation as a kind of inner civil war that divides us internally. It produces the pain and suffering inherent in any civil war, whether in our internal world or outside. It seems that the human urge to do creative work, to use all our stones to heal and restore our wholeness, is a compensatory impulse and blessing that arises from the psychic civil war that wounded us. In my own work as a psychoanalyst, I have witnessed the truth of Kohut’s findings. I have watched patients grow in wholeness as they began to work creatively in a variety of media that helped them recover and restore cut off parts of themselves.</div><a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/Creative-Soul-Art-Quest-Wholeness/dp/0981034446?ie=UTF8&tag=wwwmalcolmclc-20&link_code=bil&camp=213689&creative=392969"><img class="align-right" width="104" src="http://ws.amazon.com/widgets/q?MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&ID=AsinImage&WS=1&Format=_SL160_&ASIN=0981034446&tag=wwwmalcolmclc-20&width=104" alt="q?MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&ID=AsinImage&WS=1&Format=_SL160_&ASIN=0981034446&tag=wwwmalcolmclc-20&width=104" /></a><img width="1" height="1" border="0" style="border:medium none;margin:0px;padding:0px;" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=wwwmalcolmclc-20&l=bil&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0981034446" alt="ir?t=wwwmalcolmclc-20&l=bil&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0981034446" /><br /><div style="text-align:justify;">Creative work actually serves as a kind of inner parent that compensates for the flawed parenting we may have had as children. Creative work mirrors us in a way we were often not mirrored by our parents. Creative work mirrors us for the simple reason that we can see projected in it, if we look and interpret carefully, our own psychological and spiritual selves. Mirrors in all their manifold guises help restore the wounded self.</div><br /><span style="font-size:x-small;">1 Jung, C.G., Collected Works 14, par. 206<br />2 Shakespeare, William, Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Grosset & Dunlap, New York.<br />3 Puccini, G., Tosca.<br />4 Crash Paul Haggis (director/writer/producer), Lion’s Gate Films (2005).<br />5 Lawrence of Arabia, David Lean (director), Robert A. Harris and Sam Spiegel (producers), Columbia Pictures (1962).<br />6 A Civil Action, Steven Zaillian (director), Walt Disney Studios (1999).<br />7 Kohut, Heinz (1983), The Restoration of the Self, New York, International Universities Press, especially pp. 53-54, 10, 17-18, 40, 158 and 289.</span><br /><br />This article by Lawrence Staples is an excerpt from <em>Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Wa</em>y.<br /><br /><div style="text-align:center;"></div><div style="text-align:center;"><span style="font-size:85%;">Lawrence H. 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