The Bottomless Pit

I spent today in a Jungian Dream Interpretation workshop led by Matthew Silverstein. The image above is a photo of a page from my journal with some free associations to images from a nightmare. I have worked on this dream prior to the workshop, but this page was done today. 

Not so long ago, I asked my unconscious for a dream about my animus, the unconscious masculine archetype that Jung thought lived in every woman's psyche. I know that my feminine aspect has been very wounded, and that my animus must also be damaged. I wanted to see what the deal was. 

I got the dream I asked for. In it, a pack of ferocious rats had attacked my cat (I don’t actually have a cat, although I do consider myself a cat person). The cat was lying paralyzed on the floor and so was I. Meanwhile, a shadowy figure that seemed both part of me and behind me, functioning independently, had shot almost all the rats with a gun. They were bloody and dead, ringing the body of my cat. 

I noticed one was still alive and I began to make a gesture to summon the shadowy killer back to finish the job. The rat that was still alive was grey, as opposed to the others who were white. He began talking to me, trying to convince me to save his life. I got caught up in what he was saying but the whole time my gut was telling me not to trust him. Finally, he started moving toward me. He was already very close to my face. I screamed so loud that my husband (in the waking world) woke me up. 

I believe my animus is the shadowy killer of the rats. He is ruthless and violent in his reaction to the attacking rats, and yet it seems significant that the job was not done thoroughly. This ultimately represents a chink in the armor of what Jungian analyst Linda Schierse Leonard calls "the armored Amazon," an archetype I tapped into early in life as a way of surviving childhood with an abusive father and a weak mother.  This chink in the armor represents an opening which is necessary for my growth. 

At first, I wanted to reject the rats--they attacked my cat, for Chrissakes! And they scared the crap out of me. And yet, because I'm curious about the shadow, and I do want to own and take responsibility for the dark parts of my psyche, I must own the rats. I haven't figured out how yet, but I'm working on a ritual to honor the dream. The rats are shadow elements, parts of my psyche that were split off and rejected who knows how long ago. They are literally starving for attention--for life blood--and this is what they had to do to get it. 

The grey of the rat in the dream represents, for me, a move from black and white thinking into a more sophisticated state of mind that recognizes the complexity of people and life itself--no one is all good or all bad. When it comes to humanity, it's almost nothing but grey area. In my life, I have vilified my father and idealized my mother, and the pattern to see all good in one place and all bad in another doesn't stop there, of course. Bush is all bad; Obama is all good, for example. When things are good with my husband, he's perfect; when they're bad, he's the enemy. This dream is letting me know that it's time for growth. This old way of seeing the world is resulting in violence and conflict, spilled blood, helplessness, and terror. 

In some ways, the environment of the dream is well described by the following image from Joan Lachkar's book The Narcissistic/Borderline Couple (2003): “the depths of the bottomless pit, annihilation anxiety... the black hole, inhabited by the internal persecutors” (p. 102). It is “containment,” in Lachkar's opinion, that allows one to reach these depths. As Matt Silverstein pointed out in the workshop today, seeing symbols and making meaning is containing. And I have been strongly contained for the past eighteen months by my beloved cohort and teachers at Antioch. This is how I have come to a place where I find myself in the bottomless pit of my psyche. And bizarrely enough, for this, I am eternally grateful.