My first introduction to Jung was through his autobiography Memories Dreams Reflections. That was 22 years ago and at a time when both my outer and inner life were in turmoil. I credit that book with saving my sanity. I read it over and over, barely comprehending it but somehow being comforted by it. Over the years I read widely about Jung and his psychology but could never bring myself to read his scientific works. It looked altogether too hard and so I did as many non-scholars do and turned to the interpreters of Jung’s work. Of all the authors I have appreciated and learned most from, Dr. Edward Edinger remains my firm favourite. The first book I read was Ego and Archetype about 10 years ago and though I had a reasonably good conceptual understanding of what he was talking about, the seeds that were sown didn’t begin to germinate until fairly recently. By then I had done enough personal healing work to consider the possibility that the individuation process that is the heart of Jung’s work was an option for me and I have been revisiting Edinger with renewed vigour. I came across these videos and watched them so many times that I decided to transcribe them for easy reference and post them here.
There are two videos which I will post separately. The second one is here. This first is an overview of Jung’s pioneering work and the potential it has for effecting real transformation in the individuals who take it seriously. The second is how the work done by individuals can affect society at large in a positive way. These videos were made about 25 years ago and there is a growing interest in Jung’s psychology, due in no small part to the influence of the internet. A statement made by Edinger early on in the first video is now proving to be prophetic:
...there’re not very many Jungians because Jung’s particular approach doesn’t seem to be relevant to the majority of people – yet. I think that’s only a short-term phenomenon but I’m trying to make it a little easier to relate to Jung by mediating.
Edinger’s enthusiasm for Jung and his work can seem a little excessive at times, which might be off putting to some people but I think that is because he really does get the importance of Jung’s contribution to the world. Rarely are visionaries and innovators fully appreciated in the era in which they have lived.
Lawrence Jaffe: This interview is being conducted in the West Los Angeles home of the internationally known Jungian Analyst Edward F. Edinger and his partner Dianne Cordic, who’s also a Jungian Analyst. I am Lawrence Jaffe, a Jungian Analyst from Berkeley, California and the Author of a book on Jung’s and Edinger’s work called Liberating the Heart: Spirituality and Jungian Psychology.
Interview:
LJ: One reason apparently that some of Jung’s books are difficult to follow is that his thinking was so far ahead of our own. Would you say that much of your work has the goal of rendering more understandable Jung’s religious message, understood broadly?
Edward Edinger: I think of myself as a mediator between Jung and a wider audience. Jung is this gigantic presence that is profoundly intimidating to all of us little ones and we’re all little ones in comparison to him. I’ve been studying Jung, as my major life endeavour, for 40 years and the more I study him, the more impressed I am by his magnitude and the more I can understand why so many people don’t want to get anywhere near him. Because it’s just too painful to experience one’s comparative smallness in comparison to such a massive entity and often I think it’s a sound instinct of self-preservation that keeps people away from Jung.
You know we have many different schools of psychotherapy and I think that’s for good reason. We have as many different schools of psychotherapy as there are basic attitudes and typological categories in relation to the psyche. In other words, the psyche creates for itself the schools of psychotherapy that serve it. Human beings may think they create the schools but I don’t think so, I think the unconscious does it you see and everyone should find the school that fits him best and when that’s done, there’re not very many Jungians because Jung’s particular approach doesn’t seem to be relevant to the majority of people – yet. I think that’s only a short-term phenomenon but I’m trying to make it a little easier to relate to Jung by mediating.
LJ: 4:15… What does Jungian Psychology have to do with religion?
EE: Everything, everything! You see Jung has demonstrated that the religious function resides in the psyche and is a integral part of human psychology. That just means that the ego, in order to be healthy, needs to have a living connection to a transpersonal centre.
There are two etymologies for the word ‘religion.’ One etymology emphasizes that it means ‘linking back.’ The idea then would be that the religious function links the ego back to its origin, to its background, to the larger entity that it came from. The other etymology of religion, that Jung really preferred actually, was that the word ‘religio’ means the opposite of the root of the word ‘neglect.’ So that ‘religio’ means the careful consideration of the background of one’s life – the opposite of neglecting the background of one’s life. Jung actually preferred that association, although he acknowledged the importance of the other one, which I think goes back to Augustine.
But the point is that the human psyche has a religious function in both senses, a need to link back and a need to give careful consideration to the source of his being and the religious process then is one in which the ego has a living, organic connection to a larger whole. And that, of course, is the function that the traditional religions have always served. They’ve done it by the collective structure and the dogmatic formulations and the whole concept of God and man’s relation to God, that they provide the believer. They’ve given the individual a religious container in which he has the sense of being connected to the larger whole. Now modern man – especially the creative minority in modern man – has lost that connection provided by the traditional religions, because they’re too concrete. They haven’t kept pace with modern man’s mental development, so they’re not in tune with modern categories of understanding.
The great service that Jung has performed by his discovery of the collective unconscious and the archetypes and the Self, he’s penetrated to the psychological source and basis that underlies all the world religions and thereby he’s verified and redeemed for modern consciousness the validity and reality of the religious operations as they express themselves in all religions. That’s been achieved and I don’t think we can appreciate the magnitude of that achievement because what it means is that the psychological basis has been laid for the realisation of a unified world. We’ve got the basis now for a unification of all of the factional divisions among the world religions and once that is achieved, I think political unification is bound to follow. It’s been accomplished! One man has done it!
10:00… I wish I could communicate the fact that I see so clearly concerning Jung’s discovery of the basis of all the world’s religions. He’s achieved by this discovery the psychological basis for the unification of the world. It’s really a pitiful sight to see the world split up into these separate warring fragments of religious identifications, of nationalistic identifications, of ethnic identifications, all at war with one another. They’re all operating out of the energies of connection with the same transpersonal image of wholeness. They are all operating out of their connection to deity – to the Self – as it is constellated and perceived within their local context – religious or nationalistic context. It’s the same psychic Self and what Jung has done, has penetrated to that source – that’s the paradoxical God that he talks about. He’s seen it and once he’s seen it, it can then no longer split up into these various ethnic and religious factions and fight against itself. One human being has seen the back of God, so to speak, so that means then that He’s going to be eventually unified and the world will be unified politically, sooner or later, as an inevitable consequence of that event of human consciousness.
LJ: Jung has taught us that the leading idea of a new religion will come from the symbolism of the religion that preceded it. Applied to modern times, this means that the leading idea of the era that we are now entering will be based on the Judeo-Christian myth. Do you have a comment on this?
EE: 13:07… Yes, I do. It leads us right in to a major pronouncement that Jung makes in his late work, especially in Answer to Job, where he speaks about the new mode of existence is to be what he calls ‘continuing incarnation.’ Now that requires some explanation because I think very few people will get right away just what he means by ‘continuing incarnation.’
You see, the central image of the Judeo-Christian myth, is that Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament, according to Jung because he had an encounter with Job, was obliged to incarnate. So, he’s born in the form of his son as a human being in Jesus Christ. That’s the basic image of the total Judeo-Christian myth and that’s the issue that Christianity has picked up and elaborated and that Judaism has declined to pick up.
Christianity is really just a Jewish heresy that has mushroomed so much that it’s sort of obscured its mother. But the Jewish scriptures and the Christian scriptures share the same idea of a divine son but the difference between them is that the Jews think his coming’s going to be in the future and the Christians think he’s already come. But the basic idea is the same and Jung’s point is that that image of the incarnation of deity in a human being, which was symbolically manifested in Christ, is now to be empirically realized in a few individuals who are able to go through the process of individuation because he considers that the individuation process to be equivalent to the symbolic imagery of the incarnation of God in the human being. What that means psychologically is that the ego, in the process of establishing a conscious, living, relationship with the Self, becomes the ground, so to speak, for the incarnation of deity. As Jung puts it someplace, the ego is the stable in which the Christ child is born.
17:30… This symbolism has now become available for empirical psychological understanding. It no longer has to be worshipped as a metaphysical hypostasis, which is the way it appears in projection, so to speak, in metaphysical or theological projection, when it’s worshipped as a religious image. In such a form it’s not yet realized as a psychic reality; as an aspect of psychological experience. That’s what Jung has achieved – he’s achieved in his own life the incarnation of deity and the way he modestly puts it, there’s now the opportunity for many to do likewise. He describes that at the conclusion of Answer to Job. He puts it so well that I’d like to read it. It’s the final paragraph of Jung’s Answer to Job. He’s talking about the relation between the ego and the Self and he says that a reciprocal action is established when the ego and the Self are consciously related:
A reciprocal action between two relatively autonomous factors which compels us, when describing and explaining the processes, to present sometimes the one and sometimes the other factor as the acting subject, even when God becomes man. The Christian solution has hitherto avoided this difficulty by recognizing Christ as the one and only God-man. But the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, the third Divine Person, in man, brings about a Christification of many.
That’s the phrase I wanted to get to: ‘the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, the third Divine Person, in man, brings about a Christification of many…’ Now if I translate that symbolic imagery into banal psychological terms, then I would say, ‘The achievement of consciousness of the ego-Self Axis – the connecting factor between the ego and the Self (the Holy Ghost) – brings about a realization that the ego is manifesting in its life a transpersonal purpose and meaning.’ That’s what’s meant by the symbolic imagery of the incarnation of God in man through the agency of the Holy Ghost. Now that’s hard to grasp but with so much of Jung’s writings, I think the way to go at it is to read the relevant passages – that’s why I point to the last paragraph of Answer to Job – to read the relevant passages over and over and over again because they really have the quality of scripture. Jung is speaking from a consciousness that transcends that of all of us and therefore we must read what he has to communicate over and over again and then it begins to dawn on us just what he means.
LJ: 22:30… Jung said about certain aspects of his work that it sounded like religion but was not. Would you say the same about your work?
EE: Jung’s work is so much that it’s very difficult to characterize it. And of course, Jung says different things at different times under different circumstances. You have to keep that in mind. I consider Jung’s work primarily – and I think he did too – primarily to be a scientific accomplishment. What he did was to discover, through his own personal experience both individually and with patients, he discovered the objective psyche – the psyche as an objective entity, as contrasted with just a subjective entity. That led him into a region of such immense dimensions, that he then spent the rest of his life trying to describe and present some of the major aspects of the nature of the objective psyche, as he’d discovered it. So he is primarily, fundamentally, a scientific genius, who has made a totally new discovery – a totally new dimension of being has been laid bare and following that discovery he was obliged to create a whole new methodology of approaching it because since it’s a new object, it cannot be approached by the old methodology that physical science used.
Physical science requires a methodology different from the science of depth psychology because the nature of the subject matter is different. The psyche requires a methodology that engages the whole person. Physical science, by its nature, excludes a significant portion of the whole person, you see, as irrelevant but dealing with the psyche requires an engagement of the whole person. That’s a totally new approach and people have yet to learn it. Jung teaches us how to do it but we still have to learn it. Anyway, he was obliged to create that whole new methodology in order to deal with the new subject that he’d discovered – the subject of the objective psyche – and this is what he’s done in all his mature work.
26:32… So that’s how I think of him fundamentally. However, what he discovered when he discovered the objective psyche and started exploring it, was that it is the source of religion, of philosophy, of art, of mythology, of worldviews of all kinds. It’s the source of those. Therefore, although we say quite accurately, ‘No, Jungian psychology is not a religion, it’s not a philosophy, it’s not a Weltanschauung,’ nonetheless it deals with the source of all of those and it has also discovered in the course of realizing the practical aspect of encounter with the psyche, which is psychotherapy, it’s discovered that psychotherapy, if it’s going to be complete in the individual case, involves the individual’s discovery of a religious standpoint and of a Weltanschauung.
So that Jungian psychology, when it’s applied, does lead to religious consciousness and to the emerging awareness of a new worldview, even though Jungian psychology itself is not itself a religion or a worldview. It’s as though it’s more fundamental than that. Just because Jung talks about religious imagery and religious phenomenology, many people superficially think he’s a religionist, or as you said earlier, he’s a mystic. That’s not true – he’s an empirical scientist of the psyche. That’s what he is.
LJ: 29:00… As you have spoken of Jung as an epochal man and you have explained that you mean by that a man whose life inaugurates a new age in cultural history, can you tell us more of this idea and have there been other epochal men?
EE: See I have a perception of Jung that I’m afraid practically nobody shares. I’m almost alone in that. Speaking of being alone, I mentioned earlier, he’s a whole new species. We know from history that when an individual carrying major new consciousness arrives on the scene, that often inaugurates a new epoch. The two examples that I’m thinking of particularly are the examples of Christ and Buddha. I believe that Jung belongs to that order of individual, you see. When a major new level of consciousness emerges, then it has to have some huge collective effect that it may take several hundred years to bring into visibility but that will eventually be seen for what it is and that’s how I see Jung. There’s a remark that Jung makes on this subject that I want to refer to. It comes from page 311 of Volume II of his letters. I want to refer to it because I believe it summarizes in a nutshell, the basic idea behind continuing incarnation. Here’s what he says,
Buddha’s insight and the incarnation in Christ break the chain of suffering through the intervention of the enlightened human consciousness which thereby acquires a metaphysical and cosmic significance.
Now of course you’re not going to get that in one reading but what he’s referring to there is the Buddhist notion of the chain of suffering that involves desirousness leading to frustration and finally to death, that repeats itself endlessly. The chain of life that goes round and round because it can never be broken. That’s what he’s referring to and he says that two things break it; he says Buddha’s insight breaks it and the incarnation in Christ breaks it. He doesn’t say ‘broke it.’ He doesn’t use the past tense. He uses the present tense, which means then that Buddha’s insight and incarnation in Christ are current happenings which have the effect of breaking the chain of suffering, through the intervention of the enlightened human consciousness, which thereby acquires a metaphysical and cosmic significance.
33:40… Now, you see, that’s what happened in the Book of Job, as Jung spells it out in Answer to Job. Job got a glimpse into the nature of the primordial psyche. As Jung puts it, ‘He got a glimpse of the back side of God, the abysmal world of shards.’ He saw it. That seeing it was Buddha’s insight and it had the effect then of bringing about the incarnation in Christ and in fact, Job was a kind of prefiguration of the incarnation in Christ because he was the victim… his suffering was the sacrifice that had to be paid in order to achieve the insight that he got. So that Buddha’s insight and incarnation in Christ are illustrated in the Book of Job and what they achieve then is the intervention of the enlightened human consciousness which thereby acquires a metaphysical and cosmic significance. It thereby takes on divine attributes and that corresponds to the incarnation of God. The fact that enlightened human consciousness acquires metaphysical and cosmic significance, means that it is a carrier of the God-image. It’s all there in that one sentence and I was delighted when I came across it.
LJ: 35:53… So, as human beings attempt to carry consciousness they participate in the transformation of God?
EE: Ah, yeah! There’s another major term, or image, concerning the same issue. Jung says somewhere that it may very well be that his insights will have the effect of bringing about a major change, major evolution, in the God-image. So, he’s telling us quite explicitly that the consciousness of an individual human being does have the capacity of transforming the God- image. Now the whole question for us is: How does that happen? How are we to understand that? How are we apply it to psychological experience that we can grasp? I’m not sure I can communicate how that’s done, but I’m going to try anyway. You remember I spoke earlier about the objective psyche as being a pervading medium like the atmosphere that we live in. We participate in it, it’s within us and is expressed through us and it’s also without. It’s the medium that we exist in that is usually invisible. The ego, the human ego, is a part of that objective psyche but it’s a part that owes its existence to the fact that it’s been able to separate itself and exist like a separate island but it’s still a part. So it’s got an organic living connection between the medium that it was born out of and its own separateness.
That means then, in the science of depth psychology, in the course of studying the objective psyche, the only means we have to study it is an individual human ego. That’s the only ‘I’ there is to look at it but since the individual human ego does have a organic attachment to the medium that it’s studying, that means that whenever the ego looks at the medium, it influences the medium in the process of looking at it – because they’re connected; they’re not totally separate entities. Well, that complicates things. It means that to some extent or another then, the observing ego, as he studies the objective psyche, is subjectifying what he’s studying to some extent. We can’t help that – it’s built into the situation but nonetheless if we’re aware of that fact, then we make allowances for it and that will at least mitigate its effects. Now that’s the situation.
40:16… The God-image is the central archetype, as Jung describes it, in that pervading medium of the objective psyche of the collective unconscious, so that when the ego perceives the God-image – when it consciously sees it for what it is – that very perception has the effect of altering it, you see, because of the nature of the connection between the ego and the Self. They’re part of the same total organism – the total state of being – and therefore what happens to one has an effect on the other and that’s the mechanism, so to speak, whereby God undergoes transformation by being seen by a human ego. Now that’s just an abstraction but when you’ve had some living experiences that illustrate it, they’re very impressive because what happens is, in the course of a really deep analysis, the unconscious changes. It isn’t just the ego that changes – the unconscious changes – and the rule of thumb that Jung has taught us, is that the unconscious takes the same attitude towards the ego as the ego takes towards it.
So that’s one aspect of how the unconscious changes when the ego pays attention to it but the unconscious also changes when the ego has seen, with its own eyes, the raw view of the primordial psyche. Believe me, it’s a terrible thing to see. I’ll show you later a picture whereby that takes place. That’s one of the Job pictures in Blake’s series that I want to show you, where Yahweh is showing Job his back side and what He’s showing him is behemoth and leviathan, the terrible monsters. That’s an image of getting a glimpse of what the primordial psyche looks like, what God’s back side is, you see and when one has that view – not just hearsay knowledge, when one sees it in shuddering, knee knocking reality – that changes the nature of the primordial psyche, first of all in oneself and we have reason to believe that the effect goes beyond just one’s own personal psyche.
LJ: 43:45… Do you believe that, as I do, that Jung will be remembered by future generations, not primarily as a theoretician of depth psychotherapy but for the religious aspect of his work?
EE: I’m not a prophet but I have a perception as to, in broad outlines, what I expect to happen. It’s obvious to any thoughtful person that Western society is hurtling toward some terrible catastrophe. That’s obvious. That means that we are going to be exposed to massive suffering – something along the order of what went on 2,000 years ago with the disintegration of the Roman Empire, where the established social structures break down and chaos intervenes, you see. Something like that’s going to happen and in such a case, there will be reversions to more primitive modes of behaviour. There will be a regressive movement backwards. There’ll be a regression to tribalisms of all kinds I’m sure, to more primitive structures, more localized structures. There’ll be a regression to concrete and fundamentalist religions of various kinds and what I hope is that, for what Toynbee calls the creative minority, the collective suffering on such a vast scale will force reflective individuals to look around desperately for some kind of understanding of what’s happening to them.
If they’re able to resist the regressive tendency to revert to more primitive modes of functioning, if they can hold onto their consciousness enough, then they might discover Jung. Then they might pick up Answer to Job and read him really attentively and realize that what’s being experienced collectively on such a vast scale… (25sec glitch in recording) …of the emergence of a new God-image and the possibility, as I mentioned earlier, of a genuine unification of both the individual and the world. I think that in the long run, that’s what’s in store for the Age of Aquarius, after a terrible time of troubles.
LJ: 47:46… In your book, The Christian Archetype: A Jungian Commentary on the Life of Christ, you write, ‘The goal of the incarnation cycle, like the goal of individuation, is the coniunctio. The time has come for the psychic opposites – heaven and earth, male and female, spirit and nature, good and evil, which have long been torn asunder in the western psyche to be reconciled.’ Can you elaborate on this idea?
EE: The basic question is, ‘What is this thing called the coniunctio?’ You know Jung’s last work, his last book length work was on that subject and the title was The Mystery of the Coniunctio – a very sizeable tome. It was a theme that really preoccupied him in his last years. He had some profound experiences of the coniunctio during his illness in 1944, which he reports in his Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Then the question is, ‘How are we to understand this symbolic image?’ You see, it comes from alchemy, as I mentioned earlier. The goal of the alchemical process was the Philosopher’s Stone and it was created, so the alchemists thought, by the coniunctio of purified opposites.
The basic image was the coniunctio of Sol and Luna – sun and moon – create the Philosopher’s Stone, so that the coniunctio is the process which achieves the Philosopher’s Stone, which achieves selfhood, which achieves the living connection to the God-image. It was pictured as a marriage, or as a sexual intercourse. Now we know that just on the biological level, the goal of biological existence is the creation of offspring, which is achieved through sexual intercourse and that’s the reason that nature has built into us the experience of supreme bliss at the peak of sexual intercourse. Nature, of course, knows what she’s doing and that is the goal of biological existence – sexual intercourse. The physical coniunctio is the goal of our existence as biological organisms.
51:40…What Jung has demonstrated is that the psychological coniunctio is the goal of existence as the psychological organism. Now the only difficulty is being able to grasp what that means. It’s easy enough to grasp what sexual intercourse means, we can encompass that in the definition but psychological coniunctio is a image of the achievement of totality which transcends the ego. It transcends therefore the rational ability to define it, therefore we can’t define it. We can talk about it and we can sort of circumambulate it and bring up images that express it but we can’t grasp it or contain it rationally because it’s bigger than we are. There’s reason to believe that probably the coniunctio is only experienced in its complete form in death, in physical death and I think that’s good to know about because there’s a real need to reappraise, in the modern world, the nature and significance of death.
Death is a goal of life and in a different sense than Freud meant it, there really is a death instinct. We’ve got the instinctual equipment built into us to take care of all the basic occurrences in human existence. These are the archetypal patterns that are built into us and our physical life ends in death and we’ve got the instinctual wisdom to relate to that phenomenon properly, if we’re in touch with that wisdom.
54:14… Part of that wisdom, I think, is the realization that one level of psychological existence is achieved and fulfilled in the process of physical death and that the coniunctio is realized, probably, to the fullest extent at that time and Jung’s visions of the coniunctio occurred during a near-death experience. He almost died during that 1944 illness. It’s an image of great joy and fulfillment. It’s the biological experience of sexuality on the psychological plane and that’s why sexual images have to be used to refer to it and perhaps our finest document concerning it is The Song of Songs, in the Bible. There of course is more to be said about it. It’s an image of totality. It’s a image of the reconciliation of opposites. On the simplest level, it’s the reconciliation of the opposites of the male and female but those images actually can be used to express all the pairs of opposites, so that it’s an image of harmony beyond the conflict of all the opposites that go to make up the struggle and agony of existence.
The holiest of all the spots on earth is where an ancient hatred has become a present love.
~A Course in Miracles
This dream came a year after attending the funeral of the aunt I mentioned in the last post. She was my mother’s only sister and I was very close to her when I was young. At the time of my birth, my parents lived with my mother’s family and as Aunt was still living at home she became my second mother for the first 9 months of my life. When she married and had children of her own, our two families had a lot to do with each other. I also lived with her family for periods of time off and on until I was 13, due to Mum’s frequent hospitalisations. I loved her very much and remember wishing she was my mother, not because I didn’t love Mum but because Aunt was totally devoted to her family. She was the complete opposite of my mother, who loved kids in her own way but just wasn’t cut out to be a mother and was often overwhelmed by the task.
Unfortunately, the man Aunt married led a double life – devoted husband and father on one hand and serial paedophile on the other. I loved my uncle too when I was young and that made me a prime target for his exploitation. She stayed loyal to him to the very end of his life and even after his death never made any attempt to heal the rift that his abuse had caused in the family. I had stopped feeling angry at my uncle many years ago when I realised that he was clearly insane. My aunt wasn’t but she was totally identified with her role as a mother and she protected that role to the end. By the time of her death, I felt pretty much at peace regarding all that had gone on and had no conscious awareness of any residual blame or anger in me but this dream showed otherwise. As Jung often said, the unconscious really is unconscious. When trauma has been deeply buried, it works its way out of the system in its own time. Perhaps it is never completely erased but eventually becomes a part of the whole rich tapestry of life.
The dream:
I am to meet Aunt and her family following my uncle’s death, apparently to try and come to some resolution over our long estrangement due to his abuse. When I get to the house, I drive down the left hand side, then make a 90 degree turn to go into the back yard. The entry is a rough track and is cluttered with rubbish and overhanging branches and hard to navigate. The yard is also messy. I go in through the back entrance. There is a woman present who is not part of the family and seems to be a mediator of some sort.
There is a discussion about my uncle’s paedophile activities but the family is in denial. We aren’t getting anywhere so I decide to leave and as I do Aunt suddenly throws her arms around me and hugs me very tightly, as though she doesn’t want to let me go. She kisses me all over the face in an exaggerated show of affection and seems desperate to show me how much she loves me but I am not impressed.
I ask in a frustrated tone of voice, ‘Aunt, why do you keep denying it? You know the truth.’ At first she goes into the same old routine of denial and demurring but then she says, ‘Yes. I did know.’
I feel an immense relief, as much for her as myself and go around telling the others about her admission. There is a mixed reception of belief and disbelief and my initial euphoria turns to a niggling anxiety that this isn’t the end of it.
I leave the same way I came, driving slowly and carefully because of the obstacles on the way out and the foliage scraping against the car. I do a right hand turn onto the street and a little way down I have to turn right onto the main road. As I brake to check the road, the woman who had been in the house appears near the driver’s side window indicating that she wants to speak to me but she is preventing me from turning and I am pissed! I wind the window down and say very testily ‘Excuse me, I want to turn there.’ I realise I am being rude but don’t care. She disappears and I make the turn, still feeling peeved. End.
When I woke from the dream I was in a foul mood and I couldn’t even begin to make sense of it so I just wrote it up and went out to do some gardening as a way of settling down. It was a perfect day for it but my bad mood persisted and was made worse by a pest control man spraying around the letterboxes not far away from me. He was decked out head to toe in protective gear but the spray was drifting towards me, so I abandoned the gardening, cursing to myself. My mind then started spinning stories of all the terrible things we are doing to the planet through our paranoia and ignorance. In the middle of this depressing inner rant, a light bulb went on and I realised with a start that my overreaction had absolutely nothing to do with the incident but was triggered by the dream hangover.
A few days later I told a friend about the dream and she asked me how I would have liked it to end. I said that I wanted to feel love and forgiveness for my aunt, that I didn’t want to feel so angry, I didn’t like the way it felt. In her pragmatic way she said that if that’s the way I feel I need to just accept it because fighting it is just going to make me feel worse. I knew she was right but I still didn’t feel happy about it because I couldn’t understand why I would still be angry with Aunt.
It was a full 3 months later that I finally understood what my anger was about and it wasn’t a happy discovery at the time. I had been doing a course in Applied Jungian Psychology and we were working on identifying our complexes. There had been a lot of discussion about the negative mother complex and the mother wound and I began to wonder about my own mothering history. I had long since resolved any anger I had towards my own mother for the fact that she didn’t protect me from my uncle but Aunt was the one I had felt most betrayed by. It wasn’t just because she knew what was going on at the time but also because of the way she vilified me in later years when I disclosed about the abuse and how she continued to be the enabler to her husband, thereby continuing to put other children at risk.
With these new insights, I was reflecting on my dream attitude and suddenly saw the situation as if it were a real event. Here was my aunt finally giving me what I had wanted for so long – a simple acknowledgement of the truth – and I wasn’t satisfied. What did I want then? I wanted her to suffer! The revelation that followed closely on this insight was that that meant I must also want myself to suffer. Anger, resentment and blame towards another, no matter how justified it appears to be, always hurts the so-called victim. There’s simply no escape from that fact. When I went deeper into my resentment I had to admit to myself that I was still feeling guilty over the fact that I had caused so much trouble in the family by my disclosure and the way I coped with it was to project it onto my aunt.
About a week later I was sitting with all that had transpired from the dream and got the distinct impression that it was at last the end of a long saga of trying to sort out the complex web of emotions that we had all been entangled in for so many years. With that, the floodgates opened and I found myself sobbing my heart out. I wasn’t crying just for myself, it was grief over everybody’s suffering, even that of my uncle who had been the primary cause of it, as well as for all who had been indirectly affected, especially the children of some of his victims who I knew suffered from the unhealed trauma of their mothers. My outburst of grief once again demonstrated to me that whenever anger is released, grief usually follows and it is the grief that is the hardest to be with. Anger is easier to deal with in a way, because at least it feels energising whereas grief feels so debilitating but it really doesn’t matter in the end. Holding onto any deeply charged emotion takes a lot of energy and there is always a price to pay for that.
At the time of the catharsis I had the feeling that I needed to write about this dream in order to complete the healing but I managed to keep deferring it until another dream recently prompted me to get on with it. In this dream I was talking to another family member who had also suffered at the hands of my uncle but who had never dealt with it. She was sitting in a car and I was on the outside and she was telling me about how depressed she felt. She started crying and at the same time desperately tried to control it. I told her it was good to cry and she said, ‘But it makes so much noise.’ At that moment a woman appeared walking down the middle of the road towards the car and I said, ‘When this woman is past, the road will be clear and you can make all the noise you want to.’ When I woke I immediately realised that this woman represented my aunt and the fear I still had of her disapproval of my speaking up. I realised that finishing this blog post was the way in which to lay that fear to rest and release both of us. It simply isn’t possible to love someone fully while at the same time fearing them and what I really want more than anything is to love my aunt as I did as a child and as I know she loved me.
I think this is what the mediator woman in the dream was trying to get me to see – that Aunt, by her admission, was really asking for my forgiveness and love and that by denying it to her, I was denying that same grace for myself.
I now have a much deeper appreciation for the lines in the Lord’s Prayer; ‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.’ As so many wise ones say, forgiveness really is for the one doing the forgiving.
I had this dream 18 months ago and it was the kind of dream experience that happens occasionally – waking up out of the dream and upon falling asleep again, going straight back into the dream. It was 6 years between this one and A Mother’s Love but they are intimately connected. In that post I told the story of how the song by Anne Murray I’ll Always Love You acted as a bridge to re-unite my mother and me after a painful estrangement. In this dream I was desperately trying to find that same song to play it in memory of her.
The dream:
A service is being arranged for Mum. It’s not clear when she died and it doesn’t appear to be a funeral but more like a memorial service. I don’t know where we are or who I am with but it feels like family. We are working out what music to have. I say we must have at least one Anne Murray song and suggest ‘I’ll always love you.’ The dream then goes into one of those marathon ‘can’t find what I’m looking for’ episodes. I know I had made tapes of all the Anne Murray albums I had but couldn’t find any of them. I decided to try and find the original LP records and re-copy them and the search was then on for the albums, again to no avail.
The scene then switches to the kitchen in my current house and Mum is with me. I don’t recall the details of the conversation but the gist of it is that I am very worried about something. Initially Mum shows concern but as the conversation proceeds she starts teasing me about my seriousness. I get upset and ask her why she is treating me like that. Her response is “It’s because I love you.” In an exasperated tone of voice I say, “If you really love me you wouldn’t make fun of me.”
I wake at this point, still quite upset. I know I should write it down but before I can rouse myself, I fall back to sleep and the dream starts at the beginning again except this time it feels like I am in my old house. I redouble my efforts to find the song but to no avail. There is someone with me supposedly helping but she is prattling on about I don’t know what and I become increasingly annoyed at the distraction. I finally give her a mouthful and tell her to piss off and leave me alone and with that I wake up.
This time I got up and wrote it down. It was obviously important because of the escalation of the intense emotions in the dream and the residue that carried on into waking but I was quite baffled by it. Mum had been dead for 31 years at this stage and most of the dreams I had of her were what I termed spirit visits and they almost always had to do with healing or solving some emotional difficulty. This one too felt like she was trying to help me but without knowing what we discussed, I couldn’t work it out.
Later in the day, I was on my way into town when I got a call on the mobile. It was a friend calling to see if I wanted to meet for coffee. This friend happened to be one of the few people I could discuss dreams with and they were always our favourite topic of discussion. She had been my hypnotherapist many years ago and was intimately acquainted with all my family issues. The timing of her call seemed more than a coincidence so I was happy to change my plans and meet up.
We tossed around some ideas but nothing felt right. The most obvious interpretation was that not being able to find a song called I’ll Always Love You as a tribute to Mum and the amount of frustration and anger I felt in the dream suggested some unresolved grief or even anger but I felt pretty much at peace with my relationship with Mum at this stage of my life. We also looked at the other woman in the dream who was hindering my efforts to find the song as a kind of inner saboteur figure getting in the way of me finding this ‘always’ (eternal) love. This did make sense as I often felt at odds with myself but as dreams don’t usually tell you things you already know, it still didn’t feel like a good fit. We parted not having come to any satisfactory conclusion and all I could do was let it percolate.
Next afternoon I got a call from my sister to tell me she had just learned that our aunt – Mum’s sister – had died and that the service was going to be next day. The news affected me deeply. Her death wasn’t unexpected, she was 90 and in a nursing home but it posed a dilemma about whether or not to attend. Aunt had been my second mother growing up and I had lived with her family at different periods of my life. Although disclosing about the abuse I had experienced at the hands of her husband had driven a wedge between us, I still cared deeply for her and wanted to pay my respects. I hadn’t had much contact with the family in the intervening years and I didn’t know if I would be welcome. My sister decided against going so it meant I would be on my own.
I texted my friend with the news saying that I thought there might be a connection with the dream as it was Aunt having a go at Mum that caused Mum to stop talking to me and then eventually reconnecting via the song in the dream. There was a flurry of text messages and in the end I got one telling me to think about whose feelings I’m protecting and if I want to go, to take a risk and just go. I was taken aback as it sounded quite exasperated and most unlike her but then it hit me – this sounded very similar to the conversation with Mum in my dream! Here I was making a big drama out of the issue instead of just following my heart. As I reflected I became more convinced that the conversation I had with Mum in the dream was about this very dilemma and that she was encouraging me to go. With that, all feelings of trepidation left me and my mind was made up.
As it turned out, it was indeed a memorial service and not a funeral. It was held in football clubrooms and there was no casket, which made it feel very much like the sense I had of the event in the dream. Aunt’s only daughter, who I hadn’t seen in 10 years, broke the ice when she saw me by holding her arms wide for a hug and telling me how happy she was to see me. To my great relief my other cousins were equally friendly and that helped ease my feelings of awkwardness in this large gathering of relatives I had never met, having had little contact with the family in over 30 years.
The tributes to my Aunt told of a woman who was absolutely devoted to her family and adored by them and who didn’t have an enemy in the world. Two of her children and several of her grandchildren paid tributes to her and they all told the same story – how she made each and every one of them feel special and absolutely loved. I knew this side of her and it was unquestionably true but I also knew what lay in the shadows. Her determination to keep the family together and defend her image and her role as matriarch meant protecting her paedophile husband and turning a blind eye to his activities at any cost. I wondered how many people in the room had been affected either directly or indirectly by their shared complicity. Was it possible that the love she gave so freely balanced out the negative effects? At this stage of my life I could no longer judge her choices and behaviour, or condemn her for her attitude towards me and nor did I want to.
When the invitation came for anyone present to say a few words, I hesitated long enough to settle my pounding heart and then went forward to tell a little anecdote about her perming my dead straight hair when I was around 4. Her daughter had very tight curls just like her father and so when she took me home, Mum at first mistook me for my cousin. It was a sweet memory and typical of the little things she would do to make a child feel special. She gave me more affection than my own mother was capable of and to dwell on what I saw as her betrayal would be to negate the very positive influence she had on my formative years and all the love she showered on her own family throughout her long life.
There was a funny little incident towards the end of the service that again reminded me of my dream. A rather outmoded portable CD player was being used throughout for the music, with one of the granddaughters operating it. When the celebrant announced that The Sunny Side of the Street would be played to accompany the slide show, she duly pressed the button only to have something quite different start playing. There ensued a comical scene of trying to find the right track. The player was on the floor, which made it even more awkward and as she became increasingly flustered her father came to the rescue and amidst apologies for the ‘technical difficulties’ it was eventually located. I had a little chuckle to myself. It wasn’t Anne Murray but as my mother had also been a big Willie Nelson fan I know she would have thoroughly approved of the choice.
Another interesting bit of information that emerged at the service was that it was my Aunt and Uncle’s 65th wedding anniversary on the day I had the dream. Aunt survived him by 5 years and one day so they had 60 years together. As they were married the year I was born, it was also my age. This coincidence further convinced me that the dream was about Aunt’s death, rather than my birth mother’s. Over the years I have had countless dreams that have occurred on significant dates pertinent to the people in my dreams, regardless of whether they had been on my mind consciously or not prior to the dream. Without this one I doubt whether I would have had the courage to go and I was so glad I did, as much healing came from it.
With my cousin’s permission I made a recording of the service and listening to it again later enabled me to reconnect with the side of my aunt that had become a dim memory for me. Her 7 year-old great granddaughter gave out sunflower seeds to plant in her memory, which I sowed the following day. Appropriately it happened to be All Souls’ Eve (Hallowe’en). It felt very satisfying to do so and as I nurtured them over the following months and watched them bloom and then die, I felt that I had at last found the peace with the past that had been my quest for a long time – consciously for the past 20 years but unconsciously probably my whole life.
It wasn’t quite the end of the story though as I had another dream a year later that got me in touch with some residual anger that was most likely connected with the anger I expressed at the end of this dream. That will be the subject of the next post.
Independent, spontaneous manifestations of the unconscious; fragments of involuntary psychic activity just conscious enough to be reproducible in the waking state.
Dreams are neither deliberate nor arbitrary fabrications; they are natural phenomena which are nothing other than what they pretend to be. They do not deceive, they do not lie, they do not distort or disguise. . . . They are invariably seeking to express something that the ego does not know and does not understand.
“Analytical Psychology and Education,” CW 17, par. 189.
In symbolic form, dreams picture the current situation in the psyche from the point of view of the unconscious.
Since the meaning of most dreams is not in accord with the tendencies of the conscious mind but shows peculiar deviations, we must assume that the unconscious, the matrix of dreams, has an independent function. This is what I call the autonomy of the unconscious. The dream not only fails to obey our will but very often stands in flagrant opposition to our conscious intentions.
“On the Nature of Dreams” CW 8, par. 545.
Jung acknowledged that in some cases dreams have a wish-fulfilling and sleep-preserving function (Freud) or reveal an infantile striving for power (Adler), but he focused on their symbolic content and their compensatory role in the self-regulation of the psyche: they reveal aspects of oneself that are not normally conscious, they disclose unconscious motivations operating in relationships and present new points of view in conflict situations.
In this regard there are three possibilities. If the conscious attitude to the life situation is in large degree one-sided, then the dream takes the opposite side. If the conscious has a position fairly near the “middle,” the dream is satisfied with variations. If the conscious attitude is “correct” (adequate), then the dream coincides with and emphasizes this tendency, though without forfeiting its peculiar autonomy.
Ibid., par. 546.
In Jung’s view, a dream is an interior drama.
The whole dream-work is essentially subjective, and a dream is a theatre in which the dreamer is himself the scene, the player, the prompter, the producer, the author, the public, and the critic.
“General Aspects of Dream Psychology” ibid., par. 509.
This conception gives rise to the interpretation of dreams on the subjective level, where the images in them are seen as symbolic representations of elements in the dreamer’s own personality. Interpretation on the objective level refers the images to people and situations in the outside world.
Many dreams have a classic dramatic structure. There is an exposition (place, time and characters), which shows the initial situation of the dreamer. In the second phase there is a development in the plot (action takes place). The third phase brings the culmination or climax (a decisive event occurs). The final phase is the lysis, the result or solution (if any) of the action in the dream.
…the mother stands for the collective unconscious, the source of the water of life…
~CG Jung Individual Dream Symbolism… CW 12: §92
I worked through this dream with Jane Teresa Anderson in the early days of her dream show podcast (link), way back in August 2009. It has taken all this time to unfold fully and though I am in a much better emotional space than I was when I had the dream, meeting the challenge I set myself in it is still a work in progress.
The dream:
I am in the study of my house with Mary. As we come out of the study, I notice water on the floor. I point it out to her so she won’t step in it. When we reach the dining room I see there is a large puddle of water also pooled on the carpet by the table. I notice an empty glass in the place where I usually sit for meals. I get a mental image of someone picking up the glass, and without realising it is full, spilling it and leaving the trail. I know that ‘someone’ is me but don’t recall doing it. The trail of water leads back to the study through the kitchen and family room to where I first noticed it.
I fetch a towel from the laundry basket and while I’m on my knees mopping up the water on the carpet, I tell Mary about Frank Sinatra’s rejection by his mother. She bursts into tears and I stand and put my arms around her and she cries on my shoulder. She says it reminds her of the way her mother rejected her. I say I am not surprised and then say very gently but clearly: ‘You can’t find love outside yourself, not even from your mother, you’ve got to find the source of love within yourself and connect with that.’
Using the concept of all dream characters representing aspects of the dreamer, Jane and I explored the idea that Mary’s emotional outburst represented some unresolved grief in me concerning my mother’s rejection. This did fit for Mary’s relationship with her mother but I couldn’t relate to it, as I didn’t perceive my mother as being rejecting. As we explored the issue further, I concluded that perhaps my child’s mind had perceived her frequent absences through physical illness and nervous breakdowns as a form of rejection and we let it go at that and went on to explore other aspects of the dream imagery. Days later, the memory of a very traumatic estrangement from my mother that had occurred almost 30 years before, surfaced from the depths and the scene with Mary made total sense.
The estrangement occurred as part of the fallout from my disclosure about the sexual abuse that had occurred throughout my childhood at the hands of an uncle – the husband of Mum’s sister. Although my mother and my aunt were the only ones I had spoken to, somehow word got around and all hell broke loose in the family. It emerged that this uncle’s activities were not only very widespread but also well known. In spite of that, I was branded a troublemaker and a liar and treated like a pariah by all except my sisters. I became the family scapegoat. It’s an all too common scenario for anyone who rocks the boat by speaking up and a powerful deterrent that perpetrators and their enablers exploit. Mum didn’t speak to me for 9 months and when she did reconnect, the subject was never discussed.
When she finally rang me, she broke the ice with the sad news that her precious dog had to be put down. She had been very attached to him and perhaps losing him made her reflect on our estrangement. When that topic was exhausted, she asked if I’d heard Anne Murray’s latest album. We were both big fans. I hadn’t and she told me it was called ‘I’ll Always Love You.’ I knew it was her way of saying what she was never able to say directly and this, together with the news of Sooty’s death and the fact that she was talking to me again had me blubbering like a baby. When I got hold of the album and heard the title song, I played it over and over. It was almost worth all the pain I had been through to hear the opening lines:
Standing by my window, listening for your call
Seems I really miss you after all
Time won’t let me keep these sad thoughts to myself
I’d just like to let you know, I wish I’d never let you go and…
I’ll always love you, deep inside this heart of mine
I do love you…
When I went to see her, we both carefully avoided the dreaded topic but as I was leaving she said to me “I know I’ve been a bad mother, Gloria.” I didn’t know what to say and her words haunted me for years. I wanted to put my arms around her and comfort her and tell her how much I loved her but sadly she was not comfortable with such behaviour and I knew where to draw the line. I also felt that she somehow needed to make that confession for her own benefit and I didn’t want to take that away from her. She wasn’t a bad mother – bad mothers are the kind that hate their kids and want them dead, like so many stepmothers in myths and fairy tales. She was, though, a Puella Aeternus – an eternal child – who in one sense make good mothers because they can relate to the child on their own terms but on the other hand lack the emotional maturity necessary to handle the responsibility entailed in raising children. She was basically unsuited to a role that was her lot as a woman of her time and place and had the added misfortune of marrying a man whose alcoholism led to him abandoning her to the sole responsibility of raising their five children. The odds were stacked against her in so many ways.
Our relationship pretty much picked up where we had left off and Mum died a few years afterwards. Until this dream, I hadn’t realised how much guilt I had been carrying over telling her about the abuse. As kids we were trained to be good girls and not to worry Mum, with the unspoken threat that to do so would result in her going away yet again. From my uncle I was warned not to tell ‘our little secret’ or else I would go to jail and so would he. Together with upsetting Mum, the thought that I would be responsible for his family being without a father and thereby suffering the same fate as mine was enough to keep me silent until I was 30. After the avalanche of hostility that was unleashed on me then, I closed down for another 20 years, until the death of my husband and the many life changes it entailed brought it to the surface with a vengeance. This dream – and many, many others – was a part of the healing process both of the childhood abuse and the trauma that occurred through my disclosure as an adult.
As I worked through the dream with Jane, we looked at the significance of the reference to Frank Sinatra. A few days before the dream, I had read an article about him in which he had stated that he hated the song My Way and that the only reason he did it was because his fans requested it and that it didn’t reflect his attitude at all. Following the thread of the mother theme we explored the idea that children have to go their own way and that made sense in the context of the dream but again it was only later that I recalled a vital piece of information that was a further key to understanding the dream within the context of the mother complex.
One of the most efficient entries into a dream is to consider what might have occurred in the day or two prior to the dream. We had discussed the article about Frank Sinatra but as interesting as that was, it didn’t have any real emotional charge to it. What did have a charge though and totally relevant to this dream was that the night before I had it, I had decided spontaneously to stop going to a Zen style meditation group I had been attending for about 15 months and had emailed the teacher to let her know. This was a very difficult decision to make because I had a deep affection for her. I had no doubt of her sincerity but was feeling increasingly uncomfortable with what I perceived as a lack of psychological awareness and the attitude that meditation practice alone is ‘the way.’ Several weeks after I stopped going, I woke up in the early hours one morning and had an almost desperate yearning to see her again. As I explored the intensity of the feeling, I recognised that it was the same kind of feeling I used to have at being separated from Mum when I was young. I knew then that separating from the teacher was another necessary step in loosening the attachment bonds of the mother complex.
One aspect of the dream analysis I did with Jane that I was never fully satisfied with was to do with the spilled glass of water. I said to her that it had brought to mind the song My Cup Runneth Over With Love and she suggested it might symbolise having an over caring attitude towards others and ‘spilling’ my love indiscriminately. That certainly had validity but I felt there was more to it than that and it was only when I connected the dream with the meditation teacher – my ‘spiritual mother’ – that I was able to join the dots. The two rooms in the dream – the study with the computer and Internet connection and the dining room where I did all my reading – represented ‘my way.’ The connection with the meditation teacher also added another dimension to the water symbolism; because life as we know it cannot exist without water, at the archetypal (spiritual) level it symbolises the life force itself – another name for which is love. The way I understand the symbolism now is that I was unconsciously spilling my life force energy (love) by following a path that wasn’t suited to me. My way home to myself was very eclectic. I studied widely and was involved in various groups but the main practice aspect of it was through a combination of meditation, dreamwork, Jungian psychology and A Course in Miracles. All of these methods have as their common denominator the development of trusting one’s own inner guidance and this dream was clearly demonstrating that very principle.
At the end of the discussion with Jane I confessed that though I agreed with the sentiment expressed, i.e. the need to find the source of love within, I was at a loss as to how to do it. She suggested a dream alchemy visualisation exercise but I never followed through on it. I had by that stage developed my own way of working with dreams and this kind of prescriptive approach, as well intentioned as it was, felt too controlling and manipulative. As the dream unfolded organically over time, I realised that I was on the right path already with what I was doing and just needed to have patience, perseverance and faith. I often felt lost and lonely and still do at times but I realise now that is the price to pay for following one’s own destiny.
The choice by the dream author of Mary as my alter ego was very auspicious. We met through a study group of A Course in Miracles and became very good friends. As our friendship developed, we found many correspondences in our lives, including being born in the same year, growing up in the same town and moving to the same city at the same age and living in similar places as our lives progressed. We are also alike personality wise, with many common interests. The main difference in our lives is that she has children and I don’t. I can’t think of anyone I know who would be a better fit as a reflection of myself. I don’t think it’s coincidence that she shares the same name as the most well known Western icon of the Great Mother. She also shares another connection with Mother Mary – her birthday is the same as the Feast Day of the Immaculate Conception, the recognition of the purity of the mother of the Christ Child at her own conception. I don’t know what to make of that but this dream seems to keep unfolding.
