Spiraling Onward

In surfing the Internet, I came across a site on Suite 101 that reminds me of how I first became interested in Jungian psychology. Though the long-range outcome of that period of time, now well in my past, for me has been one of great meaning, the events at the time felt horrible. For many years I had a desire to write about some of my worst experiences in order to convey a message of assurance that healing is possible to anyone in similar circumstances. Then as time passed, I drifted into ambivalence about again suffering through memories of depression and anxiety in order to do that writing. In a roundabout way in my articles on Jungian psychology, I have tried to convey some of my positive experience and thereby, hopefully, a sense of the possibilities of Jung's approach to healing and growth through the individuation process.

When I use the word "wholeness" in writing about the individuation process, I do not use it lightly. I said once in an autobiographical exercise for a writing class that at mid-life I "cracked up, and then life became interesting." Actually the fracturing didn't occur at midlife; it merely came to light then. Circumstances at the time were triggers that forced me to come to grips with parts of myself that had long been shut out of my conscious world. In desperation I sought help.

The therapist whom I saw took a Jungian approach. For years she said things that I could not fully comprehend. I thought I understood at an intellectual level, but what I came to see with hindsight is that some things have to be experienced in order to be understood wholly. At the time when I was in crisis and felt so hopeless, I wanted a quick fix. Just wave the magic wand and make everything okay. I had no concept of how limited my old "normal" life had been and how shaped and bound I was by the old collective messages and psychic wounds I had gathered in my life to that point.

I teach literature, and poems often come to mind as apt metaphors for what I have experienced over the years in the course of therapy and the continuing path of individuation. One that has come to mind recently is Oliver Wendell Holmes' "The Chambered Nautilus." As Holmes describes the shell of a creature of the sea, he draws a lesson in life from the fact that it continually outgrows its old compartment and builds a larger one. His final stanza begins, "Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul..." and he goes on to express the idea of continuing to build until life ends. I first am intrigued by the fact that the animal Holmes chose to immortalize here is a sea creature, the sea being a symbol for the unconscious. It is by delving into the unconscious and making those miserable descents that we are able to bring back to consciousness more of who we really are.

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