Nearing the End

I can’t believe I am in the final five weeks of my undergraduate program! As I prepare to present my senior synthesis project, Dreams, Alchemy & the Tree of Life, I have been singing the Anima Mundi chant by Marilyn Strong. You can listen to Marilyn’s beautiful chant below, or find more of her work at Hands of Alchemy.

Darkness Lost, Poem Found

In one of my classes a few weeks ago, we gathered in small groups to share our personal “heart of darkness” stories.  Each person chose words and phrases that exemplified the stories and wrote them on the board. Tonight, we were given a typed copy of those phrases and our instructor suggested that we use them to construct a poem.

I marked my copy with random dots and wrote down the words that fell closest to the marks. Here is the result:

Being strong on the outside, fear projected violence.

A tiny gift in beautiful hands finds evil, fooled by the light in a down-trapped life.

Static hurt and great care realize tenderness.

Great hurt stalks, thinking darkness is lit, as beauty struggles with deconstruction unconscious.

 

 

Schooling the Depths

I am fortunate to attend a university that offers depth psychology classes at the undergrad level—it’s the reason I chose to go to Antioch. Now that I’ve been there for three quarters, I’m beginning to see the difference between being engaged in depth psychotherapy and studying the subject academically.

My very first class was Psyche in World Religions, where we studied Edinger’s Ego and Archetype in-depth. At that point, I had already had several years of Jungian psychotherapy and reading Edinger’s work was like reading about my life. Despite my personal work and reading I had done, I had never known about the role that Ego plays in Individuation. For me, this was the keystone that held everything together and made everything click and come into focus. I use Edinger’s work in almost every paper I write and his idea of the Psychic Life Cycle has become the paradigm I use to demonstrate the necessity of sin, one of my favorite subjects to explore.

Since I was absorbing and integrating everything I was learning, I assumed (remember what they say about assuming) that my fellow classmates felt the same. Some rejected Edinger’s ideas and even more seemed to be highly critical of Jung. My heart gasped at these moments—how could someone hate Jung? This is when I began to see how my personal experience was coloring my academic journey. I came into this school saying “Depth psychology? Why yes” and “Jung? You betcha.”

The defining moment was when I started our class discussion by describing the way that Edinger’s chapter on the symbolism of the number 3 helped me to analyze a dream in therapy. To me, it was perfectly natural and a practice I had engaged in for years. An argument of sorts ensued about the validity of dream analysis. It wasn’t directed at me specifically, but my story had opened this potent can of worms. For the first time, I felt that I was in foreign territory despite being ensconced in an institution that advocated the kind of theory that saved my life. And that was just in the construct of the classroom.

Most of my colleagues plan on attending graduate school after completing their BAs. The more I talked to people, the more I began to see a bias against studying depth psychology or Jungian theory. People seemed to like it and were interested in it, but it seemed to have a veil drawn across it. To study Jung would be to find yourself inadvertently in Avalon with little hope of finding your way back to Camelot. I heard my classmates say things like, “I want to study the basics before I study Jung.” Um, my fellow, esteemed colleagues, Jung IS the basics. Okay, Freud is the basics, but they were colleagues and friends (for a time, anyway.) I don’t know what they consider to be the basics, but that type of thinking is one of the reasons why one has to go to special schools in order to study analytical psychology.

Jung wasn’t just some dude smoking his pipe in his library and pulling theory from the fondue pot. He was a medical doctor and practiced psychiatry in a mental hospital for schizophrenics.  His conversations with his patients are what began his inquiry into the collective unconscious. And really, that’s the thing that gets people, the collective unconscious. It’s mysterious–you can’t see it, hold it, weigh it or measure it. As they say at my school, it’s “woo woo.”

And that brings me to the importance of experience. I don’t know if I would view anything differently from my classmates if I had never been in Jungian therapy. But I was, and that experience is what made me decide to become a therapist myself. I never had an interest in psychology. I had seen a cognitive-behavioral therapist at one time and that certainly didn’t make me more interested in the subject. The transformative experience of my work in analytical psychotherapy breathed life into my course material. I could say, “Yes, this is exactly how it happens, because that has been my experience.” My textbooks are not just words; they are my life on the pages. So to think that I would have to study psychology that is not depth psychology doesn’t resonate with me.

In my first foray into college, I majored in music—voice major and piano minor. Not being able to study depth psychology would be akin to telling my former music-major self, “No, you cannot sing or play piano. You must learn how to play violin and oboe.” But I already know how to sing and I tried to learn violin but my fingers fumble on the strings and double reeds, really? I would have been heartcrushed. And that’s how I feel about Jungian theory. I already know it—I live it and I breathe it. It’s already enmeshed in my blood and my bones. And luckily, schools exist that promote a Jungian-based education. So there I will go, and there I will thrive.

Jung Lecture Reading List

The Asheville Jung Center has published a suggested reading list for the June 24th lecture on “The Creation of Symbolic Meaning on the Path to Individuation.”  A chapter of Warren Coleman’s will also be available for download when you register. I will be viewing the lecture but I can’t say I’ll be able to complete this reading list:

Bovensiepen, G (2002) Symbolic attitude and reverie: problems of symbolization in

children and adolescents. Journal of Analytical Psychology, Vol 47:2, 241-257

Colman, W. (2010) Dream Interpretation and the Creation of Symbolic Meaning.

In Jungian Psychoanalysis (ed. M. Stein), pp. 94-108.

Jung, C.G. The transcendent function. In CW 8, paras. 131-193.

________. The Tavistock Lectures, Lectures 3 and 4. In CW.18. Paras. 145-303.

________. The Symbolic Life. In CW 18, paras. 608-696.

________. “Symbol” in Definitions. In CW 6, paras. 814-829.

Ronnenberg, A. (ed.) (2010) The Book of Symbols.

Stein, M. (2009) Symbol as Psychic Transformer.  In Symbolic Life 2009 (ed. M. Stein),pp. 1-12.

Welcome!

Hello and welcome!

I am attempting to breathe new life into an old blog.  Make yourself comfortable and take a look at my Blogroll while I prepare a new entry.

Unbroken

I wrote this poem as part of an assignment for my Myth, Symbol and the Sacred class.  My group chose to work with The Ugly Duckling. My poem covers the first part of the story and focuses on the theme of abandonment.

Unbroken

Contained from the inside, unbroken

Fractured and splintered, unmitigated

Propelled to this destiny, unbidden

 

Homing instincts, not synched

We missed the connecting train

But still I strained

To follow her like ducks in a row

Like trucks that toe the line

But mother/protector/caretaker was not to be mine

 

With silence she vanquished my call

A loudspeaker for all

Her heart misfired the translation

“It’s time”, they said

Destination: Consternation

 

“All aboard!”

All are bored

Fly, run, abscond the son

Creating a barrier

Maintaining the interior

Creamy Spinach and Brocolette Soup

I had some spinach and brocolette from my CSA box that needed to be used, so I created this recipe.  The garlic and shallots were also from the box.

Creamy Spinach and Brocolette Soup

2-4 cups fresh spinach

1 bunch fresh brocolette

2 TBS olive oil

2 TBS butter

1 shallot

1 large clove garlic

½ cup white wine

½ cup flour, divided

49 oz can of fat-free chicken broth

3 cups 2% milk

½ cup orzo

1 cup fresh grated parmesan cheese

1 tsp thyme

1 tsp Italian seasoning

½ tsp kosher salt

cayenne pepper, to taste

fresh ground pepper, to taste

1.    Wash and chop spinach

2.    Wash brocolette and trim 1/8” off of the ends. Chop into 1” pieces.

3.    Mince shallot and garlic.

4.    Heat oil and butter in a dutch oven

5.    Sautee shallot and garlic until soft but not brown.

6.    Add white wine, let simmer until alcohol cooks off.

7.    Add ¼ cup flour and cook for 2-3 minutes.

8.    Add chicken broth and whisk to combine the roux.

9.    Add spinach and brocolette, simmer until vegetables are soft.

10.Puree ¾ of soup in batches in a regular blender then return to pot.

11.Whisk ¼ cup flour into milk and add to pot along with the spices and the orzo.

12.Simmer until orzo is cooked then stir in parmesan cheese.

All measurements are approximate as I made it up as I went along.  It may be easier to add all of the flour in the beginning before adding the broth.  Mine wasn’t as thick as I wanted it so I whisked more flour into the milk.  Experiment and let me know how yours turns out.