Barbara Holifield
Excerpt of an article published in the Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, Volume 4, Number 1, pp. 19–31, ISSN 1934-2039, e-ISSN 1934-2047. © 2010 Virginia Allan Detloff Library, C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. DOI: 10.1525/jung.2010.4.1.19.
This morning, I walk a few miles from my home to a spot I have come to know over the last decade and a half. I arrive at the stone altar, which is off the trail, tucked back in the chaparral. It is on the end of a ridge that reaches out toward the Pacific Ocean. Here, the land drops to a wide shelf where a lone pine sits on a black rocky outcropping, and then it drops steeply west toward Muir Beach and south to Green Gulch.
There on the shelf in the chaparral, a mule deer stands alert, taking in my arrival, sensing my intent. I still myself and bow my head in greeting and recognition. After a while, it goes on about its grazing, only now and then looking my way. Today is the winter solstice, and the low angle of the sun beams over the leaves in the treetops across the way in Green Gulch, transforming them into a white-sage green light. I remember the last time I was here, a large coyote trotted confidently in the brush, its gorgeous fur shimmering gold and red in the morning sun. I recall the multiple animals I have encountered within 50 yards of here over the years. Once, a bobcat leaped like a kitten out from behind a bush as my friend and I crested the rise. On another occasion, in the midday sun, I turned the bend, finding a mountain lion. We beheld each other. I can easily recall the feeling of a reverberating awe that entered my chest and vibrated down my arms and legs. In the fall, this spot, like others in the Marin Headlands, is a wonderful place to see the migrating raptors: Coopers, Harris, Red Tail, and the magic of the white Marsh Hawk in the dark days of cold fog.
This morning, I also remembered a patient I saw a few years ago. He was a man in his mid-fifties, slightly balding and dressed conservatively. In our second meeting his eyes welled with tears as he told me the pain he had while in town, seeing person after person, leave one of several coffee shops, with their coffee in a doubled paper cup, a cardboard sleeve and a plastic top. When he saw this he imagined the landfills overflowing with trash. My first contained reaction was curiosity about the degree of his emotion, wondering if it might be displaced from his personal relationships, not an unwarranted concern for this man. Yet my next more feelingful response was to simply acknowledge how sensitive he was to something that mattered to him a great deal.
As I remember my patient, I am also remembering the film Slumdog Millionaire, in which two kids’ lives go from bad to worse when their Mom is killed by a band of Hindus attacking Muslims in a slum in Mumbai. The kids later manage to scavenge a life for themselves and make a shelter in the landfill outside of the city. As I sit in this beautiful spot near my home, I imagine that the landfill the kids lived in would easily take up this entire pristine shelf before me as well as spill down Green Gulch and across Muir Beach. This morning, as I recall my tearful patient, the trash that is accumulating in town just minutes from where I sit, and the kid’s lives in Mumbai, the question I have is: Why aren’t we all weeping?
As the urgency of our environmental crisis has pressed in around me, I have wondered how can I bring psyche and our relationship to the natural world more fully into the work of analysis. We are all utterly dependent upon the earth for our going on being. There are many voices, like that of the geologian, Thomas Berry and the phenomenologist David Abram, that call out for us to consider, the earth and the earth community, as subjects to be related to as opposed to objects to be managed, resources to be conserved or used. This is the same wisdom that has been voiced by indigenous tribes from around the globe.
Our evolving understanding of individual psychology has situated the person within the matrix of significant relationships. Just as we bring more emphasis to the notion of mutual recognition, attachment and connection with the other, be it within the mother/child or therapist/patient dyad, I wonder what it might mean to seriously consider the importance of the person in relation to the earth, in the context of psychological and thus analytic process.
Jung often makes reference to our isolation from nature as a source of our psychological disruption, he writes, “No voices now speak to man from stones, plants and animals, nor does he speak to them believing they can hear….This enormous loss is compensated for by the symbols in our dreams.” (CG Jung, pg. 95). In the Vision Seminars he says, “When the great swing has taken an individual into the world of symbolic mysteries nothing comes from it, nothing can come of it, unless it has been associated with the earth, unless it has happened when that individual was in the body. (CG Jung, 1997, italics added).
If part of our pain is from this isolation, then I want to attend fully, both to the symbolic richness and the potency of our lived relational experience with the natural world as it appears in the analytic hour.
Throughout my life I have spent a significant amount of time journeying in the wild lands of this country. In my 20’s and 30’s I often spent 20 days out at a time, usually with others, in small groups, sometimes as a wilderness therapist or guide. These days I am most apt to be simply with friends and family or on my own.
I have come to understand the significance of the wilderness experience is entering into an intimacy with the living world: being in the vivid glow of a red rock canyon at dawn, those walls resonant with silence and the grace note of the canyon wren, the immense delight of drinking sweet clear water from a spring seeping out from porous red walls lined with maiden hair fern, or alternately the silent necessity of me and my companions purifying our drinking water, which had taken days to find, as we had wondered lost in a maze of dry canyons, arriving to witness gnats swarming the dead body of a horse there on the spring banks. In these wild places there is a beauty sparse, potent, and elegant, that reverberates with the harmony of life and death processes, encouraging me to embody that complexity with a like eloquence and quiet.
As I have entered a life within the confines of a consulting room I have grown keen on listening for the natural world wafting in my patients consciousness and mine. Jung’s emphasis on the objective psyche, what I see as not a thing, but as the natural process which moves through us, much like the rhythms and cycles of the living wild world, was a good fit for my sensibilities. I understand the remarkable sense of substance and soul affected in me by the natural world.
If we love and care about someone we are much less likely to exploit them. If I truly understand that I am related to the earth, if indeed there is no me or us without it, similar to how Winicott speaks of there being no baby without the mother, how can I listen more fully to its arrival or absence in the psychoanalytic dialogue? Can any healing be sustained in our world today if this relationship of the human to the more-than-human world remains unknown, disconnected, unconsidered? How do attachment patterns play out in relation to the natural world? How does the natural world aid our healing? Do I perpetuate ecological disruption by not linking the soul of a person to the soul of the world?
With these questions in mind, I reread the story of Narcissus. Narcissus peers into the lake, taken by the beauty of his own reflection, he reaches to gather what he sees into his arms. Each time he reaches, his hands reach past the surface of the lake, breaking up the reflective image yet come up wet with wanting. Again and again he tries to bring this beauty to him each time it eludes him in the same way. There he remains lost to his aching longing and repetitious reach. Unable to inwardly experience, to take the longing that is evoked in him forward in an introspective process of sensing, allowing for what might come into awareness and be known within, he becomes fatally lost to himself. Unable to hear Echo’s voice, he loses the other, unable to see past the surface reflection, he loses sense of the gleaming lake itself.
As I reflect on this tale I am very aware how Narcissus does not behold the lake. This is a myth arising from western culture. As western civilization evolved, our sense of place as humans, as a subsystem of the earth community fell away. Humans with their capacity to reason and willfully alter the land for their own preservation rose with an ever-gaining attitude of dominance over other elements and species. Perhaps the myth of Narcissus is an early story, which depicts not only a loss of connection with the depths within an individual psyche but also a concomitant loss, in the midst of the developing western culture, of a sense of the depth of our interrelatedness with the elemental world. The lake offered Narcissus a reflection of his own beauty. Though he broke through the surface reflection with his longing reach, he could not see the rippling water or the lake’s depth, which might have broken his trance.
In light of this reading of Narcissus, I want to introduce some clinical work, particularly work with one analysand, whom I will call Rene, and through this share some of the thoughts I have been working with over time about psyche and our relation to the natural world.
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