FICTION: A PORTAL TO THE SACRED
Here is my modest proposal to help us better understand our patients and ourselves:
1. Read fiction. 2. Write fiction.
I can hear you snort, read fiction? Fiction is a guilty pleasure, to be undertaken only on vacation or when serious reading has been thoroughly digested.
What's that stack of unread material on your desk? Several issues of The Journal of Analytical Psychology, a new work on Jungian psychology authored by a colleague, the book on neurobiology you have been intending to read? Not fiction.
I believe that fiction is not only one portal, but perhaps the best portal, to the sacred -- that is, to the heart of our analytic endeavors. It is our responsibility to understand ourselves and our patients. How do we ordinarily undertake this task?
To formulate diagnoses, we focus on symptoms, research family history, and draw genograms. To navigate the depths, we examine complexes, dreams, psychic energy, transference/countertransference. We circumambulate symbols and images in quest of the archetypal. Depending upon which theory or theorist most resonates with our own thinking, we might consider the ego/Self axis, the depressive position, the Oedipal struggle, psychosexuality, gender issues, neurobiology, childhood trauma, family dysfunction, addictions, the life cycle, the way of the dream, the way of the image, induced countertransference, typology, soul work, alchemical processes. We diagram the psyche in terms of ego, persona, shadow, anima/animus, and Self. We read Jung, Jungians, other theorists, sacred texts, myths, and fairy tales to find correspondences with our patients' and our own lives. We probe our dreams and journal our experiences to deepen self-awareness.
As a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and Jungian analyst, I used to read a great deal of psychoanalytic and Jungian literature, dwelling on case histories. In the process I suppose I learned some theory while taking in the myriad ways others worked with patients. But over time I had to force-feed myself this literature and finally stopped reading it altogether. Then I had time for fiction.
When I read fiction, I am compelled to relate to the characters as whole persons, as complicated and contradictory human beings, likable or not, familiar or foreign. Take, for example, my experience with Naguib Mafouz's Cairo Trilogy, the story of an Egyptian family in the first half of the 20th century. If I had related to the trilogy as a case history, I would have focused on family dysfunction, the subjugation of women, and perverted sexuality. However, the author engaged me in the more nuanced task of forming an emotional attachment to people living in the context of Egyptian Islamic culture during occupation, war, and strivings for national liberation. The patriarch of the family is tyrannical, narcissistic, self-absorbed, cruel -- in short, a hopeless chauvinist pig. But he is also a man who strives to protect and provide for his family. At the end of the trilogy he is a pitiable shadow of his former powerful self, diminished by losses of his children, his business, his health, his influence, and his friends. As Egypt became a more modern state, the pillars upon which he had built his life crumbled and fell.
I reacted to this character with revulsion and compassion. Moreover, I found in him aspects of my own personality: my narcissism, my wish to wield power, my conflict with religion. The theme of aging with its humbling diminishments and grievous losses resonated strongly with me.
Alain de Botton delightfully expresses the same idea in How Proust Can Change Your Life, which is part literary biography and part self-help book. Even if you haven't waded through In Search of Lost Time, you will enjoy chapters on how to suffer successfully and how to be a good friend.
In Ulysses, lest we miss the point, Joyce writes:
Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.
One of my former patients was a young woman who came to me suffering from a severe case of writer's block and unable to complete her dissertation. Her field was European history, and she had done much research on her topic. It was clear that she had an attachment to the material and was bright and motivated enough to finish up. But she just couldn't seem to write.
Nothing in what she told me about her childhood, her dreams, or her current life helped me understand the meaning of her writer's block. She said that she would sometimes sit at her computer for hours, trying to make some headway, but without success.
I asked her how she spent the rest of her time. She blushed and looked away. "Oh, well, sort of reading."
"Reading what?" I pursued.
She slumped in her chair, eyes on the floor. "Just...nothing. I guess you'd call it trash."
Her version of trash turned out to be historical romantic fiction. I was not familiar with this genre (my own version of trash being British murder mysteries), and I asked her to describe these romances.
She balked. She couldn't imagine what this had to do with anything. She was ashamed of wasting her time on that stuff. She needed to stop reading trashy novels and get to work on her dissertation.
I let her object for awhile but repeated my question. After initial hesitation and embarrassment, she told me about the novels. As she warmed to her subject, I thought there was a connection between her dissertation topic and the theme of her favorite reading. But I was still in the dark until she told me what we came to regard as the key ingredient.
She identified strongly with low-born characters, male or female, who found themselves pursued by, or thrown together with, or in love with high-born characters. The "low-borns" were sometimes servants to royalty, or Eliza Doolittles to Henry Higginses. They were poor, but their virtue, courage, and physical beauty brought them to the attention of their superiors. Sometimes they helped or rescued their superiors. Other times they were wrongly used or perhaps raped by their superiors. Occasionally they were forced to masquerade as high-born people. Always a secret romance developed between a low-born and a high-born. That led to the problem of how to continue the relationship. Often the ending was sad, for it was impossible for a queen to marry her servant. My patient preferred these bitter-sweet endings for their authenticity and deplored happily-ever-after endings because they didn't ring true.
The next session she brought in a dream:
A young girl who is working as a waitress, asks me about going to college. "Is it expensive?" she asks. I answer yes, it is very expensive. She runs and throws herself into a shallow stream, apparently trying to commit suicide. I pull her out of the water and tell her she doesn't have to kill herself, that I will help her find a way to go to college.
She said the girl in the dream reminded her of Ophelia. It appeared that the cost of college was too much for Ophelia to manage. She decided she would have to die since she couldn't achieve her dream.
I asked about her own feelings of despair, and the connection was clarified. I interpreted her answer: she was a low-born without hope of attaining a high-born goal. Her dream was impossible. It would cost too much.
I reminded her that in her dream she had rescued the suicidal young waitress, a "low-born." In her dream, the cost was not a reason to give up.
This realization did not immediately lead to the end of writer's block, but it was the beginning of our understanding. The ego had made a connection with the higher self, who could see more clearly and knew that cost could be managed. My patient was able to value the higher wisdom within her which could overcome obstacles, even the obstacle of finishing her dissertation.
Two years later, after she had received her Ph.D. and moved away to take a teaching position in another city, she sent me a copy of the book which had been published from her dissertation. In the Acknowledgements section, she wrote: "Thanks to my analyst, who helped me find the way to myself."
Reading fiction is good, and writing fiction is even better.
Several years ago, I justified buying a new computer with the intention of writing several papers and even perhaps a book on Jungian theory and practice. I thought I had something to say. The computer's blank screen showed me otherwise.
One day I looked through a file of short stories I had composed for a creative writing class many years earlier. One story reached out, grabbed my attention, and demanded more. I arose early each morning to make a pot of coffee and write. After about six months, I had a 140,000-word novel. A version of this novel has been published and has led me to reflect on the relationship between writing fiction and individuation.
Writing a novel provided many benefits and challenges. One of my characters, let's call him Philip, is an irritant to almost everyone else in the novel. He is blind to his faults, inflated, nosy, self-righteous, preachy, a creep, a nut-case, a mama's boy. His psyche is dominated by constant battle between religion and sexuality. Compulsive masturbation is immediately followed by a compulsive promise that he will forever renounce that sinful habit. He frightens himself with Biblical threats concerning licentiousness and attempts to attain holiness and superiority in the most absurd ways.
I became so fond of Philip that I put him into several chapters where he wasn't necessary for plot development. I gave him long eyelashes, curly hair, a sexy girlfriend, a fresh start in life, and the possibility of release from the shackles his religion had placed upon him.
My affection for and interest in Philip led me to explore and relate to my own blindness, inflation, nosiness, self-righteousness, tendency to preach; my own creepy, nutty, mother-bound self; my own conflict between my body and the Body of Christ. I found some compassion for those aspects of myself and the energy to relate to them in a different way, through Philip.
Another favorite character in my novel, let's call him Arnie, is a teacher whose attraction to young girls puts him on the verge of being unfaithful to his wife. Arnie competes with his own nephew for the attention of a high-school girl. Arnie is willful, noisy, intrusive, bossy, and bull-headed. He is a nuisance and borderline pedophile. If he had been a case history, his therapist would have called Child Protective Services and the School Board.
But Arnie was my creation and I had to take all of him into account. I noticed the tenderness he displayed for his mentally retarded sister. I witnessed that he is not only selfish but also generous, lustful and loving, foolish but wise enough to recognize and overcome his foolishness.
Writing about Arnie encouraged parts of myself to emerge from hiding. I had to admit that my controlling nature masquerades as helpfulness. I owned up to my bull-headedness and my voraciousness. In doing so, I discovered that these qualities are paired with a tender heart and a wish to contribute.
It is my belief that we can't help our patients if we consider ourselves superior to them. We need to relate to them as whole human beings, not as cases, and certainly not as flawed inferiors. To do this important work, it is required that we find compassion for our own failures and flaws, that we search for our complete selves and not be satisfied with our ego ideals. We need new avenues into shadow territory, ones that are not overloaded with shame and blame, guilt and retribution, anger and remorse.
Reading and writing fiction are fine ways to work toward individuation by discovering not only shadow and ego but also the divine and the Self.
In his volume of essays, The Merry Heart, the great Canadian author Robertson Davies puts it this way:
It is through writing that you are most in touch with what is of greatest value in yourself. The special quality is the product of the writer's access to those deeper layers of mind that the depth psychologists call the Unconscious. The ability to invite it, to solicit its assistance, to hear what it has to say and impart it in the language that is peculiarly his own, is decidedly his gift and what defines him as an artist. He is not fishing up things from the Unconscious to astonish readers but to tell them things that they recognize as soon as they hear them, but which they have not been able to seize and hold and put into language for themselves. It is a direct revelation of reality which leaves us enlarged and in possession of some new ground in the exploration of ourselves.
