CONGRUENCE

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."

William Faulkner

In the 1960s Carl Rogers introduced the term ‘congruence’ to indicate a person’s harmony with themselves. Roughly it means honesty, transparency – authenticity. To be in-congruent is to dissemble or to hide under a false appearance. A sign of incongruence would be, for example, smiling when one is annoyed or depressed.

For me, the greatest enemy of congruence is my strength of will to overcome my past. The one thing I don’t want to be is congruent with my frailty and dependence. This is who I still am, but it is not who I want to be.

I learned early on to protect my ego, my sense of self, by rejecting and disowning my weaknesses. As I grew up I also learned to be independent of those I needed. When they hurt me I was eventually strong enough to say ‘I don’t need them’ and to make it true. This ability became so entrenched that it developed into an automatic mechanism, so that my emotions are instantly cut off whenever I am reminded of my weakness and dependency. Then, I believe I really don’t care – but it’s a lie.

What really kicks in is fear and anxiety; and this goes back to my birth. Birth is a time when one is closest to death. Birth is a massive trauma. But now, when it is emotionally restimulated my feelings shut off. What I cannot shut off are the physical effects. I cannot remember the original circumstance of my terrors – but any slight reminder in present-time and my feelings automatically switch off; but not the physical effects: heartache, emptiness, fear and anxiety. These I do suffer, without knowing why.

 The event in present time that triggers the restimulation might only be that my partner shows a disinterest or contradicts something I was saying – that’s all.

But it’s enough. Instantly, before I am even aware of it, the shutting-off mechanism goes into effect. I don’t even know it’s happened.  All I feel is perhaps a slight irritation; nothing more – she often does that kind of thing – but that’s all right!

 Underneath, however, it isn’t all right. It goes deep; but I do not suffer it. My wall protects me from the threat of dying. The only effect I get is that hours later I feel depressed, my chest hurts – and I don’t know why. That night I can’t sleep.

My incongruence is not consciously purposeful. If you were to ask me if my wife has upset me I would answer in some general sort of way – without much feeling. No!  Not really upset – annoyed perhaps. As for my chest pains, maybe I should see a doctor; but I often get it and it goes away. I disparage its importance.

Since my wife is the most important person in my life, the one I most look to for reassurance, this situation happens quite often.  It is an aspect of my unconscious incongruence that I am unaware how much I am dependant on her. And any sharp reminder of it restimulates fear – which, paradoxically I cannot feel. In fact, throughout my life there have been hundreds of times when the same sort of event has happened – with kids at school, girlfriends, teachers and the like.

You may ask why I have such a wall up against the feeling of dependency. The answer is that like most people, I don’t want to know   my early childhood; how utterly dependant I was. I don’t want to deal with my fears of death and extinction again. But later in life, each reminder of it, each time someone disowns or misunderstands me, the ground opens up and it’s as though I’m there again.

So, even in my early days there grew a chain of events where I perceive myself as facing abandonment and death.

Eventually I developed an ego strong enough to be able to say, ‘I don’t care’ – and a will strong enough to make it true. My automatic cut-off clears me of my past. It’s all behind me now – except I have these queer psychosomatic problems.

*

This is how it was. But things have changed – I have changed. I have learned to be more honest with myself, to be more in tune with my felt-sense of how things are with me; to admit when something hurts, that it hurts; to admit to myself and to others my weaknesses and sensitivity. My therapist helped me, but thankfully she let me do all the work myself. With total acceptance from her I found it easier and easier to be myself.  It took quite a while, gradually learning to be authentic; but every step in taking down the wall was a step in the right direction.

*

ps. I trust the reader will be aware that the above is not autobiographical. I dramatise a fictional first person because stories tell truths better that abstract descriptions. And I wanted to tell a common theme without revealing anyone’s private story.

Elephant! What Elephant?

Imagine what it would be like to wake up one morning and find yourself able to read people’s minds, having the psychic ability to know clearly, not only what they were expressing, but also what they were withholding. No vague guessing – but knowing with a clear second sight – as though they were an open book. And suppose, too, that they had no idea that you could do this. It would pose quite a problem, wouldn’t it?

And here is a slightly different scenario. Suppose you could read, not just what they were consciously withholding, but also what they were withholding even from themselves: emotions and thoughts they actually had, but of which they were quite unconscious. That would be an entirely different landscape. One thing you would see is what is known as their ‘shadow’, aspects of themselves that they reject or, as we say, deny.

Having exercised your imagination thus far, what would you say if I said that before you could even speak, you had precisely this ability? The very young can see right through us. They can feel the unconscious of grown ups. They are wide open to people’s conflicts and muddle. The child has no idea of pretence or truth or falsehood or any sort of abstract judgment. The different rules of human engagement are unknown; so are all the defenses.  There are no boundaries, no comparisons, and no predesigned notions into which to fit their experiences.

Infants can be aware of your psyche, aware not with words, but with a felt-sense. They perceive grown ups just as they are; they are open to what people are actually being. They take in just what is there. That is until they learn not to; for, as the child grows up, it learns about what it is not suppose to know. In other words it goes into agreement with grown ups’ denials.

 The denial that something doesn’t exist when it obviously does is ridiculous – its like saying:

I can’t pronounce ‘hippopotamus’.

But you just said it.

No I didn’t.

Yes you did. I heard you.

Times up! If you want another half hour argument you have to pay.

I just paid you.

No, you didn’t… Look, I’m not arguing any more until you pay.

Here we have one of those classic sketches from Monty Python.

‘The elephant in the room’ is simply a metaphor for the denial of something that obviously exists. People do it all the time.

It is famously easy to demonstrate this impossible feat with any good hypnotic subject. You simply give the subject a posthypnotic suggestion that Fred is not in the room. You wake the subject and ask them if Fred is in the room. They, of course, cannot see him even though he is standing right in front of them. That’s a demonstration of a hypnotically ‘planted’ denial.

Now lets look at a young child in a family where one or another parent takes good care of the child but is emotionally withdrawn; lets imagine this adult also carries a repressed and denied rage at life. They show no overt anger or violence, but to the child there is an elephant in the room.

The child gets into what is known as a ‘double bind’ A double bind is an emotional dilemma in which an   individual receives two conflicting communications where one reality negates the other.¹

All the overt signs are that this is a devoted parent. But quite contradicting this is their unconscious hostility and the child is scared of it. The child is frightened because it feels like a bomb that can go off at any time. The fear in the child is a physical sensation. There have been one or two times where the bomb has actually detonated and the parent has thrown a tantrum, which is immediately put aside as though it didn’t happen, and things return to normal.

The child now has a mirror copy of the adult’s denial which amounts to the agreement that the elephant isn’t there. But in truth, it is always there. So that now both parent and child are in the same pattern of denial.

For the child’s inner life, this denial detaches his fear from its object (the parent) so that he is no longer aware what he is afraid of; a situation that can persist in life as a continuous nameless threat.

As someone once said to me, ‘I knew I was a bit scared of Dad, but I never realised that the anxiety I suffer from is exactly my fear of him. I never connected the two things. I had to really get what my fear of him was really like as a child. Then it hit me.

THE NAMELESS THREAT.

Fear is different from anxiety. Fear has an object – you know what you afraid of. You may not know why, but you know what you are afraid of. Anxiety has no apparent object. One has no idea what one is anxious about. Anxiety is, as they say, free floating. It is fear detached from its object by denial. We are looking at the ‘elephant in the room syndrome’. Remember, the whole focus of agreement in the family is that the parent’s destructive rage doesn’t exist. Nothing is said, but this silent agreement detaches the child’s fear from its object (the parent) and then persists as a floating anxiety.

What restimulates the anxiety is some signal that stirs the nameless threat in the unconscious; it surfaces physically. Physically only, mark you. The full force of the threat has been disconnected from any memories, leaving only the physical anxiety.

‘You try to tell me that my anxiety is because my mother was hostile to me. What nonsense’. I admit she may have been mad at me occasionally as a child – but that was a long time ago. I know she always meant the best for me. After all, she is my mother’.

That’s the story that keeps the anxiety in place.

*

The tale I have told is but one possible scenario. There can be many variations of it. I have dramatized just one. Every family has a different pattern of denial. There are always things we don’t talk about; its part of normal family life.

¹ Double bind theory was first described by Gregory Bateson and his colleagues in the 1950s.

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

Nocturne

People once woke up halfway

 through the night to think,

 write or make love. 

What have we lost by

 sleeping straight through?

    Karen Emslie

NOCTURNE

Electric light changed our experience of nighttime. Prior to Edison’s revolutionary invention of the light bulb, sleep was naturally divided into two parts. We think of eight hours of uninterrupted sleep as normal. But before gas and electric light, people bunkered down earlier and it was normal to have two segments of sleep. The time of the first sleep varied with the season and social class, but it usually started soon after dusk and lasted for three or four hours. In pre-industrial societies people naturally woke up from the first sleep to engage in activities that had a different quality, where perhaps the daytime analytical mind was not quite so active. Nearer to the dream-world, people were more imaginative, finding it easier to ‘write, think and make love’. A doctor's manual from 16th Century France advised couples that the best time to conceive was not at the end of a long day's labour but "after the first sleep", when " they have more enjoyment" and "do it better". Such a reference to ‘first and second sleep appear in countless old records, literary texts, medical manuscripts, diaries, archives, documents and letters in pre-industrial times. It is not so much what they said about segmented sleep, but the way they referred to it – taking it absolutely for grated as the normal mode of nighttime life. 

This unnoticed aspect of our history has recently been investigated by sleep scientists, and most notably by the historian A. Roger Ekirch of the Virginia State University in his book At Close of Day,  a study based on 16 years of research. Ekirch tells us, ‘There is every reason to believe that segmented sleep, such as many wild animals exhibit, had long been the natural pattern of our slumber before the modern age, with a provenance as old as humankind.’ He goes on to say that people fell asleep not long after dark for the “first sleep.” Then they awoke, somnolent but not asleep, often around midnight, when for a few hours they talked, read, prayed, had sex, brewed beer or burgled. Then they went back to sleep for a shorter period. 

Psychiatrist Thomas Wehr suggests that the most common insomnia we suffer, is not a disorder but rather a harking back to a natural form of segmented sleep.  Wehr also suggests that not only have modern routines altered our sleeping patterns, they have also robbed us of this ancient connection between our dreams and waking life, and ‘might provide a explanation for the observation that modern humans seem to have lost touch with the wellspring of myths and fantasies’. In pre-industrial times people might simply have lain in bed ruminating on the meaning of a fresh dream, thereby permitting the conscious mind a window onto the human psyche that remains shuttered for us moderns in the rush to start the day, missing the experience of this slightly ‘altered state’.

Ekirch tells us: ‘By turning night into day, modern technology has obstructed our oldest avenue to the human psyche, making us, to invoke the words of the 17th-century English playwright Thomas Middleton, “disannulled of our first sleep, and cheated of our dreams and fantasies”. 

Night triggers hormonal changes in our brains that suit creativity. Wehr has noted that, during the waking period between sleeps the pituitary gland still excretes high levels of prolactin. This is the hormone associated with sensations of peace and the dreamlike hallucinations we sometimes experience as we fall asleep, or upon waking. It is produced when we feel sexual satisfaction and when nursing mothers lactate. In segmented sleep intervals it must also help create that non-anxious wakefulness that most nearly resembles a meditative state. 

But not always. When the iron grip of the analytic mind is loosened in such intervals, an unpleasant and repressed feeling may surface. It is an opportunity to look into what episodes in one’s life it relates and to re-experience, if not the memory, at least the felt-sense of it. This can free up the whole tone of a day.

Kate Bussmann writes in the Sunday Telegraph, “How does this history help insomnia? For me, it proved that there was nothing natural or inevitable about the idea of an eight-hour uninterrupted sleep. If I went to bed earlier, it was OK to wake up for a few hours. It also meant that I stopped howling into the void during those few hours I was awake and instead used that time to read novels, do relaxation exercises or write. In my efforts to keep as close to my medieval forbears as possible, I never looked at my phone.  The worst thing you can do when you wake up at 3am is to stress. And nothing is likely to induce panic more than the idea that sleeping uninterrupted for eight hours is necessary for mental and physical health.”

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

HEAVENLY LIAISONS

Relationships are made in heaven, beginning as the sweet promise of a new beginning and progressing into a perplexing entanglement.

 ‘Relationship’ is such a bland word. What we mean by it is really quite modern. We are aware of what goes on psychologically between people in a way our grandparents never were, so there are no old fashioned synonyms for the modern meaning of ‘relationship’. Our forefathers had no language and therefore no insight into the subtleties we perceive. Relationships were defined socially, not psychologically: you were a wife, a husband, a mother, a cousin – and that was that. Only the perceptive Victorian novelist gave us more subtle views.

Since, say the 1950s, many social categories began to break down, which left us in something of a muddle. Couples were living together in all kinds of arrangements. The categories gone, we were force to look more at the nuances that hold people together or spit them apart.

The human psyche is a vast vortex of unfathomable depths, constantly changing. Indifference and kindness, meanness and generosity vie with each other in the hidden caverns of my soul. But in close relationships my darker shades wake up with hints of passion and hate that I have never encountered before, surprising both of us.

More than anything else, relationships are where the great drama of childhood dependency is reenacted and played out. Of course, relationships are also much more than this. But the hidden reemergence of childhood dependency and the infant determination to get what I want triggers the turmoil with our loved one, most often without our realising the connection with the past.

A child comes into the world with two basic requirements. The first is to grow and develop in the way it needs to; the second is to be protected and looked after as it does so. The first is the need for freedom; the second is the fact of dependency.

To be free and grow in my own way means to be independent and self sufficient. And so, as I grow up, anything that reminds me of depenancy is likely to be suppressed and denied – “I wish Mum would stop fussing over me.” But there is another aim of childhood that persists throughout my life: and that is to be safe, to have someone that I can depend on. Safety in childhood essentially means the confidence that I will be looked after and cared for no matter what – what we know as unconditional love.

So, in my early years I have two basic ‘wants’ in opposition: to be free and to be dependant. These basic necessities are once again restimulated by coming into an intimate relationship later in life. The old longings are fuelled by new hope and desire which have all the power of those first vital connections – and all the conflicts and disappointments too. The sweet promise is that I will be unconditionally loved and also given the freedom to be myself.

Our actual experience in childhood meets the inevitable frustrations of those expectations; and it all gets fired up again in later-life’s intimate relationships. The very same patterns develop.

Both grown-up parties in a relationship have the same basic urge: how to be independent and free and, at the same time demanding care and love. How we get along together depends on how we both unconsciously negotiate this problem. I say ‘unconsciously’ because the dynamics of both ‘pasts’ are involved below awareness. Each person lives in the bubble of their past, limiting their perception of the other.

If a relationship is lucky it might survive long enough for the long process of adaptation. This is a process where states of muddle and clarity, conflict and resolution, alternate until there is a settling down where the old demands and conflicts of childhood begin to lessen.

There are some interesting aspects to this coalescing dynamic where couples adjust to each other. For example, one partner, lets say the woman, may be in therapy and the other, the man, is resistant to the idea. Eventually, the woman’s progress in therapy has a beneficial effect on him. He is forced to change, to begin to look at himself, without any direct attempt to change him.

 What changes him is who his partner is becoming.

He discovers that it is no longer possible to control her in the way he used to. He cannot secretly secure his need to be looked after by keeping her in the role of surrogate mother. The woman begins to experience the freedom to grow in the way she needs to. He goes through all his old rage and fear of abandonment, but eventually, when he breaks through, he too will have a similar sense of freedom.

Lucky are the couple who get thus far – but it takes persistent psychological work on someone’s part.

Why is it, I ask myself, that we seldom find the opposite situation: i.e. where it is the man who seeks change in the relationship and the woman who resists. Why is it so rare for a man to seek change by promoting communication as a solution?

Let me guess an answer: perhaps as a rule men are more afraid of self exposure.  A man might more easily take the plunge into another relationship as a way out, seeking freedom and love elsewhere. Perhaps a man is more likely to suddenly choose this route rather than talking things out and risk the exposure of his dependency that this might entail, an exposure that could fatally erode his ego-image. As John Kirwan said, ‘All Blacks Don’t Cry’ – a sad hint of what it means to be a man.

Self exposure is harder for a man who has spent his life rejecting the weakness and the dependency aspect of his personality. For it is true that deeper communication, such as person-centred work, exposes one’s weaknesses.

Fear of self-disclosure is not the prerogative of men. A woman can just as easily be stifled, uneasy about self disclosure because of early abuse or rigidity of upbringing, precipitating a protective shell around them.

Whatever the individual patterns, the process of self-disclosure and exposure is what is needed in both partners if the relationship is to work.

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

ON YOU ROGER, SHAME !

A complaint of sexual harassment from a staff member to the State Services Commission has led to the resignation of Canterbury Earthquake Commission’s CEO, Roger Sutton. His major offence, it seems, was to address a woman on the staff as ‘sweetie’.

Everyone agrees that Sutton has done excellent work in the difficult job as CERA’s CEO. His decision to resign is regretted by Brownlee, Minister responsible for CERA, and I would guess most of his staff. He struck the public of Christchurch as a good man. His wife agrees with him: “He's a really good man - he's far nicer than I am. He's far more compassionate than I am, but he's also really silly. And that's kind of what I love about him. I think he kind of forgot that he was the leader of a public service; and he's too informal, he's too relaxed ... but that's who he is. That's what makes him amazing, and why his staff, the CERA staff, love him." She was an advocate, she said, of men and women being safe in the workplace, but added: "I just wish this could have been done in a less public, less hideous way."

One cannot but agree it would have been better if the offended staff member could have approached Sutton personally. He would have responded positively, I’m sure.

 I can remember myself, oh! – it must have been 25 years ago, a woman at a party offered me a plate of sausage rolls. I said: “No thanks dear, I think I’ll give those a miss tonight.” Whereupon she flashed at me: “Don’t you call me dear – I’m not your dear.” I didn’t have time to respond before she sped away with her sausage rolls. How should she have known that I am an old fashioned Cockney from the East-end where a bus conductor can inform a passenger: “Tooting Common next stop dear; or the local butcher can address a customer: “What will it be today dear – some nice sirloin?” The epithet ‘dear’ is common parlance in London Eastend. But then, my unfortunate use of the word was in New Zealand.

Times and sensitivities change – a little towards over sensitivity at times, as when the word Golliwog (a soft doll with a black face and fuzzy hair) in a  children’s story book can lead to protests of racial insensitivity.

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

AM I DEAF OR SOMETHING?

Arabians learn Arabian with the speed of summer lightning.

And Hebrews learn it backwards,

which is absolutely frightening.

But use proper English you're regarded as a freak.

Why can't the English,

Why can't the English learn to speak?

So sang Rex Harrison as Professor Higgins in the musical My Fair Lady, a 1956 Broadway musical based on Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion. The professor has made a bet with a friend that he can transform a cockney flower girl, Eliza

Doolittle, played in the film by Audrey Hepburn, into a lady he can pass off in society simply by teaching her how to speak. The professor gets himself very involved and empresses his exasperation with the inability of the English to speak properly.

Rex Harrison was an excellent choice for the part because he was one of the old school like Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier whose skill had been honed in the theatre, where one had to project one’s voice in order to be heard in the stalls, never mind the gallery. An actor had to speak out; otherwise the audience would be literally left in the dark.

In 1951 Marlon Brando mumbled his way across the silver screen in the film of Tennessee Williams’ Streetcar Named Desire. He used something called Method Acting, a technique developed by Constantin Stanislavski, a Russian actor and director. In this method the actor aims at a complete identification with the person he is portraying. Unfortunately, Brando set a style that inarticulate mumbling under the breath is a sign of realistic acting and the traditional style came to be thought of as old fashioned and theatrical.

Whether they are consciously applying Stanislavsky’s method or not so many modern actors today are bedeviled by the need to mumble under their breath, especially in initiate love scenes. It seems they believe that to speak clearly would somehow violate the intimacy. And so the love scene becomes an exchange of inaudible whispering between the lovers in which the audience is left out.

Am I old fashioned to want to know what is going on in a movie or a novel? A certain amount of mystification I can stand. It’s not only that actors don’t speak English, but the action is too fast or the plots over-mystify. So many mystery series like Midsummer Murders start off quite easy to follow, but gradually winds themselves into such a tangle of complications that I literally lose the plot.

With the forced idleness of recuperation – I have been sick for a few months now – I am discovering my difficulties with television. Audibility and articulation is certainly a problem. I wonder, perhaps if, with US shows, it might help to introduce sub-titles for English speaking audiences !

Shakespeare knew that the play’s not the thing, the audience is the thing. That’s why his characters would often speak asides directly to the audience so that they were included. A play is for the sake of the audience. A play is not to show off the actors or clever directors or fabulously ingenious plots. A play is to enchant the audience; and an audience has to be able to comprehend, to be included, in what is going on.

When being entertained by a play, like most people I’m sure, I have this childish desire to be included in what is going on, to be able to identify with the characters and their lives. Drama as we know it originated in ancient Greece where the audience was very much included. Everyone knew the myths which the theatre dramas played out. There was no mystification. The actors spoke their lines from behind masks and had to project their voices into the open air theater. Moreover, seated in the Greek thearon, everyone knew what was happening to Oedipus in Sophocles’ play – the whole point of the story was that Oedipus didn’t know. He was ignorant of where fate was leading him, but not the audience. They knew in advance his tragic destiny and could be thoroughly involved as it was gradually revealed. But they knew every step beforehand. They knew the story; and as every child will tell you, you have to know how the story goes. Otherwise the whole thing is spoiled.

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

DARWIN’S COMPLAINT

“Up to the age of 30 or beyond it, poetry of many kinds gave me great pleasure, and music very great delight. Even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”¹

What an amazingly insightful admission!

Astonishing that Darwin, probably the greatest scientist of modern times, should see so clearly that his powerful analytical mind has cut him off from his soul, and the awful cost that entails. He has lost his ‘aesthetic sense’, which we take to mean the feeling emotion and sensation as opposed to pure intellectuality.

Darwin recognises that the loss of the aesthetic sense can be detrimental to our ‘moral character’ - a rather old-fashioned expression, better stated as ‘kindness, gentleness and sensitivity. Indeed, these qualities only come into being when I am aware of the other as a person, only when the other person is as real to me as I am to myself. I need the presence of another subject, a first-person singular who can be addressed, implored, reasoned with, and loved. Without the aesthetic sense there is no subject-to-subject encounter. The other person isn’t actually there.  I ride rough shod over them and end up with a distorted version of how they actually are.

Also Darwin sees how the enfeebling of our emotional nature could be ‘injurious to the intellect’.  True. The intellect also fails without the esthetic sense. You have to feel what is there before you can think about it. Without the aesthetic sense you tend to ‘intellectualise’, dismissive of small, but vital details, again riding rough shod over discrepancies in order to bully reality into being what you want it to be.

The intellect begins with curiosity – and curiosity is very careful with details. Observation becomes a magical enthrallment with the finer points of how things actually are – nothing missed or overlooked. Only then can you afford to think.

The aesthetic sense is not interested in theories and structures but in the immediacy of sensation, the flow of life with all its muddle and indeterminacy. But the analytical mind wants a world that can be relied upon. All the facts and observations that Darwin has collected must be reduced to rational truths and so he grinds out general laws that sideline the confusion – very successfully.

This urge to abstract precise principles from the confusion of the world has been called ‘reductionism’. Booming, bustling nature gets explained away. Consistency is the watchword. Oddities get ignored. When something is odd we rush to a general principle to explain it away.

The urge to diminish confusion drives the compulsion to have things shipshape, like in the household where everything has its place.  ‘The fruit go there and the loose veggies there’. Everything in its place and a place for everything. Have you ever been in a household where absolutely nothing is out of place? It’s kind of scary. There is no flow, no confusion, no untidiness – everything is anesthetized and static. That’s interesting, isn’t it: an-esthetized means a loss of sensation - precisely what Darwin was complaining of.

It’s understandable that Darwin should lose his love of poetry and music, but why should it nauseate him. His analytical mind has become so overdeveloped by concentration on establishing principles that his soul has become ‘atrophied’, as he says. But why should poetry now turn his stomach, making him feel sick?

 I will hazard that there is something about the thinking mind, the analytical mind, that is against poetic feeling. The analytical mind doesn’t just neglect the aesthetic sense, but actually feels threatened by it. The naked world is too much, too overwhelming. The analytical mind feels terribly unsafe when confronted by primitive nature. That’s why every morning you forget your dreams. They don’t fit and so get put down.

Aldous Huxley suggested that the analytical mind is like a reducing valve.

 ‘Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed’. ²

No wonder Darwin felt sick – and I’m not feeling too well myself !

¹ The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809-1882.   Collins, London 1958

²   Huxley, Aldous. The Doors of Perception, 1952

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

THE UNEMBODIED

There are few things more disconcerting for the modern western mind than the idea of discarnate, autonomous spirits – souls without bodies. We don’t believe in ghosts any more and we have little faith now that clairvoyants can help us communicate with the souls of the departed.

Yet, during the Victorian area dabbling in spiritualism was popular at all levels of society in both Britain and America. The séance became a feature of drawing room society – sometimes entertaining, sometimes intense and serious. Interest in spiritualism became a veritable counter-culture, in many ways comparable to the 60s revolution in our own time. It tended to upstage current religion, indulge in altered states, and give more power to the intuitiveness of women. By 1855 two million people were followers of the movement.

In some circles the encounters in the darkened séance room could be quite risqué, taking on sexual overtones. Favorite familiars from the ‘other side’ would materialise to entertain the assembled guests, many of them elderly gentlemen who flirted with such ‘apparitions’. The spirit child Pocha ‘stole money and trinkets from the sitters, climbed on the laps of gentlemen, stroked their whiskers, and allowed herself to be kissed and cuddled.’ ¹

In spite of such fraudulent theatricals, sincere spiritualism carried Royal Approval. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert participated in Spiritualist séances. Later, the clairvoyant Georgiana Eagle demonstrated her powers before the Queen at Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight. The Queen’s consort had recently died and the clairvoyant revealed to the Queen the pet name that Prince Albert used for her – a secret that no one else knew. The Queen was impressed.

And there were some very famous people who were deeply involved in spiritualism: William James, the psychologist, studied spiritualism, publishing supportive conclusions; people like Christina Rossetti, John Ruskin, Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling and other famous names were involved.² And in 1840 in The British Society for Psychical Research was founded – and still exists to this day.

I would like to remind my colleagues that Jung himself had an early interest in spiritualism; his mother was a psychic and later in life Jung dialogued with disincarnate spirits. His conversations with Philemon were just that:  ‘He taught me psychological objectivity and the actuality of the soul. He formulated and expressed everything which I had never thought, said Jung.

But the situation gets blurred by his calling Philemon ‘a fantasy figure’, suggesting that he is not an autonomous spirit. Philemon was, Jung said, taken from classical literature. In other words he was a mythical character. Jung thus gives the whole thing a scientific spin by granting objectivity to the spiritual world whilst sidestepping the objectivity of Philemon as an independent spirit. However, I would say, that for Philemon to teach Jung so much he was not simply fictional, he must have been a self-directed, thinking individual, capable intelligent communication.

 But Jung refuses to call a spade a spade, throwing out a smoke screen of mythical references. Such contrived avoidance is evident throughout Jung’s work as he tries to give his occult leanings a scientific spin. He was up against the medical establishment and had to give his writings the appearance of scientific objectivity. So Instead of being legitimate agents, his spirits become ‘archetypes’, seeming to be non-personal myths of the soul-at-large. This same evasion is seen in archetypal psychology where it is de rigueur not to be ‘literal’, but to keep the discussion in the realm of imagery and fantasy, befogging the reader with endless literary references. The simple phenomenological appearance of individual spirits is fudged.  Its all in the imagination.

We can distance ourselves from the whole unreliable farrago of ‘mediums’ who claim to have access to unembodied spirits. They are either cheats or sincere hysterics with over-excitable imaginations.

However, I can’t help looking over my shoulder at the ancient traditions of shamanism among indigenous people the world over or to the priestess at the Delphi’s Temple of Apollo. As Apollo’s voice she made prophesies that determined the political and military strategies of the state. ‘She also made thousands of pronouncements that led to the freeing of slaves, the creation of successful marriages, the honouring of local gods, the successful planting of crops and engagement in trade and industry.’ ³

I can tell you, no one in ancient Greece regarded the Oracle of Delphi as a figment of the imagination.

¹  Owen, Alex. The darkened room: women power and spiritualism in Victorian England. University of Chicago Press, 1989

²    Sword, Helen. Ghostwriting Modernism. Cornell University Press, 2002

³   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oracular_statements_from_Delphi

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