I do not speak of creatures from the pit with eyes of fire. Not at all. I mean rather to indicate the facile and deceptive structure of illusion that embed themselves inside the souls of humans with such vengeance as to take possession of their very lives.

The virulent demons that are inhabiting you are not grotesque little monsters with thrashing tales. They are illusions, stories you are telling yourself that are utterly fallacious; bizarre and fantastic lies which you nevertheless believe, and which consequently are taking your life from you.

~ Martin Bell, The Way of the Wolf

If you decide to enter this dilemma with me, I want you to know there is a way out – but that you probably won’t like it.

There are a few things I think it is important for people to deeply consider as we wait on the cusp of an extraordinarily cruel and dangerous era.

I certainly do not have the mysteries of evil and abuse solved – but I’ve learned a few things from negotiating its pathways through out my life.

We call it by many different names: evil, sin, sadism, sociopathy, psychopathy, dehumanization, colonialism, immorality, cruelty, abuse, dominance, supremacy.

Ruthlessness.

Sociopathy and psychopathy are not currently diagnostic terms – people with high levels of  sociopathic or psychopathic traits who are given a DSM diagnosis are generally categorized under “Anti-social Personality Disorder”

They are terms that clinicians have used, and some still do in formulating the personality organization that leads to sadistic,  manipulative, and unemphatic behavior.  

Sociopathy describes immoral or amoral traits, impulses and behaviors (lying, manipulation, criminal acts, etc.)  that are a response to environmental factors, abuses, oppressions and deprivations through the course of life.  Psychopathy is the word used to describe immoral traits, interpersonal coldness,  and sadistic tendencies, impulses and behaviors that are associated with congenital neurological incapacities and “incurable” disabilities in moral reasoning.

All of these words, religious, diagnostic have a long history  of being weaponized by the dominant culture against minoritized communities and against cultures that uphold different moral norms and taboos.

But I am not willing to abandon these words as of yet, to discuss these human capacities and incapacities. Because these ruthless states – in ourselves, and in others,  in governments, and in our unsustainable instiutions need to be able to be recognized, identified in order to restrain and harness them.

When you step into a discussion about ruthlessness, call it what you will, you step into a hall of mirrors – where some panels reflect images of yourself back at you that you do not want to see, and some glass panes offer you a clear, framed view of others.

And you cannot negotiate this space at all unless you can recognize yourself and are willing to see yourself clearly. We are now in a time where everyone will need to consider what it means to be in the grips of the demonic. And to be able to confront it around us, we must first know, intimately and specifically, where it resides within us.

Luke 4-13: Vision Quest:

Once more Accuser took Jesus up to a high mountain and, in a moment of time, showed him all the great nations of the world. “All of their power and beauty can be yours!” the snake said smoothly. “They were given over to me, and I can give them to anyone I choose. If you will bow down to me and my ways, they will be all yours!”  ~ First Nations Version

The lust for power, the hunger for dominance has been a throughline through the entire history of this nation – since its foundation by genocidal enslavers. Every national institution and system have been organized around men who felt entitled to insulate themselves from death, disability, discomfort, and even minor inconvenience with the bodies of any living thing that they could dominate.

This is not new. This is only particularly explicit in the moment. These demonic energies live in the heart of all colonial projects, as well as through personal and familial histories.

A ruler who controls the labor and lives of others through a seductive and eventually forced dependency upon him.

And the capacity to be tempted, entranced, seduced, addicted, possessed – to be lured by the coldest face of the Trickster lives in each of us.  The rush of power, the high, the sense of inflated entitlement, the belief that we are special and therefore extra deserving: The comfort! The peeled grapes! The luxury! The glorious, relaxed pleasures. The freedom from fear. The insulation from the sharp edges and the hard knocks of living. The ease. The relief.  The power to shape the environment  and direct the behavior of others to suit our preferences.

It takes a moment to even think beyond the deliciousness of it all. To remember that this power to create comfort and security comes at the expense of lives that have been forced to insulate us from all discomfort.

All security is an illusion. It is a demon that bids you follow this bright path. And at the end, what can there be except the full anxiety of that which is?

~ Martin Bell

This terrifying era will demand that we confront the parts of ourselves that have always known that the pursuit of excessive comfort, resources, security required the death and domination of others.

This is each of us.

I am not suggesting that the oppressors and the oppressed share equal responsibility, or power.  And I’m not saying that everyone succumbs to these temptations.

I am simply saying that we are all tempted and tempt-able.  Jesus was. Buddha too. He had to touch the earth with his hand to ground himself while he faced his own demonic temptation of unlimited power and comfort.

We all want some kind of power in our lives. But we often forget that power has a warm, beneficent, and generative face, and it has a cold indifferent and deadly one.

They are inseparable from each other.

And perhaps we all succumb to the pleasures and inflation of power now and then, here and there, when we momentarily have a chance to seize them. Especially if we have chosen not to pay close attention to ourselves, or question our motives and desires, refusing to consider all that we really are.

I’m not exempt. I don’t think you are either.

Everyone has psychopathic traits; each of us is missing something or has some aspect that is markedly underdeveloped… I am not speaking of us and of them  - of us as balanced integrated and whole and of others who are missing something, the psychopaths ~ The Emptied Soul, Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig

“Speak of the devil!” we exclaim when we were just speaking of someone, and they arrive. But the full phrase is  “speak of the Devil and he will appear” and here is how that works:

When you speak of someone or something that has activated your rage, your righteousness and your sense of moral superiority enough to foreclose on them as demonic – you now feel entitled to move against them with any and all weapons you have at your disposal.

If, as Guggenbühl-Craig suggests, Sociopathy, Evil is an archetype that lives in all of us, as a kind of instinctive ruthlessness. This is the same natural ruthlessness that helps all of us animals hunt prey protect off-spring, hold our territorial boundaries and maintain nature’s order.

But:

If an organism or aggregate of organisms sets to work with a focus on its own survival and thinks that is the way to select its adaptive moves, its "progress" ends up with a destroyed environment.

Dominance, over-developed can do damage of an absolute order, upsetting natural balances otherwise so carefully protected… Whenever charisma and leadership burst the ordinary bounds of behavior in an individual, there is generally an unusual change  in the manner in which the group or society behaves

~ Vine Deloria. The Metaphysics of Modern Existence

It is also important to understand that when we encounter ruthless dominance in another it summons our own. When we imagine we are fighting monsters, that is when we are most in danger of becoming one.

Even harnessing our ruthlessness to our love, for love’s sake, isn’t a fail-safe. Ruthlessness easily attaches itself, twisting itself around our deepest loves, needs, and vulnerabilities.

Anna Ornstein is a psychiatrist and a self-psychological psychoanalyst who has spent her life studying genocide  - and for good reason. A cousin by marriage to my in-laws, she was in Auschwitz  as an adolescent  - with her mother, my mother-in-law who was near to her in age, and my grandmother- in-law. When the war ended, she moved to  Germany and reunited with the love of her life, Paul Ornstein. They attended medical school there and received their initial psychiatric training.  Their patients were Nazis. Their classmates were Nazis. Their teachers were Nazis.

And Anna makes this point: None of those she encountered were sociopaths, or psychopaths. They were people who were desperate for an admiring authority figure, who would tell them that he would love and fight for them, protect them and allow them to bask in his light as an extension of him.  The temptation that they succumbed to came in the form of the promises of a powerful and devoted parent.

That was it. That was the simple hole that Hitler offered to fill to tempt people into horrific acts of cruelty and complicity.

And when I looked through the three thousand dreams of Donald Trump that I had collected I saw the same thing: not a house of horrors, not hordes of demons. Just people who saw Trump as shoring up their unbalanced  identities, as speaking to their emptiness:

Dreamed I met Donald Trump in a shopping center. His first words to me were, “You are an exceptional historian.”[iv]

Last night I had a dream. Trump has visited us on Christmas. When he saw our Christmas tree, he spoke: “Biggest Christmas tree ever! So great! So fabulous! Well done. So Great!” “Thank you Mr. President!”[v]

~  The 45 Dreams Project

I had imagined that when I sat down to sort through the dreams and psyches of Trump’s admirers that I would find some deep personal stake in the oppressive policies he has advocated – instead, I found something far simpler and more primal: the simple, childlike need to admire and be admired by an all-powerful authority figure. Nothing more coherent or complex than the need to plug a hole left empty, a daddy-hunger seeking satiation.

 Marie Louise von Franz states it this way:

It is as if they had the right to lie, cheat and murder with no self-doubt, and no self-criticism. Underneath somewhere is also an ego-centric baby full of idealistic delusions, which, by its touching innocence hauls others into wanting to help and rescue the poor person; but that inner infant is a parasite – it never develops and therefore sentimental pity is inappropriate.

I know this infantile hunger in my own life. I know how it was exploited. I know how it bound me. I know what I became capable of, the murderous forces that were summoned in me when I had the wherewithal to fight.

These are forces we have to know intimately within ourselves when we encounter others who are possessed by them, or we will not remember to touch the ground and may be wholly overtaken - from the outside and from within.

Ruthlessness is an archetype, an instinct,  a universal psychological state that is present to some degree in everyone. We must first know it within us, in order to confront the other.

Consider yourself and your evil enemy on a shared continuum of ruthlessnes. The degree of ruthlessness between us, and in our own stories over time are wildly variable, more fluid for some than for others. Ruthlessness emerges when our capacity for love, for compassion, has failed temporarily, failed to develop sufficiently, or failed to develop at all.

Our tenuously-wired capacity for compassion can be shorted out by a power surge of our most primal instincts: fatigue, lust, hunger, rage, conformity, fear

The phenomenon of evil is simply the appearance of something demonic or abnormal, a kind of overpowering nature phenomenon, which does not pose any ethical problem but the purely practical one of how to either overcome or successfully escape it. It becomes a question as to whether one can overpower the phenomenon or whether one simply has to save one’s own life. ~  Marie Louise von Franz

But how do we overpower it? How do we dominate dominance without exacerbating and perpetuating a never-ending cycle?

 Womanist theologian Delores Williams talks about the problem of social evil this way: As “alienation from God, Spirit, Neighbor and Self.” For Williams, acts of resistance to social, cultural evil is “ the highest form of obedience to what is holy.” 

This is how I hear this: We must resist this alienation. There will be times when we may have to fight ruthlessness ruthlessly. There are times when we will need to summon our own monstrosity to battle monsters. But it is extremely important not to be merely possessed by these primal forces when they rise up in us – we must keep them tethered to our sense of what is sacred, our souls, the well being of all living species as our relatives on this earth.

What is needed is not to strike straight at evil but to withdraw to the sources of divine power, and from there to circle around Evil, bend it, and transform it into its opposite ~ Martin Buber, Tales of The Hasidim

We must stand in what is best for the souls and spirits of all impacted. We stop destructive behavior because it is destructive to us, and to those who are enacting it. We harness our own evil because our own cruelties will ultimately destroy us as surely as anyone and everyone we inflict them on.

We have capacities, proclivities, disabilities, conditioning, dispositions and traumas that have shaped our destructive energies. As long as we imagine the harms we visit on others do not harm ourselves, as long as we imagine that the destructive archetype, the Accuser is only outside of us and not living within us  - we are lost, and we will lose.

Forces as elemental as the love and safety that we most yearn for may be twisted by The Trickster and lead us into temptation. This is America. This is who we are. This is in our homes, schools, institutions and in our long history of patriarchy and colonialism.  

Even the most sadistic and destructive man is human, as human as the saint.

Vice is human. 

Destructiveness and cruelty are indeed destructive of  life, of body and spirit, destructive not only of the victim but of the destroyer himself. 

They constitute a paradox: they express life turning against itself in the striving to make sense of it. 

This is the only perversion. 

~ Eric Fromm

And this is you. And this is me.

And we must know this to learn how to restrain it, to defy alienation, to obey what is holy, and protect what is sacred.

"Big Elk, an Omaha chief, delivered a funeral oration in 1815 at the death of Black Buffalo, a fellow Omaha, and counseled his fellow chiefs as follows:

Do not grieve. Misfortune will happen to the wisest of men. Death will come and always out of season. It is the command of the Great Spirit, and all nations and people must obey. What is past and cannot be prevented should not be grieved for.... Misfortunes do not flourish particularly in our path. They grow everywhere.”



When I read this quotation from Big Elk, cited in Chapter 10, Death, and Religion, in God is Red by Vine Deloria Jr., a deep slow sigh sent fresh air down to the very bottom of my lungs. I wrote "Whew" in the margin, as I often do when some truth comes off the page and lifts a burden from my shoulders.

I wanted to sit with it for a while.

This is how I read.

Something takes me by the shoulders and shakes some sense into me. My task, as I see it in that moment, is not to understand what the author meant word by word, nor is it "to decide if I agree with them or not” (This I have learned, is a common goal of many readers of non-fiction).

The call, when I feel a certain kind of wind blowing around a phrase or a paragraph, is to sit for a moment and uncover why these words caused my spine to shiver or my breath to deepen or my heart to swell. I pause to discover what those words mean to me. What needs, yearnings loneliness, desires, associations, or context did I bring to those words? What memories, intuitions, ego-rest did those words call up in me?

Here is what arrived in the silence and the breath that came in response to the worlds of Big Elk:

Do not grieve.

Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Be comforted.

Of course you will mourn, but might there also - alongside the pain - remain a small part of your soul floating just beyond grief’s reach? A piece that insists on a love, exactly as strong, as real, as deep, as eternal, as vital as every moment they were here alive and standing with you?

There is, within me, a piece that does not grieve, because it is comforted. It remains adamantly and stubbornly in the emotional presence of the lost one. It insists on carrying those I have lost with me, always with me, and this piece does not grieve even when am wailing and keening on the floor of the shower, even when the absence of embodied one I have lost is intolerable to my own body.

Even when my body and my heart are flooded with loss, there is a part of my being that nevertheless does not grieve and cannot grieve because they are still with me, and I am with them.

Be comforted. Find this place. Grieve yet do not grieve wholly.



Misfortunes will happen to the wisest of men.

There is no escape. Misfortune, like Mercy “droppeth as gentle rain from Heaven upon the place beneath.” On the just, and the unjust. On the wise and foolish. On the good and on the bad. And if the rain of misfortune is not distributed equally, everyone will eventually get wet.

Life is not a moral test, or an intelligence test. Fair or not, everyone will encounter misfortune. Wisdom and goodness cannot protect you. Life doesn't unfold according to our personal preferences and the wise know this.

I also consider the inverse: Can you be wise or good without misfortune? Is it even possible? Perhaps the wisest and the best things we can generate on this earth emerge alchemically, from our misfortunes. Maybe some die, some are annihilated, some thwarted some twisted by misfortune through no fault of their own, and maybe if it doesn’t happen to possess, destroy, or distort you, there may be an opportunity to emerge from misfortune wiser.

I wonder if Black Buffalo and Big Elk were wise in both the ways I've imagined: Wise because they could accept misfortune as natural occurrence in a living, interdependent as system and wise because the misfortunes they survived filled him with the desire to be wiser and better.



Death will come and always out of season.

Loss will always disorient us, sending the ordinates and our experience of time and place spinning. The time is never right for death. We always want one more breath, one more word, one more moment as we say goodbye to an exquisitely beautiful and complex world, no matter how unfairly it has treated us. We want a moment, a week, a month, a season more.

When the snow comes? But the snow is so beautiful and cleansing. When the winds come? But there is such magic in the wind. Well, then when the buds bloom? But the blooms and the sunshine are so glorious.

And the time is never the same after someone has died. The seasons by themselves no longer mark time passing in the same way. Four summers from now we will mark time as "four years since the death of Black Buffalo," and not merely "four summers ago."

Loss changes our experience of time - the time of departure feels simultaneously like a lifetime ago and just a moment ago, and like it never happened all at once and for the rest of our own lives.



It is the command of The Great Spirit, and all nations and people must obey.

This isn't personal. Our deaths and our misfortunes aren’t directed at us personally for our failures and errors in this lifetime. We aren’t being punished.

We are a piece of a much larger project an intricate harmonic dance, where each note is one tone in an extraordinary piece of music. A note that means nothing much ringing out by itself – just a hum or a buzz. But when the whole piece plays out from beginning to end, each note its place between and among notes that sing above, below, before, and after ours -it is part of something incomprehensible. Unthinkable – only able to be felt.

So, trust it. Life is about what we are a part of, not about us or them or me. And no one is alone in this. Every plant, every animal and insect, every star, every person has its time and place.

This is what nature decrees. We must remember our lives are lives in a vast context of life. That context is sacred, and we are each honored and fortunate to play our part however brief or sustained.

Our lives and our deaths serve creation and the Creator. We may mourn, but may we also remember that to have fulfilled this service, is enough. Is more than enough.



What is past and cannot be prevented should not be grieved for....

Again, we may feel sorrow, we may mourn- but be careful not to let this sorrow collapse into mere regret, self-recrimination, or blame. We have done what we knew how to do. We must accept that Black Buffalo was who he was. That we were who we were. We cannot change what is past. We must redirect our imaginings and our visions toward a future that manifests all we have learned so far. All we have received, all we have given, and all those we have lost who we will keep with us. Accept the past. Let us direct our energies into transforming the future.

Misfortunes do not grow particularly in our path. They grow everywhere.

This isn't divine persecution. This isn’t a story of Job where God and Lucifer shoot craps for our lives.

We are a gesture, a moment, a movement, a song, a breeze, a season.

Misfortune shapes us. redirects us, breaks us, corrects our course, challenges us, destroys us, redeems us. It is both essential and unavoidable.

Life involves suffering and misfortune. And our task is to learn to live in, and around, and through in- to be changed by it, to prevent or ameliorate it whenever we encounter it and have the capacity to relieve it. There is nowhere on this earth to avoid it.

We all share this. it connects us and leads us to find strength and connection. We stand with the rocks and trees, the fish and birds, and mammals, the sky and the waters holding this challenge together: To say "Yes" to life, to all natural forces, to this Great Spirit - whether it arrives in our lives as misfortune or as fortune, or as both at once and everything in-between.

I’ve been reading a few books at once: The first is Awakening: Exploring Spirituality, Emerging Creativity and Reconciliation edited by Vern and Gloria Neufeld Redekop. The second is God is Red by Vine Deloria Jr (you'll likely hear more from me about God is Red in upcoming months). For this reflection I'll be focusing on the first few chapters of Awakening. I name both of these texts here because they seem to be in dialogue with each other in the back of my head as they both call on their readers to reconsider simplistic linear notions of time and causality as we negotiate living in active relationship to a complex biosphere. I cannot promise that I can keep these texts from untangling themselves in my amplifications.

Both texts challenge reductionism and determinism as the predominant methods of knowing in the Global North and confront the ways these hegemonic models have devalued and colonized other ways of knowing. This to me, is extremely affirming as a large focus of my efforts in this world attempt to address the capacities for sensing and perceiving which seem to have atrophied in white American culture, and which in my view leave us sorely out of balance with the planet, other human beings and living things, and make the dominance of Global North a danger to both ourselves, to others, and to the biosphere itself.

For now, I'm going to try to write through my understanding of the second chapter of Awakening: Stuart Kauffman's The Re-Enchantment of Humanity. (all quotes cited here are excerpted from that chapter)

There are nuances beyond my comprehension, but also openings, glimpses of a world beyond our perceptions, as well as options for responses beyond naïve optimism or pessimistic doomerism.

The crux of Kauffman's chapter is simply this: Biology does not operate like physics. The forces of consciousness, creativity and complexity mean biospheres do not abide by calcified rules as objects and particles do. There are always stochastic possibilities in living things. In a biosphere we “do not know and cannot know what will happen. the future cannot be predetermined."

The desire to reduce the living world to simple formulas and taxonomies, to impose the notion that we live in a predictable world is a deadening, a smothering, a calcification of forces that are fluid and capricious. The biosphere is not devoid of magic, surprise, catastrophe or the miraculous.

By way of an example. Kauffman points out that only a tiny portion of all possible proteins have been created and that the possibilities that exist far exceed the time and space we have had on this earth to manifest them. There is more, far more that can be created, than has been, or will be created.

Life is an ongoing, unprestestable, non-algorithmic, non-machine, problem solving for survival, becoming.

A Winchester Mansion of obsolescence, closures, expansions, openings, and ever expanding, creative additions.

We not only do not know what will happen, but do not know what can happen.



Life is a becoming. All life. Plants, animals, insects, humans, bacteria and single- celled organisms, liminal entities like viruses, organic material are all capable of transforming, adapting, or asserting a dormant, underutilized variable which can change the entire system, through synergies and conflict in ways that we have never seen before, and which we cannot imagine.

We are always creating and destroying, and at best we have very limited awareness of the complex expansive chain of response and reaction. We may be able to anticipate a ring or two of potential causation, but beyond that there are too many potential variables to begin to calculate. To think we know all that we may generate and destroy with a single gesture is hubris. Given enough time and expansion, a ritual, a scream, an act of kindness or a dance step may change the orbit of the planet, and the trajectory of life itself.

We co-create this world alongside billions of other life forms.

In Kauffman's words: "We are a biosphere building itself."

We don't know what variables may and will transform everything. There are adjacent possibilities, "empty niches," unconsidered, yet to be imagined, or perceived that may seed new ways of being, housing the emerging creativity of a becoming biosphere. A biosphere is more properly a phenomenon than an object. We might guess at what could happen next if events flow forward from fixed premises. But if the ground we stand on continually changes in a plethora of ways, then we must admit that we not only "do not know what will happen. we do not know what can happen."

At most we only know a few possibilities that may happen in a world of nearly infinite possibilities.

This is what it means to live in a complex biosphere. To accept that we are surrounded by empty niches and adjacent possibilities To stand with humility with awareness of all the limits of our knowing, and to not merely fear the unknowability of what is to come, but to consider that this is also where our unknown powers and our hope resides as well.m description

Sometimes nowadays, people refer to me as a “teacher” – not a schoolteacher, but some kind of “teacher” of adults. But it seems to me that to see oneself as a teacher, in the strange spaces that I work in – focused on mortality, spirituality, dreams, psychology, mysticism and liberation is utterly audacious.

I think of myself mostly a reader, and a digester, applier, and a conveyer of other people’s ideas – because most of what I pass on isn’t my own, didn’t come from me, and I don’t claim ownership over any of it.

I try to share ideas that I’ve received that helped me out of my own mess. I don’t like being idealized. It was the loneliest and most anxiety producing thing about being a therapist

My group chat among my friends we’ve been sharing links and commentary about the documentaries on Netflix and HBO Max about cults and the strange and frankly buffoonish cult leaders who capture the fascination of a community of people who regard these icky, obvious manipulators as “teachers” and “leaders” – and of course, our nation is on the brink of being taken over by the cult-like worship of Donald Trump and his MAGA/Q-anon conspiracy theorists army.

Also - I live in Santa Fe – land of strange New Age pseudo-Buddhist, pseudo-shamanic cults and cult-adjacent schools, programs and “healing centers.” And boy do I recoil from any kind of collective hero-worship or group-think. I wouldn’t even join a psychoanalytic institute because it felt too creepy. So of course, anyone thinking about me as a teacher or a leader of a community or a school of thought is not an idea that is comfortable or easy for me. I have actually spent a long time avoiding such things.

What might it do to therapists, teachers, spiritual directors, and clergy to have groups of people who find what they share interesting, useful, or valuable? Is it healthy? How might it be dangerous? What are the healthy ways to manage admiration and appreciation? What precautions are needed to avoid becoming ego-drunk, or group-possessed?

There here are some important safety mechanisms that I need to see in place in order to feel any willingness to engage with a teacher or in a group. These that need to be explicit and conscious in the psyche of anyone who is audacious enough to offer up ideas to other people, and explicit in the norms and practices of gathered communities to avoid dangerous pathologies.

Here are some that are important to me. I personally run for my life from groups and organizations when they are not present.

A refusal to cultivate dependency.

The celebration of self-regulation and autonomy.

Active and ongoing attempts to dismantle and de-escalate peer pressures.

The willingness to let people travel their own paths, to move away, step back, or leave entirely – with grace, celebrating graduations and departures.

An appreciation of challenge and disagreement and being overthrown in favor of other’s asserting their own core values.



And of course a handful of sentences that jumped off of the pages I’ve been reading the past two weeks - from men who were seen as wise, who had admirers, followers, students, and novices – and who worked to keep their own heads on straight as the collective pressed them into the role of Teacher - and who never claimed that the path they were walking was singularly correct.



The inspiring of the other person, bringing them to birth, without either entrapping them or attaching them to oneself - Olivier Clément, On Being Human

Humor is necessary for self-deflation - Olivier Clément, On Being Human

Humility comes before love. - Olivier Clément, On Being Human

When a proud man thinks he is humble his case is hopeless. - Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

There can be intense egoism in following everybody else. - Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

The saint is unlike everybody else precisely because he is humble. - Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

Humility consists in being precisely the person you actually are before God. - Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

God does not give us graces or talents or virtues for ourselves alone. We are members of one another and everything that is given to one member is given for the whole body. - Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

We must find ourselves in other human beings - Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation



Remember that earth and all its living things, organic processes, and your fellow humans form a huge community of teachers.

To be precisely who you are before God – without hiding, denying, or erasing human failures, limitations, frailties, or cruelties.

To never require others, and certainly not a community of people, to protect you from experiencing your own inadequacy.

To find relief in the cool ground when you fall.

To enjoy being teased, being human, getting lost, and not knowing your ass from a hole in the ground.

To find joy in not knowing, in being reminded of your smallness, and to know that you are still worthy of love and connection even when you have no shot at being “right “or “good” in any given circumstance.

Idealization should make us anxious and uneasy. But healthy admiration doesn’t require perfection and doesn’t erase our vulnerabilities. It is safe and healing to accept and enjoy appreciation if you can also enjoy your failures and foolishness.

To accept being called out, called in, challenged, confronted, teased, mocked even – as great and generous gifts.

This is why humility comes before love – because in order to give it or receive love you must know why you need it, and how essential it is for us to share love precisely because we exactly as broken as everyone else - and how worthless and lonely it is to be “loved” only because you are seen as powerful or more intact than others.

To remember that things that others admire in us, are probably the least important things, and that our talents and strengths are just armor that can obscure our desire and ability to be seen, and to see ourselves, as as whole, heart-centered human beings.

Our unformed, unconsolidated, dis-regulated, stumbling, struggling aspects are the most beautiful things about our humanity, and the vulnerabilities that allows us to connect to each other. This overpowers no one. This allows others to travel alongside each other with their own vulnerability.

A broken and still beating heart is the most sacred experience of being human, and as long as we walk together on this earth we all have equal share in this. em description

This subscription Seminar essay series will now begin to work its way through Jung’s “Visions” Seminar.

I will do my best to summarize and amplify what I see as the most useful and essential points of Jung’s teachings here.

As you will soon see, the problematic aspects of this text and these historical events will require some direct and ongoing confrontation:

There is some truly extraordinary teaching in these lectures and discussions, but it is important that anyone reading these essays understand that the text we are exploring also reveals many of Jung’s personal, clinical, ethical and theoretical failures.

The Setting: These weekly lectures were presented in English, a third language for Jung, to members of the Psychological Club at the Analytical Psychology Club House in Zurich. The Psychological Club was founded with funds from Jung’s wealthy American patient, student, trainee and admirer, Edith Rockefeller – John D. Rockefeller’s daughter – who he had treated for depression, and who went on to become a prominent Jungian analyst herself. The meetings of the Psychological Club were attended by Jung’s admirers, patrons, students, as well as former and current patients (many training to become analysts themselves) who often required additional structure and activities beyond their analytic sessions during their treatment stay in Zurich.

In many ways, the Psychological Club functioned as a kind of chaotic combination of psychosocial club, group therapy, training institute, and fan club.

A majority (but certainly not all) of the club members were women, wealthy enough to travel to Zurich from all over Europe and America, and Jung was considered both a charismatic and handsome figure who attracted large admiring audiences as well as a significant amount of financial patronage. Jung supported many of these women in their own professional development, and throughout his life many of his closest collaborators and disciples were the women who he had first treated and then trained as analysts.

As we can imagine, the boundaries in this space were messy. Many of the attendees were actively in treatment with Jung – caught up in the throes of their own complexes and conflicts, acting out competitive feelings towards other club members, seeking attention and contending with thick idealizing transferences to the dynamic Dr. Jung.

Jung often used these seminars to form defacto group interventions targeted to the psychological development of his patients/audience and to emphasize themes that he felt were common to many of the members, as a kind of annex to their individual treatment.

The Characters: These weekly lectures were to be a presentation and a discussion of his work with an American patient, scientist Christiana Morgan, one of the several patients who he first began to teach active imagination techniques. Active imagination was a method he had developed through the process of journaling his own contemplative visualizations in Liber Nous/The Red Book – in which he would sit in meditation, and allow a fantasy to emerge, and then would engage in imaginal dialogue with the characters in his fantasy. (for more information about active imagination see Seminar essay #25)

As Morgan engaged in this practice, she produced a long series of imaginal visions, and an accompanying set of paintings that Jung felt represented a deep archetypal template of a mythical initiation/integration process that was pertinent to Euro-American women generally, beyond Morgan’s own idiosyncratic healing and development. Jung’s intention was to present this to the Psychological Club as an archetypal journey through women’s developmental psychology.

To that end, he chose to try to present the visions and the paintings completely detached from any personal or identifying information specific to Christiana Morgan.

Jung had presented these lectures in German to an earlier audience, and had done so with great excitement and respect for the un-named Morgan’s process and productions, and great enthusiasm for the archetypal template that he felt offered great insight into the psychology of women.

But this lecture and discussion series proved to be very, perhaps, too stimulating for many members of the Club, seemingly activating significant envy in many of the attendees, who often attempted authoritatively dissect the visions and pathologize the anonymous visionary.

Jung’s responses and interpretations throughout the seminar grow increasingly irritable, likely in large part with the club members, but this also seems to spill over into his perceptions and presentation of Morgan and her visions themselves. Perhaps he began devaluing the content to make it less threatening to the seminar members – but whatever the trigger and there are many – this seminar becomes an outlet for Jung’s more toxic misogyny – as he begins to express sexist contempt and strong negative feelings both about the case he is presenting and the audience.

Jung also uses the N-word at several points, in discussing the psychic effect of interracial realities in the United States. It is unclear if he is mirroring language that he has absorbed from American patients, if he has, with a limited English, confounded the N-word, with “Negro,” if he used the word to seem skilled and proficient at American slang, or if he is enjoying and exhibiting an explicit belief in racial superiority.

(See: Visions: Notes on the Seminar Given in 1930-1934. Introduction by Claire Douglas, pp ix-xxxiii)

This is Jung’s unprocessed grandiosity and his white male supremacist shadow on full display – as he succumbs to the inflation of his devoted fan club, and asserts himself as an authority on women’s psychology and pathology, and seems to simultaneously enjoy and exert his authority and dominance while also trying to irritably extricate himself from the thick hero worship and its messy consequences in the room.

The Turning Point: It is also possible that Jung's negativity is a response to his lost his faith in Morgan. For multiple reasons which we will discuss below, Jung becomes less enchanted by their treatment alliance, as is faced more and more with the aftermath of their work together- this presentation is four years after their termination. He seems increasingly upset with the visions and with Morgan, as he becomes hopelessly and destructively entangled in the longer term outcomes of the case and the boundary-less community around him that he resides in the center of.

Jung received direct updates from Morgan from the United States, where she became a Jungian analyst at Harvard – but he also learned far more about Morgan from other patients that that knew her intimately through the small and incestuous Jungian community in the U.S.

In fact, during the course of this seminar, Jung was contacted for consultation by a former American patient of his, Henry Murray, who was both Morgan’s co-worker at Harvard, and her current lover, and who contacted Jung for help in leaving Morgan for another woman.

Additionally, another Harvard man, Ralph Eton, a colleague both of Morgan and Murray, at the Harvard Psychological Clinic, described by his U.S analyst as “brilliant but unstable” - had been involved with Morgan previously, been rejected by her and was unable to get over their breakup, also presented to Jung for treatment, and began attending the Psychological Club.

Eton actually recognized Morgan’s visions, because Morgan had showed her paintings to him early in their relationship.

Eton, now attending a weekly seminar that waded through his lost- lover's fantasy life - decompensated into florid psychosis – fled Zurich and returned to Cambridge where required hospitalization. He escaped the locked ward and committed suicide in the woods near Henry Murray’s home.

All of this chaos, tragedy, and boundary crossing both exposes the messiness of Morgan, and the men in her world as well as the mess that Jung himself had made by establishing himself as the guru-leader of a school of thought, the entangled and enmeshed boundaries of his tight-knit community of disciples, his own poor clinical decisions, and his destructively inflated role in his patient/trainees’ lives.

“Finally, someone overtly breaks confidentiality about Morgan’s identity and the seminar ends abruptly” (Visions: Notes on the Seminar Given in 1930-1934. Introduction by Claire Douglas, p. xxiv)

Lysis: Christiana Morgan found a place in the world and lived a flawed yet productive life, centered around her great romantic love for Henry Murray, and her work as a psychotherapist at the Harvard Psychological Clinic. Throughout her long life, Morgan returned again and again to the visions. She respected them as the core myth of her life but never succeeded in fully plumbing their meaning. (Visions: Notes on the Seminar Given in 1930-1934. Introduction by Claire Douglas, p. xxii)

So: as you can see, there is a lot to learn about Jung as a limited human being, as a wounded healer, as a white man contending with his own conflicts around supremacy and the feminine, who experiences the first hand and disastrous consequences of inflation and inflicts those consequences on others, about the historical development of a psychological discipline at time before secure boundaries were erected around transferences and before the community was large enough to avoid such enmeshments.

There is also some thoughtful, humble, generous and beautiful teaching mixed in among the damage and chaos.

I will do my best to sort through the useful, the meaningful, the toxic and the intolerable. I will offer my own interpretations and responses to Morgan's visioning. I will try to confront and cut away the contamination and the rot, and see what, if any, fruit remains when we are done.

In general, approaches to treatment that are supported in clinical psychology tend to focus on individuals in isolation from their communities, and very often do not take into account local cultural differences ~ M. Watkins & H. Shulman, Toward Psychologies of Liberation

Here and in the What a Shrink Thinks essays – I write a great deal about myths and archetypal themes, and I primarily (although not exclusively) draw on the myths and scriptures, fairy and folktales that were fed to me as my first cultural language: the Old and New Testament, The Brother’s Grimm, the Greek Gods. But I do not return to these stories over and over again because they are the only stories, or the most useful stories, or because they are inherently “universally applicable” stories (although I do believe there are likely universalizing psychological themes, “primordial images” that inform all humanity - just as we generally have the same essential organs in our bodies) But our relationship to these “organic images” varies dramatically from culture to culture, and the mythologies and values that cultures organize themselves around are often dramatically different.I don’t tell the mythological stories that I tell because they are the best ones, or the preferred ones. I use the myths that I do because they are my myths, and because I am most equipped to understand their nuances as the culture that I was raised in organized itself around these stories.Reading myths from other nations, other cultures are often illuminating – and can offer new ways of perceiving and differing values that Euro-American psychotherapeutic culture omits, or minimizes or represses. But, I don’t tell those tales as easily. They are not mine to interpret. I am not sure what cultural realities have risen from their foundations, and I cannot always know if the themes that I take note of, are perceived accurately by me, as I have not been raised in Russian, or Ethiopian, or Japanese culture. It is unlikely that I will understand all of its implications - and although I do make a point of surveying world mythologies, I am concerned about co-opting and distorting the archetypal themes to fit a “Western” point of view.An example of this kind of co-option is the archetypal tales from China about the Red Thread of Fate.So there are some universalizing components: Threads and Fate and tangled and woven threads, threads of connection, spiders spinning threads – are all “primordial images” (Jung’s first words for the archetpyes) that are often associated with the notion of “Fate.”That being said: the Chinese tales about the red threads focus on the fateful connections between husbands and wives in a historical era of arranged marriages. From my limited and translated exposures to these tales, this is not considered a good or a happy outcome, but merely an inevitable one. No matter how you may feel about your potential marital partner, whether they hurt you or adore you, your fate is tied to theirs, neutral, and inevitable. The stories appear to me and others, to help people to face their martial fates, good, bad or indifferent, with some acceptance.In the US, the community of Chinese adoptive parents saw in the myth, an archetypal image that resonated with them: A red thread that connects family members to each other - that means that no matter what – you were destined to “find” each other and to belong together. The archetypal image was dislodged from its cultural context: and new meaning was reassigned to it: We were “meant to be” your parents, it was certain we would find you, the red thread confirms that our family is the “right” one and that this is the life that you were supposed to live.The universal archetypal image, of fateful “strings” is stripped away from of the Chinese origins and cultural context of The Red String, and now tells a very different story - one that serves a different cultural function of validating and enfranchising non-biological family as a source of “belonging” equivalent to families made by birth.So, I want to be clear that I use the stories I do, because I feel they are the ones I have a better chance of understanding because of my acculturation. And I am always cautious about making any “confident” interpretation of a mythology from another culture.

The members of a single cultural group understand each other because they use the same images in their speech. Different cultural groups often misunderstand each other since their images, which to a great extent rely on their respective mythologies, differ significantly. ~ Guggenbühl-Craig, The Old Fool and the Corruption of Myth

This is important to keep in mind as therapists for lots of reasons: Many of us are going to be working cross-culturally, with clients who are first or second or third generation immigrants to our nation, who may draw on cultural reference points, and myths and values and beliefs that are very different from the practitioners. And we need to be careful both about 1) assuming a common underlying mythos that may not be present, and 2) imposing a set of culturally specific values that we may naively imagine are universal.And “myths” are not only stories, they operate in contemporary culture as (often unexamined) collective beliefs, assumptions and values:

Like the Gods of mythology who can change into animals or trees, myths take many different shapes. They are our ideologies, idols, models or policies, visions, demands, our slogans, psychological theories and economic notions. Individual and collective myths shape the life of the individual and of nations. At the same time they expressive the individual and collective soul. ~ Guggenbühl-Craig, The Old Fool and the Corruption of Myth

Guggenbühl-Craig writes in his various books, for example, about the myths of equality, the myths of progress, the myths of marriage, the myths of helping professions, the myths of independence, the myths of creativity, the myths of old age. We might also speak of the myths of adoption, the myth of decline and the good old days, (MAGA), the myth of freedom, the myth of the pursuit of happiness.If we look at American notions of equality for example, you will find that almost every single American, even the most extreme, assert that equality is a primary value that they hold and pursue in some form. They may experience themselves as the oppressed party who has been denied equality, or they may fight for the equality of others who they see as being treated unequally. But of course there are hundreds of thousands of ways that American culture does not actualize these values – there is profound income inequality, those who fight for their civil rights are sometimes perceived as having gained “special rights” that have some how made them “more equal.” Even to speak of communities that have access to “more equality” or "less equality" than others makes no sense.And of course there are ways in which we are certainly not equal – some have greater skills and some less, some are smarter, some have more challenges than others, or more deficits in some area. We don’t all run as fast or finish the test at the same time. And even without institutional biases and oppressions which work against whole groups and races of people- fate and fortune still do not distribute themselves equally – some will be granted more or less opportunity, some have more or less luck. Some of us pass through massive clusters of unfathomable and cascading ill fortune while the sun never stops shining on our neighbor’s home.But no matter our behavior or our fates – there is generally an organizing American myth of equality that all of us speak of and feel strongly about.

An incomplete myth is harmful. A balanced one, however, is a reflection of our inner life and thus enhances self realization. ~ Guggenbühl-Craig, The Old Fool and the Corruption of Myth

Different nations, cultures and cultural groups often have differing organizing values. For some cultures, respecting social and generational hierarchy is a far more salient organizing myth and assumed “equality” would be rude or even blasphemous. For some cultures “personal happiness” is not only not a central cultural value, some cultures don’t even have words for such an experience as “happiness” is defined as by the over all quality of well-being for the group or the family unit. So, imagine the capacity for destructiveness and harm when “Western” trained “mental health” practitioners who have been inculcated in the psychotherapeutic myth (for that is a myth too) begin imposing their national mythical beliefs in equality, autonomy, and happiness on to cultures who do not value those mythical constructs or who interpret them very differently.Cross cultural work can be liberating at powerful for both participants as long as both participants’ cultural mythological schemas (including the myths of dominance and supremacy) are up for explicit examination and both participants mythologies are respected. If we consider that all of our cultural and national myths are only partial truths, then cross-cultural work has the possibility of bringing both participants a fuller picture of the world.I have found such work to be the most illuminating therapeutic relationships of my lifetime – but only when the dynamic is one where the client is always allowed to be skeptical of how my “American-ness” or my “white-ness” or both skews my perceptions, and I am simultaneously both “aware enough” of our basic cultural differences – and also always willing to return to a state of “beginners mind” where I am receptive to being taught about what I do not know, and also to acknowledge what I can never really understand.I wrote this essay a long time ago about being a non-adopted person who is often immersed and surrounded by adoptee culture and mythologies that I can and have learned a good deal about, but that I can never entirely understand.So every “group” and sub group and family and region and ethnic community and nation has myths about themselves and about others – and sometimes we can find ourselves working in a defacto “cross-cultural” relationship with clients born in the exact same local and era as our own.Psychoanalysis itself is its own mythology, and there are a variety of different mythic beliefs that we now call schools of thought: The Freudian myth, the Object-Relational Myth, the CBT myth. The disease model is its own myth, as is the myth of development. We like to imagine there are clear, universal developmental stages, and sometimes we do see children and adults move through stages of apparent and “expectable” development – but just because sometimes people live out myths and are loyal to them doesn’t mean they are unilaterally true or necessary.In psychotherapy, there are great dangers in trying to identify “universal themes” among and between peoples and groups - and in cross cultural work– in part because it has too often been the case that this universalization has merely been the imposition of a white European/American psychological myth.And in large part: the primary white Euro/American psychological myth as it is practiced today– is one of individualism and personal pathology.In their text Toward Psychologies of Liberation, Watkins and Shulman, recount how medicalization and the models of personal pathology came to dominate mental health provision in parts of Europe and in the US. It was not always the case that the psychoanalytic community saw the individual as its primary arena of intervention. Many of the first psychoanalyts were Marxists, socialists and social democrats – actively involved themselves in social justice movements and saw that as a rightful extension of their mission and theories. Freud was involved in establishing free clinics. Early pychoanalysts of various schools of thought were active in establishing reproductive health care initiatives, and “education for women, schools for the poor, the kindergarten movement, school based treatment centers for children traumatized by war and poverty, settlement house psychology classes for workers, the first child guidance clinics, and suicide prevention centers.”

They paid attention to building conditions for peace and stability in Austria and Europe, put forward initiatives to help women struggle against varying forms of domination and control, and suggested architectural changes for public housing that would help build urban families’ sense of community. Their advocacy for children issued from the extensive needs of children after World War I, psychoanalytic insight into the importance of early childhood development for later psychological health, and awareness of the traumatizing effects of poverty on childhood development. ~ M. Watkins & H. Shulman, Toward Psychologies of Liberation

In other words, psychoanalytic theory and intervention took place in communities, among nations, and in social environments and not only in the psyche of an individual with a problem that had been located inside their “person.”Watkins and Shulman and others, speculate that the horrors of World War II, and the immigration processes of many psychoanalysts caused many of them to “tone down” their more radical social justice resumes in order to negotiate naturalization processes. For those that found themselves living in the US, McCarthyism would drive such ideological affiliations even further underground. As the various psychoanalytic schools and institutes vied for prestige and for legitimacy and began to advocate for the full medicalization of the profession and the elimination of "lay analysts" – now reserved for doctors and those with graduate degrees only. Thus the medical model with its focus on individual symptoms, financial model of reimbursement, and disease model became so entrenched it was as if the psychoanalytic community had never seen social justice as part of its purview - and its theories and technologies became exclusively focused on individual treatment.But this is what Guggenbühl-Craig would call an “incomplete myth.” In the archetypal psychologies, all archetypes have a “positive” and “negative” aspect – “light and shadow” - and any myth which divorces itself from its shadow aspect has the capacity to become destructive, even dangerous, in its attempts to eradicate the aspects of the complete myth that it most fears. The myth of equality is only a complete myth if it includes a legitimate exploration of the ways that some fates and fortunes and happinesses will always be distributed in ways that are inherently unequal. Some will live long lives. Some will die young. The myth of equality cannot truly eradicate all inequalities, all unfairnesses.In order to make sense of these inherent unfairnesses of living – we create a new myth, the myth of superiority. Those who have had fortune are elites and deserving of it. Those who have misfortune are ne’re-do-wells who got what they deserved as well.

All myths and stories that express how I or my group is superior to others express something which takes place in my soul. What is pernicious about that? I believe mythologies of chauvinism and racism lack something: they are one-sided myths… For a mythology of group affiliation to be complete, it must include superiority and inferiority.

Each myth is harmful only if it is not counteracted by the opposing myth.~ Guggenbühl-Craig, The Old Fool and the Corruption of Myth

Of course early depth psychologists and psychoanalysts were particularly cognizant of the destructive myth of superiority, having witnessed many of their colleagues and cohort annihilated by the holocaust.The larger point here is that as therapists we must remember that our clients are embedded in a sociopolitical matrix, and it may require as much intervention in the social environment to alleviate the stressors that plague them as labors toward helping the client summon their resilience.And sometimes, when we cannot intervene ourselves in the environment that surrounds the client – we must at least help them locate the source of their problem, whenever it is possible and accurate to do so – outside of themselves.I have a client who spoke about their “Trump-adjusted mood” (credit to podcaster Ana Marie Cox) – meaning that their baseline has shifted downward as a result of the socio-political anxieties of the time. What would have felt as "very anxious" before is now “okay, considering.” Of course the client wasn’t familiar with Axis 4 diagnostic critera – but there are massive environmental stressors impacting everyone in some way right now. The world has become a precarious and a paranoid one – and even if we are powerless to block the injustices that are crashing down around us like a giant’s footsteps – we can at least take as much pathology as possible off of the individual psyches that are sitting in the room with us.

Liberation psychology should illuminate the links between an individual’s psychological suffering and the social, economic, and political context in which he or she lives. ~ M. Watkins & H. Shulman, Toward Psychologies of Liberation

Or as Jungian Marie Louise von Franz might put it:

Suppose an analysand behaves outrageously in a group. If we try to make him see that this was all his fault, he is too crushed and, objectively, that would not be correct, for a part was the group shadow. Otherwise there might be too great a feeling of guilt, and there is a kind of secret norm of how much of the shadow a human being can stand. It is unhealthy not to see it, but just as unhealthy to take too much of it. One cannot function psychologically if one takes on too much…

I say all this to make clear that when we speak of the shadow there is a personal individual aspect and also a collective aspect, the group shadow. The latter naturally would in some be the sum of the shadows.. ~ Marie-Louise von Franz, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales.

I think, that this is in large part why I, trained as a social worker, was more drawn to Jung’s theories over other psychotherapeutic models: Because it is transpersonal, systemic, about how we live, what we have in common, and what we don’t, as a species. And about what our responsibilities are with regard to enabling or individuating from our cultural and national myths.

Nevertheless, a purely personalistic psychology, by reducing everything to personal causes, tries its level best to deny the existence of archetypal motifs and even seeks to destroy them by personal analysis. I consider this a rather dangerous procedure which cannot be justified medically… Can we not see how a whole nation is reviving an archaic symbol, yes even archaic religious forms, and how this mass emotion is influencing and revolutionizing the life of the individual in a catastrophic manner?

~ C. G. Jung, The Concept of the Collective Unconscious

Jung, of course, wrote that passage referring to the rise of Nazism in Germany. But this too is an era that is revolutionizing the life of the individual in a catastrophic manner.What does this look like in session with an individual? It means that when a client is claiming too much of the collective shadow, as von Franz said, that we must remind them that their assessment of the severity of their mood must be “adjusted” to factor in the anxieties of this unstable era. It means that we don’t let our clients take more than their share of the collective shadow.It means that when a client is talking about how their work weighs them down, feeling worried or depressed or anxious all the time, we remind them that yes, they may be stressed because of their divorce, or and their work, and its true that if they could face the bills they have been avoiding they might feel better – but how do they think that the news and the uncertainty in the larger world may be impacting them? We remind them that many people are feeling triggered and anxious as the #Metoo movement changes the ground under their feet, that many are worried about the possibility of looming war. That the cause of their distress is not exclusively personal, it is collective. It is our national shadow casting its chill. We help them to individuate, to separate from the myth that has gripped our country: a myth of xenophobia, a myth of dominance, a myth of paranoia and a myth of superiority and power. We ask how they are feeling about the Muslim ban, if they know anyone who is impacted by the challenges to the DREAM act l, how they feel about the stories that they are hearing, and the ways their own lives may be transformed as norms and expectations and entitlements are threatened and eradicated.

The purpose is to pinpoint all shades and polarities of a particular myth of ideology, individually and collectively. ~ Guggenbühl-Craig, The Old Fool and the Corruption of Myth.

Liberation psychologies place stress on identifying, supporting, and nurturing the psychological attempts of individuals and groups alike to re-author their own sense of identity. This requires a critical analysis of oppressive power relations, including those within psychology itself. Psychologies of liberation gather together resources to help people understand possibilities for multiple layers of interpretation through which the world that has been imposed on them can be understood and reorganized. ~ M. Watkins & H. Shulman, Toward Psychologies of Liberation

I wrote here about working to include ecopsychological-minded interventions into my practices, and the work introducing of liberation psychology into psychotherapeutic work is not so different: we simply ask about the things that the myth of personalized psychotherapy leaves out: We broaden our focus, we ask about how clients are feeling about the world and the social political natural historical environment they are embedded in.And we ask:Who does the myth serve?Who has it left out?What is missing?What might lie beyond this myth?And we remind ourselves that psychotherapy was, at its inception, a myth that included radical practice, a practice that was inexorably connected to social justice. We find the causes and the realms of social action that we feel called to outside of the office, and we help our clients to see that a portion of their pain, maybe even a very significant portion, is generated by the environment, and we help them find the wherewithal to engage in constructive action to make their myth more complete, and the world more just.

“It is saddening that many Jungians still tend to speak of the feminine as if it is the special province of women, or speaking of women’s psychology as “feminine psychology” or men’s psychology as “masculine psychology” ~ Masculine and Feminine, Gareth S. Hill,

To look at any depth psychological theory means contending with the biases and bigotries that the theory is built upon, and to consider whether or not there are useful notions and ideas which are salvageable when the bias has been confronted, or if the theoretical construct is itself is so completely contaminated, serving only to maintain an oppressive status quo, that it needs to be tossed out with the rubbish.One of the key examples of this is the notion of “penis envy” associated with traditional Freudian theory. “Mother blaming” notions about the psychoanalytic origins of homosexuality, and schizophrenia – are another example of misogynistic theory.Jung - a student of Freud’s, working in Victorian Europe, seeing women with “hysterical” paralysis – may have rejected Freud’s reductionist sexual theories, but baked plenty of his own and his historical era’s misogyny into his own theories of “women’s psychology.”Most people have encountered a gender essentialist interpretation of Jung’s Anima and the Animus archetypes through an (infamous and heternormative) self-help book published in the mid-nineties by John Gray: "Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus". Gray took Jung’s ideas about the archetypal “Masculine” and the archetypal “Feminine” and reduced those ideas to traditional gender roles. Men need women to soothe and reassure them, to be patient with them in order for them to move out into the world of work as “warriors.” Women who are insufficiently nurturing, or “too dominant” unwittingly create obstacles to receiving the attention and affection from men that they yearn for. When women help men feel like “men” they are more likely to have their primary, emotional needs met by their partners.And truly, there have been many generations of Jungian couples therapies that have unfolded along this ridiculously oppressive model. And in fact, reading Jung’s clinical examples of how he himself applied Anima/us theory in practice – is just as infuriating. I hated these notions upon my first exposures to them, and experienced them as utterly unsalvageable. But the more I sat with them, the more that I found ways that these archetypes - these instinctive ways of being - live in each of us, without regard to embodied gender, I began to find small treasures embedded in the rubbish.So: what do these words "Anima" and "Animus" mean?For Jung this is an extension of his idea that wholeness is the result and the resolution of the “tension of the opposites” - That everything that is whole contains opposites. The 24 hour day is composed of both daylight and darkness. Inferiority masks unconscious desires for superiority, and superiority is the attempt to compensate for unconsciously held feelings of inferiority. Jung saw the relationship between the unconscious and consciousness as compensatory and bivalent - a dance between opposing energies which, when it is in a state of health, keeps us in balance, and moves us toward wholeness.Compensation is a fundamental concept in Jungian psychology, which corresponds to the self-regulatory functions of a living organism. To express this idea that one-sidedness is answered by its opposite in the psyche, Jung used the Greek word enantiodromia. ~ Masculine and Feminine, Gareth S. Hill, And in Jung’s era, and beyond– gender was perceived as binary, and compartmentalized: Man was the opposite of Woman, Masculinity was the opposite of Femininity. Which for Jung, meant that for each of us, our gendered “opposite” lived in our unconscious. The repressed, unconscious “feminine” was called the Anima. The repressed unconscious “masculine” was called the Animus. Men had to make contact with their repressed feminine “soul” to be whole, and women had to become conscious of their repressed masculine “spirit” in order to become whole.Moreover, Jung believed that those who kept these energies repressed could become “possessed” or inflated by this unconscious content – and men could become neurotically femininely “moody” and “irrational” when they were “anima possessed” and women would become strident, opinionated if their animus had no conscious expression, and took hold of them in unconscious ways. Men who were unconsciously overwhelmed by emotion or passivity and women who were driven by unacknowledged ambition were viewed as neurotic as a result of the force of these unconscious instincts.For Jung: The anima/us were also archetypes which emerge in dreams as the “contrasexual” characters in our dreams – a man who dreams, for example of following a golden haired maiden into the forest, may be dreaming of making contact with his own "feminine" soul and emotional life. A woman who dreams of being guided by a wise old man is encountering a psychopomp, a guide and teacher who may lead her to deeper theoretical understanding of her own being.In traditional Jungian theory – these are also the archetypes that we project out onto potential (heterosexual) romantic partners. A woman may encounter her Animus through myth and dreams and analytic explorations, or she may encounter “her perfect type” in the guise of all that she projects onto her partner/husband. And, for Jung, a heterosexual man will encounter his anima as he seeks out his “ideal feminine” mate. And, in this theory – heterosexual couples fall into conflict when they unconsciously pressure each other into manifesting their ideal: when a woman’s animus “attacks” a man’s anima. Or a man’s anima responds to his wife’s animus with moody irrational rejections.When I first began to wrestle with this content it would start out momentarily interesting and then quickly get very yucky- But the more I labored with it – the more I began to suspect that although the culture/era/patriarchical applications of these theories were grossly oppressive - it felt like Jung's notion itself was like an attempt to break down oppressive gender and gender role binaries, and to free the "contra-sexual" element in all of us.Whatever we are not biologically, whatever we are not allowed to be by our families and our cultures, whatever opportunities are withheld from us with regard to our biological gender identity (male, intersexual, female) or our gender role presentation ( how we perform “feminine” or "masculine” cultural standards) no matter who we are or what culture we live in, our opposite, our unlived aspects reside within us. And when we can become more conscious of that we are more whole, and more free.Gareth Hill, in his book “Masculine and Feminine” - writing also in the mid-nineties - undertook the task of reformation and rescue of some of the salvageable aspects of Anima/animus theory.And Hill is also restricted by his era: Binary gender “opposites” still hold sway in the thinking of the time – as opposed to gender continuums, homosexual marriage is illegal at the time of his writing, and was only fairly recently depathologized in the revised DSM of that decade. There was no popular discourse on intersexuality, transgender identities, or gender queer presentations or gay or queer parent households. Many gender “associated” qualities are still considered inherent and biologically based in this generation – but Hill does his best to avoid the gender essentialist arguments that Men are From Mars puts forth:

Anima and animus are the archetypal patterns of masculine and feminine which transcend gender. ~ Masculine and Feminine, Gareth S. Hill.

So maybe we can think of it this way:

Animus or anima otherness is an expression of what a person cannot in that moment be. Shadow otherness is that which we don’t like to be, or don’t want to admit being. ~Masculine and Feminine, Gareth S. Hill,

Or maybe it is the archetype of all that we are not permitted to be: that requires we become “disobedient” and “radical” in order to claim for our conscious selves. And sometimes Anima/us may be the unlived aspects of our being that we foreclose upon and mourn because the opportunities to manifest them are thwarted by oppressive cultural structures and expectations.I find this all far easier to consider when we strip gendered language from this entirely- the clearest archetypal image that I return to make sense of this theory is the T’ai Chi: reframing Anima/us as Yin and Yang, remembering that each state also contains its opposite.(But sometimes I want to get past even those classifications: Sometimes, privately I think instead of my grandmother-in-law’s childhood pets: A massive great dane named “Bitsy” and a tiny dachshund called” Zambor.” Everything great has something tiny inside of it. Everything that is small contains something huge and heroic. We might also think of these archetypes as The Left and the Right. Although we associate gender with some of these qualities, that is because we have filtered them through cultural lens which have assigned gendered expectations to universal states of being.We can call these energies anything we like, and to me, we are closer to wholeness when we remember that all of them are present inside of each of us.Hill further breaks these archetypes (despite the gendered language) down in to useful and recognizable patterns of being and behaving (which I have used and amended to include my own thoughts) :The Static Yin/ Feminine/Left : BeingContaining,HoldingAcceptanceResponsivenessMirroringInterdependecy, primal dependencyNurturanceMothering (by any gender)In its “negative aspect” – when it is too one-sided out of balance: this will look like smothering, merger, engulfing, devouring, passivity.The Dynamic (Yang/Masculine/Right) : Separation/differentiationIndividualismGoal directednessTechnologyAmbitionActiveAssertiveWarrior/HeroWhen out of balance: Aggressive, abusive, domineering, self-serving, grandiose.The Static (Yang/Masculine/Right) : OrderingDisciplineHierarchyTheoryRules/Standards/ExpectationsStatus/role/personaFathering (by any gender)KingWhen out of balance: rigidity, excessive control or punishment of others, righteousness, disconnection, systemic oppression.Dynamic (Yin/Feminine/Left)PlayTransformationSpontaneityAltered ConsciousnessImaginationIntuitionDecomposition/decayWitch/Magician/ProphetWhen out of balance: “spacy-ness” disorganization, magical thinking, chaos, rot, substance abuse/intoxication, and delusion/hallucinationSo: these metaphysical energetic states are natural states that are accessible to all human beings regardless of their gender. Yet when Jung and his more dogmatic binary followers attempt to apply it to their worldview of binary and “opposite” sexes - these ideas become damaging and toxic.So how might we use our awareness of these instinctive ways of being in the therapeutic session in practical and liberating way? I find that primary usefulness of these ideas are to help me and the client remain alert to a basic “onesided-ness” or imbalance – that has risen up from within, or has been imposed from the outside:I very rarely make any direct reference to these archetypes in session. I can count the times I’ve spoken to a client about “masculine or feminine” archetypes or anima/us on one hand. But here are some fictionalized accounts that demonstrate how applying these constructs in the therapeutic session can be helpful:A gentle, somewhat passive cis-straight married man with an unacknowledged yearning to be a primary caretaker (static-yin) and adventure guide/play mate (dynamic yin) for his child, in a traditional gender-role divided marriage, pressed into expressing his love for his family by taking on assertive bread-winning (dynamic-yang) energies and unhappily trapped in the (static-yang) role of household provider. Noticing the one-sidedness of his role, naming the yearning to care for his child in more nurturing and related ways, and grieving the ways that this is an impossibility for him. A trans man in transition, being nursed by his supportive and attentive mother, in the weeks following his top-surgery (double masectomy) has a powerful dream that his breasts “are still there.” Upon waking he is frightened by potential implications/interpretations of the dream, but the dream itself was not distressed, but felt deeply pleasurable, comforting, whole, powerful. As the dream is explored, it becomes clear that the client is feeling very connected and grateful for his mother’s maternal care, devotion and nursing, (static-yin) and that the client feels strongly identified with his mother and hopes to manifest the same kind of steadfast support for his loved ones. We discuss all the ways that the archetypal Static Yin (without naming it as such) will remain central to the client’s values and being through his bodily transition into his gender identity. A queer relationship between a self identified professionally powerful “cis-butch” lesbian and her artistic gender-queer partner. The couple would like to start a family, and explore the implications of pregnancy and parenthood on their bodies, their gender identities, and gender roles. The conversation also explores the ways that the archetypal Static Yin, without labling it as such, is desired and feared (in its devouring negative aspect) - experienced as a potential threat to both Dynamic-Yang career ambitions and to Dynamic-Yin creative processes. A self identified cis-straight woman, in a “traditionally male” working class profession, the only woman on her job site, eliminates any trace of vulnerability or femininity that might impact her role at work. Placed in a supervisory position (static-yang) over a group of large, physical, dynamic-yang–possessed men who are threatened by her authority at the job. Some men recoil and rebel. Other's on the team, “soften” toward her, and respond to her nurturing, (static-yin) maternal or sisterly care for them. She drinks to excess and is plagued by intrusive nightmares. (dynamic-yin in its negative aspect) A deeply religious cis-straight woman, attached to traditional gender roles, who married young and whose mastery experiences organized around motherhood and housekeeping – decides to separate and leave her substance-abusing (dynamic-yin) husband, and head out into the world to start a new life- (dynamic yang). She assesses her skills and capacities for order and organization and decides to return to school to become a C.P.A and take on the financial support of her household. (static yang) Or myself: an old psychotherapist whose relationship to her work life as a therapist (static-yin) and her commitment to working heroically and taking on “hard” cases that others turn away (dynamic-yang) has been dramatically reorganized by chaos, (dynamic-yin) in the year following a life-threatening diagnosis. We can see in all of these examples, that we are more likely to experience symptoms, or “fateful” external obstacles when we fall into (or are pressured by external circumstances) into imbalanced “one-sidedness”. When we find our selves “stuck” in one state - facing down every obstacle like a warrior going into battle – for example – we are undervaluing and under utilizing other energetic strategies, such as patience, or play, or restructuring. Nature notices these imbalances – and responds to correct/compensate for us: either with psychological or somatic symptoms, or through strain and conflict in our relationships in the world around us.If we can hold the words “masculine” and “feminine” lightly in our minds when discussing the Anima and Animus archetypes, we can see that in the mythical and folkloric cannon – that these energies are often (but not exclusively) represented by gendered characters, and that these myths and stories can tell us something about the pathological one-sidedness of an entire culture:The captive princess awaiting rescue is an oppressive image only if it taken literally to imply that everyone in a female body must wait passively to be saved by a powerful man.But, if we look at the princess as a symbol of the collective Static Yin archetype which is too often devalued, repressed and made powerless by a patriarchal culture – it may require that we all summon our heroic Dynamic-Yang energies to break “her” out of imprisonment and move us toward wholeness as a community.We are all the princess. We are all the hero. We are all the ruling King. We are all the tricky old Witch.And our myths and scriptures and our nighttime dreams often use gendered characters to talk to us about what energies are ascendant in us, as individuals and as a community – and what aspects of our identities are experiencing repression or oppression.But in truth these archetypes exist in all of us.Each of us have hard, strong dominant aspects which will need to be softened.Each of us has soft, passive, reactive, nurturing aspects that will need to be strengthened.Each of us has creative, disorganized, chaotic energies which need to be more structured.All of us can become rigid and rule-bound and need to learn to allow more inspiration and freedom and play into some area of our lives.We are all susceptible to one-sidedness. Our culture and are families of origins and our sexual and romantic relationships can cauterize and prune our gendered identities in ways we can’t always notice- that may drive our development to consciously identify with one set of these qualities and repress its complement into underdeveloped unconsciousness.To be whole and stable , we need all four legs under our table of be of equal size and strength. When we over-develop one area of our being, and neglect, or silence its “opposite” it makes us wobbly, unstable in both our personal and our collective lives.

This is essay is a part of my subscription seminar series, two essays each month - discussing depth psychology texts and their practical applications. I have set this essay to "public" so that those who may be interested in this series may have access to a "free sample." This essay continues our exploration of “Children’s Dreams: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1936-1940” - by C. G. Jung. This book (available to read online ) is an assemblage of notes a group of analysts studying dream work under Jung. Children’s dreams were selected as a subject as they are often rich with common archetypal themes – and offered Jung a chance to teach his trainees how to explore, and apply, and how not to apply, some of his theories about dreaming and dream exploration. In the Winter 1936/37 session (Chapter 2) analyst Margaret Sachs presented the following dream of a nine year old girl from a lower middle class family - who was distractible, only superficially engaged in her school work, who was repeating the second grade, and still having a very challenging time. Her intellectual functioning seemed to be fine. Her mother noted that the girl was unable to marshal her industriousness to engage in household chores. The dream: I went into a forest and then a lion came. I wasn’t afraid of the lion. I wanted to stroke him and ride on him. But I fell off. Then he ate me up and I was dead. Now my mommy came and took me on her arm. She went home with me and laid me on the bed. Then I discovered a magic mirror in the pocket of my apron, which I turned toward myself, and then I woke up again. I had enchanted myself. I had also put a spell on the whole house, and there was a store downstairs, and everything was completely different now. The people walked all slanting, me too, and I kept thinking I’d fall over but I didn’t. I went and got a loaf of bread in the store, and the woman said: “You have to hold onto the bread” But I let the bread fall, and then many worms came out of it. Now she had to give me another loaf of bread, and then I walked up the narrow staircase and fell over myself. There was a hole in the stairs; I stuck the bread into the hole (I didn’t know why), threw the money away and brought mommy a couple of stones. She was angry with me and beat me with a switch. Then I woke up. When Sachs explored the dream with the little girl, she offered more content about what she saw in the magic mirror: A dead body, decaying and skeleton-like, suspended from a tree. The image made the dream-ego, (the dreamer within the dream) nauseated. She tries to take the body down but she, and the body both disintegrate further.I'll start this discussion by talking about how I might respond to this dream in the spirit of the present era, if a child told it to me in session, or a parent who I saw for parental guidance and support reported to me that their child had such a dream:First: there are the diagnostic and prognostic implications that I would take note of for myself, privately, while listening to such a dream – some of which I may, or may not share with the child or the parent. Here are some things I would notice and wonder about as I listened:

What instinctive energies, maybe aggressive ones - are emerging from the “unconscious” - just as the lion, a powerful instinctive force, comes from out of the dark forest in the a clearing of ego-consciousness.

I would notice that the child is not anxious, and bravely wants to tame and and harness her instincts - by riding the lion - like one might ride a horse. Freud himself made a similar analogy when explaining the function of the ego: The ego is 'like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse.' Freud, S. (1923). The ego and the id. SE, 19: 1-66. Here, the dreamer is trying to “get on top of” a much more aggressive and overpowering force – the “king of the jungle.” The dreamer is unable to manage her primal impulses – her ego/conscious is overthrown, and then eaten and swallowed up by these energies. She didn’t retreat anxiously from the development challenge, she was overpowered. The image that emerges in my mind when I picture the child in this dream is the Strength card from the tarot deck – in which a woman depicted as successfully able to tame her powerful animal passions. This child, seems to be dreaming about a kind of weakness that leaves her overwhelmed.

Following her defeat, she is picked up like a baby, and nursed by her mother. She has some sense of safety net after her painful failure. She begins to “reflect” upon herself and what has happened to her, and encounters an aspect of the self, or hoped for trajectory, or a potential that is now dead, and leaves her feeling disintegrated and fragmented. I might wonder if this is the self that could have been – the girl that could have moved on to third grade with her peers and if she could have found the strength to harness and focus her energies. Some ideal, expectable future has died, both for the mother and the child – and the child, as well as the parent, likely need some time to rest nurse their wounds and grieve this loss. A nine year old child is acutely aware of their own functioning in relationship to their peer group. Children of that age know who is the best reader in the class, who is the fastest, who is the funniest, who is the best artist or who is the naughtiest or who gets into trouble the most. She knows that her classmates moved forward and she did not. She knows that it isn’t anxiety that interfered – she says clearly that she was not afraid – but that she doesn’t have the ego strength alone to focus herself.

She also sees that her failure has cast a pall on the whole house, perhaps activating her parents anxiety and worry and frustration – leaving everyone in the house out of balance and throwing off the household homeostasis. She is worried that she may “fall” again, but is able to stay afloat for a bit.

The store downstairs makes me think of the unconscious instinctive resources that she also has available to her - not only the energies forces that she cannot yet contain. She is able to “go down” into her depths, and come up with some sustenance - she makes some contact with, a nascent adult self, or parent introject, or her own inner “wise woman” who tells her how important it is to hang on to the bread.

I might wonder if the bread represents some kind of emotional nourishment - or provisions, fuel, to feed and strengthen her – and perhaps both the girl and her mother needed to be fed some healthy narcissistic supplies so that they can get their inner balance, and find their faith in her again (I think here of the bread of the communion – as this is likely a Christian, churchgoing family in that place and era – and how all are welcome at “God’s table” and each person ingests and holds a piece of the sacred inside themselves) before facing another school year. But she tragically is unable to hold onto these supplies – it slips from her fingers and becomes rotten before she or her family can internalize it. She just couldn’t hang on.

But this girl does not give up easily. She is trying very hard in the face of all of her struggles. She goes back down, and gets more supplies from the store in the basement - and is able to hang onto her sense of self – as she tries to negotiate some narrow developmental “steps.” This time, even with the bread in hand – the poor thing falls again – into a hole in the steps. This seems to me to be pointing to some real developmental challenges that this girl is facing. And the dream to me doesn’t seem to be about a neurotic or emotional psychological problem. She isn’t afraid. She doesn’t give up. She has some real inner resources she can access. She doesn’t become despairing and quit. But there is a hole. A lacuna. Something missing which makes her unable to take the next step. She stuffs her sense of self in the hole – perhaps trying to get by on confidence alone or in an attempt to cover up the hole so she doesn’t have to face it, or so others won’t notice. She cannot bring her mother the rewards (money) or sustenance they both yearn for. But this leaves her with nothing to offer her mother but stones. She ends the dream punished, despite how hard she has tried to complete the various trials she has faced in the dream.

I would wonder about the repetitive theme of falling in this dream: falling off the lion, almost falling in the out of balance slanty house, the bread falls, and then rots and falls apart. The body falls from the tree, the arms and legs fall and she falls over and over. And she falls on the stairs.

I also notice that she has to get bread twice, and fails at that test twice – and that this is a child who is failing at her second attempt at second grade

I would also notice the positive aspects of the dream: the girls experience of being cared for and carried after a painful failure. The resources in the basement. The woman who offers her provisions.

As I listen to the dream, I would also take stock of my emotional response. I feel a bit heartbroken for this girl who keeps trying, who mourns and feels off kilter and who tries and tries again. Hopefully, in this day and age, this is a child who would already be identified by the school system - if by no one else – as a child who is potentially struggling with some learning disability or who is non-neurotypical in some way - perhaps a kid with some executive function disabilities, or ADD/ADHD. This is a child that I would want to see have a full neuropsychological assessment if they had not already, and I would make that recommendation based on the dream in conjunction with the presenting problem.

In talking to the child – I would likely just try to mirror the emotional content of the dream – How brave the dreamer was, how scary it must have been to see that in the magic mirror – I might ask questions that would encourage her to express some of the emotional content of the dream: “that must have been upsetting! But you went right back and got more bread! You didn’t give up!” or “Oh no, you got in trouble even after you tried so many times!” I might ask more about how the hole, and possible ways to get around or up or over it. I might create some active imagination exercise for the girl: “The bread didn’t work to fill the hole… is there anyone we could ask to help you get up the stairs because they sound like hard stairs to get up! Was the lady in the basement helpful? Maybe she could help you get over the hole? Should we pretend to ask and see what she says?” We might make drawings of a new way around the hole, or if I had a sand table available I might just let the child build the house in the sand and see if she could create new solutions. If I was talking to the parent (lets say mother since she is the one present in the dream) : I might underscore that the child’s challenges seem to be beyond her “will” at the moment. Perhaps the energies that overwhelm the child are active/aggressive drive -– and manifest as hyperactivity –needing to move and pounce and run and disrupt her attentions at school – or these energies could manifest as day-dreaming,– as intrusive fantasies emerge to derail her industriousness. I would try to show the parent the ways in which this dreams depicts this little girl as trying very hard – and how often things keep falling apart and disintegrating despite her best efforts. I might explore with the mother the ways that a “spell had been cast” over the household – and how her daughters struggles and failures were effecting her. I might try to help her identify aspects of her daughter that she felt admiration and tenderness for and has faith in, and try to help her modulate her frustration if it was present and not merely her daughter’s fear of making her mother angry. I might explore the loss and falling apart that the magic mirror revealed – give the parent some space to mourn for the “ideal” that she had hoped for her girl and point out that the girl experienced this little death too. I might also explore the ways that both mother and daughter are getting frustrated - how the girl is getting fed up with trying, wants to “stuff it down” into the hole and throw away the possibility of reward – and how she is also feeling punished or is fearful of being further punished for her failures.I'd also be aware that both the girl and mother were left in need of strengthening and emotionally hungry at the end of the dream - and try to identify ways for me to offer, and to help them identify others around them who could provide some nurturance. In short, in my view– this is a dream with a few archetypal images – but which is also extremely close to the child’s current central developmental and environmental dilemmas– and which offers us some clues as to what challenges and resources exist for her.Next seminar we will look at some of the ideas Jung and his trainees have - some which may lead us far afield, and some which might enrich our understanding

This essay explores Jung’s Visions, Notes on the Seminar 1930-1934, Lecture 9, December 8th, 1930, pp 155-157 (To read the Visions essay series from the beginning please start with Seminar #84 )The next vision is long and Jung’s discussion of it is cursory. This essay, (and the following to be post at the end of the month) will primarily focus on my own amplifications and questions regarding this content.

I beheld a man on horseback riding over a mountain stream. The rider looked down and saw a man baptizing himself in the water below. He took from his saddlebag a few grains of wheat and threw them upon the water, and it sprang into fully ripe stalks.

The banks beside the stream became steeper until at last the rider found himself in a narrow defile of rock. He then came out into a plain, in the full sun light, and I saw that the man on horseback was the (American) Indian (from her previous dreams). Before him was an ancient city, white, with many domes.

A great crowd was gathered in the square. The (American) Indian looked up and saw in the sky a golden sun. Then he saw the crowd was worshipping the sun. There was also a fire, and near the fire a fountain. The Indian held his face and body over the fire and then stood up unharmed.

Then the crowd shot arrows at him but without harming him Finally an arrow hit him in the left leg below the knee; he pulled it out and blood flowed.

The Indian then returned to his village, was welcomed and all the animals come out from the woods and the fish throw themselves on dry land

Characters: The indigenous man who has been a guide or psychopomp leading her through these visualizations, a crowd of sun worshipers who then attack the Native American man, the villagers that welcome him home. The dreamer/visioner is present only as “beholder”

Exposition: The psychopomp grows corn stalks magically after seeing a man baptized.

Turning Point: He moves through a dark, narrow passage and comes out into a wide open plain.

Lysis: He is attacked in this open plain, but the attacks are futile, causing only a glancing injury. He returns to his home and his community and the animals celebrate and welcome him.

One point we must touch upon is the role of the therapeutic relationship and its influence upon the content that the dreamer/visioner is producing. Jung has already clarified that it would be a clinical error to associate the guide or psychopomp in these visions with himself as the therapist. This would intensify the dreamer’s idealization and dependency upon the therapist, and the dreamer would be less likely to recognize this symbols as aspects of her own psyche.

This is her inner guide, her internal leading, a piece of her own soul leading her through trials and toward her inner home.

But an idealizing transference to the psychotherapist exists nonetheless. The dreamer entangled in their own complexes, and the dreams and visions they produce, can be profoundly influenced by the desire to be pleasing or fascinating to the therapist.

Such active imagination and contemplative exercises are closely related to self-hypnosis, and even the therapist’s activated curiosity or excitement about an image can operate as a post-hypnotic suggestion, encouraging the dreamer to produce more and more such content. In this way, Jung often seems “taken in” or swept up by the richness and intensity of the visions, and one wonders if his cursory treatment of this vision is in anyway influenced by a sensation that the dreamer may have (unconsciously) produced this complex vision, almost over-loaded with archetypal content, to try to fascinate him.

If/When a therapist senses that the dreamer is producing dreams to bring the therapist close, rather than to follow their own trail of symbolic content, it is important for the therapist to step back from taking an active role in amplification, to modulate their excitement, and to leave the images and symbols in the dreamer’s lap to find meaning in for themselves.

The next issue we need to highlight is the process and influence of cryptomnesia on the dreaming and associative process. Cryptomnesia – the resurfacing of a forgotten memory –may feel like one’s own idea or production when it returns.

I once wrote about a small experience of a forgotten memory: a rhythmic phrase, divorced from its origins, floated up into my awareness and I was grateful that something about it felt so deeply familiar that I googled it and discovered its source, rather than inadvertently plagiarizing it in my writings.

I recently tweeted about a dream I had on twitter, where I was served a sweet and starchy tropical fruit pudding that I identified as “poi” and that I ate with my fingers. I have never had poi to my knowledge, and have no conscious awareness of ever being told what the ingredients are or how one should eat it. I had no idea as I shared the dream if it was proper or offensive etiquette to have eaten it with my fingers.

Yet, someone quickly confirmed that poi is a fruit pudding with starchy tarot root intended to be eaten by hand.

This could seem like some synchronicitous event - information emerging from the “collective unconscious” or some deep, universal archetypal symbol - that I had no way of knowing about - but it is far more likely that when I was 5 years old in 1969, the tenth anniversary of Hawaii’s statehood that my kindergarten included some information about Hawaiian culture in the curriculum to commemorate the event. My psyche relied on an image, stored in my latent memory banks, to represent an experience of pleasurable, healing nurturance.

I suspect that there are some significant images that may rely on such cryptomnesias in this vision, as well as some parts of this vision that may have been unintentionally produced to enthrall Jung.

We will look more closely at these elements and that the archetypes presented in this vision in the next essay.

NOTE: This essay is one of my Seminar Essays which are generally only available by subscription behind a paywall. This one is posted publicly both as a sample and for use in teaching and for workshops I facilitate on these subjects.

This seminar essay, and the two that will follow expound on Chapter 14 in the Portable Jung: “On Synchronicity” – CW Vol. 8 pars. 969-997 -

I will also in this multi-part discussion draw on an expanded version of this essay “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principal” published as Part VII the same volume – CW Vol. 8 pars 816 – 968) as its starting point.

Chapter 14 is a fairly brief outline of Jung’s thoughts on synchronicity. He wants the reader to know that the term has “something to do with time” and with simultaneity – the meaningful coincidence of two or more events that appear, subjectively, to be interrelated in such a meaningful way that it is hard for us to accept that mere probability is at play.

Jung will spend a great deal of this essay trying to empirically distinguish between “runs” of chance / normal probability and what he will call the acausal connections of synchronicity. Meaningful events, close to each other in time that have a strong resonance to each other but do not in any way cause each other. Jung will also suggest that these may have some actual, mild deviation from strictly calculated probability.

Remember, Jung had been interested in spiritualism and religious matters continuously since childhood, his father a minister, his mother seemingly suffered from fairly severe depressive and dissociative episodes, and came from family with a history of visions and premonitions. Jung’s cousin was a fairly well known medium, an early subject of his paranormal research - later “debunked” – in an era where psychology as an extension of the medical model - and spiritualist movements such as theosophy were in active competition to claim, explain, and define uncanny/unconscious/unexplained phenomena. Jung had dealt for many years with accusations by colleagues, competitors, and by Freud of succumbing to superstition, excessive religiosity and occultism.

Freud saw him as betraying the scientific method and empirical standards and saw his exploration of such “parapsychological” subjects as undermining the medicalization of unconscious conflict as the core explanation for symptoms associated with mental illness and disturbance.

Jung, by his own view, remained strongly identified with the medical profession and valued empiricism - even as he acknowledged its limitations - and sought to examine such phenomena as beliefs which may be proved true, false, or remain improvable - but which nonetheless exist real beliefs that have real psychological effects on the believer.

He wants to examine the processes, influence and outcomes of believing in things, as well as consider why we believe in anything, and the common shapes and forms that such beliefs take.

One can sense that being dismissed as “religious” pierces him, and Jung seems to work very hard to establish that he is approaching these synchronistic phenomena from an empirical perspective, rather than relying on anecdotes of how the uncanny experiences manifest and may be utilized in the psychotherapeutic process.

Synchronicities are a combining of deeply subjective perceptions or events with apparently random objectively occurring events. Moreover, our subjective experience is engaged in such a meaningful way that is often difficult for us to dismiss these correspondences as random. These events of happenstance may correspond so directly with our inner lives and experiences that they appear to us as signs, omens, portents, or we may experience them as uncanny, numinous, or even miraculous.

Jung points out that many “runs” of coincidences occur within the realm of common probability - He gives a simple enough example of a person who encounters the same number three times in one day: - on the street car they are riding, a telephone number, and on their theater ticket.

A normative coincidence that most of us might not even notice, or if we did – we might not think much about it.

But - if we extrapolate beyond Jung’s example – if we were to add an intensely emotional subjective component – say the person involved had had a dream the night before – where his grandfather had handed him an important message and when he opened it the number was written on the paper – and then he had gone on to experience the repeating coincidence - or – say that the number corresponded to a pivotal experience in the person’s life such as the birthdate of the person’s deceased daughter – many would be more likely to interpret those events as “beyond chance” and “not just random.”

Perhaps this would be due partially due to the length of the coincidental “run” being extended from three occurrences to four – but if the fourth occurrence was again something merely objective instead of a dream or a birthday – say a number of a radio station posted on a passing billboard – we would probably simply think to ourselves: “Hmm. Weird coincidence!” and think nothing further of it.

When such coincidences activates something that has deep emotional or psychological meaning to us, we are more likely to see the scenario as too meaningful to seem “random”. We might believe that the dream “foretold” the numbers we would encounter the next day. We might consider what, if any, message we were to derive from the destination of the streetcar, the person we were talking to on the phone, or the play we were seeing. Some might even consider buying a lottery ticket after a dream and a set of coincidences like that – to test how long and how lucky the “run” is. Or, some might take it as a “sign” that a deceased loved one was still present with us, looking over us, or “sending” us a numerical birthdate message as a consolation.

Jung writes in detail in this essay about ESP experiments and about a small data set of correspondences between astrological charts and marriage partners. For myself, I think these kinds of phenomena can emerge from subjective experience, and be extremely valuable clinically without any need for there to be any mathematically increased improbability to support their “reality.”

People “really” consider synchronicity to be meaningful – and most therapists I know who have done this work for a long time have come to experience such extraordinary twists of fate and luck that we have all surrendered to the fact that the “uncanny” exists as a real influence on human behavior. We have all worked with clients who have been bereaved who have experienced the felt presence, or a “sign” from a dead loved one – and the comfort that is drawn from the experience is real whether the event falls inside or outside the established odds of likely probability.

But, Jung needs to establish that there is some different kind of confluence at play, otherwise, these experiences can be dismissed as delusions or superstitions or “magical thinking” or as an irrational defense – and those who engage in Freudian medical models of the time would see their job as needing to confront or undermine, or interpret as a symptom, arrest or an indication of a childhood complex.

Jung saw these synchronicities as important and useful clinically – not as illusions to be confronted or as symptoms of ego-deficits, and in order to value them in his historical context, he had to try to make a case that they were subjectively meaningful and objectively real.

We are not, in our current place in history, engaged in the same struggles that Jung was in his era and culture – and perhaps we are in an era where the limits of science, the place of the unknown and the unknowable, is a less threatening notion. And Jung’s arguments in favor of magnetic influence of the planets and ESP research seem less than compelling.

That being said: Jung is also talking about phenomena that has become much more accepted in terms of scientific inquiry – and so in someway, the notions behind synchronicity seem less outlandish to us today with many more generations of research into quantum physics. What Jung is trying to establish in this discussion is that heightened subjective experiences may change something about our experience of time and space. Or that perhaps our internal subjective state has some non-causal effect on the manifestation of objective events. And we know now, that just the fact of being observed at all, even by an electronic non-conscious “eye” can change the way particles behave during experimentation.

Jung actually worked very closely with physicist Wolfgang Pauli in trying to understand more about how time and space seem to work so differently in our subjective lives and in the quantum realm than it does by empirical measurement. (If you want more information about their collaboration you may want to read a book called: 137; Jung, Pauli and the Pursuit of a Scientific Obsession by Arthur I. Miller.)

If time and space are “not real” in and of themselves, but only concepts that emerge as a result of our creating objective measures – what is time and space from a purely subjective experience- might it be felt and lived much more fluidly in ways that are very different than the mechanistic measurements we believe it to be?

”Time in itself is non-existent. There is only the current of events which we measure with the time-concept. For the… man close to nature, the course of time is not an abstraction; for him there is only what is just before one, the now, and what is behind. He has no clock by which he could read the time with numbers; he is entirely in this stream of events which steadily flows on down into a dark hole. It meets us out of the dark future, flows through us, and sinks down behind us again into an endless darkness.” ~ Children’s Dreams, C.G. Jung

It is in this strange subjective kind of dream-time –where our subjectivity might slip ahead to anticipate the future in a dream or “feel” the danger threatening a loved one thousands of miles away that Jung thinks synchronicity emerges.

But, I’m not sure you have to understand the origins or even agree with Jung’s hypothesis about the ultimate source of meaningful coincidence in order to work constructively with such coincidences when they emerge. In the upcoming seminars we will look at some of Jung’s examples of synchronicity, and some of my own – and consider how we might respond to such occurrences in the psychotherapy office. We will also consider synchronicity as a kind of heightened intuitive state and as an instinctive method of perceiving which may be activated in times of crisis, change or transformation.

This essay is a continuation of discussion begun in Seminar #47 on Chapter 14 in the Portable Jung: On Synchronicity as its starting point. (found as an afterward to the 1951 The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche – CW Vol. 8 pars. 969-997) I will also draw on a later, expanded version of this essay Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principal– (CW Vol. 8 pars 816 – 968)

Many clients will report meaningful coincidences, uncanny dreams, anticipatory sensations that “something is about to happen” or a “feeling that it wouldn’t work out” – and depending on the therapist’s view of such experiences the sharing of such subjective experiences of “signs and omens” can either become an opportunity to deepen trust and exploration in the relationship – or if the therapist is dismissive or too expressive of skepticism - an event which drives such “irrational” yet meaningful sensations into deeper repression or out of the therapeutic relationship.

’I was amazed to see how many people have had experiences of this kind and how carefully the secret was guarded.’ ~ C.G. Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principal

Client’s often report such experiences by preemptively dismissing them: “I know this is ridiculous and totally woo-woo but….” Even clients who are deeply anti-religious, strict materialists, or avowed skeptics hang onto synchronic experiences or “signs” like secret hidden treasures that can be very difficult for them to expose to anyone else.

It isn’t necessary to “believe” that synchronicities are “signs from the universe” or from a god to appreciate their existence, and the opportunity they may provide:

My tendency is to think of synchronicity as a kind of heightened intuitive state and as an instinctive method of perceiving which may be activated in times of crisis, change or transformation. I suspect that we gather many subliminally perceived pieces of data about the world and the patterns around us, and that synchronicities are what may happen when our unconscious begins to anticipate a shift in natural patterns or rhythms of living.

I don’t know that you have to believe that distant planets exert influence upon the lives of human beings to consider the archetypes and patterns that astrology attempts to talk about for example. The stories and seasonal shifts that astrology speaks to – the differing energies of spring, fall, winter, summer and the archetypal narratives we have created around the celebrations and rituals associated with the shift of the year – the long days of summer and long nights of winter and the transitional seasons – may have archetypal influence on how we see ourselves and the world without any “planetary influence.” How does it feel to be born in spring, to have your birthday each year emerge as the blooms are first coming out? How does it affect our identities to feel that our story begins and reboots each new year as chicks are being hatched and bulbs are blossoming? How might it feel different if you born in the dead of winter – your story starting over each year in on the darkest day? How might it shape, even in very subtle ways, how we experience ourselves and our identities to associate our personal new year/new beginning with “back to school” season or with the lazy relaxation of summer? How might our seasonal stories correspond or diverge from each other?

I was once, about 15 years ago, gifted an astrological reading – and the one “prediction” that it made was that I was susceptible to experiencing some kind of cancer or serious illness in my lower back or in my colon when I was fifty-two and that if I was vigilant I would come through – and that certainly, with hindsight that chart reading (on tape so that I could review and check my memory) came to seem like a very meaningful synchronistic event when I experienced a cancer that involved lesions on my lumbar spine causing saddle paralysis.

In New York City it is extremely common for clients to have consulted with healers or readers who use synchronistic methods such as tarot, IChing, astrology, etc. If they tell us that they experienced something meaningful from such a reading – even if we do not “believe” in it ourselves, or think that the reader is merely a cold reader, the experience can be a very powerful method to examine the unconscious projections and processes of meaning making. In my view, unless the transactions are addictive, fiscally damaging, or are indicative of a kind of passivity or too exploitable gullibility in the client - or have left the client significantly disturbed or seem to be creating a destructive dependency they should be accepted and explored.

Just like dream work, I would not over-focus on synchronicitous content with a client who is having a challenging time staying grounded reality, or who has symptoms of psychosis or significant ego weakness or injury. But neither would I consider that the presence of interest in such content was inherently a sign of ego weakness. It is probably most important to begin by exploring what meaning the client finds in these experiences.

Unless the client is really unable to think clearly generally, these are usually experiences where people “dip into the irrational” to allow their unconscious processes to come closer to the surface of their rational consciousness.

If we think of archetypes is as instinctive patterns of behavior that can be activated by objective or naturally occurring events, synchronicity often clusters around the activation of such instinctive energies. Synchronicities may be more likely to emerge when our anticipatory function (ie – intuition) is heightened for some reason – quite possibly from signals that were gathered subliminally, by our pre-conscious awareness – that our unconscious assembles and passes onto our conscious awareness through drawing attention to the coincidences in the world around us which coincide with our process of meaning making.

”One can observe in everyday life how the unconscious anticipates things… Such peculiar beside-the-mark perceptions are very frequent… one generally overlooks them and thinks: ‘What a coincidence!’ But there are examples which are really marvelous… I am in the habit of saying ‘Now you must watch, now something will happen!” ~ Children’s Dreams, C.G. Jung

We may experience these things as “magical” because our meaning-making function is particularly heightened at the moment. And I don’t discount that there may be good reason for that in the external world. We don’t scoff or consider it magical when animals detect and respond to earthquakes before they occur, or when lost dogs are able to track down their owners who have moved to new homes across the country, or monarch butterflies migrate to a specific a breeding ground thousands of miles away. We assume that the animals have some instinctive processes and sensory abilities that we have yet to understand – but we do not experience as magical or uncanny or even slightly irrational – even if we consider it amazing or beautiful.

It seems to me as likely that we “read” patterns unconsciously and automatically without realizing we are doing so, just as all animals do.

I've written before about September 11th and the dreams that my classmates and I collected that seemed to anticipate those events. And whether you think of them as “fortune-telling” or magic, or you think of them as a manifestation of some kind of unconscious anticipatory pattern recognition, the point is that they offered a kind of preparatory service to the people who dreamed them, and seemed to help those who saw their dreams as useful to them in negotiating the overwhelming experience.

When a client reports an uncanny experience that has occurred in their lives outside of the therapy office they often interpret them very concretely and positively as magical or confirmatory signs that something is “right.” In my experience this is extremely common particularly when people are dating and looking for new romantic partners – and they very often feel that there are “little signs” that confirm for them that a potential partner is a good match. Sometimes people even have difficulty leaving an extremely problematic relationship because so many signs told them things were “right”

I don’t think Jung would disagree with me, that like dreams or any other unconscious content – synchronicitous experiences are not concrete signals that are to be obeyed, and whatever their function they are not necessarily confirming or positive. Oedipus tried to take the prophecy of the Delphic oracle at face value and it didn’t help him optimize his fate!

Synchronicities seem to be activated when the external environment in some way is summoning archetypal, instinctive content. Signs only indicate that something is shifting, or that some necessary experience is approaching. Often they are simply sparkly attention-getting messages from our depths that say, “Pay attention!” or as Jung says above “Now something will happen!” - What happens is likely to be both good and bad or neither.

Jung tells a story of a client of his who died suddenly of an illness that had only presented with very mild, unconcerning symptoms. His wife anticipated his death because a flock of birds had settled on the roof of her home, as had happened before when several of her other relatives had died.

In the essay Dancing In the Graveyard I present a long “run” of meaningful coincidences that happened in and around me after the death of Geoffrey Holder, who was featured in a recurring dream I’d had since childhood. Certainly these were not “positive” synchronicities, although they may have been preparatory or assisted me in negotiating such challenging if meaningful circumstances. They were simply coincidences that felt extremely meaningful to me just as my life was shifting into a season of dying and illness.

Or as Jung says: “The unconscious often knows more than the conscious” and synchronicity, deeply felt meaningful coincidence may simply be one of the ways it passes that knowledge upwards into awareness.

Perhaps on a day when a portentous subliminal instinctive knowing was not constellated in her unconscious - the wife of Jung’s dead patient would not have taken note of a flock of birds on her roof. Perhaps the portent – or her the ability to recognize portent –was activated inside of her.

Perhaps synchronicity occurs when we are in need of heightened awareness at important crossroads, or, as we are moving into a new phase of life or consciousness. Perhaps the numinous quality of synchronicities is simply our unconscious awareness pulling toward the surface of awareness when our animal bodies sense change or danger or opportunity.

“The conscious then comes under the influence of unconscious instinctual impulses and contents”

Perhaps such meaning-filled coincidental phenomenon takes place when our car is switching drivers – and the unconscious takes over the wheel at an important intersection.So, when clients do talk about such “magical” feeling experiences – I don’t in anyway challenge their belief in the importance of the sign or symbolic occurrence. I often do try to help them expand their interpretation of such signs and not assign positive or negative value judgments to them. We retain a choice about how we respond to such signals, and we do not have to commit to any course of action based on a “sign” or a synchronicity. Until the event has played itself out entirely, there is no way of knowing what they are indicating other than perhaps that something important is happening. Pay attention. This is a crossroads. This is a portal to another stage of living. Something different is occurring. Something is changing. Simply that.

Next seminar will continue this discussion, focusing on synchronicities which occur in the psychotherapeutic relationship and in the office - and what they may indicate about the transference/countertransference processes and the therapeutic process itself.

This essay is a continuation of discussion which includes Seminar #47 & #48 focused on Chapter 14 in the Portable Jung: On Synchronicity as its starting point. (CW Vol. 8 pars. 969-997) I will also make reference to a later, expanded version of this essay titled - Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principal (CW Vol. 8 pars 816 – 968)

We will talk further here about exploring synchronicity which emerge in the therapeutic office or in the therapeutic relationship: In On Synchronicity, Jung describes three categories of synchronicity:

1) The coincidence of a simultaneous objective external event that corresponds to the psychic state in the observer.

The example Jung gives here is the story of a very logical, somewhat concrete-minded young woman who reported a dream about being given jeweled golden scarab. As she finished speaking Jung noticed a buzzing sound at the window of his office. Jung opened the window and caught up a shiny green-gold beetle in his hands and offered it to his patient.

The experience and exploration of something so irrational, unreasonable occurring seems to have, according to Jung’s report, opened the client up to experiencing her non-rational aspects (i.e.: emotional, physical, intuitive). So a subjective, internal experience – the reliving of a dream of a scarab – corresponds to an objective external experience - the beetle buzzing at the window.

2) The second type involves the simultaneous correspondence of a subjective state with an objective event at a distance, beyond the observer’s perception, and later verified.

A fairly common example of this is people who experience a dream of a loved one, or a bad feeling at the moment of the death of a loved one. If you work with bereavement, death or dying you will have heard such accounts. These kinds of experiences appear uncanny to us because they disorder our understanding of perception and distance.

3) The third type involves subjective experiences that seem to predict or anticipate objectively real events that occur at a later time.

I have written elsewhere about a depth psychology class I took where the dreams we collected appeared to anticipate the destruction of the Twin Towers a few days later. Here, the uncanny sensation emerges from our understanding of linear time being challenged. In the weeks after September 11th I made space for the client’s who seemed to have had anticipatory dreams - to explore their feelings about them. I particularly remember a woman who had a dream of “kamikaze” airplanes flying down the streets of New York City talking about how her dream seemed to prepare her for what we all witnessed that day – and that she seemed to be able to understand what was happening before others around her could process it. Such predictive dreams seem to me to serve just that function – to put those who have them in a state of readiness, as if they had already begun to “pre-digest” the positive or negative transformative event before it occurred – allowing them to move through the experience with less overwhelm.

When the “prediction” appears to be of a “low stakes” event – or something even quite peculiar but inconsequential – not “transformative” - it often serves a function similar to the scarab - inviting the client to consider their intuitive experience more deeply, bringing “irrational” and “magical” ideas that had been suppressed, into the treatment dialogue.

I am not particularly concerned with what is real or not real, provable or not provable. Most of our experiences are not “rational.” Our irrational selves, our emotional lives, our attachments, our creative and artistic experiences, our response to symbolic content, our dreams at night, our childhoods and our religious and spiritual beliefs, and our hunches are all irrational, nonlinear, and often operate without clear cause and effect – but that does not make them illegitimate or unimportant.

And we create realities our of our subjective experience: A very dramatic example of this third type of anticipatory synchronicity emerged with a young woman I worked with many years ago who had been passing through a very difficult patch and said to me: “I feel so desperate – I wish that I could see you every day this week!” The next day we passed each other on the street in an area of town that was not near my office or either of our homes. The next day I ordered a sandwich at a health food store, and as I left, she was eating her meal on the bench out front. The day after that, my husband and I had a “date night” and went to a new restaurant that we hadn’t tried in Union Square – when the hostess led us to our table, my client was already seated with a friend and was finishing up her meal at the table right next to ours. We acknowledged each other and waved each time – laughing and expressing surprise and shaking our heads but having no other conversation. These happenstances continued, bumping into each other in Central Park, standing in parallel lines at a random bank lobby to get cash – so that it became almost expectable and unsurprising. Until it turned out, by our next session that she had in fact “seen” me every day that week!

When I told a colleague about the remarkable run of coincidence their first assumption was that the client was following/stalking me. But for at least half of our encounters I had been the one to stumble into her space after she had already been there for some time.

So of course we talked together about this remarkable series of events – and about what a powerful wish it had been, how it made her feel “held” to see that existed outside the office in “real” circumstances and how it felt to her like I was powerfully “there” for her – and deeply reassuring that she was not alone.

But of course, when we are implicated in a synchronicity with a client, it becomes our synchronicity too, so what did it mean to me? For myself, I think that it was reassuring that I was able to help this client – by seeing that even though her need for me and dependency upon me was great, what she needed from me was actually not any kind of extraordinary labor – she simply needed to know that I existed in my own skin, in my own life without disrupting me in anyway. Her demand was not more complicated than that – and as the week of surprise encounters unfolded I saw that she really just needed a lot of simple little gestures and reassurances from me in order to stabilize – and it was very informative for me through the rest of the treatment.

This is one of the more dramatic synchronicities I’ve seen as a therapist – but synchronicity between therapeutic partners is a common experience for myself and many of the cases I have supervised - albeit on a smaller scale.

I will also add a fourth type of synchronicity to Jung’s list: a subjective state that corresponds to another person’s subjective state across distance or time.

In my experience this most likely to happens between the client’s dreams and my own dreams: Client’s dreams can influence the therapist’s and vice versa. Generally, I just think of dreaming synchronicities that occur between therapist and client as a indicating a kind of crystallization of the transference/countertransference – the client’s unconscious is in communication with the therapist’s unconscious – which occasionally breaks into awareness and is experienced as uncanny. Or an archetypal experience is activated in session – i.e.: the session felt thick and foreboding like a storm brewing on the horizon, or like a dam broke and a great flood poured forth – which the therapist identifies with and experiences vicariously or in the relationship- and both members dream about similar symbols because they shared – or are sharing or are about to share – an experience together.

One of the most common occurrences that I hear from many supervisees is of thinking about a client they have not seen for a long time who then calls out of the blue for a session or contacts them shortly afterward.

One of the decisions that the therapist has to make is this: When the therapist is the one who knows of the synchronicity, do we share it with the client? For example: if you have a dream that mirrors a client’s do you decide to share it or withhold it? If you think of a client who calls, do you tell them or keep that small synchronicity to yourself? If I had run into the client I spoke of above each day for a week, but she hadn’t seen me – should I mention to her that I had encountered her or keep that out of her way?

I recently sat with a client who owned a restaurant – and as she spoke about her work, and how her business had been running I had a picture in my minds eye of the space that I have seen in photos online. But, strangely, in my minds eye, a former client was sitting at one of the tables eating a muffin! I have spoken to the restaurateur many times about her establishment and pictured the space many times without imaging any other client in it. And the next day – I was contacted by the “muffin-eater” who I hadn’t heard from in almost two years.

I decided to tell her about what I had imagined and the funny way she had popped into my mind because it struck me as an expression of feeling connected and indeed, that was why the client had reached out – just wanting to know that we were still connected after a period of not seeing each other.

The fundamental question is: Is this your synchronicity or the client’s or does it belong to both of you? I don’t think that there is one universal answer – I rarely share such things with the client when I am the only one privy to the coincidence. For me, it depends on the client’s level of differentiation and individuation. If I suspect they are likely to over- or under- value it – dismiss it outright or attach to it too concretely – I will keep it to myself. If I feel that the client, or the connection between us is strong enough to contemplate and be curious about a symbol without becoming “possessed” by it – if they can withstand a strong feeling, of “uncanniness” without becoming flooded or fixated - but can instead wonder about what various meanings they alone- or the two of us together - might assign to it - I will likely share it.

Similarly I keep it private if I think it will be disruptive or annoying to a highly skeptical client, or one who generally devalues their “irrational” aspects - I don’t expect a synchronicity that only I experience to have any positive effect on them – and it will simply become a moment of misattunement to impinge on their session with whatever the synchronicity meant to me. If they need to make more contact with their irrational aspects – their own unconscious can manufacture their own meaningful coincidence, or invite a scarab to buzz at the office window and challenge their linear thinking.