psychological - Blogs - Depth Psychology Alliance
2024-03-28T09:46:29Z
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The Shape of Water: The Shape of Change?
https://depthpsychologyalliance.com/profiles/blogs/the-shape-of-water-the-shape-of-change
2018-02-02T02:34:24.000Z
2018-02-02T02:34:24.000Z
Jean Raffa
https://depthpsychologyalliance.com/members/JeanRaffa
<div><p></p><p><span style="font-size:12pt;"> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9142464666,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img src="{{#staticFileLink}}9142464666,original{{/staticFileLink}}" width="400" class="align-right" alt="9142464666?profile=original" /></a>Filmgoers may have laughingly dismissed Godzilla, the Teenage Werewolf, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon in the 1950’s, but nobody laughs at the real-life monsters we see on television every day in the form of terrorists, genocidal dictators, and political leaders who incite divisiveness and spout nuclear threats. We get it. Dystopia is us. Our problems are caused by humanity’s psychological and spiritual ignorance, and they will not be resolved until enough individuals acquire more mature and humane ways of thinking and behaving. What used to be the role of deities and religious authorities has now become everyone’s job.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:12pt;"> Fortunately, there are prophets among us to show us the way. They are the courageous and gifted artists who create books and films depicting ordinary people who evolve into heroic individuals. The Star Wars series, Avatar, Arrival, and The Shape of Water are examples. Their mythic themes and archetypal characters limn the shape of our own souls. Everyone enjoys a good story. But do we realize these stories are about us? Do we understand their metaphors and decipher their symbols? Do we apply their lessons to our own lives?</span></p><p><span style="font-size:12pt;"> Each of us contains a possible hero like Luke Skywalker, an indomitable Amazon heroine like Princess Leia, a Wise Man like Yoda, a menacing Warrior like Darth Vader. You may relate to Avatar’s Jake Sully, a vulnerable wounded Warrior with the potential to be healed by love, but his counterpart—the dark side’s ruthless, power-hungry Colonel Miles Quaritch—also lives in you. Regardless of your gender you can activate the healing of an Earth Mother like the Na’vi’s Mo’at, a beautiful Beloved like princess Neytiri, or a benevolent Wise Woman like Dr. Grace Augustine. Archetypes are latent patterns of energy in everyone’s soul. They teach and empower us when we listen.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:12pt;"> Consider Arrival’s gentle Louse Banks, a linguist who’s tormented by intuitions and visions which fill her with confusion and dread. She’s the image of a person in whom the Mediatrix archetype is activated. When the U.S. Army recruits her to communicate with alien life forms hovering over the earth, she breaks the rules to gain their trust. In a blog post titled “Arrival: How the Feminine Saves the World,” depth psychology expert Carol S. Pearson notes this “reveals how traditional elements of the Lover archetype are morphing to meet new challenges.” The world leaders see the aliens as dangerous threats and are preparing to make war on them. But because Louise is motivated by love, not fear, she sees them as wondrous life forms to communicate with and befriend. This prompts us to ask ourselves: Do I respect people and species different from me? Do I listen to the subtle messages of my body? Do I befriend my thoughts and emotions or try to ignore them? </span></p><p><span style="font-size:12pt;"> In The Shape of Water, an even more vulnerable heroine saves the life of an amphibious monster. The year is 1962. Elisa is a mute, mousy janitor on the night shift of a top-secret government research lab desperate to get one-up on the Russians. One night a promising “asset” arrives in a portable tank in the form of a scaly green creature-from-the-Black-Lagoon lookalike from a Brazilian rainforest where he was worshiped as a god. Deeply drawn to this equally voiceless and powerless creature, Elisa initiates a fairy-tale romance with him by playing Benny Goodman on her portable record player, placing hard-boiled eggs on the lip of the tank in which he’s confined, and teaching him sign language when he emerges from the water to eat them.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:12pt;"> As it turns out, the real monster in this story is Richard Strickland, a sadistic, square-jawed military officer who tortures the green man, sexually harasses Elisa, and makes racist comments to Zelda, her co-worker. Overhearing the scientists’ plans to kill and dissect her beloved in the name of science, a frantic and determined Elisa enlists the help of Zelda and her gay neighbor, Giles, to rescue him. The remainder of the film builds the tension amid a dreamy, watery green ambiance before reconciling it in a surprise ending that leaves us wondering: What just happened? Is he what he seems? Do I have it in me to do what she did? Does love really have a god-like power? How strong is my Lover archetype? Do I truly know how to love?</span></p><p><span style="font-size:12pt;"> The characters in these films play out their roles against a backdrop of mythic themes:</span></p><ul><li><span style="font-size:12pt;">the destructiveness of our shadow Warriors</span></li><li><span style="font-size:12pt;">the crises and suffering necessary for the making of a hero/ine</span></li><li><span style="font-size:12pt;">the need to respect, communicate with, and accept help from other people and species</span></li><li><span style="font-size:12pt;">love’s victory over ignorance and hatred</span></li></ul><p><span style="font-size:12pt;"> But here’s a not-so subtle difference. It used to be that only men got to be heroes, but we’re seeing more heroines now. Although the first Star Wars film to appear centers primarily on Luke Skywalker, it is his heroic sister, Princess Leia, who turns him into a hero. The same is true of Avatar’s Jake Sully whose heroism is inspired by the equally heroic Princess Neytiri.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:12pt;"> The most recent of these—Arrival, The Shape of Water, and The Last Jedi—convey a theme new to our time which resonates with many souls today: the feminine as savior. Louise, Elisa, and Rey are not fantasy superheroines like Wonder Woman and Aquagirl. And they’re not sidekicks who help the main character accomplish his goals. They are ordinary women who initiate change and accomplish it with the respect and cooperation of healthy, caring men. Louise’s heroism is aided by Ian, a scientist. Giles helps Elisa save the green man. And in the newest Star Wars episode, Rey becomes the last Jedi with the help of Luke Skywalker. The main protagonists are females.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:12pt;"> This shift in the spirit of our times is reflected in recent statistics. The Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film reports that of the top 100 films in 2014, only 12% featured female protagonists. But then something happened. In 2015 the figure was 22% and in 2016 it jumped to 29%.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:12pt;"> Although the data are not in for 2017, we appear to be seeing the beginning of a trend. Water, like earth, has always been considered a feminine element, and in dreams, water and earth symbolize the unconscious self. Societies have unconscious selves too. Like the ocean, our collective unconscious contains monsters, but it also holds overlooked hidden treasures. Is the feminine as savior of the world the shape of change? Are you and I the shape of change?</span></p><h2><span style="font-size:12pt;"><em>Note: For more posts like this, please check out Jean Raffa's blog, <a href="https://jeanraffa.wordpress.com" target="_blank">Matrignosis,</a> and the blog of author <a href="http://www.carolspearson.com/blog/">Carol S. Pearson</a>, where this post first appeared.</em></span></h2><h3><em>Jean Raffa’s The Bridge to Wholeness and Dream Theatres of the Soul are at <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Jean-Benedict-Raffa/e/B005K8MFNM">Amazon</a>. E-book versions are also at <a href="http://store.kobobooks.com/en-CA/ebook/the-bridge-to-wholeness-a-feminine-alternative-to-the-hero-myth">Kobo</a>, <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-bridge-to-wholeness-jean-benedict-raffa/1111449439?ean=2940045493901">Barnes And Noble</a> and <a href="https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/jeanraffa">Smashwords</a>. Healing the Sacred Divide can be found at <a href="http://www.amazon.com/author/jeanraffa">Amazon</a> and <a href="http://www.larsonpublications.com/">Larson Publications, Inc</a>.</em></h3><div id="jp-post-flair" class="sharedaddy sd-like-enabled sd-sharing-enabled"><div class="sharedaddy sd-sharing-enabled"></div></div><p><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></p></div>
The Incest Taboo - in therapy and in life
https://depthpsychologyalliance.com/profiles/blogs/the-incest-taboo-in-therapy-and-in-life
2014-04-15T14:16:19.000Z
2014-04-15T14:16:19.000Z
Jane Platko
https://depthpsychologyalliance.com/members/JanePlatko
<div><p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9142447461,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img width="500" height="534" class="align-full" style="width:188px;height:269px;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9142447461,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9142447461?profile=original" /></a><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family:georgia, palatino;"><font><font face="Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif">In my story of how after nine months of some pretty intense psychotherapy my patient and I decided to end our therapeutic relationship for a more emotionally and spiritually honest coupling that leveled the playing field, even in its telling, I break a taboo. The publication of my account of what it has been like for my husband and me to live with this history for twenty-four years has elicited the predicted ire and scorn from parts of the psychological community.</font></font></span></p><p><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family:georgia, palatino;"><font><font face="Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif">The evolution of a therapy relationship into an intimate relationship is a highly charged topic. It unearths an archetype, threatening the cornerstone of psychotherapy from back in the day of Freud and Jung. The incest taboo. This taboo lies at the core of the transference phenomena, where the conscious and unconscious of both therapist and patient meet and mix in ways not dissimilar to the ways we all relate to one another, but with the exception that in therapy it is the therapist’s responsibility to do whatever she can do to bring consciousness into the resulting stew of projection and projective identification better known as human relationship. Which is a very long-winded way of saying the buck stops at the therapist’s door. And it is, I believe, every therapists' conscious desire to do no harm.</font></font></span></p><p><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family:georgia, palatino;"><font face="Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif">The bottom-line here points to what in psychotherapy is imaged as the inner or interior child of the patient. It is the patient’s child-self that must be protected at all cost. The two-year rule found in many psychological ethics codes, which mandates a two-year waiting period between the termination of therapy and the beginning of a sexually intimate relationship, is primarily designed to keep the former patient’s child-self safe from any sexual exploitation. An inarguable intention.</font></span></p><p><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family:georgia, palatino;"><font><font face="Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif">Let me be perfectly clear. I am not, nor have I ever been, an advocate of converting therapy relationships into sexual relationships. Though I have dared to reveal intimate details of my history in an effort to show how the broken pieces of my psyche fit into the puzzle of my husband’s psyche in a way that brought us together, there is nothing cavalier in that telling.</font></font></span></p><p><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family:georgia, palatino;"><font><font face="Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif">I say in my memoir,</font></font></span></p><p><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family:georgia, palatino;"><font face="Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif">"To my mind the move from analysis to a romantic partnership was necessarily daunting and those who made it blithely were fools, or worse. But to declare that a union forged along the seam of transference was sure to fail would be a poor prognosis for most relationships—so much of attraction being borne of projection.</font></span></p><div><p><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family:georgia, palatino;"><font face="Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif">I do agree there must be rules to protect the vulnerable. But there will be exceptions to any rule. And those stories have a right to be heard."</font></span></p></div><p><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family:georgia, palatino;"><font><font face="Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif">And the forbidden, I believe, must be continually revisioned and renamed. What exactly are we talking about? What anathema? What map locates love, need, desire, and abuse? And where are the wise counselors able to fine tune the mapmaking?</font></font></span></p><p><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family:georgia, palatino;"><font><font face="Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif">There needs to be clarity in language, certainly in psychology. Is there really no difference between incest committed between adults and children in families and the incestuous pulls in therapy and in life?</font></font></span></p><p><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family:georgia, palatino;"><font><font face="Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif">From the start, my husband maintained that I reminded him of his mother. Only in the best sense, he would say. His mother, who had her demons, was one of the most generous, funny, salt of the earth, intelligent women I’d ever met. In fact, I experienced her in many ways as the mother I’d never had, and my mother-in-law and I became close friends. Sweet, some might say.</font></font></span></p><p><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family:georgia, palatino;"><font><font face="Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif">Others could argue my vulnerable husband was seduced by his therapist mother, and make a case against our relationship, a relationship in which we have been mostly happy together for twenty-four years, calling it pathological, exploitive, inappropriate, and some do.</font></font></span></p><p><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family:georgia, palatino;"><font face="Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif">My memoirs are my reflections on the mysteries of my life. My story is my personal truth. I have not offered it as a collective model.</font></span></p><p><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family:georgia, palatino;"><font face="Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif">Deeper conversations about psychological ethics and codes of conduct, about the transferences and countertransferences in therapy, about morality, and the regulation of love and the regulation of sex, and the rational and irrational forces that affect individuation, and about whether those countless couples who live in hiding because their love for each other began in a therapy relationship should be judged as criminal or immoral or insane, these conversations, it seems to me, are waiting to be had.</font></span></p></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>