Behind Shades

Sunglasses have a way of showing up in odd places, in songs or interpersonal encounters or photos of public figures. “Cheap Sunglasses” by ZZ Top. The image of Ray Charles. A friend whose eyes are hidden behind dark lenses. Other characters who live mysteriously behind shades.

Recently I lost my regular prescription eyeglasses and had to rely solely on my prescription sunglasses to see clearly. In my therapy office, I went without glasses. I enjoy hanging out behind dark lenses in some circumstances, but while doing therapy isn’t one of them. Whether eyes meet or not or at what moments they do … all these variations are significant and interesting during a session. I explained to clients that without glasses I could see, but joked that everything is in “soft focus.”

In the days of film photography, which still continue for some of us, you could buy a soft focus filter to lend a pleasing blur to an image. My digital photo editing software can create the same visual effect. To be more accurate, my vision problem without glasses is not exactly a soft focus issue. It is closer to the blur in a portrait photo, in which the subject is in sharp focus, and whatever is going on in the background fades into a blur that suggests a dreamlike reality. Sometimes I think of this as the dreamlike background of existence–the fluid realm out of which individuation emerges and which becomes activated during developmental events in a person’s life.

One might also think of impressionistic movements in art as attempts to squint, or blur vision, in order to see reality differently. Seeing clearly has its downsides. Used destructively, it kills the imaginative faculty. As I coped with the embarrassment, frustration, and self-attack involved in losing my glasses, this blurring of vision afforded a new view of things. As focus softened, I softened, and my attitudes softened and became more fluid and capable of experiencing what was there.

Maybe not being able to see so clearly forced me to rest my eyes, half-closed, and thus experience a relaxing of my mental muscle–the muscle that tries to know and master what I encounter. In the words of Captain Beefheart, “Somebody’s had too much to think!” Relaxing the need to know and master is in fact beneficial to psychotherapy in various ways. Psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion associated each therapy session with a kind of dreaming while awake. Therapy makes a space for reverie and free association–less knowing and mastery, in other words–and thus engages the capacity to dream one’s experience into existence. This capacity undergirds psychological development and therefore therapeutic efforts by making it possible to metabolize experience.

Face Not Recognized

I finally capitulated several years after everyone else and got myself an andoid – a telephone that is “smart,” like an I-Phone but not Apple. I’ve hesitated to do so, largely on account of my discomfort with further attaching my own consciousness and daily experience to digital devices. It’s a known fact that Google wants to be the third half of your brain. Are you okay with that? How does that alter your sense of self? Particularly your sense of your own human limitations?

Those questions aside, I wanted to report a truly psychological experience brought on by tethering myself to a device. When I told my android how I wanted to keep it secure from intruders, I first chose the option “Recognize My Face.” In case you’ve not encountered facial recognition software, let me explain. The android takes photos of your face and puts the data it collects from the images into an algorithmic structure. When it captures the image, a dotted line slowly encircles the perimeter of your face, and when it finishes, that version of your face is saved. You can do this as many times as you wish, in as many different lighting situations and with as many expressions and types of eyeglasses as you choose. The more versions of you that enter the algorithm, the more likely that the android will recognize your identity at any given time.

So, when I turn my phone on, it asks me to show my face to the camera. Then it tries to match what it sees to what it has seen before. If it does, quickly the android grants access. Many times, however, because of anything from bad lighting to bed-head, it says, “Sorry Face Not Recognized.” As I read this on the screen, the photo of my face in that moment mirrors an often sorry-looking me, in one stage of dishevelment or another, or with sunglasses on and bright light behind, or whatever. I am not recognized. I have dutifully taken what feels like hundreds of self-portraits for the software, but the failure rate for access has continued to annoy.

Gradually I have become ridiculous, and screw my face up into awful contortions when the android tries to recognize me, just so it won’t. It’s as though I want to flaunt my individuality—the impossibility of summing me up in an algorithm. After all, IT doesn’t have a face. IT is a digital reality, a reality that can be reduced to zeros and ones, faceless. I, on the other hand, am not. I want to say to this device, “Guess what, you can’t know me, and you can never know me, however smart you are.”

The obvious reference here is Martin Buber, the philosopher who distinguished between “I – Thou” and “I – It” relations. A device is an It. A person is a Thou and cannot be summed up or reduced down to its elements. A Thou is a mystery who can never be fathomed.

I could argue that an It also can never be fathomed given the mysterious nature of reality, but I will save that for another posting.

Relationship with the Unconscious

I remember sitting for a time with some Buddhists when I lived in California. By sitting I mean going to a center, which happened to rent space in a Quaker church, and sitting for a couple of hours, once a week. What did we do while we were sitting there? We listened to a teacher of Vipassana or mindfulness meditation, and then put his teaching into practice, which meant quietly paying attention–to our breath, to our thoughts, feelings, and body sensations. I never took on the mantle of Buddhism myself, but the experience there has stayed with me.

Today it came to mind. I was thinking about thinking, and how in any given day, thoughts and feelings and images–the flow of our internal worlds–move along of their own accord. Sometimes it feels as though I have little say in how they move. They happen, quite forcefully at times, and I may find myself on the receiving end. In terms of depth psychology, we are continually fielding the forceful influx of the unconscious psyche.

I remembered something the meditation teacher said about how, when we quiet our minds and simply pay attention to what is happening, suddenly we realize how incredibly busy and noisy it is inside. It can be rather distressing. I believe the Buddhists call it the “monkey mind.” Stop for a moment, and notice all the crazy monkeys jumping and swinging about, making a big racket. And you thought you were master of your psychic house! Think again.

Okay, so now to transpose things into the milieu of Jungian psychology, or any depth psychology that acknowledges the unconscious as a significant force in the human psyche. The personal self or ego does not rule over the unconscious psyche. It is one player on the stage of a drama, and it’s not in charge of the production. But it does have a say; it can take a stand.

Broadly speaking, the other players consist of unconscious forces, which Jung calls complexes. Complexes are emotionally charged thoughts and images that have an autonomous life. They have a personal aspect, based in our individual traumas, biology, and patterns, and an archetypal aspect, expressed in the over-arching images of myths and fairy tales. In their archetypal aspect, the complexes are the gods and goddesses, who rather notoriously do not have personal human welfare high on their list of priorities.

So what of the human? What of the self that wants to take a stand? That wants to move from the receiving end of unconscious forces to the active, choosing end? That is not interested in being a plaything of the deities? It’s not an easy matter. Consider the mundane experience of moving through your day. A terrible mood may overcome you. A thought about an old relationship might take hold of you. A feeling about your unworthiness might convince you. An old wound might open up and suck you in. It’s hard in the moment to take a stand in relation to these psychological facts that happen to us. But say that you do. In your own way, you meet the force of the unconscious with a counter-force. You demand room for “me.”

I would propose that then, when you make that demand, the unconscious will respond differently. I am reminded of a dream I heard once. The dreamer had been chased recurrently in the dreamworld by a sinister figure. Finally, one night, something changed. The dreamer turned to face the persecutor, and things were different after that. Not necessarily easy, but now there was a more symmetrical relationship between the person and the forces of the unconscious. The prey had turned to the predator and said, in effect, “I see you!” And, “You don’t just get to do what you want with me. I have a say in this relationship.” Now there is the possibility for an encounter, a negotiation, and ultimately, the ability for the person to make a demand on the unconscious psyche to contribute something worthwhile. Maybe we can even imagine that the psyche has wanted this kind of encounter with us all along.

Dis/connected Connection

The other day I headed up to the mountains. Just for a day. I’m lucky to live in Portland, Oregon, where that’s possible–to drive up into the wilderness and back within the space of a mere 10 or 12 hours. I gave myself a day off from my counseling practice, from family, colleagues, friends, and the familiar sights and rhythms of the city. To go away, and to come back. It’s important. It always feels good and leaves me with a reminder that “I want to do this more often.”

I left early so as to make the best of my time. The night before, in an uncharacteristic spurt of organizational prowess, I laid out everything I needed for the time away. When I woke before my alarm, I slipped out quietly into the cold air and dim light of early morning and was on my way.

It was about 20 minutes into my drive when I found myself reaching for my cell phone, only to find… no phone. Not in my pockets. Not in my bag. Not in the storage area under the armrest. Nowhere. I stopped and rifled through everywhere I could think to look. Twice. Nothing. Had it fallen out of a pocket onto the street? Was it on the table at home?

I noticed my anxiety rise as I contemplated my venture without that apparently indispensable tool, the cell phone, that only 15 years ago I did quite well without. What if I had car trouble? Or sprained my ankle on a trail? What if there were a family emergency? Or a client crisis? No one would be able to reach me, and I could reach no one, short of a pocket full of change and the rare sight of a pay phone. I reproached myself, my disorganization, my mistake.

Now, just to clarify, I don’t have a phone with lots of fancy stuff. No iPhone. No “apps.” Not even a less expensive knockoff of said device. No offense to the wonder of those technologies, but I don’t particularly want anything like that. I have a recording of the singer Tom Waits telling stories and jokes to an audience in Birmingham, Alabama, and I like it when at one point he laments the cell phone that is also a camera. “Why can’t something just be what it is?” he asks. My phone does have a camera, but it’s basic. I went for one that can take a beating too, which is fortunate, since I’ve already left it lying out in the grass on a dewy night once or twice by accident. It has a permanent defect now where the damp got in and messed up the display, but it works fine.

As the absence of the phone sunk in, I found myself driving down the freeway and country roads, slowly letting go of my anxiety at being dis/connected from the spirits of the air, those invisible transmitters of text, image, and voice, to other humans far from the actual place I inhabit at any one moment. A strange calm came over me, and a release. I was free in a new way for that day, from the fear driven by my attachment to those invisible connections. Then it was evening, and I was back. Nothing bad happened. I felt happy and refreshed and wondered whether I would leave my digital device behind on purpose next time. I thought to myself that maybe–thanks to technology–never being dis/connected means never really getting a chance to go away, and to come back, and I expect the soul wants that chance.

What Can’t be Spoken

I’ve had a little hiatus from writing here on this blog of mine. The holidays, travel, fun, stress, the usual suspects. And a certain hesitancy to pick up the virtual pen and write again. Even the word “blog” irritated me just now as I wrote that first sentence. Blog … what sort of word is that? Blog, bog, log, boggy feelings, being weighted down, a mere cog in the wheel … the associations that come to mind are not particularly pleasant. It sounds like something that gets stuck in one’s gut and needs medical intervention to remove it. “Thank God, I went into the surgecenter and got that blog removed yesterday. I feel so relieved!”

Can you feel my resistance and irritation? What can really be said, I wonder, in the end? What use are words? These are dangerous thoughts for a therapist who practices “the talking cure.” My funk will pass, I know, and likely I will write my way through it and into a space where the words mean something again. They will communicate thoughts and feelings, and I won’t feel so bloggy.

In the meantime, I will report that I have recently been perusing the websites of many local artists here in Portland, Oregon, exploring the art realm here and looking at many images of sculpture, painting, drawing, and photography. I have also been watching a few documentaries on great masters, including Pablo Picasso, Michelangelo, and Louise Bourgeois. Among the many motivations, conscious and unconscious, leading me to these explorations stands a feeling that sometimes the important things cannot be spoken. They must be formed into images.

In his book, The Art of Sculpture, Herbert Read identifies the work of sculpting as the artist’s formation into image of an emotive state that exists within. Whether this is a comprehensive definition that holds true for all sculpture in all times and all places I don’t know, and don’t frankly care. For my purposes it works well. Reading this led me to take up hammer and chisel myself this past week and begin shaping a large block of aerated concrete–into what form, I don’t yet know. But something is moving now; that much is clear. There is an intelligence and an emotional reality embedded in the material, and it’s my job to notice what it wants, and to help it come into being.

Already I feel less bloggy. Something like this process I am describing often happens in therapy. Things get stuck. Words don’t come, or when they do, they don’t say what we want to say. Then an image comes, in a dream, a waking fantasy, or a piece of artistic work, and the flow of communication of thoughts and feelings comes back, and with this flow words once again mean something, and even prove indispensable.

Longing for Paradise

I recently picked up a psychology book that I’ve had my eye on for awhile now. It’s written by a Jungian psychoanalyst named Mario Jacoby. The book is, Longing for Paradise: Psychological Perspectives on an Archetype. Jacoby’s theme centers on the importance of the paradise archetype in psychological life and development, not to mention in the work of psychotherapy.

This is a bit of a different take on “paradise” for psychological thinking, and it provides a good jumping off point for some reflections.

The usual schtick in psychology on this matter smacks of “nothing but” reductionism. Reductionism happens when you take a complex phenomenon and break it down into its component parts, and say that the complex whole is nothing but the sum of its parts. Here are some reductive variations that you might come across on the present topic: The longing for paradise is nothing but a regressive wish to dissolve into infantile, oceanic feelings of oneness, free from the conflicts that real life involves. Or, the longing for paradise expresses a developmental failure to mourn the loss of unity with mother, and to accept separateness. Or, the longing for paradise afflicts those who didn’t get an adequate holding environment in infancy, and so they forever long to redress that early lack. Or, the longing for paradise shows a rejection of limitation, and should be analyzed away as an inflated identification with the realm of the archetypal, and specifically with the archetypal Mother.

These are all possible ways to understand thing A (the longing for paradise) in terms of thing B (some form of developmental / psychological problem). Thing B is supposed to explain how and why thing A comes about.

Jacoby, in what I’ve read so far, knows how to think about paradise in developmental and psychopathological terms. He points to the early holding environment, in which mother and caregivers must respond adequately to the hunger, anxiety, distress, and need for touch and loving attention in the infant. If a good-enough experience at this stage doesn’t happen, he offers, significant disruption of emotional and relational health later on is likely. An inordinate fixation on paradise and a pursuit of paradisiacal experiences might well grow out of an early trauma to the holding environment, in which some degree of paradise is actually appropriate for the sake of the utterly dependent infant.

Naturally, psychology wants to explain the longing for paradise in terms of the early environment and early relationships. Where else but with mother do we ever get some measure of paradisiacal experience? Infancy even entails a certain timelessness. The rhythm of relationship to mother is the ordering principle of the moment-to-moment experience of being that psychology imagines the infant to live. Grown up time does not exist for the baby.

Modern attachment theory and infant observation seem to support such thinking. Clinical experience also seems to support the notion that early traumas to primal relationships create suffering in clients, and that the therapeutic relationship, when it works well, can bring some measure of healing to the early wound. The image of paradise is one image among others that can come up in this area of experience, in or out of the therapy room.

However…

I think we need to think symbolically about this. A psychological theory is a kind of symbol that happens to be highly differentiated. But it’s a symbol nonetheless. I am using the word symbol in the sense given by the depth psychologist C.G. Jung. A symbol, in Jung‘s psychology, is a living reality. It’s an image that forms in order to communicate something that words can’t express adequately in a rational way. A symbol expresses an unknowable reality that otherwise we could scarcely approach at all.

I’m proposing that the psychologist or psychoanalyst is using the image of a good enough mother-infant relationship as a symbol. It’s a symbol that psychology uses to communicate to itself something unknowable–in this case, the elusive image of paradise, imagined as a state of being that is touched in infancy.

It’s important to take note that when a psychologist looks at the realm of infancy and begins to make theories about the infant’s inner experience, there is naturally a significant degree of projection involved. What the therapist experiences in working with clients at this early level of emotional experience, as it gets expressed in psychotherapy, ends up as part of the theory about the infant’s inner life. Even the therapist’s own longing for paradise gets into the mix, and possibly imagined as a lost state of being that the infant must have experienced, or is supposed to experience when things go well.

And why not? It’s very legitimate to create theory out of clinical and even deeply personal experience, in addition to data such as the observation of infants and mothers, so long as we are aware of what we’re doing.

Stay with me a moment longer if you‘ve come this far. I know this is getting long, and perhaps muddled.

What I’m coming around to is the fact that no matter the brilliant insights of psychology into the developmental substrate of the paradise archetype… the image of paradise remains the image of paradise, and psychology will never divest that image of its power by explaining it theoretically. Sure, the archetype can cause problems in living and relating. But in itself it’s not something to be fixed, cured, treated, analyzed. The longing for paradise speaks to an experience common to all human beings, whether or not the primal relationship with mother got disrupted. That’s what’s meant by calling it an archetype: it’s typical of human existing to touch this particular place.

What remains to examine is how this archetype expresses itself in psychological life and in psychotherapy. I’ve got a ways to go in Jacoby’s book, and so maybe I’ll save the rest for another post.

Fear and Loathing in Therapy

I’ve been reading Hunter S. Thompson, for the first time. I’d never encountered the wild, destructive, creative force of this writer before. I’ve also been watching biographical movies about him, and of course the movie based on his book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The movie stars Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro.

It may seem curious for a depth psychologist to take an interest in the originator of “gonzo journalism,” especially since my interest is not to diagnose Thompson’s psychopathology. It would be easy to pin him down with a few diagnoses from the psychiatric Bible–the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Here is a man who suffered internally, a lot, took a lot out on those around him, indulged in consistently bad behavior, and made no apologies for his extensive alcohol and drug consumption. He would not be an easy therapy client, and as a matter of fact, he would likely never come for psychotherapy in the first place. In one of the interviews I watched, the interviewer asks about therapy and psychology. Thompson replies that he has no time for psychology; he is interested in politics.

His family and close associates give a picture of Thompson as both fiercely destructive and difficult, and keenly insightful and creative. It seems to me that his own personal madness may have given him a potent level of insight into the decadence of the society that he loved to rail against. In a poignant speech by his son Juan Thompson, in front of an audience in the author’s home town of Louisville, Kentucky, Juan says that his father taught him to see underneath the surface of things. It isn’t enough to go along with, for instance, the cover stories that we are told by the media and the government. You have to look for what is really true, even if it’s ugly and unpleasant.

I am reminded of a passage in the biblical book of Job. Job is a righteous man who’s done everything by the book. When his entire life is destroyed by tragic losses, he wonders how God could allow all this misfortune and chaos to happen. Job hadn’t done anything wrong. Towards the end of the book, God shows up and speaks to Job out of a whirlwind. At one point, God points to two wild and dangerous creatures that he’s created and says, in effect, check these two beasts out, Behemoth and Leviathan (traditionally believed to be the hippo and the crocodile). They are wild and powerful and beautiful. You can’t control them. They are fierce, and there’s nothing nice or pretty about them, but I made them. In fact, Behemoth is in some way the first of my creatures. In this passage, perhaps God is subtly revealing something of his own wildness to Job as well.

Who knows what this passage really means, but when encountering a wild force of a man, who broke all the rules, I am reminded of it. I can’t help but make the connection to psychology and its relation to wildness, or chaos. Psychology is no different from religion in that it tends to prefer the ordered, peaceful, well-behaved, and the safe. It will do what it can to enforce these values, with its diagnoses and its technologies of treatment.

Any therapy that lasts awhile is liable to encounter in some form the chaos that is part of living a human life. Not even the most sophisticated psychoanalytic theory and method will ever analyze away this element of the chaotic and uncontrollable. It’s a permanent fixture. Finding a way to relate to the Behemoth and Leviathan doesn’t come without great struggle. Destruction of self and other is all too easy to fall into. Yet for the psyche to be alive and in play, the individual has to forge some kind of creative relationship to chaos–one that gives the wildness a place in the work of individuation.

But enough, as Hunter might say, of my gibberish!

The Power of Not Now

Various popular renditions of spirituality and therapy in our current culture encourage us to live in the present moment. We are told to realize the true self in the now–to become conscious, aware, transformed. Sounds good, right?

That is my simplistic take on what seems a common thread of much spiritual and psychological and therapeutic thinking these days. The thread of “living in the present moment” has good precedent in Buddhist and Hindu thinking. I’m not for or against this thinking, but it’s worth playing with for a moment.

To begin with, I wonder why this goal of living in the now isn’t working better, for more people.

I have to wonder how well any of our popular spiritual and therapeutic self-help is working for us. Take a stroll through the self-help and popular psychology sections at Powell’s bookstore. While there’s some good stuff being written, at least now and then, these strolls tend to elicit a certain despair in me. So many theories, systems, and recipes for well-being. The striving for an elusive cure to what ails us goes on forever, aisle upon aisle, world without end. What does that tell us? We want to become conscious, live in the now, make sense of suffering, manage depression, cure addictions, alleviate anxiety, heal wounds, transform behaviors, and renew relationships. And we evidence an unending appetite for new methods of achieving these ends.

What if, instead of striving for a final solution, we slow down and spend some time with the longing in us that drives much of this striving? Our culture values drive, achievement, mastery, and consciousness, and does not encourage us to slow down and feel things that might not be terribly comfortable at first. But I suspect that the human heart, with its longings, confusions, stuck points, unconsciousness, and hurts, will ultimately evade our desperate attempts for a final fix. As a result, we may in the end feel like we’ve failed to live up to some psychospiritual standard of good living–being in the now, being conscious, healed, on top of things, whatever.

A more human approach might help us remember the power of “not now.” We need room to be stuck, confused, defended, and to let our development take the time it needs. The movement of psychological development–individuation, in Carl Jung’s terms–is a spiral path, some have said. Progress is made towards a center, but we also go round and round. That’s just how it is. We are chagrined to encounter our “same old shit” in new and deeper forms over the years. We come around again to the same old joys too, and remember how easy it is to forget them. Real change happens in this cyclical way.

Image of the Spiral

We sense the presence of the center as a kind of timeless “now,” though we don’t get to hang out there forever. If we actually did succeed in fixing / curing / redeeming the innate messiness of a human life, and living 24/7 in a state of ultimate conscious realization of the self, we wouldn’t be living a human life any more. We’d lose touch with the longing that reminds us that there is, after all, a center that we are circumambulating. We’d lose touch with the wounds that open our hearts to others that we’re sharing our lives with.

I think that this take on things makes room for letting go into a development of the self that truly gets the striving ego out of the center… which I think, in the end, is the point of those who tell us to awaken into the present moment–as it is, with all its messy glory, not as we’d like it to be.

Midlife Crisis (and Transformation) in Portland?

What might a so-called midlife crisis really look like? And does it really happen here? In Portland, aren’t we (I’m generalizing to make a point) pretty well put-together? We’re conscious about the environment, intentional about what we eat, invested in local communities, authentic in relationships, and so on….

It’s not good or bad to have these ideas about being conscious and well-put together, but it’s important not to take them as literal truths. Part of the danger of such literalism is that something important could get overlooked: that there come times in life where our self-image falls apart–a little or a lot–and may even need to fall apart for us to transform. Midlife is a period where this sometimes happens, leading to a renewal of life and self.

The so-called midlife crisis is often seen in psychology as happening as early as 35 years old, and often later, at some point in the 40s or 50s. The psychologist Carl Jung contributed a lot to the psychology of midlife. Jung’s view feels a little old in some ways, but still holds deep insight if we adjust for cultural changes that have occurred since his time. Jung argued that the first part of adulthood usually focuses on adapting to life in society. We get educations, find work, build a career, have relationships, become parents, and thus establish a well put-together place in the world.

It’s usually once we have been through a lot of this stuff of life’s first half that we may reach a critical moment. It certainly doesn’t happen to everybody, but something may come along to upset the structures that we have so carefully built and tended in the first half of life. The outward cause of the upset could be a death, an illness, a divorce, the loss of a job, a new relationship, an inner malaise, a depression, trauma, or any number of events on the outside or inside of life that threaten to shake up the known structures of life and self.

A lot of strong feelings can come through during this time. It’s not necessarily all bad or all good feelings that come, but an intensity of feelings and a variety too. The Jungian analyst Murray Stein and others have written about midlife crisis as a kind of second adolescence. If you will remember the tumultuous feelings and developments of your first adolescence, you might get some flavor for the second adolescence of midlife. Like the teen years, midlife can be a major transition into a new phase: what Jung called the “second half of life.”

And like the teen years, midlife can feel unsettling. We can feel confused and uncertain of the future. It’s often a rich and satisfying time as well as a challenging one. We may begin to realize that the old structures of our life could use some readjusting. We may begin to enjoy living in ways we forgot we knew. A feeling of renewal can come, and a feeling of increasing freedom to be ourselves.

The midlife crisis and transformation doesn’t tend to happen without struggle. There’s a reason people in one form of midlife crisis or another end up in therapy. In Jung’s view, therapy can facilitate a long-term process of change. The uprooted feelings of midlife can lead into a new feeling of rootedness, deeper in our real selves than we had imagined possible. Then life can proceed out of a new source of vitality and development.

I ran across this poem by Pablo Neruda today, and I think its language evokes some of the feelings and potential of the so-called midlife crisis and transformation.

Lost In The Forest
by poet Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)

Lost in the forest, I broke off a dark twig
and lifted its whisper to my thirsty lips:
maybe it was the voice of the rain crying,
a cracked bell, or a torn heart.

Something from far off it seemed
deep and secret to me, hidden by the earth,
a shout muffled by huge autumns,
by the moist half-open darkness of the leaves.

Wakening from the dreaming forest there, the hazel-sprig
sang under my tongue, its drifting fragrance
climbed up through my conscious mind

as if suddenly the roots I had left behind
cried out to me, the land I had lost with my childhood—
and I stopped, wounded by the wandering scent.

Depth Psychotherapy

There are many ways of studying and working with the depth of the psyche. The term psyche denotes the soul–the very substance of who we are as human beings in the world. Psyche refers to what we know about ourselves, and to what we don’t know about ourselves. Both the known and the unknown. What we know is referred to as conscious, and what we don’t know as unconscious. In reality, we are always a complicated mixture of both known and unknown.

So-called “depth psychology” and “depth psychotherapy” or “analysis” are especially interested in how the deep unconscious levels of the psyche operate. Depth psychologies argue that–contrary to popular opinion in our time–the bulk of who we are exists unconsciously. For the most part, we are unknown to ourselves, or known only partially. We tend to think that we know more than we do, and that we are in control of more than we are in control of. Yet we cannot escape the fact that the psyche resists our attempts to know and to control, and ultimately demands a sacrifice of such attempts. What we can do is listen to the symptoms, dreams, ideas, feelings, human relationships, and images that the psyche sends our way. A new, less troubled, more creative relationship to our deepest selves can then take root and begin to change our lives.

Working out psychological difficulties in therapy therefore means facing the unconscious, and listening to what it has to tell the client and the therapist. That’s the nature of the conversation in therapy. It is a conversation with the psyche that generates therapeutic changes over time.

The depth psychologist Carl Jung elaborated a depth psychology in the early and middle parts of the 20th century. Jung was a close associate of Sigmund Freud’s for a period of years. Just as his career seemed to be advancing towards its high point, Jung left Freud’s movement of psychoanalysis, and spent the rest of his career developing his own theories. The depth psychologies begin with figures such as Jung and Freud, and include many other, more recent psychologists who have changed the field of psychotherapy. Many new theorists have added to, challenged, refined, and re-imagined the psychologies of these two founders of depth psychotherapy and analysis.

Sigmund Freud, Stanley Hall, and Carl Jung, in the front, from left.

Sigmund Freud, Stanley Hall, and Carl Jung, in the front, from left.

Now we are at a crossroads in the field of depth psychology. The old divisions between differing schools of thought are becoming less and less interesting. The points of connection between the depth psychologies and psychotherapies are what hold more interest now. The reason for this is simple. All of these ways of thinking about the psyche and about therapy are attempting to understand what happens in therapy. The point of unity is the experience of therapy itself, and there are many ways of trying to understand what happens there, and how individuals undergo processes of psychological change.