Recovering Fragments of the Feminine

I wish I had more time to write, but I have enough time to write about how my psyche seems to be in the process of recovering lost parts of myself--especially the part that's unabashedly female, the part that has feelings and isn't afraid to have them, in a particularly female way. Of course, I'm in dreadfully tricky, sticky territory, attempting to talk about the Feminine, and femaleness, without an in-depth analysis of what exactly I mean. But that's why this is a blog and not a master's thesis. 

In a recent dream, my mother had moved in with me, Michael, and Elva, and this wasn't a bad thing. It seemed good. The house felt safe. It was night and the television was on, casting blue light into the otherwise unlit room. Elva and Michael were in bed. My mom was sitting in a chair. A feeling of safety pervaded. I left the house to go out and look for someone, or meet someone. In the dark, I encountered my friend Jen. Jen has always symbolized a certain type of primordial femininity, facets of extreme earthiness and oceanic depths of feeling. Always lithe, in the dream she was overweight and covered in scrapes and bruises. She had left an abusive relationship. He had kicked her out of the house they shared and told her to go back to Venice, where she had an apartment in my building. I embraced her and told her how amazing I think she is, and how she deserves only the best. I expressed a great deal of love for her. She said she wanted to be alone and went to her apartment. I thought she might be angry at me. I wasn't sure, but I was glad she was back. 

The patriarchy is a constant presence in my dreams, beating down my inner feminine. I feel like Jen represents, among other things, a part of myself that has been held hostage by a violent, abusive, internalized masculine archetype. He has kicked her out, so he still has some power in the picture and she may be angry at me because I didn't rescue her all these years, or fight for her. I didn't make it my business to know where she was or what kind of hell she had fallen into. But I do feel she came as a result of this active dialogue I've cultivated between my conscious and unconscious realities. Uncle Gary came in a dream and enabled me to take better care of myself in reality, and the act of taking better care of myself in reality has resulted in the return of Jen--symbolizing some aspect of the forsaken feminine--in a dream. 

She's beat up, angry, deeply miserable, and mine, all mine. I welcome her with open arms. Her energy was very present in my last therapy session. My therapist was encouraging me to feel the sadness, regret, and loss of my childhood. I kept talking about moving forward and he kept pointing me there, to the messy, shameful, embarrassing wounds. What does it mean to embrace that aspect of the self instead of leaving it behind like some loss you have to cut to survive? How would it feel not to reflexively look away?

Uncle Gary and the Inner Objects

More than just another great name for a band, this is what I call the latest piece of inner work I’ve decided to share with any interested readers.

Several nights ago, I had a dream that I had an uncle named Gary who had heart problems. I was driving him around in my car—in the dream, an olive green station wagon with side paneling--very 1974. There were several important things about Uncle Gary. One is that he was clearly a “composite”--my current therapist, Friedemann Schulz, crossed with a professor from last quarter, Gary Penn. Another is that I really cared about him. I didn’t mind driving him around, trying to find “Santa Monica Hospital” so that he could get his heart fixed. I felt quite tenderly toward him and was more than willing to go out of my way for him. He sat patiently in the back of the car with his cane. This is significant because I don’t have those kinds of warm, positive feelings toward my father, who has had a lot of trouble with his heart—the body is so symbolic sometimes, n’est-ce pas? Perhaps the most significant thing about Uncle Gary is that he is a perfect symbol of growth in my psyche.

 

Uncle Gary, I believe, represents a shift, or at least a new possibility, in the world of my inner objects. Don’t know what inner objects are? Read on for a most likely very simplistic analysis of this complex branch of psychoanalytic thought!

 

In laywoman’s terms, object relations is a way of understanding the human psyche, and how we all internalize our caregivers. We all have inner objects, whether we know about them or not, and they powerfully influence how we feel about ourselves and others, and how we act in the world. If you’re interested in having a peek at my inner objects, check out the entry titled Always Running and Hiding. In it, the Feminine (the mother-daughter complex) is all good and all loving, and the Masculine is violent, irrational, and oppressive. This is how I’ve internalized the concepts of mother and father in my psyche. According to some theorists, these objects were concretized in early childhood and are based on my collective experiences of my mother and father.

 

Sally Kempton wrote, “It’s hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your mind.” This pretty much sums up my relationship to my father, the patriarchy, and the masculine inner object raging around in my psyche trying to kill people. I once did a painting of this horrible figure after a series of nightmares about a very large man waiting at the bottom of the stairs to beat me to death if I left my bedroom and tried to leave the house. In the painting, he wore a baseball hat and a pin that said, “I Hate Women.”

 

Suffice to say, I don’t have a lot of dreams about sweet older men about whom I feel tenderly. This is a new archetype for me, a kindly elder masculine figure. It’s on the heels of Uncle Gary’s arrival that I have made some real progress in creating healthy boundaries for myself with my real father, which is an example of how inner work leads to outer work, and how the unconscious can heal us from the inside, through dreams like this one.

 

 

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. 

           

 

 

 

 

 

 

           

           

Mandala for the Dream of the Feminine and the Hit Man

Always Running and Hiding

The Dream of the Feminine and the Hit Man

In a Sopranos-like environment, I am part of a mother-daughter duo and a hit has been put out on us. We are standing together in a white rectangular space made of fabric with zippers for closures--like a make-shift cloth closet. We are, I think, in a warehouse. We know someone is stalking us and we are asking, "Should we hide?" We decide yes, and wrap ourselves in white cloth and prepare to lie on the floor of the closet. I wonder if we will be found. I can picture the gunman in my mind--large, dark, fat, cruel, merciless, pointing a gun at us. 

The scene changes and we are driving in a convertible (white?) down a causeway. We have escaped. We are just out of the danger zone and I feel a surge of relief. I am looking out at the water and the open road, feeling like we might be free. 

This is an entry in my dream journal from February of 2008. It seems worthwhile to share it here because it is a dream about escaping my shadow. It reminds me of an escape dream I had when I was in analysis with a Jungian therapist. In the dream, I fled a dark, decrepit house in upstate New York, full of menacing, semi-retarded people, and drove off to California and felt great. My therapist called me on it, suggesting that these disowned parts of myself might be worth relating to, but I wasn't ready to hear that it might be a good idea to stay in a dark house full of semi-retarded people, much less that it wouldn't be considerably more intelligent to speed off to the Golden West in a convertible. 

Oh, how I've changed! Now I prowl around in my unconscious looking for trouble, which is not to say that I don't also spend a great deal of time in denial. It's just that I am beginning to see that you can run and you can hide, but you can't ever really escape your shadow. 

But how do you work with Mr. Dark, Fat, Merciless, Pointing A Gun? Running and hiding seem the obvious responses. In working with that question of how to relate to the shadow--everything we fear and reject--I have come to different conclusions at different times. In Inner Work, Robert Johnson suggests creating and performing a ritual in honor of a dream as a way of integrating its wisdom. In the case of this dream, I created a mandala that attempted to relate the masculine gun and the feminine mother-daughter element to one another. I will post that drawing in a separate post immediately following this one.  

I eat people

This is another drawing from my dream journal which came, not from a dream, but just spontaneously entered my mind and made me laugh. I knew it was some kind of gift from my unconscious. Originally, the shirt just said, "I eat people." Later I softened it with the "I want to eat people." I was unable to fully own eating people. Oh dear me, no, I would never eat people. I mean, of course, I want to eat people, and I'm willing to admit that, but I would never actually do it. 

This is a great shadow image for me. I'm a vegetarian. I don't even eat animals. So here's this ravenous, dead-eyed version of myself eating other human beings. Horrible. I love it. It's this monstrous part of myself. I am looking to better understand what to do with these primitive aspects of me. I can laugh at this image, but most of the time I still desperately want to be simple and good. I want to be light and funny and in a way, I am softening this image by making it funny. 

Maybe I need to go out and eat someone. 

Just kidding. 

This image came to me after I had been writing for several pages about a dream I had that illustrated the ways in which I tend to disown darkness, which I associate with my father. I wrote, "This dream indicates, in Kleinian terms, a paranoid-schizoid position, which reflects back to me how I have internalized my early childhood objects. Put simply, mother: good; father: bad. This seems so sad. I have moments of slipping into the depressive position, and I can almost always get there intellectually, but emotionally, most of the time, I'm stuck: parts of self related to mother are good; parts of self related to father are bad. In a classic case of projective identification, I find these hateful qualities abounding in my external environment, while I am the innocent victim... This dynamic is operating quite intensely in all aspects of my life, and I see that, and I feel utterly confused as to how to begin the process of owning what I've been disowning for so long."

I think the process involves owning the fact that, on some level, I really do eat people. I am the aggressor, the perpetrator--enraged, violent, merciless, and very, very hungry. Watch your back. 

The High Priestess

These are images from my dream journal of a female figure who appears often in my dreams. She is the High Priestess, the guardian at the gates of the unconscious in the Tarot. She is often silent, but with a presence as powerful and deep as the night. She sometimes scares me, sometimes soothes me. In my dreams, she has guided me, smothered me, asked me to come closer. In a recent dream she told me she likes me to stand near her so she can breathe. She is the embodiment of mystery, and she seems the place to start with this process of trying to share what can be shared of my own mysterious process, exploring the places she stands watch over. In the most recent dream, I had followed a group of people--"the Irish"--who were going to visit their dead. We went into a place under the ground, and she stood next to me there, in a flowing skirt, with long black hair, letting me know that I am somehow able to help her breathe. This seems creepy in retrospect, but in the dream I felt lucky, as if I had been honored by a goddess or some other powerful entity. I felt a deep and abiding love for her--a movement in the core of my body.

First Post

I have spent many hours, both blissful and tormented, alone in a room with a notebook and a pen, drawing, writing, writing songs, writing letters--letters sent and unsent, eloquent and awkward, finished and unfinished. I have carried little books in my pockets and recorded  overheard conversations, nascent song lyrics, morbid thoughts, angry outbursts, expressions of love and desire. I have drawn every friend I have at least sixteen times. I have quoted them and used their quotes to understand and explain what I'm going through. I have struggled and questioned and sweated my way through broken hearts, unprocessed childhood traumas, lost opportunities, and uncertain successes. All of this has been a celebration of inner work, the work I most love doing in this life.  

This blog is part of an independent study (Advanced Studies in Inner Work) at Antioch University. The course is about consciously naming and undertaking the lifelong process Carl Jung called individuation. The foundation of this process, as many psychologists and mystics have noted, involves facing the darkness within ourselves, and I will be working with my shadow aspects through the vehicles of dreaming, creativity, and reading other writers who work with the dark parts of the psyche. I will be posting my thoughts in this blog in the hopes of sharing and making sense of the work in a way that engages and inspires other inner workers. 

I want to thank Doug Sadownick, PhD, for his mentoring and for giving this course its name.