Anthology of Contemporary Clinical Classics in Analytical Psychology

The New Ancestors

Stefano Carpani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000554236
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

2022 Gradiva Award nominee for Best Edited Book!

This anthology of contemporary classics in analytical psychology bring togetheracademic, scholarly and clinical writings by contributors who constitute the "post-Jungian" generation.

Carpani brings together important contributions from the Jungian world to establish the "new ancestors" in this field, in order to serve future generations of Jungian analysts, scholars, historians and students. This generation of clinicians and scholars has shaped the contemporary Jungian landscape, and their work continues to inspire discussions on key topics including archetypes, race, gender, trauma and complexes. Each contributor has selected a piece of their work which they feel best represents their research and clinical interests, each aiding the expansion of current discussions on Jung and contemporary analytical psychology studies.

Spanning two volumes, which are also accessible as standalone books, this essential collection will be of interest to Jungian analysts and therapists, as well as to academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies.

Chapter 1

John Beebe

DOI: 10.4324/9781003148968-2

My engagement with the trickster began long before I came to look on it as an artistic relationship. For me, childhood demanded a paradoxical attitude: it seemed the only way I could survive a gorgeous, anima-woman mother who nearly mirrored me to death and a father whose ambitions required the kind of son who would serve as golf caddy to his ego. She, a Georgia Peach, was from Venus and he, a military officer from Eisenhower’s Kansas, was from Mars. The only way I could keep from being drawn and quartered by their oppositions was to move in middle childhood to Mercury and keep my own counsel there.

That is where I stayed through my long adolescence, near enough to the brilliance of the Sun to be dauntingly intelligent and kept by that dry enough not to be seriously hurt by my peers’ envy and suspicion. But I was forever going backward in my tracks, taking out more books that any 11-year-old could ever read from the Princeton University Library—which I could do since my mother had a typing job on campus after her divorce from my father—only to return most of them unread, a strategy that left me unsupervised to read the books on homosexuality down in the stacks. I stayed precocious, and by the age of 15 had learned to appreciate the syncopated irony of the great jazz singers all working in New York in the year of my birth, 1939: Mildred Bailey, Billie Holiday, Ethel Waters, and Lee Wiley. Later the sexual doubles entendres of Henry James in novels like The Awkward Age, which I encountered while majoring in English at Harvard, informed my own slow coming out, and by then I was in love with ambiguity. It took Jungian analysis to bring me down from the kind of sense of humor that kept everyone else a little bit afraid of me and that led me to explore the parallel universe of sincerity with an equally frightening intensity.

It was not until midlife that I could put these opposites in my adaptation together and become what Jung would have called fit for life. I’m grateful to this chapter for helping me survive a forty-first year that would otherwise have proved the crack in my own Golden Bowl, and to the great movie auteurs such as Hitchcock and Welles who knew how to mend their own most notorious splits with touches of evil that would make anyone not want to kill them. Being a film buff helped me, while I wrote about suicide in my earliest serious publications as a psychiatrist. I was watching movies from the late 20s and early 30s and saw Garbo and Crawford, in their late silents and early talkies, avoid the fate of Monroe and Garland in the 60s. I come from a generation of Americans who too often died before they turned 30 and am one of the few in my surviving cadre who did not end up on antidepressants in midlife. The trickster saved me from all that by toughening up my anima. I hope the essay I’m sharing is as empowering to readers now as it was to me when it was published at the beginning of my forty-second year, which was only my second as a Jungian analyst.

The Trickster in the Arts

Originally published in The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal in 1981. Reprinted with permission.

What I want to discuss here are the effects of certain works of art. Particularly, I have in mind works of art like Hamlet or the Mona Lisa which have a paradoxical, ironic, or ambiguous effect. Such works affect us rather in the manner of certain difficult people, who “get to us” with their unexpectedly unsettling impact. These works of art perplex or madden us as we try to comprehend what is being said or shown to us, yet all the while they appear to be pleading innocent of any such confusing intention. They just go on being themselves.

One response to such a work is to go to some outside source for help in understanding it. Nowadays, it is the fashion to interview the creator of the work.

For instance,

When Gertrude Stein was lecturing at the University of Chicago a young student in her seminar asked her for the meaning of “rose is a rose is a rose.” This was her reply:

Now listen. Can’t you see that when the language was new—as it was with Chaucer and Homer—the poet could use the name of a thing and the thing was really there. He could say “O moon,” “O sea,” “O love,” and the moon and the sea and love were really there. And can’t you see that after hundreds of years had gone by and thousands of poems had been written, he could call on those words and find that they were just worn out literary words. The excitingness of pure being had withdrawn from them; they were just rather stale literary words. Now the poet has to work in the excitingness of pure being; he has to get back that intensity into the language. We all know that it’s hard to write poetry in a late age; and we know that you have to put some strangeness, as something unexpected, into the structure of the sentence in order to bring vitality to the noun. Now it’s not enough to be bizarre; the strangeness in the sentence structure has to come from the poetic gift, too. That’s why it’s doubly hard to be a poet in a late age. Now you all have seen hundreds of poems about roses and you know in your bones that the rose is not there. All those songs that sopranos sing as encores about “I have a garden! Oh, what a garden!” Now I don’t want to put too much emphasis on that line, because it’s just one line in a longer poem. But I notice that you all know it; you make fun of it, but you know it. Now listen! I’m no fool. I know that in daily life we don’t go around saying “… is a … is a … is a …” Yes, I’m no fool; but I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years.

(Meyerowitz, 1971, p. 7)

In this case, the young questioner struck gold. So did the person who asked the Belgian artist René Magritte about his well-known surrealist painting, Ceci n’est pas une pipe. In this piece, the larger than life-size, flat, commercial image of a curved briar pipe floats above an inscription in French which reads, “This is not a pipe.”

Of this work, painted in 1928–9, Magritte told a 1966 interviewer: “The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it’s just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture, ‘This is a pipe,’ I’d have been lying!” (Torczyner, 1977, p. 118). (See Foucault, 1973/2008 for the way the work itself makes this very statement.)

Figure 1.1 René Magritte (1898-1967). La Trahison des images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe). [The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe)]. 1929. Oil on canvas. Digital Image © 2021 Museum Associates / LACMA. Licensed by Art Resource, NY.

When the work of art is generally recognized as a masterpiece, one can also turn for help to a critic. But with the kind of work I have in mind, one is likely to be offered rather too much in the way of help from critics. Hamlet is our best example of that. James Kirsch quotes a Hamlet editor who remarked in 1907, “the literature on Hamlet was larger than the national literature of some of the smaller European nations.” Writing in 1966, Dr. Kirsch could already add, “since 1907 the literature has probably doubled” (Kirsch, pp. 3–4). One shudders to think where it is now.

One can find this same sort of voluminous response around Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man, and Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw.” Around each of these works a mountain of criticism has grown, even if not on quite the scale of the Hamlet mountain. If one digs into such critical mountains, one is likely to find, in addition to useful insights, critics bickering endlessly with each other about details, wrangling over interpretations, and competing with each other via complicated theories. From time to time, theories are offered which pretend to explain the other theories, as if their own deft sweep could finally circumambulate the work in question. Pursuing what has been said about a controversial work of art is like reading a series of interviews by analysts from different psychotherapeutic schools who were all asked to see the same celebrated patient.

Indeed, the critical mountains that grow up around controversial works of art—the immense and troubled response which such works engender—remind me, as a psychiatrist, of the chain reaction of emotional responses that certain psychotic individuals are capable of setting off.

I am thinking particularly of persons in the grip of a full-blown manic episode, whose effect on others resembles nothing else that one sees in the course of psychiatric work. When the diagnosis is going to be mania, a veritable trail of harried individuals follows the patient into the emergency room. They come in person, and by letter, and by phone, and their numbers, as well as the distraught, exasperated quality of their responses, testify to the demonic impact of the possession at hand.

I think this effect closely resembles the impact of a difficult masterpiece upon its audience.

Here is the brief, unforgettable first chapter of such a work, Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts:

Miss Lonelyhearts, Help Me, Help Me

The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard. On it a prayer had been printed by Shrike, the feature editor.

“Soul of Miss L glorify me.

Body of Miss L, nourish me.

Blood of Miss L intoxicate me.

Tears of Miss L wash me.

Oh good Miss L, excuse my plea,

And hide me in your heart,

And defend me from mine enemies.

Help me, Miss L, help me, help me.

In saecula saeculorum. Amen.”

Although the deadline was less than a quarter of an hour away, he was still working on his leader. He had gone as far as: “Life is worth while, for it is full of dreams and peace, gentleness and ecstasy, and faith that burns like a clear white flame on a grim dark altar.” But he found it impossible to continue. The letters were no longer funny. He could not go on finding the same joke funny thirty times a day for months on end. And on most days he received more than thirty letters, all of them alike, stamped from the dough of suffering with a heart-shaped cookie knife.

On his desk were piled those he had received this morning. He started through them again, searching for some clue to a sincere answer.

Dear Miss Lonelyhearts—

I am in such pain I dont know what to do sometimes I think I will kill myself my kidneys hurt so much. My husband thinks no woman can be a good catholic and not have children irregardless of the pain. I was married honorable from our church but I never knew what married life meant as I never was told about man and wife. My grandmother never told me and she was the only mother I had but made a big mistake by not telling me as it dont pay to be innocent and is only a big disappointment. I have 7 children in 12 yrs and ever since the last 2 I have been so sick. I was operated on twice and my husband promised no more children on the doctors advice as he said I might die but when I got back from the hospital he broke his promise and now I am going to have a baby and I don’t think I can stand it my kidneys hurts so much. I am so sick and scared because I cant have an abortion on account of being a catholic and my husband so religious. I cry all the time it hurts so much and I dont know what to do.

Yours respectfully,

Sick-of-it-all

Miss Lonelyhearts threw the letter into an open drawer and lit a cigarette.

Dear Miss Lonelyhearts—

I am sixteen years old now and I dont know what to do and would appreciate it if you could tell me what to do. When I was a little girl it was not so bad because I got used to the kids on the block making fun of me, but now I would like to have boy friends like other girls and go out on Saturday nites, but no boy will take me because I was born without a nose—although I am a good dancer and have a nice shape and my father buys me pretty clothes.

I sit and look at myself all day and cry. I have a big hole in the middle of my face that scares people even myself so I cant blame the boys for not wanting to take me out. My mother loves me, but she crys terrible when she looks at me.

What did I do to deserve such a terrible bad fate? Even if I did do some bad things I didnt do any before I was a year old and I was born this way. I asked Papa and he says he doesnt know, but that maybe I did something in the other world before I was born or that maybe I was being punished for his sins. I dont believe that because he is a very nice man. Ought I commit suicide?

Sincerely yours,

Desperate

The cigarette was imperfect and refused to draw. Miss Lonelyh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Epigraphs
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The New Ancestors and the “Agenda 2050” for Analytical Psychology
• 1 The Trickster in the Arts
• 2 Psychoanalysis and Primary Health Care
• 3 Rules of Thumb Toward an Archetypal Psychology Practice
• 4 The Racial Complex: Dissociation and the Search for Unification With the Self
• 5 Moments of Complexity and Enigmatic Action: A Jungian View of the Therapeutic Field
• 6 The Body as Symbol: Dance/Movement in Analysis
• 7 Reflections on Knowledge and Experience
• 8 Varieties of Numinous Experience: The Experience of the Sacred in the Therapeutic Process
• 9 Synchronicity and Moments of Meeting
• 10 Getting Your Own Pain: A Personal Account of Healing Dissociation with Help From the Film War Horse
• 11 Breathing—Physical, Symbolic, Spiritual and Social Aspects
• 12 The “Activist Client”: Social Responsibility, the Political Self, and Clinical Practice in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis
• 13 The Daughter Archetype
• 14 Traumatic Experiences and Transformation of Consciousness
• 15 Projective Identification in a Famous Zen Case: Implications for Relationships With Spiritual Masters
• List of Contributors
• Index