Also by James Hollis, PhD

Harold Pinter: The Poetics of Silence

The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning at Mid-Life
Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men
Tracking the Gods: The Place of Myth in Modern Life
Swamplands of the Soul: New Life from Dismal Places
The Eden Project: In Search of the Magical Other
The Archetypal Imagination
Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path
On This Journey We Call Our Life
Mythologems: Incarnations of the Invisible World
Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life
Why Good People Do Bad Things: Exploring Our Darker Selves
What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life
© 2013 by Chiron Publications. All rights reserved. No part of this
publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher, 932 Hendersonville Road, Suite 104,
Asheville, NC 28803.

Book and cover design by Marianne Jankowski.

Cover art: Spectral Presences, by Jill Hollis, oil on canvas.

“My Ghost” from Everything Else in the World by Stephen Dunn, © 2006
by Stephen Dunn. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Co. Inc.

Paul Hoover, “Theory of Margins,” used with the kind permission of Paul
Hoover.

Gunnar Ekelof, “Etudes III,” translation by Robert Bly. Reprinted with the
kind permission of Robert Bly.

Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hollis, James, 1940-
Hauntings : dispelling the ghosts who run our lives / James Hollis, PhD.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-888602-62-3 (alk. paper)
1. Autobiographical memory. 2. Subconsciousness. 3. Influence
(Psychology) 4. Ghosts--Psychological aspects. I. Title.
BF378.A87H65 2013
155.9'2--dc23

2013014253
 This book is for
Jill
Taryn, Jonah, Seah,
and
Timothy, who is always with me

With special thanks to Liz Harrison,

agent and friend,
and
Siobhan Drummond,
whose fine eye was most helpful in the manuscript
. . . the ghosts who let you sleep,
who speak, if they speak at all,
into the ear closest to the pillow,

offer you assurances of dawn

while their vaguely palpable bodies
touch you like a strange wind . . .

—STEPHEN DUNN, “SLEEPING WITH GHOSTS”

 CONTENTS
Preface: Spectral Presences
1. The Haunting of Untold Stories
2. On Synchronicity and Quantum Physics
3. The Ghosts of Our Parents
4. Hauntings as Complexes
5. Our Danse Macabre: Relational Ghosts, Relational Hauntings
6. Guilt Ghosts, Shame Ghosts
7. Ghosts and Things That Go Bump in the Night
8. Betrayal's Lingering Ghosts
9. The Sailor Cannot See the North: The Haunted Soul of Modernism
10. Dispelling Ghosts by “Going Through”
11. The Haunting of the Unlived Life
Bibliography
 PREFACE
Spectral Presences

This is not a book about ghosts in the usual sense of that term. There will
be no Ebenezer Scrooge on these pages, no ghost of Marley dragging his
lockboxes behind him to mess up the day for a miserly narcissist. But we
all drag such noisy metallic boxes behind us. Can you not hear them? Can
you not see them in your family? Can you not see them rippling through
the pages of the daily newspaper? Henrik Ibsen did, and well before depth
psychology as we know it came to be. He deeply intuited the impact of
unexamined history upon the present. After all he called his 1882 play
Ghosts, for he felt that his Oslo contemporaries were governed by invisible
presences: dead ancestral influences, dead values, and deadly scripts to
enact. And thus he has one of his characters say,

But I'm inclined to think that we're all ghosts . . . it's not only the
things that we've inherited from our fathers and mothers that live on
in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and old dead beliefs, and things
of that sort. They're not actually alive in us, but they're rooted there
all the same, and we can't rid ourselves of them. I've only to pick up
a newspaper, and when I read it I seem to see ghosts gliding
between the lines. I should think there must be ghosts all over the
country—as countless as grains of sand. And we are, all of us, so
pitifully afraid of the light.1

James Joyce—who spent his brilliant, wretched, fugitive life in exile,

writing only about his accursed/beloved Eire—came to a similar
conclusion in his 1914 story, “The Dead.” He knew that he had to leave his
country, his church, and his family. What he loved most, because it was
governed by the past—foreign hegemony, the oppressive church, the
burden of tradition, collective expectation, and practice—no longer truly
loved him, valued him as the unique soul he was. So, when he looked
around the bustle of Dublin he saw not life but death, and the gradual
graying of souls by the weight of that collective burden. Thus, “One by
one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other
world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally
with age.”2 And thus he flung himself into a life of poverty and exile,
supported only by his much put upon Nora and his own, obsessive,
mythopoetic genius.
Contemporaneously, his countryman W. B. Yeats obsessively chased
ghosts, joining several societies who sought direct connection with the
spirit world, among them the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. His
wife, whom he first met in one of these societies, allegedly channeled the
voices of this spirit world, who came, fortunately, to “bring him metaphors
for poetry.”3 Several of his twenty-six plays, including his last, the 1938
Purgatory, dealt directly with the presence of the other world in the affairs
of this one. During the same era—a time between the erosion of biblical
literalism and the demonstrably inadequate surrogates of contemporary
culture—Carl Jung discovered that his mother was a medium; he attended
more than one séance and later wrote his medical school doctoral
dissertation on the “voices” which came through one of those occult
encounters as embodied in his equally mediumistic cousin Hélène
Preiswerk. But he too was not satisfied by their answers; he searched for
and, I believe, found a psychological explanation for those disembodied
voices and, having ruled out fraud and chicanery, explored ways those
spectral presences might be honored without being literalized.
In Jung's heuristic studies, and his mapping of the rich terrain of the
human psyche, we move from fear, superstition, and projection triggered
by encountering the profound mysteries of the world we inhabit to
understanding that all mental events, finally, are within us. No matter what
we encounter in the outer world, whatever its autonomous, material form,
we experience it, process it, and value it through our individual and
collective psychologies. So it is, and so it has been, although there are
those who have been burned at the stake for saying so.
The task before us, then, is to consider more fully how we are all
governed by the presence of these invisible forms which move through us,
and through history, and to understand them psychologically without
“psychologizing” them. To psychologize is to reduce something to a
merely mental state. Throughout most of recorded human history people
have believed in ghosts and the like: daimons who visit both poets and the
mad, angels who reportedly mediate the spiritual orders, not to mention
incubi and succubi, and a host of other psychic phenomena and states of
possession. Our predecessors considered the contiguous boundaries
between visible and invisible worlds highly fluid, highly permeable. Jung
has described this pervasive phenomenon:

Among primitives . . . the imago, the psychic reverberation of the

sense perception, is so strong and so seriously coloured that when it
is reproduced as a spontaneous memory-image it sometimes even
has the quality of an hallucination. Thus when the memory image of
his dead mother suddenly reappears to a primitive, it is as if it were
her ghost that he sees and hears. We only “think” of the dead, but
the primitive actually perceives them because of the extraordinary
seriousness of his mental images. This explains the primitive's
belief in ghosts and spirits; they are what we simply call “thoughts.”
When the primitive “thinks,” he literally has visions, whose reality
is so great that he constantly mistakes the psychic for the real.4

There are mysteries, to be sure, and we will never fully understand the
ineffable dimensions of our lives. Yet to understand them
“psychologically” is to obtain two gifts:

greater possible personal freedom through understanding from whence

come the influences which govern our daily lives, and how we might
bring consciousness to oppose them when necessary and serve them
when desirable;
and to understand that so much of what bewitches the ego into
literalism and slavish service can be seen in depth for what it is—a
received, inherited, culturally contrived energy system and not one
rising from “the gods” or from our soul's holistic intent.

But to begin this study, I have to confess that this particular book began
with a “haunting” of sorts, a disturbing presence that would not go away
until I began to pay attention. I was finally obliged to ask, Why have you
come? And what do you want of me? These are disturbing questions, but
to flee them produces only compensatory symptoms and further haunting.
One morning I awoke with an intriguing dream whose motifs were
peculiar, puzzling, even hilarious, but nonetheless imperious. I dreamt I
was in my house with my wife and daughter (both the house and locus
were amorphous, anonymous). I had been instructed by someone that in
the other room was the body of General Grant, yes, that one, Ulysses S.
Grant, leader of the Union Army and later eighteenth president of the
United States. It was my ambiguous charge to guard or protect his body
until some anonymous authority would arrive to pick it up and deal with it
properly. In the strange logic of dream life, I did not question this
assignment, but took it on without question.
From time to time I would walk into the other room and look at the
form, which was covered by a blanket. After a couple of such visits I
noticed the blanket had shifted, progressively revealing a bit of the body. I
asked my companion if she had moved the blanket, but she demurred. I
visited the room again, and the blanket was further disturbed and now
revealed the upper torso of the late general. Knowing this was peculiar, I
looked around for other “agents” who might have moved the blanket, even
air currents that might have ruffled the covering, but saw none. A
subsequent visit revealed that the body itself had shifted position and now
had a grimace on the countenance, one that suggested annoyance.
With considerable apprehension, I bent down and whispered in the face
of the general, “Are you angry.” There was the mildest stir, and I heard a
faint grunt from the corpse that sounded like “yes.”
At this point I fled the room and told my companion, “He is alive,
somehow . . . alive!” She suggested that I call some authority and tell them
that the general was still alive. So, for some reason not clear to me, I called
a pharmacy instead and told them, “General Grant is still alive, and oh, by
the way, I need some pens!” To my dismay, the pharmacist who answered
cut me off and shifted me to the pens department, and I felt intense
frustration that the real message—the general was still alive—had neither
been delivered nor grasped. At that moment, the alarm clock rang, and I
was summoned to a day of work. I felt deep dissatisfaction that I would not
know how that dream would come out. It felt, as dreams often do, as if it
had taken place over several hours rather than minutes. Moreover, I
preferred to know the ending to the story rather than respond to the
responsibilities of that day, and I suspected that the ordinary world of
appearances and obligations would once again trump an aperture into the
extraordinary other world of dreams.
As I stood in the morning shower I puzzled over the dream, smiling at
its bizarre imagery. Then a quote of which I am quite fond came to mind,
and I understood why this dream had been presented to me by whatever
intrapsychic powers exist. The observation is from the novelist William
Faulkner, who once opined that “the past is not dead, it is not even past.” I
then understood the meaning of that dream in the context of my present
life.
I am at a point in the aging process, and in my professional life, where I
would like to throttle back a bit. I have burned the tires to the nub or, in the
words of West Texas, been “rode hard and put up wet.” I had already
published my thirteenth book and decided that one was the last one! Surely
by now I had said everything that I had to say—the last two chapters
modestly addressed the riddle of death and asserted that the meaning of
life is found in the journey and not the destination. What else is there
beyond such themes? And frankly, I was tired of hearing myself talk. At
the same time, now, as had happened with my previous books, there were
occasional nudges from the unconscious: a flash of a picture, a half-formed
thought, an intimation of some task coupled with a feeling response. For
me writing is both a joy and a pain, as it is for most people. It is what I find
most mysterious, most onerous, most imperious and demanding, and most
rewarding in the doing, or better, the having done it . . . and I was
thoroughly tired of it. As the novelist Thomas Mann once observed,
“writing is an activity which is especially difficult for those who are
writers,” and I wanted a normal life for a change. What could be wrong
with coming home and talking more to my wife, or watching the Rockets
game, or reading a book hammered from someone else's smithy?
Still, one theme keeps coming back to me in personal life, in daily
psychotherapeutic practice, and in watching the spectacle of history unfold
in its familiar ways: the persistence of the past. We all believe we are self-
made people, living consciously, making right choices, meaning well, and
only when the consequences pile up around us do we ever question this
presumption. On those dolorous occasions we may even be driven to ask,
What is really going on here? Who is in charge of my life, really?
Collectively, we live in a culture that discards the past as irrelevant, and
individually we are convinced that we create ourselves anew every day.
But as a therapist in dialogue with a client, working in this palpable world
every hour, hour after hour, it has been ineluctably forced upon me that we
also swim in a tenebrous sea of “timeless” time. It is not that we are
dwelling in the past in our therapeutic work, but we are inevitably impelled
to witness that the present moment is informed by the past, driven by its
imperatives, its prescriptions and proscriptions. Either we are repeating it
by serving its message, or trying to escape it, or we have evolved our
unconscious “treatment plan” for it. Either way, the past calls the shots, at
least until it is flushed out into the full light of consciousness. But who
really wants to deal with the possibility that they might be repeating or
running from their parent's lives rather than living their own? Who wants
to look at the possibility that we are dumping bad karma onto the
generations that follow us?
I have also learned, by personal experience, professional training, and
clinical example, that there is a deeper intelligence than our egos at work
in the lives of all of us. (What, after all, produced this weird dream? I
certainly did not conjure it forth from any conscious frame.) Our egos are
fragile wafers on a vast sea, even as our separate biographies float in the
flotsam and jetsam of histories not our own. Sensing its fragility in this
overwhelming mare nostrum, the ego inflates its importance and
proclaims, mostly to itself: I know who I am; I am in charge here; I know
what I know; and what I know is sufficient to make proper decisions for
myself. Sometimes, more often frequently, the aftermath of such inflation
obliges reconsideration and recrimination, and we wonder, What was I
thinking? or we recognize that there were other factors at work than those
of which we were conscious at the moment. Such moments of insight are
humbling, even humiliating, but from them we gain a grudging sense of
the presence of the invisible in the midst of the visible world.
Now, back to the bizarre dream of the dead general who, it seemed, was
not dead. I had recently read a new biography of Abraham Lincoln, given
that we have celebrated his bicentennial anniversary, not to mention having
grown up in Springfield, Illinois, and having Lincoln as an inescapable
part of my psychic tapestry.5 Grant, another citizen of Illinois, was not
someone I was drawn to, although I must admit I was profoundly
impressed by how he, like the great Rail-Splitter, had, through persistence,
gone on to a large destiny after a series of first half of life failures. I also
was moved by how, given his parlous presidency and the economic turmoil
of his day, which parallels that of the present, Grant, dying of cancer,
heroically wrote his autobiography to help support his family. (There were
no talk shows then or affluent groups that would pay handsomely for a
celebrity to visit and utter banalities, as recent politicians are doing as I
write.) Rather, in the face of pain and despair, and imminent death, he
summoned himself to write. He finished the book that would support his
family just days before he died of cancer.
Could it be that this image might have some meaning to me? Could it be
that the corpse was “angry” because he was being treated as dead when he
wasn't dead yet? Could it be that, contrary to my will, I was entrusted with
this responsibility for the past, that my lethargic consciousness around just
“sitting with the dead” was no longer permissible, and that whether I
wanted to or not, I was being directed by some authoritative other to the
pens department? What, one wonders, would one be expected to do with a
pen? Could it be that the autonomous psyche was calling me back to my
vocation, quite independent of the ego's whining desire for surcease, and
that, as Jung observed in his essay on the attainment of personhood, the
summons to live our journey is a vocatus, a calling forth, quite separate
from one's conscious desires? Could it be that the Self, the superordinate
wisdom and purposive energy of each person, has little interest in my
comfort or my petty wishes but has at least one more assignment to give?
To think so would, in the climate of our fugitive, hedonistic time, either be
pretty peculiar . . . or pretty compelling.
For the reader who is new to the work with the psyche, the dream of
General Grant seems like a bizarre fantasy, the kind we all have and
dismiss as silly: the product of indigestion or a replay of what we saw on
the late night news before going to sleep. I used to believe that. After all,
what could be more improbable than the muse showing up, unbidden, in
the form of General Grant? But I have spent the last few decades working
with the invisible world that drives this visible plane and now know better.
I knew enough to not dismiss the dream even though at first I thought it
both humorous and opaque. I also know enough to keep worrying it about,
and slowly, inevitably, through a long day of appointments with others,
fragments of insight floated to the surface: the dead are not dead; the
Illinois lads rebound and push through fatigue and imminent defeat until
they arrive at destiny; destiny commands, whether with pen or sword, and
imposes a sacred obligation to show up in the face of one's desire for a
normal, casual life.
Such engagements with mystery are what life calls us to. It is not what
we want but what life, apparently, wants of us. To believe this, one then
has to believe also in mystery of some kind, that is, that we are more than
merely material bodies that dance awhile and then just rot away. If we
really understood this life, it would not be mystery, and whatever we
understood would only be a petty artifact of the limited tools of conscious
life. There are other forces afoot of which consciousness has only the
dimmest of understandings, though our ancestors have reported similar
encounters, and left behind quite disparate accounts, for millennia.
Do any of us really believe that we are here to make money and then
die? Are we here just to propagate the species anew? Why bother then?
Why not just “lose, and have done with losing,” as Samuel Beckett wrote
in Endgame. What animates this matter at birth, courses through us,
registers its opinion through our autonomous feelings, our somatic and
energy systems, and then departs at death? What drives our species to the
symbolic life, whether it be a concerto or a concentration camp? What
does life ask of us, and how are we to answer that summons? Does life
matter, in the end, and if so, how, and in what fashion? As children we all
asked, indeed lived, these questions, and many of us have forgotten them
in the steady drumbeat and reiterative abuses of daily life. But our choices
reflect our values and our putative answers to these questions, whether we
are conscious of them or not. Being more conscious then is both a
summons and an obligation. My dream was a summons, and this text is an
obligation.
And so this is the beginning of my next book. It is not my choice, at
least not the “I” who addresses the reader directly at this moment. It is,
however, not “I” as ego consciousness, but some other “I” who is called
into service, who timorously steps out onto the road, marching south
toward places unknown, into the unconscious. Years before me those other
Illinois sons marched to many strange, terrible, compelling places with
magical names like Chickamauga, Shiloh, Manassas, Chickahominy,
Spotsylvania, Antietam—opalescent jewels on a skein of suffering. They,
too, surely, were weary and afraid, and still they went, and we honor them
for going. Who knows what magical places we will be brought to visit in
our time, for the forces that move us all course deeper than we can ever
understand. The past is not dead; it is not even past. And what we resist
will persist—as haunting.
Notes
1. Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts and Other Plays (New York: Penguin, 1964), 61.
2. James Joyce, “The Dead,” in Dubliners (New York: Dover Publications, 1991), 152.
3. W. B. Yeats, Introduction to A Vision (New York: MacMillan, 1938), 8.
4. C. G. Jung, Psychological Types, vol. 6, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1971), par. 46.
5. Michael Burlingame, The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln (Champaign: University of Illinois
Press, 1997).
 CHAPTER 1

The Haunting of Untold Stories

There's always someone haunting someone—haunting someone
And you know who I am
Though I never leave my name or number
I'm locked inside of you . . .
—CARLY SIMON, “HAUNTING”
To ordinary consciousness, we seem to be corporeal bodies, mostly, fixed
by gravity and stitched by pain and mortality to this gravid earth. But we
are, rather, systems, energies, exchanges, projections, programs, force
fields, and continuous enactments of tenebrous scripts both conscious and
unconscious. What animates this assemblage of matter that we inhabit
when we are born? What blows spiritus into the lungs of the bawling
infant? That spiritus—ésprit, re-spiration, in-spiration—is energy, a force
field blowing, blowing through eternity into time-bound bodies whose
curving trajectory brings them inexorably back to earth. Even as plummet-
bound bodies, decaying, dying as we lurch through life, we remain
nonetheless force fields of energy, dancing on the grave of history and
aflame with eternal fires.
When I think about “story,” I think of a shaping spirit, an informing
intentionality. We may call it narrative, plot line, and, cumulatively,
biography, with a predictable end but with infinite permutations along the
way. As Hemingway reminded us, if you don't have the hero die at the end,
you just didn't finish the story. But is that the story, really, the only story?
Perhaps. Perhaps not.
If we could materialize our invisible psychic life, make it tangibly
visual, we would perhaps see it as a congeries of energy streams. We
would acquire a much more psychological perspective if we could
transform most of our nouns into verbs. It makes for inelegant English, for
sure, but we need to think of the Self as an energy source “selving” and
our stories “storying” through us. Our ego, in service to understanding and
the need for control, converts the elemental processes in life into nouns.
We foolishly convert even “the gods” into nouns, into objects “up there,”
looking down, rather than metaphors for the autonomous, mysterious
energies of the universe. The ego reifies its understanding of being,
oversimplifies it, concretizes it, and tries to fix it in service to stability,
predictability, and, most of all, control—all in the face of the transforming,
autonomous nature of “naturing.” In every moment, the ego is driven to
fixate, stop, grab hold of, and control, even while cells are dying,
rebirthing, and transforming, even as psychological matrices enact their
recondite agendas as well. Understandably, we are obsessively compelled
to ask what provides unity amid this discontinuity. What offers an answer
to Goethe's paradox, “Was Dauert im Wechseln?”—what provides
continuity amid change? what abides amid transience?
The answer of the theologues is that God is the abiding presence. Or, as
the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in the nineteenth century, in
a poem celebrating the abundance, variety, and multiplicity of this concrete
world,

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.1

To the Buddhist, the idea of permanency is delusory. All is flow,

transition, passing, especially this transient ego state. To the conventional
ego, identity is memory, intention, as well as the manifold structures we
create and which then define us. To the depth psychologist, it is the Self
that, transcendent to the ego, provides autonomous continuity, even when
memory fades or trauma intrudes. Thus we breathe without ordering the
lungs to their inhalant labors, autonomously pounding primal tom-toms in
the scarlet chambers of the heart, pushing oxygen through the capillaries to
outlying provinces, and metabolizing sugars and proteins in service to the
hearty appetites of blood, bone, and beef. Who or what but a reality
superordinate to the ego is running this bizarre operation? What but a
transcendent, yet inner, presence could attend all these operations and get
it (mostly) right?
And what guiding intelligence weaves the threads of an individual
biography; what hauntings of the invisible world invigorate, animate, and
direct the multiple narratives of daily life? Timeless sagas unwind their
narrative skeins in each of us: a genetic story, older than memory; an
archetypal story that forms, shapes, and directs in service to adaptation and
meaning; a socially constructed story, such as gender, or race, or class, by
which we are so often bewitched as to grant them ontological status
despite their fictive origins. And then there are the compelling complexes
which are splinter stories, splinter identities, splinter scripts, splinter
mythologems.
We all have complexes because we all have a history, and history
charges our psychic life with energized clusters of valence. Some
complexes exercise a benign, protective role in our lives. Without some
positive experience of bonding and trust, we would be prevented from
forming commitments and relationships. Yet others bind us to trauma,
immaturity, and outdated prejudicial perspectives. The recrudescence of
these fragmentary histories invariably usurps our purchase on the present
and plunges us into our replicative pasts. Some complexes even dominate
an entire life.
Consider, for example, the pathetic story of Franz Kafka. One of
history's keenest writers, he lived miserably with his parents in Prague,
loathed himself, sabotaged his relationships with women, and suffered
numerous psychosomatic illnesses. What produced all this? His
domineering father, miserable in his own life, convinced his son that he
was similarly miserable and effectively doomed Franz's journey. Franz's
only respite from this spiritually infested home was through an aesthetic
sublimation of his suffering, producing luminous attempts at self-analysis
through his strange parabolic stories and paradoxes. Even then he
attempted literary suicide by requesting that his oeuvre be destroyed (a
request fortunately refused by his friend and executor Max Brod). Twice
he was engaged to Felice Bauer but backed off from marriage. Their
concrete embodiment felt too incursive, and so he remained distanced,
aloof, spectral. “Letter writing,” he once observed to Fraulein Bauer, is “an
intercourse with ghosts, not only with the ghost of the receiver, but with
one's own, which emerges between the lines of the letter being written . . . .
Written kisses never reach their destination, but are drunken en route by
these ghosts.”2 Apparently, forbidding spectral presences stood between
these two and intercepted those kisses. One is reminded of E. E.
Cummings's remark in “since feeling is first” that whomever pays attention
to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you.
A friend of Kafka observed that Kafka served a god in which he did not
believe. Do not we all so serve such residual, resident “deities”? Do not we
all serve spectral presences, primal complexes, ghostly admonitions,
ephemera which bind us to our past? Do not we all worship at the shrine of
the dead every day, and does not such unconscious bondage reduce the
scope of the life we might otherwise be living?
What would you do if you were free, unfettered by the claims of the
past? Just today I spoke with a client who had reacted with tears and
sleeplessness when she had to reverse herself and seemingly break her
word to another. It was not so much that the demands of the situation
required her to change course, but that such a posture placed her back in
the realm of childhood where the ill opinion of another was not only scary,
but potentially lethal. No wonder she could not sleep. Another client, a
therapist in supervision, lamented her rage against her dying parent, how it
floods her with guilt and ambivalence, and how it creeps into her work
with her own clients. When one has resided long enough in a toxic zone,
one carries the toxin within, always, and all one can do is flush it out into
the realm of consciousness and wrestle with it. In the case of the therapist,
she is summoned to an awareness that her attendance upon her mother may
be compassionate but no longer compromised by the infant's need for her
approval. Given that such approval never came, or at least was never freely
found without crippling conditions attached, grants this spectral presence
an immense power in her present psychic economy. She, too, continues to
worship a god in whom she also no longer believes.
As for Kafka, most of his destructive turmoil derived from the untold
story of his father and the perversity of a parent's personal problem. What
unlived life, what self-loathing in the father served as a transferred spectral
presence in the child's life to devour his son's spirit? How one wishes one
could have intervened to help the child flee this psychic miasma and lead a
normal life. But was Franz Kafka ever to have a normal life, born as he
was into a haunted house, a house dominated by a father who doubtless
had his own determinative ghosts harrying him into persecuting his own
child, the simulacrum of his own lost, disconnected past? This is why Jung
observed that the greatest burden the child must bear is the unlived life of
the parent. That is, wherever the parent is stuck, the child will be similarly
stuck and will spend his or her life seeking to overthrow such noxious
stuckness, evolving an unconscious treatment plan whose purpose is to
assuage the pain of the psychic burden of this static past.3
So, what is the “real” story of our lives? Are they all real or all unreal,
all provisional? There are the stories we tell ourselves, and the stories we
tell others. Some of them may even be true. But what are the stories which
are storying their way through our daily lives and of which we are mostly
if not wholly unaware? What are the stories that represent our
rationalizations, our defenses, the stories in which we remain stuck like
flies in molasses?
All of us suffer the fallacy of overgeneralization, namely, what was
“true,” or appeared true, remains a defining point of reference, a prompting
script for us in ever-new situations. What past wounds to our self-esteem
show up today in our deflections from our deepest truths or our
overcompensation and grandiosity in reaction to scripts foreign to our
souls? What stories did we acquire as children, what marching orders did
we receive to serve in the remaining chapters of our history? Were we to
be the unseen child, the fixer, the scapegoat, the marginalized? How do
those stories persist in the present?
We know from depth psychology that we have coping devices which
click in automatically and protect us, sometimes by denying stories,
sometimes by identifying with them. Sometimes we project fractal scripts,
palimpsests of possibility, onto others and then relate to them as if this is
who they are rather than recognizing them as fictive characters in our inner
drama. Thus we unwittingly seek out persons to play and replay our
persecutors, or rescuers, or victims. Sometimes we repress stories, and
their presence may only be surmised when they leak into our dreams, our
bodies, our children, our anaesthetizing addictions. Sometimes we
dissociate from or condemn others when they enact our secret lives and
embody our shadow, which is always repulsive to the ego. The vastness of
the human psyche is such that we will never know it fully, or even in
significant measure. So we who pride ourselves on being conscious, lead
lives in service to stories, some conscious but construed and witnessed
aslant, some unconscious but persistent, and almost always binding us to a
past over which we had no control. Given the ubiquity of these silent
formative narratives, what is our alternative to struggling for a precious
purchase on consciousness over against whatever agencies are there
dictating our lives?

Let us look at two stories that remained untold and yet whose influences
seeped into the reality of everyday life. The first story is the family
narrative of my good friend Stephen Dunn, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet,
and the second is the fictive account of novelist Bernard Schlink in his
novel The Reader.
Stephen has written about this story in various poems and has given me
permission to use it here, so I am not revealing something profoundly
private, though it certainly was kept private in his childhood. Stephen told
me once that he knew there was a frosty distance between his mother and
father, but he didn't know why. His father would sit in his rocking chair at
night and read and drink, and in the morning Stephen would find him with
a half-empty bottle and half-finished book.
Stephen wrote of how he would be sent to fetch his father at the local
pub and bring him home for supper. He worshipped his father, who once
took him to see a hurricane whip up the frothing sea at the Rockaways,
after which they were both scolded by his mother out of her protective, and
equally correct, love. So the child sat between them, amid more familiar
stormy weather, knowing that other, more opaque currents of destruction
whipped about each evening repast. Given the child's limited purview,
intuiting something was amiss, but lacking the powers of adult
comprehension, what else was he to conclude but, “I must have thought
damage / is just what happens”?4 The child normalizes the abnormal.
While his psyche “knows,” and registers its seismographic readings, the
child is unable to draw upon any powers to effect clarity, change, or
resolution in the outer world.
What was that damage, one wonders? Why this estrangement? What
were the causes? All remained lost until later, much later. Then, as Stephen
wrote me in an e-mail, “I learned the truth of the situation from my father
when I was sixteen. He was drunk, but what he said was clearly true, and
he swore me to secrecy.” Stephen learned that his mother had looked to
their savings and found them missing. When she queried her husband, he
lied to covered up a situation.

The money went to my maternal grandfather whose mistress had

been hospitalized. My grandfather had run out of money paying her
bills, and he asked my father for help. He was never able to pay him
back, and one day my mother saw the bankbook devoid of their
savings and asked where it had gone. My father said he had lost it at
the track, evidently not wanting to tell his wife that her father had a
mistress. Grandfather died shortly thereafter; no one fessed up, and
my father was treated as a kind of wastrel for the rest of his life. He
died at fifty-nine of a heart attack. After an earlier heart attack, he
had been told to stop drinking, but instead redoubled his effort.

So, a noble gesture, an untold story, becomes a spectral presence which

haunts the family, ruins a marriage, and scars the life of the child. As
Stephen further wrote me, “I loved all the actors. I know that the
knowledge of these stories contributed to my silence, and to a lifelong
proclivity toward ambivalence, of siding with every side.” Notice those
qualities of personality: silence and ambivalence. Perhaps useful in many
life circumstances, but are they really chosen, or rather obliged? They
remind one of Joyce's autobiographical character Stephen Dedalus, who
said that he felt obliged to effect “silence, exile, and cunning” in order to
protect himself and to pick his way through the thicket of his life.
Stephen Dunn's life and verse remain haunted by these perplexities. Two
decades after writing of his parent's marital secret, he returns to the primal
scene in a poem titled “My Ghost,” in which he writes,

An outgoing man, my father once held back

a truth that would have rescued him from sadness.
Now he roams the night, my inheritance
In every word I hear him speak. He vanishes,
returns, no place for him in this entire world.5

A truth that would rescue us from sadness . . . surely we ought to speak it

now and free ourselves from such Sisyphean sorrow! But honor calls, truth
is withheld, and silence and exile eventuate. Stephen's inheritance
manifests every day in invisible but compelling ways. What place is there,
then, for us in this haunted world?
Stephen's father died while his son was studying in Spain. That night
Stephen and his wife were awakened by a pounding on the roof. There was
no storm, no branch above, no natural explanation. In the morning a
telegram from New York arrived saying that his father had died that very
hour. Stephen and his wife were convinced, rational souls as they were,
that it was his ghost pounding on the roof to be let in, or at least to say
good-bye. It made no sense, but they were both terrified and both were
summoned to the numinous mystery of haunting. Who is to say that that
man's spirit was not in fact seeking a home, for a moment at least, or a
farewell to what mattered in his life, in his passage from this spinning
earth, the only home we know? And who is to say that, as Stephen intuits,
his spirit does not still roam, an ancient mariner with the albatross of an
untold story about his neck, seeking someone to hear and to welcome him
home? Who is to say that in many of our moments there is not some
unbidden spirit who seeks solace and welcome from us, as Philemon and
Baucis respectfully welcomed the godly strangers who passed their humble
abode? It is only when we welcome such spirits and give them entrance
that they may reveal themselves to us. When we open to ask what comes to
us, why it has come, we may grow and be enlarged by the dialogue that
emerges. When we deny them entrance, they do not go away. They go
underground, persist, perseverate, and prevail. All ghosts will tell us, if we
listen, that we ourselves will come some day to say, along with Stanley
Kunitz in “Passing Through,” “I only / borrowed this dust.”6 When the
dust is returned to this earth, the energy that animated it perhaps persists in
other forms. At least it does not hurt to ask what that past might be asking
of us. Then damage is not “just what happens,” but rather is the residue
that keeps on keeping on.
Only dialogue with such “stuff” provides release. The question of how
we do this is addressed later in this book, but it suffices now to ask
ourselves this very practical question: What do these powers, these issues,
make me do, or what do they keep me from doing? Often, intuitively, we
know the answer immediately, and if we do not, we keep asking the
question until it comes to us at three in the morning, or in the shower, or
while we are driving in heavy traffic. We do know, though often we do not
know that we know.

Another form of the untold story appears in the fine novel The Reader by
Bernhard Schlink. A young man is taken in by an older woman who helps
him, seduces him, and quickly captures his soul as only first love can. The
youth obsesses about her, follows her at her job as a tram driver, and is
frequently critically rebuked by her, all the while enjoying hot sex. Even
so, she professes feelings for him and asks him to read novels to her. He
introduces her to the classics that he is reading in school. She is as much
hooked by the intellectual world these books open to her as he is to the
sensual world she has opened for him. Mysteriously, she moves away, and
he mourns her with the typical ghastly grief of the adolescent, the
Liebeswahn or “love madness,” which all of us have suffered at some time.
The youth goes on to graduate from the university and attends law
school, where his international law professor takes the class to one of the
war crimes trials which are then transpiring in post–World War II
Germany. To his astonishment and horror, his seducer is sitting in the dock
as one of several concentration camp guards accused of atrocities. Of all of
the accused, she alone takes responsibility for signing a document that
acknowledges their role in burning prisoners to death, and the other
defendants are happy to let her. While all of the defendants are convicted,
she receives the longest sentence.
The young man cum lawyer reviews her strange acquiescence to the
charges being piled on and compares it with other memories of their time
together. He realizes that the secret of her “untold story” is that she is
illiterate, and she is haunted by this secret which is somehow more
shameful to her than having been a guard at a concentration camp. That is
why she asked him to read all those novels to her during their trysts. That
is why she was working as a tram driver, because it was a job which did
not require reading. That is why she confessed to the implicating document
at her trial, because that monstrosity was still preferable to her confessing
her shameful illiteracy.7
Jung observed that everyone has a pathological secret, something so
scary, so shameful perhaps, so humiliating, that one will protect it at nearly
any cost. As long as such secrets remain buried, they will continue to
percolate their invisible toxins into the world of conscious life. As a
therapist I have born witness to the confession of many such stories, which
is both privilege and burden. Yet the telling of such, in the presence of a
witness, often occasions a lifting of that burden for the client.
While the woman in The Reader is serving her years in prison, the
lawyer goes through his own doomed marriage, doomed in part because
nothing can compare to the intensity of that first love. But he also
continues to read novels to the woman; he tapes them and sends the
cassettes to her in prison. Through the long years, his fidelity to her is
unshaken, yet for him the untold story that always sits between them is not
her illiteracy but the nature of her work at the camps. Still he continues to
send the tapes, and one day she figures out that she can begin to match his
voice with the words in front of her in books borrowed from the library;
painfully, diligently, she learns to read, an achievement she keeps to
herself.
The day before she is released he visits her in prison—he is now
middle-aged and she is elderly—and he makes it clear that while he will
continue to help her, they will not be living together. Though he never
specifies why, the implication is that the untold story of her role in the
camps lies between them like a ghost, forbidding further intimacy. That
night, her last night in jail, she hangs herself, leaving only a note stating
that the money she has slowly saved is to go to a Jewish charity that
teaches reading. Clearly this is her last will, and it testifies to the horror of
her history.
When the lawyer finds out that she has learned to read, he also discovers
that much of what she later came to read, studiously, was the history of the
Third Reich, especially the history of the camps.

I went over to the bookshelf. Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Tadeusz

Borowski, Jean Améry—the literature of the victims, next to the
autobiography of Rudolf Hess, Hannah Arendt's report on
Eichmann in Jerusalem, and scholarly literature on the camps . . . .
[The warden adds,] “As soon as Frau Schmitz learned to read, she
began to read about the concentration camps.”8
While her motive for suicide is not fully disclosed, it is certainly plausible
that when she learned the untold story of her participation, her collusion in
the greatest organized crime in Western history, she could not bear the
thought of leaving her legitimate sentence behind for a putative freedom.
The incredible paradox of this story is that by giving her the gift of
literacy, the freedom of understanding a story larger than the immediacy of
her environment, her lover also gave her access to the information that
condemned her.
So, the untold story of her illiteracy, the untold story of their illicit
affair, the untold story of her criminal history, the untold story of her part
in history's nightmare, the untold story of our collective failures—all
collude to haunt the present, infiltrate lives, and destroy them. The Reader
additionally sheds light on the untold story of the millions who perished,
their lives unlived, their stories cut short by thugs and by quite ordinary
people who proved capable of murder, haunts all of Western civilization,
for when our good people, our sacred and venerated institutions, and our
humanistic traditions were put to the test, we failed. That story cannot ever
rest untold.9
The narrator of The Reader explains that he finally had to write the story
of their lives, their passionate engagement with each other, and their
unexpected intersection with the dark plumb lines of history. While he
seeks understanding, forgiveness, release from the haunting, he also
knows,

The tectonic layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the
other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones,
not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but
absolutely present and alive. I understand this. Nevertheless, I find
it hard to bear. Maybe I did write our story to be free of it, even if I
never can be.10

Tracking our ancestral origins is another means by which the untold story
haunts and, like a drop of ink in a liter of crystalline water, slowly threads
its way through and in time colors the whole. The earliest fictive fragments
often ripple through the generations, forming barriers, deflections,
admonitions, and play out their way until someone, through suffering or
sudden revelation, apprehends their presence and breaks the chain. Such
stories are our personal “foundation documents,” whether we know them
or not.
In James Agee's autobiographical A Death in the Family, he recalls
summer nights as a child in Knoxville when the family left the dining
room to sit on the porch, watch the bell spray of the lawn sprinkler, hear
the susurrus of the cicadas, until fatigue captures the child's frame and he
tumbles toward sleep. The people in the big bodies take him up to bed,
lovingly, but did not then, did not ever, tell him who he was. Similarly, the
young James Joyce, through his imagined persona, Stephen Dedalus, sits
in school daydreaming and writes his name at the center of concentric
circles, going out from his family, his school, his country, his Éire, his
planet, to the universe itself in seeking to learn his real name and learn his
real story. Both of them spent their adult lives assembling those stories and
bring them into greater and greater consciousness.
Did we not all have these thoughts, these questions as children? Did we
not all wonder whose story we might have entered? As a child, I wondered
if the sky above me, which to my corporeal eye formed a great dome, was
not a single dot in the brain of some cosmic dreamer, in whose dream I
moved and seemed free but which could be ended at any second by the
dreamer awakening or simply having another dream or thought. I was not a
weird kid; I was simply thoughtful, and I intuited that there must be some
such story, as yet untold to me, but which perhaps the adults knew well. (I
remain somewhat disappointed to this day that I never found an adult with
a story that makes any more sense than my childhood vision).11
What story, told or untold, threads its way through our DNA, our
genetic coding, and plays out a same old, same old? Jung said that we
could all be wiped out but for two, and the world would be reconstructed
very much the way it is now, for after reproduction the genetically driven
stories, the archetypal shaping energies that lie in all of us, would recreate
patterns, dynamics, personae, and denouements in an old, old story, which
forever renews itself. Anyone who does not know that today's headline is
simply a passing variation on an old, old story is simply not very well
educated in the human narrative. The same passages, the same stupidities,
the same delusions, the same inflations and deflations, and the same
returns to earth play themselves out over and over. The past is not past.
The present is haunted by the archetypal dynamics which remind us that
any story untold is an unconscious present. An unconscious present is a
story which will insist on being told and will spill into our biographies.
Over the entrance to his home, Jung carved a phrase from Erasmus:
“Bidden or unbidden, God will be there.” So, told or untold, the archaic
stories ineluctably manifest through our unconscious choices, our
aversions, our preoccupations, our projections, and our agendas and replay
themselves in the recognizable patterns which constitute the human story.
How many of those who are insecure seek power over others as a
compensation for inadequacy and wind up bringing consequences down
upon their heads and those around them? How many hide out in their lives,
resist the summons to show up, or live fugitive lives, jealous, projecting
onto others, and then wonder why nothing ever really feels quite right.
How many proffer compliance with the other, buying peace at the price of
soul, and wind up with neither? We all have been here before,
metaphorically, and we will repeat these scripts in ever new variety,
wearing new costumes and brandishing new amulets, but they are the same
stories. And we are never more haunted than when we forget this fact, that
our lives are the variations upon central themes, the dialectical
embodiment of which is both our fate and our destiny.
When Yeats considered the hysteria that seized his contemporaries in
the late 1930s, he reminded them that, while ostensibly new actors stepped
forth center stage, old dramas and old personages were once again
enacting their scripted roles.

All perform their tragic play,

There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,
That's Ophelia, that Cordelia;
...
Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages,
And all the drop-scenes drop at once
Upon a hundred thousand stages,
It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.12

All of us enact our inner Hamlet: though we know what we need to do,
for reasons we do not know, we cannot do it, and thus we fret and dither
about until our hand is forced. All of us are captive to our inner Lear, that
insecure, narcissistic part that takes over from time to time and plays the
lion to conceal the bleating lamb. Like Ophelia, all of us pine for what is
not possible and end by destroying what is. And all of us yearn beyond
measure, beyond intrinsic capacity, and are alternatively saved,
condemned, and owned by that same yearning.
Gaelic, the ancient language of the Celts, which is still spoken in parts
of West Ireland and Northern Scotland, has no word for the present. The
nearest equivalent is a word that translates as “the continuing past.” And so
it is for us all. As a therapist, I see how each of us buys into a fragmentary
narrative of some kind, a provisional story which we were told by others
perhaps or which was imprinted on us by the fortuities of our time, place,
and roles, or more commonly were our phenomenological “readings” of
events and experiences. Naturally, we identify with these early
fragmentary stories, serve their narrative scripts, and drive inexorably
toward their dreary denouements. That these are received, not inherent,
stories is something we have to learn the hard way, even though our
symptoms, our addictions, our compensatory dreams are protesting our
service to them from childhood to the present.
Whoever has given tongue, brought these internalized narratives to
consciousness, attains a fragile purchase on this moment and, with that,
new possible choices. Whoever can imagine, bring to consciousness, such
figures as haunt our lives has truly become “psychological,” that is, he or
she is thus able to lend tangible image to the otherwise invisible currents of
the soul. With such images we can become somewhat more conscious if
we work at it, but we will not, over time, avoid playing out our drama just
as it was written within a long time ago. Accordingly, we continue serving,
running from, or trying to fix these narrative scripts, and we err to think
that having once recognized them, they will quietly retire from the scene.
Their staying power, any older person knows, is immense, and they resist
our efforts to repress them or finesse them or distract them. But that does
not keep us from trying to dispel them from our psychic attics.
Notes
1. G. M. Hopkins, “Pied Beauty,” in Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair, editors, Modern Poems:
An Introduction to Poetry (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), 23.
2. Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena, trans. Philip Boehm (New York: Schocken Books, 1990).
3. It is beyond the purview of this book to consider the role of genetics as a different form of
haunting, but one might ask, for example: Were the replicative, self-destructive immolations of the
Eugene O'Neill family chosen, learned, or genetically driven? Were the suicides in the Hemingway
clan, or the suicide of Nicholas Hughes, son of Sylvia Plath, choices or predispositions, or both?
4. Stephen Dunn, “Regardless,” in Landscape at the End of the Century (New York: W. W. Norton,
1992), 33–34.
5. Stephen Dunn, “My Ghost,” Everything Else in the World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 24.
6. Stanley Kunitz, “Passing Through.” Accessed at http://www.poetry-foundation.org/poem/179287.
7. In Swamplands of the Soul I tell the story of one inhabitant of such a concentration camp who had
to make terrible decisions, not unlike the situation in the novel Sophie's Choice, and, haunted as she
was by this choice, she felt condemned to roam the earth and tell her story, struggling in vain to be
released from her bondage.
8. Bernhard Schlink, The Reader (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 205.
9. I address this capacity within each of us for the full range of motives and behaviors, however
angelic or despicable, in Why Good People Do Bad Things. What lies unconscious, untold in our
stories, tumbles into the world by the acts we perform, whether conscious or not. The shadow which
trails behind each of us is the untold story that soon, perforce, becomes the collectively untold story
of the world.
10. Schlink, The Reader, 217–18.
11. In his memoir, Jung recalls sitting on a rock as a child, thinking about the rock, and wondering
whether the rock rather was thinking him. Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaffé (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1961), 20.
12. W. B. Yeats, “Lapis Lazuli,” Selected Poems and Four Plays (New York: Scribner, 1996), 179.
 CHAPTER 2

On Synchronicity and Quantum Physics

Science is uncommon sense.
—J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER
I am writing this page on a Saturday in August 2009. In a few days I fly to
Tampa, Florida, to address a conference devoted to exploring mind/body
relationships. As I am often stuck in airports or waiting in a hotel, I always
make sure I have something to read. As I reflected on what to take, it
suddenly came to me that it was time to reread the Meditations of Marcus
Aurelius. Thin as it is, it would fit easily into my carry-on bag. I had read
the book some years ago, but why it came back to mind was wholly
unknown to me.
I was checking my e-mail before going up to the attic to fetch the
Meditations when I received one from a friend whom I had not seen or
heard from in many years. In this e-mail he expressed his appreciation for
the meditations of one Marcus Aurelius, which I had introduced him to
many years ago but had forgotten. How could there be such an amazing
confluence of thoughts occurring in two sensibilities separated by time and
thousands of miles?
The following Monday I read in The Writer's Almanac, which I
gratefully receive every day in an e-mail from NPR, that it was the
birthday of a well-known poet. I always paid attention to this poet because
he married a former college student of mine, Hilary, from New Jersey. One
hour later I got an e-mail from a former client to tell me her close friend,
the same Hilary, sent me greetings and thanks for a chapter I had written
on death in my last book. It was helping her cope with the death of her
husband, that same poet. I had not known that my former client and Hilary
were friends, but the more important fact was not that NPR was behind the
news of his death, but that there could be such a strange congruence of
events once again.
 That same Monday, I was thinking about ordering a book written by a
friend of mine in Australia. When I got home that night, he had mailed me
his book, unbeknownst to me, without our having discussed it and after a
hiatus of communication of several months. The following Wednesday, I
took advantage of a free hour to phone my brother who lives less than a
mile from Wrigley Field in Chicago. He talked about going to a Cubs
game and how close he was to the stadium. When I hung up I realized that
my last client, a baseball fan, while an Atlanta Braves fan, had left his
other cap on the chair, which read (of course), “Wrigley Field / Home of
the Chicago Cubs.” On Thursday night, while I was writing the paragraph
in chapter 1 about wondering as a child whether we were part of some
cosmic dreamer's dream, I recalled that there was a mythic reference to
that same idea that I should look up. I closed the manuscript and went
online to check my e-mail before retiring. In one of the messages, a
colleague from Dallas referred to Vishnu's dream, in which we are all
characters in the reverie of a cosmic dreamer. There is no way he could
have known I was trying to remember that source.
I ask of the reader only that you accept my word that all of the five
examples above—Marcus Aurelius, the death of the poet, the mailed book,
the Wrigley Field cap, the allusion to Vishnu's dream—really happened as
I have described them here. I have no motive to deceive in these matters.
In fact, I am as befuddled as the next person at these remarkable,
convergent events. I am sure you can likely supply analogous examples
from your life, and I could also draw from the many I have heard from
patients. Frankly, my rational side, which dominated the first half of my
life, is still confounded by these offenses to our Western notions of
causality. I understand the theory behind these acausal events, but a
substantial part of my mind refuses to accept them. Still, they happened.
Any one of these “coincidences” can be explained away as having some
cause we have overlooked or as being within some sort of mathematical
possibility, if not probability; however, I do not think so many occurring in
the space of a few days can be explained in any other way than what Jung
called synchronicity.
What is synchronicity, and can we explain such events? What are their
implications? Are they not also some form of haunting, the spectral
presence of some kind of purposive energy infiltrating the apparent
objective solidity of daily life? If there are such energies, how are we to
explain them? Are we meant to explain them? And how are we to reframe
our understanding of ourselves in this palpable world if such confounding
mysteries exist?
Historically, the Western world prevailed in physics and chemistry, both
of which explore the external, tangible, quantifiable world. Thanks to
Newton and others, we gained enormous control over the forces of nature.
I am grateful for this mastery every time I fly in a plane or drive a car or
turn to my physician for treatment. Similarly, our sense of time and space
are external, measurable, ostensibly predictable. One exists at a specific
location at a specific time. Furthermore, one has a name, a defined locus,
and a social role. These forms of measurement are arbitrary, to be sure, but
they give you a point of reference from which you can obtain a sense of
orientation. Whenever these “fixities” are shaken, the person, the tribe, the
culture grow disoriented and suffer crisis. Because the alleged fixities of
social order, race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, hierarchy of values,
and so on, have been deconstructed over the past two centuries, shown to
be social, not physical, constructs, less fixed than nomos, there is a high
degree of cultural anxiety which takes the form of hysteria, shabby
reasoning, and regressive, even violent, affect, and which seeks to repress
such ambiguity by oppressing others.1 This is the thinking of dictators, and
the chronically insecure.
On the other hand, Eastern cultures have traditionally sought access to
the interior world. Just as Western physics studies the external world, so
such historic schemata as the I Ching, the Tao Te Ching, and many other
healing or divinatory modalities address the inner life. The I Ching, to
choose one example, utilizes a method that most Westerners would
consider arbitrary or accidental to gain purchase on an interior causality.
To the Western sensibility, casting coins or yarrow sticks seems fatally
stricken with accident or chance, but the Eastern view is that the
practitioner, in a meditative mood, enters the Tao of the moment, that is,
participates in the qualitative dimension of reality. Thus the arrangement
or conjunction of moments is not arbitrary after all but takes on the
qualitative textures of time and space.
To choose a simple example: if two cars collide at an intersection, the
Western mind asks who failed to yield, who violated the nomos, that is, the
legal constructs we have evolved to guide the flow of traffic. The Eastern
mind might rather ask what does it mean that we have met in this way.
What does this “accident” ask that I become more mindful of? We could
put it another way: How does this accident oblige me to become more
psychological?
Like these forms of investigation, modern psychology has similarly
split. On the one hand are the therapeutic modalities which identify
behaviors and seek their correction, or recognize flawed cognitions and
seek their reprogramming, or uncover biological imbalances and seek their
adjustment. All of these efforts make sense and are useful. At the same
time, any one of us would feel insulted if we were considered to be only
the sum of our behaviors, thoughts, and body. Each of us would say
something like, “But that is not who I really am; that is not my essence. I
am more, much more than that.” Another branch of modern psychology,
the psychodynamic, understands that we all are meaning-seeking,
meaning-creating creatures and that when we experience the loss of
meaning, we suffer. Such suffering does not lend itself to quantification,
and the forms of modern psychology addressing only that which can be
quantified have suffered a failure of nerve before the larger question of
meaning. Modern depth psychology asks questions of meaning and
understands that the chief project of psychology is to solicit the meaning,
the mystery, of the psyche in all its intents, especially in its pathology, its
symbolic expressions. When we remember that the Greek word psyche
means “soul,” we have then entered the interiority of our lives. Too much
of modern psychology, and almost all of the pop psychology one finds on
talk shows and bookshelves, has forgotten psyche. The requirement that
we restore psyche to psychology obliges us to enter the inner life in order
to better understand and order the outer life.
Synchronicity is a manifestation of energies moving through the
invisible world and entering the visible world as seeming coincidence.
Does coincidence exist apart from synchronicity? I think it does, and
coincidental events certainly lie within mathematic probability.2 But there
are events that manifest something other than mathematical possibility,
events which call for an engagement with mystery and an enlargement of
consciousness. These events ask that we consider whether there are other
values to be considered, other perspectives to be honored, other framings
to be invited than those that fall within the blinders of conventional,
constrictive consciousness.
 When, for example, one consults the I Ching, as I do infrequently
precisely because I respect it so much, one does not ask how to further
manipulate one's life from a conscious standpoint, but rather one submits a
question like: “Of what should I be mindful when considering this career
path?” “What different perspective is asked of me in considering the
events which have befallen me?” Just today I spoke with a woman who
was seeking a way to help emancipate her son as he approached the age of
majority, which was complicated by the recent death of his father. When
her son came home and told her he was moving out, and moving on, she
was devastated. Yet his own psyche had told him exactly what was needed
for him, for both of them, at that moment. What seemed traumatic and
rejecting was reframed as the psyche's answer to the perennial dilemma of
dependency versus separation needs.
Or consider this far more improbable example. A former colleague of
mine served as a Texas Ranger during the 1940s. On one occasion his life
was saved by another Ranger while patrolling the Rio Grande. Their lives
took different paths when the two men entered different branches of the
service during World War II. When he returned, long separated from his
friend, and not in direct contact, my colleague undertook further education
through the G. I. Bill and became a college professor in New Hampshire.
One day, while discussing stories of rescue with his class, the professor
began to tell his own story of rescue by his fellow Ranger. In the midst of
the telling, the man walked into the classroom, having tracked down his
old buddy twenty years after the event. How can one possibly explain this
away as mere coincidence? For my colleague, who a sensate, “facts are
facts” kind of guy, the incident helped compensate his psychic life by
bringing a bit of mystery into it. Afterward, his sensibility enlarged, and he
was even more aware of the presence of invisible energies amid his
tangible world.
How can one go wrong in humbly asking the question, “Of what should
I be mindful here . . .?” Synchronicity is merely a word that asks us to
consider that there are, as Hamlet reminds us, more things in heaven and
earth than we had heretofore considered. When I consulted the I Ching
thirty-five years ago about whether or not to travel to Zürich to undertake
analysis, and later, analytic training, the hexagram that came to me
involved crossing the wide water and consulting the wise man. An image
like this can be interpreted in many ways. Certainly at the ego-conscious
level the wide water seemed like the Atlantic Ocean and the wise man
seemed to be Jung. But at the intrapsychic level, it also meant to me to
enter the vasty deep of the unconscious and to find the source of wisdom,
the wise figure which dwells within each of us. That both of these images
underlined, perhaps ratified, the decision to go to Switzerland was a
reminder to take even more seriously the choice before me and take more
seriously the short life we have to live. Affairs had become, in playwright
Christopher Fry's words, “soul-sized” and demanded of me a soul-sized
response. It was not that I had to consult an outside authority, which is
what we learn to do in childhood; it was rather that I had to learn to consult
the authority within, wherein I recognized what I wished, needed, had to
do. The I Ching was telling me what I already knew.
So what could the synchronicities I described at the beginning of the
chapter mean to me? There is no definitive answer. As we approach
mystery, consider how to explain it, we inevitably are reminded that if we
can explain it casually or causally, it is not mystery. So, I am left to ponder
these convergences of events piling on top of each other in the middle of a
heavy work schedule. I conclude that their meaning for me, which is the
only meaning I can possibly grasp, is that they were calling me back to
something. What, perchance? I think they were reminding me, during a
series of days when I was preoccupied with outer demands, that the inner
world also makes demands, and when we forget this, the consequences
begin to pile up. Additionally, I had stopped writing this book for awhile—
distracted, yes, busy, yes, but also lazy in that I did not fight fatigue and
torpor and distraction and “show up.” Most of life involves our showing
up, and we have so many ways of not showing up. Our popular culture is a
vast array of protections, distractions, and soporifics, lest we be obliged to
show up.
Since I mentioned Marcus Aurelius, what would he have to say about
my spiritual, intellectual desuetude? He wrote this reflection, not in the
sybaritic retreat of a Roman mansion, but on the Danube frontier, cold,
wet, and fighting the barbarians who threatened his life, his nation, and all
he held dear.

At day's first light have in readiness, against disinclination to leave

your bed, the thought that “I am rising for the work of man.” Must I
grumble at setting out do what I was born for, and for the sake of
 which I have been brought into the world? Is this the purpose of my
creation, to lie here under the blankets and keep myself warm? “Ah,
but it is a great deal more pleasant!” Was it for pleasure, then, that
you were born, and not for work, not for effort?3

Well, now, it is rather hard to contend with Caesar Marcus Aurelius on this
front, is it not? How could I not show up, despite the outer and inner
obstacles? These synchronicities did in fact pull me back to my task, the
task of approaching mystery again, of engaging the hauntings of daily life
by the ineluctable forces of the invisible.
What then does this have to do with quantum physics, and why should
we care? The other speaker at the conference in Florida, Dr. Amit
Goswami, is a quantum physicist, and part of my job was both to learn
from him and to dialogue with him on the subject of the healer and the
healer's relationship to the mystery of healing.
While Newtonian physics still works for us, keeping airplanes in the sky
mostly and bridges from collapsing without reason, we have known for a
century now of phenomena that do not behave according to the
expectations of ordinary observation, of electrons passing from one orbital
path to another without traversing the distance between, of particles that
appear in two places at once. We have become obliged, in short, to
undermine the fixities of materialism with more sophisticated questions
and more sophisticated observing instruments. Ever since Danish physicist
Neils Bohr (1885–1962) asked his questions and made his observations,
the causal loci of time and space aptly described by Newtonian physics no
longer seem to apply. Simply by observing phenomena, we change them,
concluded Werner Heisenberg (1901–1971), given that we both participate
in a common force field. Chaos theory shows us that even apparent
randomness, or chaos, serves patterning processes from a source
transcendent to ordinary consciousness, ordinary causality.4
Just as a trompe l'oeil obliges us to reframe our conscious standpoint in
order to view the object from more than one angle, so quantum physics
obliges us to understand that the fixity of the object is only a sensation
from one illusory perspective, while from another it is entirely different.
So the new physics reminds us that what we take for the fixity of the object
is but our momentary observation of energy systems, systems that are
forever transforming themselves every millisecond. From whence this
phenomenon originates is a mystery, a mystery some have called God in
the past. (Consider the ancient saying, found in many sources, that “God is
a sphere whose circumference is nowhere and whose center is
everywhere.”) This nonlocal insight of the mystical and intuitive tradition
is now being confirmed and ratified by the new physics. Thus, some
“consciousness” transcendent to ordinary human consciousness not only
“makes” matter but drives the patterns of its transformative manifestations
as well.5
The new physics confirms the insight of Jung that an archetypal energy
field organizes chaotic energy into patterns of meaning, and thus we all
move to cosmic rhythms. What Rupert Sheldrake called “morphic
resonance” is analogous to what the ancients intuited as “the music of the
spheres.” Just as nature organizes and drives in service to the fulfillment of
the potential of the object, so psyche organizes the chaos of energy into
developmental systems in which individual objects are portions of a
universal drama. In his memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung
observed that we may achieve all of the objects our ego desires and still
feel disconnected and adrift unless we also intuit ourselves part of a
cosmic drama through which we also experience nonlocalized
connectivity. So my fantasy of what we might call Vishnu's dream was not
off the mark after all. Robert Oppenheimer, who penned the epigraph at
the beginning of this chapter, also understood the archetypal resonance of
the moment when he observed the first nuclear blast at Alamogordo, New
Mexico, and quoted Vishnu, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of
worlds.”
So what is this about, really? Recall that I was flooded by these
synchronicities in which we find an oxymoronic acausal principle at work.
While I was attending to my outer work demands quite faithfully and, I
would like to hope, effectively, these synchronistic images piled up on me
to push me to remember the inner work as well. Recall the e-mail from a
former student that launched this series of events, and his quote from
Marcus Aurelius reflected on how all the pieces of our sundry worlds may
fall harmoniously into structural unities. What I was forgetting was that the
disparate parts of our busy world, which so easily can fall into disunity and
neurosis, are also in service to profound currents that seek to shape and
move us toward greater personal consciousness, on the one hand, and, on
the other, the progressive surrender to participation in a cosmic
consciousness. To put it bluntly and concretely, having the groaning,
grunting General Grant appear in my dream life was not enough to get me
moving in a sustained way. So, whatever energies first produced that
dream regrouped, revisited me, and got me mobilized anew, to both my
dismay and aroused motivation.
Standing before the awesome majesty and magnitude of the universe is
so intimidating that many of us cry out for mediators—the state, gurus,
evangelists with coifed hair—all with their own agendas of gain. The
purveyors of the marketplace frequently denounce those who learn to
respect their own encounter with mystery as “gnostics.” Well, gnosis
means “knowledge.” If I can learn from my direct encounter with mystery,
if I can feel myself moved by the energies of the universe, and am haunted
by them when I ignore them, then why not live my life according to what I
have learned directly, rather than what is mediated by others, however
sincere their motivation may be?
Some distrust such splintered revelation, even consider it the route to
madness, and flee encounters with the invisible energies that in fact course
through us on a continuous basis. Is it not a paradox that the chief practical
function of so many religious organizations is to protect people from
religious experience? Are they afraid that the faithful might go off the
reservation? Still, as William Wordsworth observed of his imaginatively
driven contemporary William Blake, many considered him mad but he
plumbed depths not known to the sanity of others.
When we can acknowledge the presence of the invisible in our visible
worlds, as my dream and those intrusive synchronicities recalled for me,
we truly appreciate the symbolic life and participate once again in the
mystery of which our individual journey is such a tiny but inestimable part.
The flight from these mysteries, the flight from the summons to look
within, shows up over and over as symptoms, somatic disorders, or
troubling dreams. In his 1900 The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud cited as
his epigraph, “If I cannot persuade the higher powers, at least I can stir up
the lower.” Stirred as they are, the lower powers enter the quotidian world
as haunting.
This book exists because of the movement of invisible energies. My
conscious intentions were not enough; in fact, they sabotaged the
necessary work of writing. So it would seem the invisible powers—call
them gods, demons, muses, or whatever metaphor one prefers—took over
and began to nudge, then push in their various annoying ways. I believe
that each of us experiences such nudging from the unconscious world all
the time, but we have learned to suppress and repress these entreaties in
service to a more comfortable status quo ante.
The truth is unsettling: if we are to recognize the powers of the invisible
world, however understood, then we have to broaden and deepen our view
of our lives, continuously reassess our values, and make more difficult
choices. We have to embrace a psychology that goes deeper than behavior
modification and cognitive reprogramming. If we open to this possibility
of an invisible, dynamically active world, we then live in mystery anew, a
prospect both inviting and daunting to the power-driven, comfort-seeking
agendas of a dilatory consciousness. As Jung observed, “The least of
things with a meaning is always worth more in life than the greatest things
without it.”6 This book exists not because I wanted it to, but because those
telluric powers refused to stop their irritating haunting. As the twelve-step
programs aver, “what we resist will persist.”
We may add to that: what we resist in time becomes pathology, either
through platitudinous, superficial lives or embodied as addictions,
depressions, or obsessions with those objects upon which the unlived life
has been projected. We may confess instead that what we resist will
persist, as haunting.
Notes
1. Millennia ago, the Greeks recognized nomos as how socially ordered experience becomes
normative for much of our lives.
2. By the way, the creator of the mathematic construct we call probability theory, which underlies so
much of our ability to anticipate the range of the possible rushing toward us, was both a mystic and a
mathematician: Blaise Pascal.
3. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Maxwell Staniforth (New York: Penguin Books, 1964), 77.
4. Between Einstein's four papers in 1905 and the Solvay conference in Copenhagen in 1927, the
essential stability of the Newtonian world was overthrown and even the most sophisticated physicists
plunged into mystery after mystery. While that mystery persists, many current technological
innovations have derived from a theoretic model still evolving, still far from finished.
5. As I write, physicists at CERN in Switzerland are announcing the confirmation of what is
hyperbolically called “the God particle,” or Higgs boson, which seems to be an elemental catalytic in
the formation of matter.
6. C. G. Jung, “The Aims of Psychotherapy” (1931), in The Practice of Psychotherapy, vol. 16, The
Collected Works of C. G. Jung (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954), par. 96.
 CHAPTER 3

The Ghosts of Our Parents

When the wind blows wrong, I can hear it today.
Then my mother's worry stops all play

And, as if in its rightful place,

My father's frown divides my face.
—NAOMI REPLANSKY, “AN INHERITANCE”
Our biographies, our psychic lives, our impulses toward the world are
historically contained and yet driven by forces that transcend
consciousness and individual intent. Consider, for example, that we are
apparently the only species that, being mortal, is also conscious of our
precarious purchase on this world. Life brings us two gifts: a moment in
time, and the consciousness of its brevity. We owe life two things in return:
a life fully lived, and the gift surrendered at the end. But consider also that
how we view this journey is profoundly influenced by the lens through
which we see the world.
When I was a child, just after World War II, I received a pilot's fur-lined
helmet and goggles as a gift. Naturally, I wore this gear as I flew at a fairly
low altitude, perhaps four feet, to school each day. What was remarkable
about the goggles was that one could insert different colors of Plexiglas in
order to adapt better to climatic conditions. I waited eagerly for a foggy
day so that I might see the world through a yellow lens. The green lens
produced a green world, and quite different features emerged from the
world as presented through the other lenses. Even as a child I could not
help but be aware that I was seeing the familiar world in an unfamiliar way
simply by changing the lens. Later, when I learned that our eyes have
lenses as well, this variegated reality continued to bubble up in disturbing
questions: What is the world, I wondered, and how is it that I see it so
variously, depending on which lens I use?
 Unwittingly, naively, I had backed my way into philosopher Immanuel
Kant (1724–1804), who used the same metaphor of blue spectacles to
indicate that we never know the Ding an sich, that is, the thing in itself, but
only our subjective experience of it. Our subjective experience is, of
course, our reality, strained as it may be through our physiology and our
affective and emotional screens. Do we ever, as separate physiologies,
separate psychological lenses, separate planets, see the same orange, the
same apple, at the same moment? Hardly. We have our personal, subjective
experiences of them, and our highly eccentric experiences interact with
that presumptive external reality and alter it profoundly. (While we need
experience to ground reason, lest we fall into seductive delusions, we also
need reason to critique the traps of subjectivity and its tendency toward
overgeneralizing.) Unwittingly, I had also backed into Werner Heisenberg's
(1901–1976) principle of indeterminacy, which asserts that our experience
of the world is a highly interactive, dialectically changing engagement of
“world” and “experience of world” in which each is altered by the other. In
short, we are ineluctably driven to the necessity of psychology, namely, the
recognition that all we experience is flushed through our subjective
apparatus. Moreover, psychology is tasked with the troubling paradox that
its chief summons is to bring clarity to how we experience the world, and
how we distort it in the very moment of experiencing it. We are obliged to
wonder, can we ever really understand something from an objective
remove when we are also swimming in it?
Similarly, we need to employ a phenomenological perspective, which
asks that we not speculate on the nature of ultimate reality, which we
cannot know anyway, but rather observe how we are experiencing it. As
Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and a host of other phenomenologists
insisted, we are obliged to study the experience of the world without
presuming we know or understand the world. But we can observe and bear
witness to subjective experience through such categories as perception,
emotion, or even meaning or its absence. Each of us operates within a
received Lebenwelt, or frame of cultural experience, which has ground the
lens, and construes the world anew, as well. Such a “life world” is a
framing lens, both aperture and limitation at the same time. Do I
experience the same blueness of the sky as you do? At what moment? Do I
experience the same reality as you do when one talks of happiness? Do
you and I have a common experience of the idea of God?
 How can we possibly relate to each other when we live in such
idiocentric isolation from one another? Fortunately, we have invented
useful contrivances—images, signs, languages—which have a common,
albeit fictive, representational ground. The language of mathematics is
more or less common throughout the world as a fictive representation of
proportion, duration, process, and relationship. A red octagon shape on a
roadside now represents “stop” in almost every country. As we move up
the ladder of abstraction, however, we are obliged to employ metaphor and
symbol to point toward the ineffable rather than name it. What do we mean
when we say love, or justice, or beauty? Certainly we have conventional
definitions of these experiences, but our experience of them, and what we
mean when we utter these words, varies immensely. And what do we mean
by nature, or god, or meaning? If they were merely nouns, pointing to
objects, could we then find them in South Dakota, or Bolivia, or
Samarkand? Is not our essential condition, then, that of members of a
species that desperately seeks to stand in relationship to presumptive
reality, and to other members of the species, while swimming all the while
in uncertainty?
Even worse, as Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) reminded us, we fall
into bewitchment by our own contrived language games and think we are
speaking of reality when we convert verbs into nouns like nature or God or
meaning. He suggested that if we really understood how we grow
enchanted and imprisoned by the very tools we have evolved to help us
navigate the world, then we would need to just shut up for awhile.
(“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one should remain silent,”
Wittgenstein concluded in the final sentence of his Tractatus Logico-
Philosophicus.) But we babble on nonetheless and periodically try to kill
our neighbors in defense of our bewitched condition. How many armies
have marched off to slaughter their neighbor in the name of their God, the
true God, unaware that they have actually violated boundaries shouting,
“Our metaphor is better than your metaphor”? (As Joseph Campbell once
observed, myth is other people's religion.) Understanding that the metaphor
only points toward mystery, but is not that mystery, would seldom if ever
inflame the hearts of youth to go off on a jolly venture to kill their
neighbor.
So what does this have to do with parents? Everything! No influences in
our lives, no grinding of the lens by culture, no newly learned experience
plays as large a role as that played by parents in the formative life of the
individual. We receive our genetic inheritance from them and with that not
only our somatic tendencies, aging patterns, propensity to certain
disorders, and lifestyle predilections, but the actual physiological apparatus
of our perceiving and processing tools: eyes, ears, brain, et al. But as
obvious as this physical inheritance is, and as pervasive an influence, a
Lebenwelt in itself, the psychological influence is even greater.
Fundamental percepts of how we see the world and ourselves in it are
derived from the internalization of these primal presences, or primal
absences, in our lives.
As tiny, vulnerable beings, we are largely at the mercy of the conditions
our environment presents to us—economic, social, cultural—which define
roles, scripts, ways of seeing, ways of not seeing, values, and so on. The
Lebenwelt of a medieval, agrarian Buddhist living in Thailand a thousand
years ago will have a quite different lens through which to see and value
the world than a young businessperson in Montreal in the twenty-first
century. But even more, we internalize the specific messages, our
subjective renderings of messages, and their implicate and explicate
models of behaviors which we observe around us as essential teaching
devices for the engagement of self and world. Is the world safe? Will it
meet us halfway, or more? Is it trustworthy? Is it invasive or abandoning?
And if so, how are we to cope with that? Inevitably, each child internalizes
a Weltanschauung of self and world and a set of reflexive adaptive
stratagems whose purpose is to manage anxieties and to get one's needs
met as well as possible in a limited universe.
If one experiences the world repeatedly overflowing one's boundaries,
for example, the core message internalized is that the world is powerful,
and we are not. This core percept of generalized powerlessness leads to
systemic adaptive patterns of avoidance, a compulsive power drive to get
control of that environment, or reflexive compliance, or multiple
combinations of the three. Each strategy is an embodied interpretation of
self and world, reflexive in character, and a protective adaptation that in
time gains such a purchase on one's life as to become one's operant way of
being in the world. In other words, our internalized interpretations drive
our daily management systems and create patterns with which we become
acculturated and come in time to call our lives.
 In the face of the uncertain other, the abandoning other, one has a
tendency to internalize the discrepancy between one's needs and the
limitations of the other and form various provisional, essentially
unconscious hypotheses. Among these hypotheses may be, for example,
doubts about one's worth, having internalized the limitations of the other as
a statement about one's own intrinsic suitability for nurturance. From such
diminished self-worth arise both patterns of avoidance or self-sabotage and
patterns of overcompensating grandiosity. Or one may suffer narcissistic
wounds, which are treated by the manipulation or control of others to more
adequately reflect and feed one's unmet needs. Or one may be driven by an
inordinate need for reassurance and connection, which births addictions
and dependencies of all kinds. In the momentary “connection” with the
other, the existential horror of disconnect, abandonment, is assuaged, but
only for a moment, and therefore the compelling drive to repetition is
reinforced, institutionalized within.
Each behavioral pattern is replicated so often as to become a locked-in
mode of being in this contingent world. Each pattern is a derivative,
fortuitous vision of self and world, driven mostly by the internalization of
the parental engagement, an interaction that is ubiquitous, overwhelming,
exclusive, and most often “the only game in town.” So who would
contend, then, that the primary haunting of adult life is not the
internalization of those parental presences that drive, deflect, repeat, and
necessarily distort our voyage through this essentially unknowable
universe?
Predictably, we will see only what our lenses allow us to see, lenses
ground and refined by the millions of repetitions of early life. Naomi
Replansky's lines at the beginning of this chapter are a confession that, for
all the miles she may have traveled in her emotional life, the parental
models she lived with were internalized as apprehensions, and impose
themselves upon her, no matter how vigilant her consciousness.
Here is a another example of this primary haunting: Celine's mother
recently died after a long illness. She dreams, “I am in my childhood
home, taking a shower alone. I emerge from the shower and feel someone
is there in the house. I am scared. I open the front door and cross the
threshold and that is scary too.” We have more questions here than
answers. Why has the dreamer returned to the childhood home? Is that her
mother's presence lingering in the house? She never sees anyone in the
house. Why does opening the door and walking outside, crossing a
threshold, also seem frightening?
While we cannot definitively know the answer to these elliptical
questions, nor even fully why we dream, nature never seems to waste
energy, so dreams are surely part of the self-regulation of our natural
system. Jung believed that dreams both process and metabolize the
immense onslaught of daily life and compensate for the one-sidedness our
daily adaptations demand of us. Understood from this angle, the dream
raises still more questions. Do we ever really leave our childhood home?
Or rather, does our primal experience there stay with us and influence,
haunt, our contemporary choices? Is Celine's mother's spirit there in some
palpable way? Or is it her absence now that constitutes the haunting
presence? Why would either occasion fear in the dreamer? And why would
one not be apprehensive about these inexplicable mysteries? Is it the
mother's absence that now makes it fearsome for the dream-ego to cross a
threshold and step into the larger world outside?
Some people only feel liberated in their own life, find permission to
stretch and fly, when their parents pass away. Others feel anxious because,
with their parents gone, there is no “home” now. As Robert Frost said
once, home is where you go and they have to take you in. What if there is
no there there, no one to take you in? Is the larger world outside emptier or
freer? Is that empty space “the openness of Being,” as Martin Heidegger
(1889–1976) suggested, or is it the void, the swallowing abyss? Will the
dreamer be able to step into that largeness that waits outside? Did it in fact
take the passing of the mother to oblige this step, this necessary prelude to
a larger life?
Clearly Celine is at a liminal moment in her life (limen means
“threshold” in Latin). But threshold to what—abandonment and terror, or
freedom and the ticket to her own life, finally? Or maybe it is both. It
remains to be seen how this will play out in her life. In the life of every
girl, the mother remains a huge figure. After all she is the source, the
model, the thing to be emulated, but how, in any particular setting, does
this primal ratio play out? One woman said to me recently, “I had to build
my model of motherhood alongside of the ruins of the house to which my
mother used the wrecking ball of her narcissism.”
In the face of any compelling message we have three tendencies. First
we are inclined to serve the message, repeat it, identify with it, and
replicate it—the more so as the model operates unconsciously within. The
second most common reaction is to react against the model and its explicit
and implicit messages. “I will be anything but like my mother,” except that
one is still being defined by that other rather than by the unfolding
possibilities that lie within each of us. The third response is to spend one's
life trying to “treat” the message. These people live in denial, perhaps
generating frenetic activity to distract its thrumming beat upon their souls,
or perhaps drugging its interruptive urgencies, or, if truly troubled, they
become therapists and try to treat others with similar issues. No matter
what strategy one has been driven to elect, one is never free of the power
of the model and its message, and never fully freed of its continued
invisible work in our lives unless and until it becomes fully conscious.
How could one ever choose freely if one is not aware of all of the forces at
work in the choices of one's life? This is why Jung suggested that we do
not ever “solve” these core problems, but we may out grow them.
For example, the weight and measure of the mother in a daughter's life
may be a powerful agency enabling the daughter to live her own life if the
mother has in fact lived hers. With all our blunders, the mess we all make
of things, the most positive influence can be the authentic life the parent
provides the child. This message opens up her imagination, gives her
permission, and frees her to make decisions as well. However, when the
mother is blocked, bottled up, living through her children or her role alone,
a different sort of message is implanted in her daughter.
When the mother is overly identified with motherhood, the daughter
may have a tendency to be similarly identified. Or she may spend her life
saying “anything but that” and be driven off her instinctual foundations to
a life of overcompensation. She may even be driven to overidentify with
male roles, institutions, or values and lose contact with herself. But the
invisible presence of that past inevitably emerges in some way; supportive
or sabotaging, it will show up. The past is not past.
So, too, the boy will receive compelling messages from his mother. Is
she reliable, consistent, available? If so, he will experience the world as
generally stable and likely to meet him halfway. Jung's mother was
emotionally unstable, and he later said, “When I hear the word mother, I
think of the word unreliable.”1 How does such a message play out in the
life of any boy and his subsequent choice of partners? How did that affect
his relationship to his own body, his affective life, his connection to the
world of feeling, spirit, inspiration? Did he feel that his job was to find a
wounded woman and take care of her, as evidenced by many of my male
patients? Or will he distrust women and feel he must control them, avoid
them, or figure out a way to keep them continuously happy? He will
reflexively, redundantly, be driven by the invisible presence to grant the
woman in his life an inordinate power, a power not hers inherently but
transferred to her by the weight of the inner imago and whatever load up it
carries. Thus he will continue to exhibit controlling behaviors, avoidant
behaviors, or compliant behaviors, little guessing the inner, historic source
of these compelling agendas. Subsequently, he may grow to resent his
partner for reasons unknown to both of them, the unconscious being by
definition unknown. Whatever patterns are played out with his partner, he
will not be without that primal, subtle presence at all times and in all
relationships with women. As poet Walt Whitman said of death, “Dark
Mother, always gliding near, with soft feet.”2
And what then of father?
When Jung approached his cleric father with honest questions of
religious enquiry, his father replied that he should simply “believe” and not
question. From that exchange, Jung reported that he lost confidence in his
father and said, “When I think of the word Father, I think of powerless.”3
So, we have quite a load: “unreliable” mother and “powerless” father.
What else is one to do with one's life, having been delivered those
messages, but become a psychologist, or an accountant?
What does the reader think upon hearing the word father? Is it possible
to approach such a summons without history playing an immense role in
one's response? Is one not haunted, so to speak, for good or ill, with the
detritus of actual experience or, more likely, the experience as it has been
inwardly construed and which has thus become one's de facto story?
For some, unlike Jung's complex, the idea of the father will be
synonymous with power, for either benevolent or malevolent ends. For
some it will occasion a generative source; for others the abuse of power.
The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins metaphorically responds to the creation
as that which “fathers forth” (p. 2). For some of my patients, the father
offers sustaining support, guidance, and empowerment, while for others
father is a monster who eats his children out of his own anger, insecurity,
and infantile jealousies.
 For the initial years of our lives, the father is at times almost irrelevant,
so bound is the child to his or her mother. But from about age six through
twelve, the father provides the bridge out of the mother/child fusion and
creates the necessary tension of the third. Without that third, the child
remains bound to the mother. How many three-hundred-pound tackles
raise their hands and say “Hi, Mom” on television, and where is Dad in all
of that? With more and more fathers missing in action for so many reasons,
especially in minority and urban families, the bridge for boys into the adult
world is often missing and is more likely to be supplanted either by
dependencies, on the one hand, or by a transference to forms of pseudo-
adult empowerment such as peer groups and gangs on the other.
Fathers can hardly fulfill their archetypal role if they themselves have
not been fathered. How can a man pass on to his children what he has not
himself been given? So, we transform our colleges into holding tanks for
confused adolescents, swimming in the arms of alma mater, looking
desperately for the empowering father who might authorize their lives and
validate their journeys, their curiosities, their individuation necessities. So
many youth are haunted by the missing gravitational pull of the father, up
and out of the mother world, but since one can hardly rail at the darkness,
few ever grasp the profundity of that missing piece in their psychic
puzzles.
Possibly the most subtle haunting of our lives is the unfinished business
of the past. I say this neither to judge nor devalue our ancestors. We have
access to information, models, and most of all “permission” to ask
questions, take risks, and pursue an individual path, which would have
been unthinkable to our predecessors. Still, we all must heed the challenge
Jung posed when he noted that the greatest task every child must bear is
the unlived life of the parents. Moreover, he believed that he, and perhaps
most of us, are

under the influence of things or questions which were left

incomplete and unanswered by . . . parents and grandparents and
more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal
karma within a family which is passed from parents to children. It
has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate
had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered,
 or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which
previous ages had left unfinished.4

Jung's insight is profound, and we need to be reminded of it over and

over again. Does not the Bible explicitly say that the “sins” of the fathers
are passed on to the children unto the third generation? Did not the great
tragedians intimate that some ancestor had offended the gods, who in turn
placed a curse upon the house, which then played out in subsequent
generations until some heroic figure, through suffering and sacrifice, broke
through to an enlarged consciousness and lifted the curse of the haunting?
Do not therapists continuously encounter not only the ghostly appearance
of the parents in their patient's lives and, implicitly, the presence of the
grandparents who similarly formed the complexes, lived the unanswered
questions, and generated the models and charged imagoes for the parents
as well?
As therapists, when we treat a man who can only express his sexuality
when he is high, then we are most likely dealing with a parental inhibition,
a complex, a constrictive or punitive message that separates this man from
his nature. When we have a woman unable to voice her deepest angers,
hopes, and desires, we have some constrictive possession, some febrile
haunting. Sometimes these hauntings are so deeply systemic in the
person's history that he or she will be unconscious of their presence and
will assume that “this is the way things always are” or “this is who I really
am” or “how could it ever be otherwise?” Gaining permission is the
implicit task: permission to be who one is, permission to serve what wishes
to enter the world through us, permission to desire what one most deeply
desires, permission to serve the present hour, but permission is equally
opposed by the spectral presence of the charged imago, the complex.
Before going further, we need to reexamine, reappropriate, and
appreciate anew the radical gift Jung provided us through the idea of the
complex. Of all his insights, the complex is perhaps the most practical of
his gifts. There is not a single therapeutic hour when I do not think about
complexes, recognize their presence, and realize that we are always
struggling with compelling spectral presences that have the power to usurp
and manage this present hour, and to subvert all the possibilities of this
moment into replicative history.
 We do not rise in the morning, look in the mirror while brushing our
teeth, and say to ourselves, “Today I will do the same stupid things, the
reflexive things, the regressive things which I have been doing for years!”
But more often than not we indeed do the same stupid, reflexive,
regressive things, and why?
Notes
1. C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaffé (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961),
8.
2. Walt Whitman, “When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom'd.” Accessed at
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174748.
3. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 8.
4. Ibid., 233.
 CHAPTER 4

Hauntings as Complexes
. . . We drag

expensive ghosts
through memory's
unmade bed.
—PAUL HOOVER, “THEORY OF MARGINS”
A little over a century ago, Carl Jung was finishing his medical degree at
the University of Basel. As he neared the end, he chose as the subject for
his medical thesis, the strange case of a medium who allegedly
communicated with the shades of the dead. What a strange topic for a
physician, both then and now.
In this work he studied a woman who entered into somnambulistic states
of suspended consciousness during which the “voices” of the departed
spoke through her in forms which were reported recognizable as the voices
of the departed. Was she a fraud? Was she psychotic? What did she have to
gain, if anything? What Jung did not reveal in this 1902 thesis titled, “On
the Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena,” was that
the subject of his study was his own cousin Hélène Preiswerk, whom he
knew personally and whose good faith he trusted.1 In considering her
strange talent, Jung concluded that she had an extremely labile ego state,
such as anyone might have who is highly intuitive, drunk, fatigued, or
stressed, during which dissociated parts of her own psyche exercised a
measure of autonomy and expression. If we think of some of our dreams as
examples of how different characters can embody different aspects of
ourselves, or how we might, in moments of stress or altered consciousness,
say things we might regret or repudiate the next day, then we realize how
dissociated aspects of ourselves may in fact rise from our own mouths. To
identify those dissociated energies Jung borrowed the term complex, which
had been coined by a Berlin psychiatrist named Theodor Ziehen (1862–
1950) in the previous decade.
When Jung was posted to the Burghölzli, still today the psychiatric
hospital of the University of Zürich, he was asked by the director Eugen
Bleuler (1857–1939) to explore the so-called word association experiment
for its possible usefulness as a diagnostic tool.2 (The protocol was called
an “experiment” rather than a “test” as there is no “right” answer to its
stimulus words.) The subject was presented with a series of words to
observe his or her reactions. As Jung explored this instrument he found
that in supposedly normal subjects, ordinary words were quite capable of
producing intrapsychic effects in people. In time he identified more than a
dozen indications that disturbances of consciousness occurred, suggesting
that the stimulus word had hit some unconscious material within these
normal subjects. We all have reactions of various kinds to the stimuli that
life brings us. Such reactions occur because we have a history, a
psychoactive history, which is reactive, charged, and always present with
an affective quantum of energy.
The word Komplex in German is a neutral word, as in “an apartment
complex” or “an airport complex,” namely, a structure, neutral in itself but
triggering slightly different meanings to each of us, depending on the
variegations of our history. Remember that Jung said when he heard the
word mother he thought unreliable and when he heard father he thought
powerless. Where did he come by these associations other than by having
had a history in which these entities were loaded up with valences?
Back when I was teaching in college I used to demonstrate a complex
by walking into class and calmly saying, “Please take out a piece of paper
and a pen.” While the request and its images are essentially banal, students'
hearts would seize up and they would be flooded with anxiety. Why?
Because who has not been threatened by surprise exams? While my
sentence was quite ordinary, the history it activated was not. And beneath
the level of the pop quiz anxiety lies a far deeper, archetypal need—the
need to feel approved by the other, the need to feel safe, the need to be
protected. All of this material is activated by this most ordinary of
sentences: “Please take out a piece of paper and a pen.” Now we
understand what a complex is, and how the present moment is always like
a lily pad floating on a vast ocean of affect.
 Since a complex has a quantum of energy, charged by history, it always
manifests in the body, perhaps as a constriction of the throat, a flutter in
the solar plexus, tightening of the muscles, and it always floods the
moment with an extra charge of affect. The problem is that in the moment,
under the spell of the complex, we usually feel the level of affect generated
is appropriate to the moment. Later we might wonder, “Why did I get so
upset with my partner last night?” Folk wisdom recognized complexes
long before we had a name for them. “Write the letter but don't send it for
a few days,” and, sure enough, when it comes to sending the letter we do
not feel so strongly about the matter.
Most insidiously, a complex has the power to usurp the ego, plunder
ordinary consciousness in the moment, oblige us to look through the
regressive lens of history, and therein respond to this new moment, this
new situation in an old way. Sometimes complexes are protective. We do
need to run from some threats; we do need to look both ways before
crossing the street; we do need to adapt to circumstances beyond our
control. And some complexes help us relate to the new in a grounded way.
If one never experienced moments of relational constancy and trust, then
he or she would not be able to form relationships. If one has repeatedly
experienced betrayal and disappointment from others, most likely he or she
cannot value justice, equality, or good faith negotiations. If one has been
punished for experiencing beauty, then he or she might cringe before a
painting or flee the irresistible affect generated by Beethoven's Ninth
Symphony. So, complexes per se are neither good nor bad. What matters is
how they play out in our lives. Or, very pragmatically, what do they make
us do or what do they keep us from doing? To what degree, and in what
specific moments of choice, does history govern? Thus, what is most
troubling about complexes is their capacity to remove a discriminating
judgment from this moment of consciousness, assert, even impose, a
historic view generated from an earlier, more likely disempowered place in
our history.
Observing someone lying on a couch talking about Mom and Dad has
become such a cliché that only the New Yorker continues to approach it in
cartoons. But stop and think: what are more primal messages about self
and other, and relational dynamics between, than our first and most
sustained experiences of relatedness, especially when we are tiny,
vulnerable, and incapable of comparative analysis? The term Jung used to
describe the experience of a complex was Ergriffenheit, the state of being
seized or possessed. In other words, when a complex hits, whether benign
or malign in its effect upon us, we are seized by history, possessed by the
past. In such moments we are led to choices that produce patterns,
repetitions driven by the spectral influences of our history, and serving for
good or ill to bring about the same old, same old. No, we do not stand
before the mirror in the morning and say, “Today I will do the same stupid,
self-defeating things I have done for decades.” But by day's end, we will
have, predictably, done exactly that.
Try telling a person in the grip of a complex, exhibiting rage, anxious
obeisance, or avoidance, that he or she is in one and they will not only
deny your assertion but most likely have a ready justification. In fact, one
may safely say, in a pseudo-scientific theorem: wheresoever ready
rationalizations exist, thereunto a complex is being protected. Thus we are
all, much of the time, prisoners of history, haunted by the spectral
“instructions” that float up from the past to inform, color, dictate our
choices in this new present. This moment is always new; it has never
existed before, but we reflexively, repetitively bind our days, sometimes in
moments of necessary continuity and sometimes in regressive obeisance to
the past. Such is the power of complexes.
By now the reader is surely crying out for an end to theory and
description and hoping for an illustration. Let me respond with an example
that occurred at four p.m. this very afternoon. I ask the reader to trust the
veracity of my report, even as I thank the analysand for his willingness to
share this example with you. He understood the moment he had the dream
what, in general, it meant and why it had come, and we were both awed by
its wisdom and critique of the central complex of his life.
The primary reason we pay attention to dreams is that they do not arise
from the ego. If the reader thinks otherwise, please try to order up a certain
kind of dream tonight with the authority with which you might order from
a restaurant menu and see if the unconscious pays a whit of attention to
you. So, here is the dream the analysand, Geoffrey, brought and the
situation out of which it emerged.
The dreamer is a man in his seventies who faithfully but fruitlessly
nursed and protected his alcoholic wife for decades through a long and
troubled marriage until she died. A few years later, he began a relationship
with another woman who was, in quite different ways, troubled as well.
While he sensed the futility of this later relationship, he also felt
compassion for her and did not want to let her drift off into some vague
nothingness. Then, to compound things, his adult daughter's life fell apart.
He spent considerable time, money, and most of all anxiety trying to help
her, her children, and her life situation. Finally, she seemed to be back on
an even keel, and he could relax a bit. When his daughter hit a very deep
trough again, he was prepared to go to visit her in a distant city and take
over whatever he could to help manage. While his efforts on behalf of all
three women are notable, even noble, much of his life had been defined by
someone else's stuff, someone else's pathology. While he professed not to
mind the sacrifice that so much of his life had been, his psyche had another
view and wished to be heard.
The morning of his last session before flying off to attempt to rescue his
daughter one more time, Geoffrey had the following dream. While its
power shocked him, and he knew at one level what it meant and why it had
come to him, our discussion led to even deeper engagement with what one
might call the central complex of his life. Please remember, the dreamer
does not consciously invent this dream, yet it is clearly his dream and has
come to confront him from some place even larger in his life than that
otherwise dominating complex.

My mother has died. She is in a black casket in front of me. My

father and others are there, but they are shadows and say nothing
and glide away out of sight.
A doctor and I are going to do an autopsy on the body in the
casket. I don't want to do it. The doctor says we must do it so
someone gets the benefit from it. I assume someone will get the
information from this autopsy.
I think, “Why me? Is this too much for a husband but okay for a
son?”
The doctor looks like an old-time magician dressed all in black.
He has a long rod with which to pry open the casket.
I am afraid of getting a disease from the decayed body. The doctor
opens the casket. A woman in a long black dress with puffed
shoulders is lying there. She does not look like my mother at any
 time in my mother's life. The woman looks young, thirty something,
and does not look dead. Now I see it is Jolene [his deceased wife].
She moves as though awakening from sleep. Before the doctor can
touch her she pushes herself up with her hands so that her upper
body is against the lid and facing us. I am thinking it is Jolene, and
I don't want her back alive.
The doctor says, “They would be better off to leave them alone.”
(I assume he means the woman in the casket or people like her.) He
moves to kill her with the rod and close the casket. I yell “no” and
stop him. I am horrified at the body coming back to life but am more
horrified at killing her now, again.
The woman berates the doctor, scolds him, and calls him by
condescending names like she knows him well. I am frozen, huddled
up, waiting.
She gets out of the casket. She walks away. She says, “I rule here.
I'm back.”
Now she floats swiftly through the air toward me. She kisses me
on the lips and quickly floats away like a dark shadow and
disappears. The taste of her kiss on my lips is acid-bitter.

First of all, who would consciously create this stuff? And yet,
undeniably, the dream belongs to the dreamer and arises out of his haunted
history. The dream was chilling to him, frightening, and yet resonated in
such a way that he knew he would never forget it.
The dream begins by demonstrating that the past is never really past.
How scary is the admonishment: “I rule here. I'm back.” In every man's
relationship with the feminine intimate other the field of mother energy
will be active and resonant. When the dreamer was a child, his father was
kindly and supportive, but the child clearly picked up an assignment to
take care of the wounded woman before him. This charged imago
undoubtedly played a role, albeit unconsciously, in his selection of a
marital partner, the more so as her impairment demanded his faithful
allegiance and sacrificial efforts over several decades until her death.
As a result of his entering therapy in the aftermath of his wife's death,
the “doctor” part of him, the part requiring and demanding that an autopsy
of events transpire, emerged even as his ego consciousness scarcely
wished to return to those painful precincts. Thus, we are told, what the
father did not do is now left to the son to address. The doctor is also found
in his collaborative partnership with the therapist in therapy. Like an old-
time magician, they combine to address mysteries and dark places. The
dreamer is naturally reluctant to undertake this dissection, for he fears the
onset of the old dis-ease, but we are not even allowed such liberty before
the mother figure morphs into his former wife Jolene.3
In the dream when he realizes that Jolene is not really gone but has
come back to haunt him anew, he is horrified and acknowledges what he
could barely admit consciously theretofore, namely, that he does not want
to walk down that pathologizing path again. But that complex, that archaic
agenda, is truly powerful. It mocks him, challenges his analytic efforts,
belittles him, and freezes him.4
The archaic script: take care of that wounded woman at all costs, even
the cost of your own soul, asserts anew: “I rule here. I'm back.” Reflect on
the power of the ever-living, the vampiric complexes that attach
themselves to our souls and leech our spirits away. Her ghoulish kiss,
which haunted and repulsed him even hours later when he recounted the
dream, is the kiss of death, not of life, not of love and faithful sacrifice. It
is the kiss of death that reaches out from the land of the dead to strike the
living anew.
Note when this dream came to him—just as he was departing on his
mission to rescue a third generation of wounded women. Of course one has
compassion for one's spouse, for one's companion, for one's child, but the
cumulative price of this lifelong assignment has been huge indeed. Could
we not conclude, as a result of this quite dramatic set of images arising
from the deep Self and confronting that history, that he at least ought to try
to measure the amount of sacrifice he offers to his adult daughter? I write
this on the day he has embarked on the familiar rescue mission, and I await
a report on the engagement, compulsive or contained as it may prove to be.
Next week together we will again take on the powers of this haunting
history, a history that never seems to let go, a history that rises from the
grave to impose its ghoulish agenda on the present and dictate its dreadful
denouements again. How can any of us, in any moment of action, ever be
assured of being free of history, wholly conscious, and absent the
interpolating presences of ghostly gestures, spectral scenarios?
 When we stop and conscientiously consider our life's patterns,
especially the self-defeating patterns, the ones that bring harm to ourselves
or others, the ones where we are most stuck, we realize that indeed we are
the progenitor of most of our problems. So how and why is this troubling
contradiction the case? The answer to this conundrum, which surely has
troubled, befuddled, perhaps defeated us all at some moment in our lives,
is that our ego is in service to powerfully imprinted “messages,” some
generated by trauma, some by repetitions, some by “readings” of the world
around us. Whether accurate or not, those readings provide the text for the
fractal scripts to which the fragile ego—in which we invest so much faith
and, frankly, overconfidence—is in service. And the more unconscious
that ego servitude is, the more autonomous those messages are.
For example, one woman who had experienced traumatic abandonment
in her life went through cleaning frenzies in her house whenever her
husband went on a business trip. Once, when he was delayed by bad
weather, she fantasized that he was dead, and she imagined selling their
house and moving several states away to be near their daughter. When he
returned, she collapsed in self-disgust and anxious relief, but she had
simply been victimized by the spectral presence of a history that set her up
for the likely prospect of the inevitability of abandonment. So concerned
were they at her reaction that they entered therapy together, during which
her husband pleaded that if he should die before her some day, she should
see that natural event, the common destination of our separate journeys,
not as one more abandonment. He did not wish his mortal state to reinforce
the power of her terrible abandonment complex. In similar fashion, a man
who had grown up with a missing father and a crack-snorting mother
compulsively followed his wife, tracked her phone calls, and fully
expected her to betray him or leave him, just as his parents had. Such is the
power of history, especially early trauma, which imprints its message upon
our brows with such power that we never fully escape its influence.
I have heard so many excoriate themselves for falling back into an old
destructive pattern of one sort or another. We have to learn to forgive
ourselves for we have such ghostly haunting because we have history, and
history writes its message deeply into our neurology and our psychology.
In workshops on various subjects I have often asked the question, “Where
are you stuck in your life?” Nowhere, in South America, the United States,
Canada, Europe, or Russia, has anyone ever asked me, “What do you mean
stuck?” We all know, quickly and rather surely, where we are stuck. So
why is it that we do not get unstuck? We castigate ourselves for being
stuck and assemble New Year's resolutions to get unstuck. Part of why we
get stuck is that there is a complex blocking our will, our intentionality, at
least as strong as our hope for moving forward. Sometimes resolution,
intentionality, willfulness, or concerted, sustained effort is enough to get
unstuck, and we get through the blockage. Sometimes that is not enough.
Why?
What I have learned from depth psychology is that what we see is often
a compensation for what we don't see, and the issue that is readily apparent
to consciousness is seldom the real issue, that is, it's not about what it is
about. If these two premises are accurate—what we consciously see is a
compensation for what we don't see and it's not about what it is about—
then no wonder life is so difficult and behavioral psychology has so much
trouble tracking our disturbances to such hidden places.
What I have found through the years, both as a human being who suffers
complexes as readily as the next person, and as a therapist witnessing their
sometimes wicked work hour after hour, is that all of our stuck places track
back to the twin existential threats to our survival and well-being:
abandonment and being overwhelmed. I have written about these twin
threats, and our persistent panoply of management strategies elsewhere, so
I will be brief here.5 Metaphorically, an invisible wire reaches down from
the stuck point into the archaic field of our psychological history.
Wheresoever we experienced being overwhelmed, we also acquire coping
strategies of avoidance or struggle for dominance and/or proffer compliant
behaviors. Wheresoever we experienced abandonment in its many forms,
we internalized such deficits as definitions of ourselves and wound up
either self-sabotaging, or compelled to overcompensatory behaviors to
prove our worth, or we manipulated others to support our shaky sense of
self, or obsessively sought reassurance from others, from institutions, from
substances, and the like. In other words, the “stuck” places are much less
about our dilatory will than the power of haunting history to reach up from
below and, through stuckness, “protect” us from reexperiencing the
original traumas of history. In his discussion on the repetition compulsion
—the complex that leads us to repeat our wounding history in such stuck
ways—Freud speculated that we are not just programmed to repetition, but
that at some level we perversely choose it in order to exercise a measure of
control. But even more, and paradoxically, that repetition to feel our
chosen pain is still preferable to reexperiencing the primal pain anew.
Either way we look at such perverse patterns, so contrary to our conscious
will, we must acknowledge the haunting power of history.

The diagram detailing the mechanism of the complex (p. 49) might help.
Sometimes we can recognize the presence of a complex in the moment of
its nefarious coup d'état. For example, sometime we are able to recognize
that the energy generated within us is excessive, far in excess of the reality
requirements of the situation. The problem with this indication is that
while in the grip of the complex, seeing the situation through its historic
lens, that disproportionate energy appears appropriate. Only later, with the
lens removed, do we recognize its excess. Still, as we reflect on the role of
such historic haunting in our lives, we can sometimes realize, in medias
res, that we are more charged and charging than necessary and throttle
back a bit. In those moments bad decisions may be averted, damage
limited.
 As we all know, often in times of stress or when one's conscious
vigilance is reduced, such as through drinking or medication, the
protective and inhibitory filters are removed, and the person is prone to
rash decisions, including violence. Most domestic violence occurs when
the parties are distressed, weakened by drink or substances, or battered by
pressures. I have sat in football stadiums and watched ordinary kids turn
into violent monsters when caught up in the toxic mix of intractable life
frustrations, alcohol, and the anonymity which a crowd seems to promise.
Is there, psychologically, a great difference between a rock concert or
football match, fueled by booze, pot, and anonymity, and a Nazi rally? One
would like to think so, but it is a sobering fact that the human ego
consciousness is so easily invaded by complexes, so easily subsumed by
the collective sensibility, that ordinary people can be subsumed by
collective frenzy. Having undertaken pilgrimages to six former
concentration camps, I know the most frightening fact of all of them is that
such collective enterprises are made possible not by monsters or
psychotics, but by ordinary people caught up in collective complexes and
disconnected from a relationship to their own soul. There are not enough
monsters in the world to staff those places, provide the transportation,
make the round-ups, process the incarcerations, or take the role of
neighbors looking the other way. It took the cooperation, both active and
passive, of millions to make such horrors happen. In my own country, we
are not far removed from justifying the institution of slavery, the
extirpation of indigenous civilizations, the segregation of races, the
ravishing of the environment, and the sanctioning of torture as an
instrument of national policy—all because, once evoked, complexes are
replete with justifications aplenty.
When the energy of a complex is activated, it always manifests in the
body. The polygraph and many other instruments may measure this
discharge of energy and may even tell us things about ourselves of which
we are unaware. Sometimes we can catch a complex mid-flight when we
feel a familiar distress in the body: sweating or shaky limbs, a flutter in the
stomach, a constriction of the throat, and so on. All of these indices are
reminders that nothing occurs in the psyche that is not also in the body,
since we are one organism; moreover, the body is a powerful register upon
which the psyche expresses its calculus of approval or disapproval. It is,
for example, a common pathology of therapists, who sit in repose
physically, but whose psyches are stressed by the nature of their work, to
suffer neck and back disorders. Accordingly, many learn the importance of
physical exercise to drain off that energy which the complex has vested in
the body, in order to renew both body and spirit for the next day's work.
On some occasions we may see the complex coming, for example,
accompanying a forthcoming exam, a medical procedure, or a dental
appointment, and plan accordingly. While it is natural to have a measure of
apprehension when approaching, for example, a job interview, where much
of one's future might be riding on the outcome, how much more difficult
the process becomes when the normal stress of such moments is further
burdened by, for example, an inferiority complex, a lack of permission
complex, or a negative parent complex. I have seen perfectly competent
psychoanalytic candidates wash out of training institutes because the
negative parent complex is so powerfully constellated that they forget all
they know and are reduced to history's frightened child.
 Periodically, some polling agency which is having a slow day decides to
query the public as to its greatest fears. Over and over, the outcome is the
same. The number one fear is not death, not terrorism, but public speaking.
Why? We have all experienced the existential task of pleasing “the large
other.” While that other was once a parent or guardian upon whom our
survival and wellbeing did indeed depend, such an archaic imago, or
complex, gets transferred to the amorphous other embodied in an audience.
As one who is profoundly introverted yet who travels and speaks to
audiences a great deal, I have learned to deal with this by talking through
the complex in advance. I do this in two ways. First, I remind myself to not
allow the complex to load up the situation. “These folks are not here to see
or judge you. They are here to find help in living their lives. If you have
learned anything that may be shared, it will help them do that. That is why
they are here, not you!” I really do privately say that to myself. And
second, and this is dangerous, I kick a sleeping dog in the basement. I
remind myself that I come from a family that was oppressed by lack of
education, opportunity, permission to speak out in this world, and that I,
their child and grandchild, now have that possibility, so I can speak on
behalf of those who could not speak. That puts enough fire in the belly to
overcome stage fright. In reality, I invoke a complex to stand up against
still another, constricting, complex.
Both strategies are attempts to anticipate the complex, for, like the shark
in Jaws, it is always circling below, waiting to strike in a thoughtless
moment. In the first strategy, I walk out of the complex by reframing its
limiting perspective. The new moment is almost always larger and replete
with more possibility than the constrictive purview of the past. In the
second strategy, I use one complex to take on another. While it can be
dangerous business to invite those sleeping dogs to come snarling out of
the basement, the old injustices, the shame and denial, have much more
power than the anxieties of this present moment. As a result, people have
repeatedly said, “This must be easy for you, you seem so calm.” But the
real battles of our lives are almost always within and were waged long
before arriving at that podium.
The central problem is the enormous energy from which core complexes
draw their power. Whatever is first, or most archaic, in our history will
often draw upon a vast reservoir of energy. Second, consider the limited
imagination of such spectral presences. The purview of a complex always
is limited to the time and place of its origin. It can only say what its
looping tape has to say, hence our self-defeating patterns, the places where
we seem unable to avoid bringing harm to ourselves or others. Fortunately,
we grow, gain resilience, and learn other possibilities and thereby are more
empowered to take on the tasks of the new moment. But we can never
presume that the complex, with its ready agenda of regression, will not
grab hold of our leg and pull us under. It is often the work of our lives to
grow larger than the constrictive arena in which complexes would have us
play. When we make such presences conscious, we must conclude that
being bound to the past is not acceptable, and we perforce are thrust into a
serious fight to recover a larger measure of personal sovereignty.
Charles grew up with an emotionally invasive mother and a passive and
ineffectual father. He finally escaped the tyranny of this impossible
situation by what I have called “the Seattle solution,” namely, he moved as
far away from his family of origin as he possibly could without drowning
in the sea. But we travel with our suitcases filled with history, and there,
just beneath the underwear and socks, that history waits to be replayed in
the new setting. Accordingly, unaware as he was of the power of this
constellating complex, his radar found and married an emotionally
troubled woman, and he quickly became as dominated by her distresses as
he had been by his mother. To “solve” this problem he turned first to
depression (anger turned inward and learned helplessness), then to self-
medication of the depression through alcohol, then to an affair with a
woman two hours drive away. Their brief trysts were governed by his guilt
—which is to say anxiety from violating his good-boy complex—and
ended by making both Charles and his mistress miserable.
Because the relationship of the child to the invasive parent is so large,
Charles seemingly has only two options: obey it and be depressed, or
violate its script, which causes huge anxiety and attendant guilt. His task is
to be angry neither with his mother nor his wife, her surrogate, but with the
constrictive power of the complex that reigns in sovereign tyranny and to
figure out what he really wants to do with his life. Living either in
obeisance to, or revolt from, the powerful other is a poor way to conduct a
life. Figuring out his own journey, his own desire, sounds easy enough, but
it is exceedingly difficult to achieve, given the power of theprimal message
that his psychological reality did not count, and given that his well-being
lay in being adaptive and subordinate to the narcissistic needs of others.
 We all have these, or similar, archaic instructions. They have been
around so long we simply have grown familiar with them, like bad habits.
But we are not our history; ultimately, we are what wishes to enter the
world through us, though to underestimate the power of that history as an
invisible player in the choices of daily life is a grave error. Further
examples of the activity of these spectral presences provides the grist of
the next chapter, and then we will turn to how we might break the bonds of
these spectral presences in our lives.
Notes
1. C. G. Jung, “On the Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena” (1902), in
Psychiatric Studies, vol. 1, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1957).
2. C. G. Jung, “The Association Method” (1909), in Experimental Researches, vol. 2, The Collected
Works of C. G. Jung (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973).
3. In the third of R. M. Rilke's Duino Elegies, on the nature of love, he explores how when one
embraces the other the archetypal realm, the personal history, and multiple ancestral personages are
involved in that embrace. When we embrace the other, history is present in each gesture, each
enacted script, each outcome. Accessed at
http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/German/Rilke.htm#_Toc509812217.
4. We all have primal fears which, when evoked, freeze and paralyze. There is an inner Medusa in
each of us which turns us to stone when we stare into her pitiless eyes. Shakespeare described the
power of such complexes over four centuries ago when he confessed how often “resolution is
sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought . . . and lose the name of action” (Hamlet, act 3, scene 1).
5. See James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up
(New York: Gotham Books, 2006), 46–64.
 CHAPTER 5

Our Danse Macabre

Relational Ghosts, Relational Hauntings

At some point in grade school our teacher played a haunting piece of

music for us. At the time I did not remember the name of the composer,
Saint Saëns, but I never forgot the title, as she explained it to us: Danse
Macabre. The Totentanz or dance of death, was a familiar motif in
medieval iconography, church ritual, and popular culture. Soon, very soon,
the ineluctable message: Master Death will arrive, and all of us,
irrespective of class or station in life or moral record, will dance to his
piping into the gaping grave. How often later in life, as a therapist, I have
thought on that metaphor, how often I have observed the relational patterns
of thoughtful, well-intentioned people, who seemed pulled irresistibly by
the spectral presences of the past into the seductive graves of diminished
choice. How often they seem compelled without pity by energies that led
them to old places, familiar dead ends, and wounding arenas. Perhaps the
best way to illustrate this troubling phenomenon is by providing some
examples of dreams, the memorable way the psyche illustrates what is
really going on. Recall that our ego state does not create our dreams, but
they are our dreams nonetheless. So some energic source within each of us
is observing, invested, and offering a commentary to whomever may be
able to hear. My clients have provided some notable examples through the
years, examples graphically depicted in the narratives which arise from our
psyches each night, revealing to us our various homages paid to the dead
past. The dead, it seems, are not dead and dance on still.
Earlier today, I spoke with Denise, a mature woman who has lived a
thoughtful, productive professional life but was undone once again by the
prospect of visiting her city of birth because she would have to spend time
with her father. The father dominated the sons and daughters of the family,
obliged them to serve his needs, and drove them always toward
accomplishments so that he might feel better about his own wretched life.
While they lived in relative affluence and privilege, the inner life of the
father was, and remains, impoverished. So he demands of his adult
children obeisance, flattery, and servitude. My client, wishing to return to
that city and spend time with friends and siblings, knew that she would
have to tell her father the truth, namely, that being with him, serving his
needs, was an impossibly high price of visiting. Yet to say these words
understandably occasioned enormous anxiety in her. While she would not
permit anyone else to treat her with the disdain and control her father
wielded, the price of saying no to him remained daunting and disabling.
Again, recall that our psyche metaphorically is an analogue computer,
asking have I been here before, what was the message of that experience,
and what is my best course of action here? This process occurs in an
instant, as a reflex, and our ego state is momentarily flooded by the data of
that earlier time and circumstance. To the child within each of us, the
parent remains always a giant with gigantic powers to help or hurt. That
deeply programmed imago is never left behind, and carries with it a large
charge of energy, a waiting script, and a predictable outcome. While it
might seem simple to the outsider to say to the father, “I have had enough
of this control and manipulation, and this is how I plan to spend my time
while visiting, and you may have only this much of it,” to approach that
abyss is to open up the spectral presence of the past and to experience
unacceptable levels of anxiety. But at least in Denise's case we are not in
doubt as to where the stress is coming from. We are not in denial
concerning the real feeling life, the desire for personal freedom, of the
daughter.
Jeremy, a sixty-something man, confessed remorse at having lashed out
at his wife. Her attentiveness to his efforts around the house had resulted in
his screaming at her to leave him alone. So exaggerated was his reaction
that they both knew it was not about the situation at hand—it was about
the spectral presence of the past. His mother was invasive, frequently
prying into his childhood in painful and embarrassing ways. She was
convinced that if one did not have a full bowel movement every day, one
would die of toxicity, and so into his high school years, she demanded to
examine his daily productions to assess his health. It was not until he
finally went away to college that he learned that one did not have to have a
bowel movement every day, and that if one did not, one would not suffer a
debilitating illness. Traveling home at spring break, he strapped a javelin
to the car so that he could practice his track event. When the force of the
wind blew away the towel he had used for padding, he stopped in a panic.
His passenger asked him why, and he replied with great anxiety, “She has
all the towels counted, and if I am one short, she will scream at me.” When
they returned to campus after the break his companion told this story to
others, and soon Jeremy became the butt of the dorm's teasing: “Did you
count your towels today?” “Did you get a good shit today?” and so on. The
shame and worthlessness he felt abides with him today. So when his wife
looks in on him, he jumps down her throat. He and I know why, and now
his wife knows why, but he cannot help himself from having this excessive
reaction.
Both of these persons are extremely competent, capable individuals, and
both came to know not only the nature of these core complexes, which
were running their lives, but also the corrective, redemptive efforts of the
Self to bring enlargement and healing to them. Both had dreams that
helped them gain a perspective larger than the ego, beleaguered as it was,
and both came to recognize that the dreams were theirs, that they had come
from some place outside the ego frame as their friend, their advocate, their
mentor.
Denise, anxiety ridden by the forthcoming visit to her city of origin,
dreamed that she was met at the airport by the mayor of the city, who, in a
solemn ceremony, welcomed her home and told her she had brought great
honor to the city. Her father, present at this ceremony, simply walked
away, perhaps dismayed that he was not the center of the occasion. While
the dreamer felt a flash of nostalgia in the dream for her departing father,
she also knew that it was important for her to be present to the mayor and
to be honored. The mayor in the dream was not the current mayor of her
city, but a more famous mayor of her childhood. She understood that he
embodied a more objective view of her, a celebratory affirmation of her
worth, having nothing to do with the father. While she felt sad for her
mother, she knew that she was being asked to define herself as someone
other than the person defined by her father's narcissistic needs. After all, if
the famous mayor, perhaps a surrogate for the Self, saw her worth, who
was the father, or the dreamer, to argue with him?
Jeremy, hypersensitive to his wife's observant presence, dreamed a
series of dreams, the most traumatic of which was one in which his mother
came screaming at him like a banshee, trying to swallow him in her open
mouth. He compared the image to a shrieking face from the painting Echo
of a Scream by Mexican artist David Siqueiros (1896–1974). Another
dream featured his wife, wearing the clothing common to the fifties when
he was a child, and a set of cereal boxes that he treasured as a child. On the
back of these cereal boxes were cowboys and heroic figures whose
exploits were compensatory to his enslaved condition. During this stage of
his life he had saved up pennies and nickels to send off for magic rings,
spy glasses with codes, and costumes of these mythic saviors. His youthful
psyche was desperately hungering for male energies and these cardboard
hero figures offered themselves up to him in appealing forms.
All relationships, all relationships, involve two elemental psychological
mechanisms at all times: projection and transference. The only question is
the degree to which these mechanisms operate unconsciously and, as a
result, make us do certain things or keep us from doing certain things. In
Jeremy's dream we see that he has projected onto his wife something of the
power of the mother imago. How could he not? His mother was quite
simply the most important woman he had ever met, especially given her
omnipresence and omnipotence during his most formative years. Now his
wife is ostensibly the most important woman in his life, but inevitably he
projects the power of that earlier woman onto his partner and transfers to
her a power that she does not have in reality. But once one looks at the
other through the lens of the past, that power and its attendant strategies
are transferred to the new person, the new moment, but with the agenda,
the script, and the predictable outcome of the first go around.
As an aside, in speaking to women's groups about men, I define and
illustrate this transference phenomenon in relationships and declare that it
forces the man to grant the woman too much power in his life. While this
bestowal of power might seem flattering at first, it is based on an unreal
relationship, a relationship defined not by the man's reality-based
engagement with his wife but by history. Given that the woman has
received this inordinate power, the man is set up to have only three
choices: keep her happy at all costs, try to control her, or avoid her as
much as possible. Many of the women in these groups pipe up: “My
husband does all three.” While “keeping her happy” may be exploited by
an unconscious or devious wife, it operates not out of loving concern but
out of power. Macho behavior is a telling indication of the magnitude of
the transferred power of the mother imago. The more a man swaggers, the
more insecure he is in his own masculine nature. (This is why homophobia
is an unwitting confession by macho types of the hidden power of the
feminine, and why it is most pronounced among macho assemblies such as
sports teams or the military where one needs to define one's self in male
constructs on a daily basis simply to hold one's ground.) Similarly, male
avoidance of intimacy is in direct proportion to what degree the man felt
invaded in his childhood. Accordingly, virtually all adult relationships are
ghostly reenactments of earlier times and places, earlier personae, and
earlier scripts.
Jeremy's dream was so clear: his wife in the clothing and setting of
childhood. How could one not see this sinister connection? It would be
tempting to report that these dreams led people to vanquish the
diminishing power of the past overnight. They did not. But for both Denise
and Jeremy, the dreams seemed to objectify another kind of energy that
was rising to inform, support, and perhaps heal them. For Denise, the
mayor himself says she is of great value, has brought honor to her city, and
has nothing to do with her father in all this. For Jeremy, his partner is the
unfortunate carrier of the debris of an unresolved past. Because he loves
his wife, because he wants to be a free man, because he wishes to claim his
own life journey, Jeremy today is much more self-contained, much more in
the present. Occasionally, he will flash back at his wife, but they both
recover quickly, knowing that it is not about them, but about someone long
ago and far away. It is difficult to remember this in the heat of the moment,
but the more we can remember, the greater the purchase on the present
moment. Thus the wisdom of Edmund Burke, repeated in George
Santayana's observation, that those who do not learn from the past are
condemned to repeat it. This truth plays out not only on national stages as
presidents and pontiffs parade their neuroses at the expense of the rest of
us, but in the most intimate of chambers as well. In fact, the more intimate
the relationship, the more present the dramas of the past, for they mean
more to us, cost us more, and therefore carry the heaviest freight.
Let me illustrate the spectral danse macabre with two more examples,
again using dreams as the point of entry.
Ilse had been born into an old European family where the paterfamilias
exercised a benevolent dictatorship, choosing her friends and her values
for her. Her mother was a passive participant in this protective regime.
Naturally he would have denied that he played a domineering role, arguing
that all he ever did was see to the best for his daughter, and Ilse
wholeheartedly subscribed to this reading of their relationship. At the onset
of World War II, the family emigrated to America, and Ilse entered the
same scientific profession as her father. She married only when her father
was dying; and the man she chose, Karl, was a generation older and in the
same profession. She considered this marriage idyllic and she did not
know that she had merely handed the baton of authority to the next
intimate male, external other in her marital choice. It was not that she was
“marrying her father,” but she was surely wed intrapsychically to what she
experienced as the benevolent role of the father complex, along with its
attendant authority. She entered therapy at age sixty-five, when she was
widowed by the death of her husband.
While her grief was real, and understandably the focus of the therapy
initially, Ilse steadfastly resisted remembering her dreams, claiming first
that she never dreamed and later that only vague images hovered over her
waking moments before slipping back into the unconscious. While her
professional life was one of considerable achievement, her flight from the
summons to personal authority persisted in her resistance to the idea that
an authority might be found within. She had a strong positive transference
to her therapist and expected him to tell her what to do with her life now as
she faced both retirement and widowhood. It was several months into the
therapy when she reported her first full dream, and I knew the moment she
spoke it aloud that we had moved from a legitimate process of grief work
to an analytic frame.

Karl and I are on some sort of pilgrimage together and are walking
side by side. As we reach a flowing stream, I realize that I have
forgotten my purse and must go back and fetch it. Karl goes ahead.
I return to our car, retrieve my purse, and return to the path we were
on. When I reach that bridge again and begin to cross, a man my
age, but unknown to me, joins me from the left and we begin to talk.
I understand at this moment that Karl is both just ahead of me,
and that he is also dead. I tell this stranger about my loss, my
terrible bereavement, and then, to my shock, he says to me, “I know,
I understand, and it has been good for me!” [referring to himself].
 Ilse certainly understood that she and her husband Karl had been on a
journey together, that in some way they still were, though he has gone
ahead of her, but she was puzzled by the symbol of the missing purse and
offended by the insensitive, even cavalier, attitude of the stranger who
averred that her suffering was good for “him.”
After all these years, and so many dreams, I have seen hundreds of
missing purses. What does one carry in a purse: personal effects, even, one
might say, one's personality, confirmation of identity, resources, keys,
capital, and many other things. It is never a good thing to lose one's purse.
Ilse had left these things behind in Europe many decades before, or better,
had folded them into the protective but constrictive embrace of the
father/daughter symbiosis.
The stranger is somehow a familiar companion to her, of the same age,
for he has been around exactly as long as she has, but he is a stranger to
her conscious life. Yet the psyche brings the two together on that fateful
bridge of transition, a crossing over into a different stage of the journey
and demanding a more reflective psychology to direct it. In classical
Jungian terms, the stranger is her animus, the so-called inner masculine
that had been enfolded so long in the father complex that she had never
known her personal authority. As long as her life flowed in its protected
way, she had only the easy decisions to make, and she made them with
professional skill and alacrity, but when it came to the question of who she
was and what she stood for, she was still a sweet child on history's large
and indifferent stage. Only the suffering occasioned by the removal of the
protective blanket of well-meaning males in her life could lead her to this
crossroads. This is why the stranger, who is strange only to ego
consciousness but who has always been with her, says that her suffering
was good for him, that is, because it made their conscious encounter with
each other possible.
Ilse's attitude toward the stranger and the task he brought her was more
than ambivalent; she disavowed the summons that the integration of this
animus energy asked of her. A woman's encounter with the negative
animus is usually embodied as self-denigration: “What makes you think
you can do that?” The positive animus is experienced as not only the
capacity to take who one is into the world, but the permission to do so.
Such an energy has a gravitas, a grounding, and an empowering effect on a
woman's life. Given that the primary task of the second half of life is the
recovery of personal authority, namely, to discern what is true for oneself
and find the courage to live it, Ilse was being summoned in this dream to
grow up and be her own adult. From all outward parameters, she was very
much an adult, and a productive one as well, but from an inner perspective,
she was only now, at sixty-five, taking on the true mantle of adult
accountability.
She hated that stranger and his insensitivity to her loss, and even more,
the summons he brought her to integrate the life-expanding energy he
embodies into her life. To her credit, Ilse took on this project and over the
years made a great number of changes to her life, all based on risking a
personal authority which theretofore had not been available. In time, she
even left the church of her tradition and became a Quaker, doubly
significant because of the Quaker emphasis on accessing divine guidance
not through priests, hierarchies, or vested authority but through trusting an
inner light. Her shift of religious affiliation was a signal of her taking on
the project of personal authority and wresting it from the benevolent but
spectral presence of the father.
Damon was a thirty-six-year-old British graduate student of German
language and literature. He was in Zürich completing a PhD with the
expectation of returning to England to teach at the collegiate level. His
presenting issues were a persistent depressive affect, feeling always that he
was on the periphery of his own life, and difficulty sustaining intimate
relationships with women. Several weeks into his therapy, he had the
following dream, which is set back in England with his family of origin:

We are on holiday and get into our car and leave London. As we
drive out into the countryside, we pass a field of peasants or
farmers working their crops. I announce to everyone: “That is how
real people live!”
We stop at a roadside inn and have lunch and then drive on until
the road peters out and we get out and walk into a forest. As we go
deeper into the forest, it gets darker and darker, and I feel
apprehensive. Then, in the distance, we see the glow of lights and
faintly hear music playing. As we draw near, we see it is actually a
mansion lit up, and my father says to me, “This is Keats's house.” I
say, “No, it couldn't be because Keats spent his whole life in and
died in London.” But my father insists and when we get to the
 entrance of the mansion, there is a bronze plaque which says, “John
Keats's House.”
We go inside and some sort of theatrical performance is going on.
There are no chairs, so we go to the front and seat ourselves on the
floor. I realize that it is an erotic ballet version of Shakespeare's A
Mid-Summer Night's Dream. After awhile one of the dancers, a
young woman comes over to me and holds out her hand as an
invitation to join the performance as her partner. I am shy and feel
uncomfortable but think, “Why not?” We begin to dance together,
slowly but closely and purposefully. Then the phone rings and
someone tells me it is my mother calling and that we left her stuck
in the toilet back at the inn and I am required to go back and fetch
her. I am furious that this is taking me away from the dance, but I
feel I have no choice and leave.

The reader may wonder, as I do, how we dream such things. Perhaps we
do not fill our dreams with the literary associations of this particular
dreamer, but we all do rummage through our own experience and from that
detritus form images from the depths which speak to the conduct of our
journey. To realize that we have such sources of guidance within is to be
assured that we do have a source for personal authority, for guidance and
solace, and for a more considered life.
Recall that Damon's presenting issues are the persistent depressive
cloud over his life and his ambivalence toward intimacy with women. We
all carry our families of origin with us as spectral presences, so this dream
begins with the family together as before. As they leave the world of
conscious ego construction, the city, they enter into the countryside and
less conscious realms. Damon's pronouncement that the farming folk are
real people reveals his self-critical attitude toward himself as someone
unreal, living in his head but not his heart and his body.
When I asked why it was that his father announced that the mansion
they encountered was the residence of John Keats, the nineteenth-century
poet, Damon replied, “Keats died young. He wrote his own epitaph: ‘Here
lies one whose name was writ on water.’ My father never got to live his
life either.” “What was his life about, then?” “Taking care of my mother
was his whole life.” Damon felt that while his father would not have
known that information about Keats, he felt his own provisional hold on
life was in turn modeled on his father's failure to provide a more dynamic
model for a boy to emulate. If Damon believes, as his complex has
internalized and now dictates, that his job is to take care of a
narcissistically demanding partner, no wonder he is ambivalent about
intimacy.
Damon associated the Shakespeare play with joie de vivre, the dance of
life, and was astonished that he was in fact invited to join. Overcoming his
inhibitions, he takes the hand of this psychopomp, this guiding anima
presence, and begins the dance, but alas, the power of the old complex
reasserts its sovereignty and pulls him out of this union with its more
enriching possibilities. When I asked why the mother was “stuck” in the
toilet, he replied that she had always associated the body, and sexuality in
particular, with something dirty, surreptitious, and foreign. What a
divisive, troubling message to pass on. No wonder he was depressed and
estranged. What else could he be when in the grips of this spectral
succubus, this denier of life?
These stories are real, the dreams are real, yet the dilemmas each person
faces are founded on the presences that haunt from their past. We see again
the twin mechanisms present in all relationships: projection and
transference. Each of them, meeting any stranger, reflexively scans the
data of history for clues, expectations, possibilities. This scanning
mechanism is instantaneous, mostly unconscious, and then the lens of
history slips over one's eyes. This refractive lens alters the reality of the
other and brings to consciousness a necessarily distorted picture. Attached
to that particular lens is a particular history, the dynamics, the script, the
outcomes of which are part of the transferred package. Freud once
humorously speculated that when a couple goes to bed there are six people
jammed together because the spectral presences of the parents are
unavoidable. One would have to add to this analogy the reminder that
those parents also import their own relational complexes from their
parents, so we quickly have fourteen underfoot, not to mention the
persistence of even more ancestral influences. How could intimate
relationships not be congested arenas?
As shopworn as the idea seems, we cannot overemphasize the
importance of primal imagoes playing a domineering role in our relational
patterns. They may be unconscious, which grants them inordinate power,
or we may flee them, but they are always present. Thus, for example,
wherever the parent is stuck—such as Damon's mother who only equates
sexuality with the perverse and the unappealing, and his father who stands
de-potentiated and co-opted—so the child will feel similarly constrained or
spend his or her life trying to break away (“anything but that”) and still be
defined by someone else's journey. How could Damon not feel depressed,
then, at his own stuckness, and how could he not approach intimacy with
such debilitating ambivalence?
Given that the problem of the unconscious is that it is unconscious, we
only become aware of this hidden haunting when we have served it many
times and begin to see a pattern, when we have revelatory, compensatory
dreams, or when we grow large enough to take on the burden of history
that courses through each of us. When we are young, the ego is
insufficiently formed to attempt such a massive project. After many years
of serving these spectral messages, the ego may have gained sufficient
energy, sufficient solidification to undertake such a self-examination. It
sounds simple but in fact it is not, for the ego will be required to stand
before humbling recognitions, daunting challenges, and intimidating
prospects of risk. We say we wish to undertake this project, but normally
we only address whatever parts need greater consciousness when our
suffering is no longer deniable or manageable. So Denise had to suffer the
anxious crisis of necessary choice, Jeremy the disturbance of terrifying
dreams, Ilse the deaths of her father and her husband, and Damon the
oppression of depression, desuetude, loneliness, and longing. Without that
suffering, there is no call to consciousness, no showing up for the
appointment we have with life. We all keep slip-sliding away until
something catches us and holds us to accountability.
Jung once observed that each therapist must ask the question: What task
is this person's neurosis helping him or her avoid? Sooner or later, the
necessary path of healing becomes clear. We can no longer avoid the
“going through.” Going through means that that which we have neglected
through denial, unconsciousness, or living in mauvaise foi, remains as
unfinished business. In the book Swamplands of the Soul, I noted that in
every swampland visitation we experience, there is always a task, the
addressing of which can move us from victimage to active participation in
the construction of our journey, and the flight from which invariably leads
to the same old, same old. Or, as poet Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, to
remain our own “sweating selves.”1
 How unpleasant to realize that finally we all have to face what we fear?
All of us. How unpleasant to realize that until we do, the life we are living
is at least partially in service to the dictates of the past, the persistent,
interfering ubiquity of which cannot be exaggerated. Discerning these
presences with their urgent, redundant messages is only the first step. But
we will not take even that first step until we have to, until it costs too much
not to. Even in our brightest moments, the danse macabre plays on, for the
dead are not dead, nor are they gone. A vast company of ancestral
presences embraces us in dance, always. In sundry forms and fashions,
they are present always, and their gestural messages move through our
limbs and our choices . . . and here we thought we were alone on this
journey.
Note
1. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems and Prose, ed. W. H. Gardner (New York: Penguin Books,
1953), 62.
 CHAPTER 6

Guilt Ghosts, Shame Ghosts

Alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, RICHARD III, ACT 5, SCENE 5
Recently a man whom I had been counseling for some time came in
shattered. His adolescent son had committed suicide, leaving no note, amid
no overt symptoms of depression or debilitating conflict. Not only was this
father stricken by the loss of his beloved child, he was ridden with guilt:
What should I have seen? Did I do something wrong? Did I fail to do
something? These questions are initially reasonable and responsible, but
their persistence becomes obsessive and lacerating. How many of us are so
afflicted by decisions made and not made in our past? And what can one
say to a parent in such a moment of extremity?
I tried to make the following points: First, none of us knows the stresses
within another person, and often what they do makes sense to them at the
time. Even though we feel it a violation of what we consider the natural
order of things, to have a child precede a parent, we are all on the same
mortal journey together, albeit strung out separately along the way.
Second, the loss of a child does change one's world forever, but I would
suggest two things: a) talk to the son at least once a day to honor the
relationship, knowing that death does not end relationships, and b)
consider what values one held in common with the child and continue to
serve those values as best we can. Third, in any case, we all have separate
lives, separate journeys, separate destinies, and we do not serve those lost
by abrogating or sabotaging our own summons to live. Rather, we are
reminded to live even more consciously in the face of loss and to treasure
what relationships, and what tasks of growth, are still around us. Just how
is it that we would serve the child's memory by not showing up in our own
lives?
 I came to these conclusions the hard way, not as a therapist, but as a
parent who lost his child as well. Joining the dismal company of so many
grieving parents, the world's worst club, I also suffered guilt, asked all the
self-incriminating and lacerating questions, and still do, but I also consider
my life both a testament to what we shared so abundantly and as a spur to
show up and not be afraid of what life has yet to bring. How I used to
puzzle over the terrible admonition of the Greeks: “Not to have been born
is best, and to have died young second best.” Surely that “wisdom” was
too pessimistic. But now I know why they might have so concluded, for to
live long is to suffer loss after loss, even while not to live long is to bring
loss to others. Moreover, to live long, and perhaps grow more thoughtful,
is to have more consciousness, more insight, and, frankly, much, much
more about which to feel guilt, or at least complicity. Still, showing up
seems important. It was after personal loss that I rediscovered Marcus
Aurelius and remembered not to “grumble at setting out to do what I was
born for, and for the sake of which I have been brought into the world.”1
As humans we are gifted by memory and also cursed by it. The memory
of sweet moments can serve as a susurrus to the cacophonous timbre of the
present. But the memory of trauma can make us adverse to risk, hesitant
before the task of the hour, or, having identified with our adaptations to the
existential demands of a fortuitous environment, out of touch with our
guiding instincts and our capacities for enlargement. We are equally
equipped with the prospect of envisioning the future. Such a gift allows us
to anticipate the rigors of the journey and the provisions needed, and
perhaps even to intuit behind which bush the predator might wait.
Nonetheless, the cost of a burdening past is guilt, and the cost of an
uncertain future is anxiety. Each affective state, guilt or anxiety, has the
capacity to erode our participation in the moment and remove us from
instinctual guidance in service to agendas of the past or anticipations of the
future. Given that this book is about hauntings, we will focus here on the
burdensome powers of the past.
While the capacity to feel guilt makes us sentient, potentially moral,
creatures, the weight of guilt is often crippling. Mark Twain once noted
that we are the only animal capable of feeling embarrassment, and the one
with most legitimate claim upon that emotion. So, too, it may be argued, is
our capacity for guilt. And while it is often true, as the surrealist poet
Guillaume Apollinaire declared, “memories are hunting horns whose
sound dies out along the wind,” more often memories haunt us, drain the
joy of this hour, and even oblige numbing behaviors, divertissements, and
projections of accountability onto others.2
Many of our behaviors, conscious and unconscious, are driven by guilt,
shame, anxiety, and other dismal denizens of the soul. Typically, guilt
shows up in our lives in one of three ways: patterns of avoidance, patterns
of overcompensation, or patterns of self-sabotage. Guilt drives us away
from the normal attractions of life by feelings of unworthiness. In
overcompensating, one seeks to “treat” this unknown disorder by
demonstrating one's worth, one's power or wealth, or one's magnanimity
(as Pearl Bailey, a great American psychologist, put it, “Thems what thinks
they is, ain't”). In the third form, the burden of guilt demands accounting,
retribution, payback, and often leads to self-denigration, self-flagellation,
or self-abuse before the compelling ledger sheet for things done, things not
done, is balanced. (Oedipus, viewing the weight of his unconscious
choices, blinds himself and pleads for death, only to be punished even
further by exile and long repentance, the burden of guilt and exile being a
more exacting punishment than execution.)
When we reflect on the strange paradox that guilt binds us to the past
and anxiety to an unknown future, it seems that we might rarely be present
to this moment, this reality, insofar as we are driven by guilt or anxiety.
But there is a place for guilt. And what is that place?
To answer that question we have first to recognize that there are at least
three modalities of guilt, all with very powerful claims upon our emotional
lives. They are:

1. Legitimate guilt as a form of accountability for our choices

2. Contextual guilt
3. Illegitimate guilt as a form of anxiety management
Guilt as Accountability
No matter what the exigencies, the crises of the moment, all philosophical,
theological, and psychological systems hold us accountable at the end of
our lives for the consequences of our choices, no matter how well intended
they may have been at the moment. While courts may sometimes
recognize a diminished capacity for making choices, generally we are held
before the bar of real life, real choices, and real outcomes. The night I am
writing this paragraph an Italian captain is being charged with abandoning
his ship and passengers in the moment of peril. How easy it is to sit in
judgment, and judged he must be, even as all of us remember shameful
moments of turning away from what we knew was right, what we knew we
were called to confront. An earlier illustration of this dilemma was
depicted by Joseph Conrad in his novel Lord Jim, a fine account of this
burden of guilt and the many ways the central character sought to
compensate for his own panic during a crisis at sea. All of us have
vulnerable spots in our armor, areas of personal vulnerability, and we are
fortunate indeed if the fates do not bring us to those terrible places in our
lives. All of us have some aperture where we are most frightened, least
able to resist the rapid transport which every complex embodies out of this
moment into dismal places past.
While technology advances and social contexts vary, human nature does
not. All of the great religious and spiritual observers have witnessed this
tendency in all of us, and they often provide a form of expiation and
renewal. Greek tragedy, for example, was a highly moral view of the
universe in which choice, consequence, consciousness, guilt, recognition,
and compensation unfold. Those who returned humbled before the gods
were redeemed; those who would not bend the knee of contrition perished.
So, too, rites of expiation, conscious scapegoating, repentance, and
confession were institutionalized and made available to the sincere that
they might be renewed and enabled to go on with life. Others, lacking such
beliefs or rites or sacraments are eaten up with compensatory behaviors,
anesthetizing practices, and the erosion of any participation in the
celebration of life.
After consciousness brings accountability, confession, atonement, or
compensation is obliged, unless, as the twelve-step programs recognize, to
do so would bring further damage to aggrieved parties. Many times the
compensation is not possible without further damage, or at best some
symbolic offering is substituted as a symbolic gesture for the loss, injury,
or grievance.
If the accountability and confession and compensation are sincere, the
possibility of atonement, or becoming one again with oneself, and restored
relations with the wounded party may be possible. Underneath this gesture
is the notion that we all feel better somehow when living in good faith with
the other and with ourselves. The etymology of both penitentiary and
reformatory speak to the human need to feel connected with others again.
Sadly, there are of course those so damaged in their relationship with
another that such restoration of right relationship is impossible. They
remain frozen in sociopathic or schizoid distance from others as a radical
form of protection and suffer a fate even worse than the guilt-ridden—they
are locked in isolating prisons from which there seems no escape without
enduring the overwhelming threat of accountability.
After sincere recognition, recompense, and repentance, one may find the
grace of release. I say grace, because this fortuitous gift may be
experienced even by those most guilt-ridden. Grace is the experience of
feeling restored to community with self and with others, apart from
whatever one has done or failed to do. Perhaps the best definition of grace
came from theologian Paul Tillich who said that grace requires accepting
the fact that one is accepted despite the fact that one is unacceptable. This
is not something that can be earned—not by money, not by wearing a hair
shirt, not by compensatory behavior—but is a gift rising out of the
generosity of others.
The ability to own our own guilt, to acknowledge our shadowy capacity
for wrong of all kinds, paradoxically allows us to move in new ways into
the world. The trick is not to be defined by that guilt and its compensatory
or evasive agendas, but to admit the wounds and flaws that characterize
our species. Such a person, Jung wrote, now

knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he

only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real
for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an
infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our
day. . . . How can anyone see straight when he does not even see
 himself and the darkness he unconsciously carries with him into all
his dealings?3

As the Roman playwright Terence observed two millennia ago,

“Nothing human is alien to me.” Ironically, this devastating insight into
ourselves is also the key to self-acceptance, to legitimate guilt but also to
legitimate reinvestment in life. If I can accept Terence's conclusion, then I
may even be able to accept myself— when all of us know how
unacceptable a proposition that may prove to be. To accept one's humanity
is also to experience the necessity of grace, grace toward others who have
wronged us, and even, much more difficult, grace bestowed unto
ourselves.
Guilt as Contextual Consciousness
The second form of allegiance to the spectral presences of the past
shows up as contextual guilt. As animals coexisting on this spinning globe,
we live by killing: other animals sometimes, vegetal life often, and we
daily serve the paradox of this life that our lives depend upon the killing of
some other living form. We pretty it up with dogmas of superiority,
rationalizations of divinity-bestowed rights, and whatever ploys necessary
to preserve the fragile stability of the ego. It is not sentimentality to see
that the great systole-diastole of life is the life-death dialectic of which we
are an active and compromised part. Our ancestors finessed this paradox
not only with stories of innate superiority but with rituals which divinized
killing, submitting the various acts of violence to a divine drama, the
“cycle of sacrifice” as I called it in Tracking the Gods: The Place of Myth
in Modern Life. Thus, they offered “grace” as a form of thank you and
expiation for the slaying of the other. Today, we deal with it by distancing
ourselves from the slaughter that goes on around us, not only of sentient
beings but of forms of life that we increasingly find also have natural
“intelligence,” even primitive types of consciousness. So it has been, so it
will be. It is moral obtuseness not to observe this daily fact rather than
rationalize it away and accuse others of pathological sensitivity. A former
vice president of the United States was lampooned for speaking out on
behalf of the planet, even though it is clear the ecological balance of the
planet is increasingly in jeopardy and will have the final say.
Even more, those of us privileged to live in the so-called first world live
on the backs of children and exploited adults throughout the rest of the
world. When Candide set off on Voltaire's magical mystery tour in the
seventeenth century, he visited the Caribbean where he saw the appalling
conditions of work life in the sugar plantations and concluded that now at
least he understood the real price of a lump of sugar to sweeten milady's
tea in Paris. Once we have tumbled to some form of consciousness around
these matters, we have to acknowledge the tennis shoes on our feet, the
jeans on our rumps, and the shirts on our backs are quite likely wrung from
the exploitation of the powerless somewhere in the world. As we grow up
and, hopefully, attain a modicum of consciousness and moral sensibility,
we know we are accountable before history and before our fellow
creatures. We also begin to realize that many of our choices will not be
between clear goods and obvious evils but in gradations of gray.
Additionally, we know that there is enormous moral evil going on all
around us. We participate, passively in most cases, in discriminations of all
kinds, and turn our televisions to other channels when the grim reality of
the world begins to seep into our comfortable living rooms. We expect
others to take care of this creeping sepsis for us; yet we elect
representatives who are narcissistically driven by self-interest and
corporate quarterly reports and who help us avoid the monstrous in our
midst: the hungry in a land of plenty, the exploited in a democracy, the
millions living on the fringe of survival. Our technology assists in
numbing and distracting. The Roman panum et circum is far surpassed by
our easy access to junk food and a variety of electronic entertainments
running twenty-four hours a day with infinite capacity to seduce, to
distract, and to deaden. To be even mildly aware of what is described here
is to experience contextual guilt; to perpetuate this is to live in mauvaise
foi.
Guilt as Anxiety Management System
Much more often, the state we label “guilt” is not the two forms of guilt
identified above—the courageous acknowledgment of harm brought to
others or our shadowy collusion with exploitation and values contrary to
our professed intent. This sort of guilt, as we noted earlier, always
manifests somatically, as queasiness in the stomach, a tremor of the limbs,
even light-headedness. One of the signs of an activated complex is that it
always manifests somatically, and while we may focus on that physical
reaction and the energy coursing through us at that moment, we ignore the
fact that the roots of this experience reach deeply into our psychological
history and activate archaic fields of anxiety.
This activated state is often called guilt, but in fact it is an
epiphenomenal reaction to a primary phenomenon, a secondary alert
system to a primary sounding of anxiety's klaxon. We hear people say that
they feel guilty when they say no to someone, or when they are angry, or
when they fall short of parental ideals, and so on. Remember that our
elementary sense of self, our internalized program of self and other, and
our protective systems are all derived from disempowered times and
places, messages overgeneralized, overinternalized, and subsequently
reinforced by endless replication. As children, in necessary service to our
narcissistic self-interest, we quickly run into the limits of our capacities,
the sundry powers of the world around us, and its devastating proclivity to
punish or withhold approval and affection.
For many, what was once spontaneous and natural expression becomes
perilous, and we slowly grow alien to our original selves. One client spoke
of how he used to sing loudly and joyously from the porch of his home
until one day his mother screamed at him to shut up, and he did, thinking
at that moment: “I will never sing again!” It was a silly moment and a rash
conclusion, but in high school years later in a chorus alternating with gym
class he was called on to sing so that the instructor could determine the
right section for him. He shook with fear, opened his mouth, and nothing
came out. His classmates laughed at his distress, and the instructor took his
gesture as defiance and subjected him to corporal punishment, which was
generally still permitted in those times. To an outsider, this incident seems
trivial in the context of a larger life history, but each of us, if we have
moments of insight and honesty, know that there are places in our psyche
where we simply freeze and are rendered mute or grow angry and attack
those around us.
From such encounters with the power principle, inevitable in the
socialization process of each of us, one begins to internalize restraints,
governors of our spontaneous natural expressions. Over the years one may
lose contact with the psyche as a self-guiding system and slowly
disconnect from the reality of one's feeling life. Since feelings are natural
spontaneous reports from the psyche—we do not choose feelings, they
choose us—to repress or constrict them is to collude in our self-
estrangement. What is called guilt, then, is often an expression of the
autonomy of this self-protecting system that protects us from returning to
the wastelands of punitive or abandoning threats. Thus, when a natural
impulse toward expression rises, a hand metaphorically reaches out and
arrests the movement as a mode of reflexive protection. The
epiphenomenal feelings of distress are leakage from the elemental anxiety
that has been roused. All of this circuitry is triggered in an instant, and the
impulse to action, expression, or value is contained. The payoff is anxiety
management; the price is self-estrangement. Feeling guilty for saying no is
really a defense against the possibility that that other will be displeased
and subject us to the threats of punishment or withdrawal. Looked at from
the conscious remove of adulthood, such a linkage is at best an
overgeneralization and, at worst, a permanent state of paranoid fearfulness.
But let us not downgrade the power of these archaic feelings, and defenses
against archaic feelings, that allowed us to get to this new moment and
then to suffer its contamination by the paradigms of earlier, disempowered
times.
Given that most of us were conditioned to be nice rather than real,
adaptive rather than assertive, this kind of guilt is a profound haunting of
the present, an undermining by the perceptions and dynamics of the past.
We need not debate the existence of ghosts when our daily lives and
choices, and therefore patterns, are inhabited and driven by these spectral
presences.
Guilt as a defense against the archaic agendas of angst reflects the
necessary conditionality every child faces, and it shows up later as a tacit
lack of permission to be oneself. The only way one can recover traction on
the present is to ask the question directly: “Of what (or of whom) am I
afraid in this moment?” Often the fear dissipates in the face of our adult
powers, adult options, and adult resilience, but even then we often
recognize how we have transferred an old paradigm of self and other to our
partners, our organizations, and our society in general. How many children
grew up hearing, “what will people think,” and to what extent did that
maxim contribute to their cowering before the world decades later?
Usually when we smoke out those fears it comes down to the possibility
that someone, somewhere might be unhappy with us.4 Such a fact is
devastating to a child and unpleasant to the adult, and we often fantasize
outcomes that do not happen. But we have to imagine that if the worst
came to pass, that someone would be unhappy with us, we can bear it, and
bear it we must if we are to lay claim to adulthood and to a modicum of
personal integrity.
When we remember that these reflexive but regressive powers were
once necessary and protective in motive, we may find compassion for
ourselves and others, but when we also reflect that those old protections
lead to a diminished life, then we realize that such hauntings have to be
confronted. There is nothing wrong with being fearful; that is human. But
it is wrong to live a life governed by fear.
A child must do what a child must do. In the present world, to be a
person of value rather than an emotional ethical chameleon requires us to
make choices whether or not others approve. The angst that surges up from
below when we do so can still spring forth with amazing, paralyzing
power. But such guilt is inauthentic. Jung observed that neurosis is a life
designed around avoiding authentic suffering. Neurosis is not about our
neurology; it is about the split agenda within each of us. Authentic
suffering means suffering the insurgency of the old angst and restraining
the powers of regressive protection in service of speaking and living the
truth as we experience it. We are all haunted by these spectral messages
and attendant scripts, and when they prevail we are still stuck in childhood.
Whenever we fight them, we move from a quisling guilt which betrays us
from within to the necessary struggles of adults who wish to be persons of
value and integrity. Once we have become truly conscious of this sort of
haunting, the mechanism of guilt is no longer invisible and no longer
acceptable.
Still, after all this we must remain guilty beings, and necessarily so.
Without the pernicious gift of guilt, without ballast, we might easily drift
untethered into clouds of narcissism and naiveté. Guilt can destroy, as we
know, but it can also lead to a more differentiated consciousness. Jung put
it this way: the guilty person “is chosen to become the vessel for the
continuing incarnation, not the guiltless one who holds aloof from the
world and who refuses to pay his tribute to life for in him the dark God
would find no room.”5 The person without guilt is either profoundly
immature in conscious development or has never really entered life, which
occasions a guilt of a still deeper violation of incarnation.

Twenty years ago I wrote a book on all the troubling places the soul
might visit in this long and unsteady journey we call our life. Swamplands
of the Soul describes such marshy zones as depression, guilt, anxiety, loss,
addiction, betrayal, and many other dreary visitations. After it was
published one reader wrote to me and said, “Why did you not include
shame?” “Huh,” I thought, “why didn't I? It is so obvious.” I thought a
long time on that question and am still puzzling over it these many years
later when I tell myself I really ought to know better. I finally concluded
that, dismal as those other places were, I had a special resistance to writing
about shame and managed to “forget” it in the list on my Hades Mystery
Tour. But now I have to go there.
I grew up with shame, as many children do and as my parents did. My
mother lost her father before she could remember him. Her dear mother
was a seamstress, and she went to school in dresses sewn by her mother
from flour sacks. She told me that she didn't know what the I stood for on
her school records until much later when she learned that it meant
“indigent.” She drove me by the Jacksonville state psychiatric hospital
where her father reportedly once was and told me to remember it because
someday I would be visiting her there. (Ironically, she never went there,
but my brother Alan served his MSW internship there many years later.)
The family was on some sort of public assistance long before FDR and the
beginning of Social Security, the safety net we have come to take for
granted (unless, of course, one has been unemployed too long, and one's
benefits run out). On many occasions my mother publically shamed me
and discouraged my initiative in matters ranging from education to sports
to socializing. One neighborhood child was deemed off limits because he
was taking trombone lessons, and anyone privileged enough to have music
lessons was in a class way above us, so I was to spare myself further
shame by dissociating from him, despite the fact that he lived next door.
(At the same time, his mother shamed him by forcibly giving him a
permanent so that his hair would be curly like mine.)
My father, who wanted to be a physician, was pulled out of the eighth
grade because of family economic distress; at age thirteen, he was sent to
work for the rest of his life. His unrealized dreams were sources of great
sorrow to him, but he never complained, ever, about the conditions of his
life on the assembly line at a tractor factory. At one point, around age
twelve, I memorized William Ernest Henley's poem “Invictus” because it
touched something in me. I recited it aloud to my parents, and they both
said I should forget it; life is not that way, it is better not to have
expectations. It was still a culture shock when later I went to graduate
school and mingled with folks there who had grown up with empowering
messages of expectation. One of my deepest shames derives from a
childhood moment in late August when my father and I were walking out
of that factory with its 120 degree heat, the humid air filled with flying
metal splinters, and I said, thoughtlessly, “I am glad September is nearly
here so I can go back to school.” “September never came for me,” he said,
without recrimination, only resignation. To this day I regret my insensitive
reminder to him. I suppose this is my public apology to him.
In telling this story, I am in no way criticizing my parents. They were
honest, hardworking, decent folk who meant well, but they could not help
but share the Weltsicht that governed their lives. These days I honor both
of them and am glad that they were my parents. Most of all, I grieve the
lack of opportunities life seemed to afford them and provided me. I write
of them only now, when they and all their contemporaries are dead, so that
they not be shamed further. In the face of such powerful parental exempla
— some overt, some phenomenologically internalized from the
atmosphere—one either serves the message or runs from it. I did both. As
it is, most of us feel fraudulent or illegitimate and either wind up serving
that message in avoidant or self-sabotaging choices or in overcompensated
grandiosity or power complexes.
In the first half of life, so many of my choices were shame-based and
self-denigrating. Education, which seemed the only ticket out of this
impoverished worldview, proved to be something upon which I relied too
much, thus cutting off both the vital feeling function and the shameful
broth in which it was drowning. This inner discord finally reached its
crescendo in a midlife depression and meltdown. It also led to my first
hour of analysis. My first therapy sessions were with a well-meaning
psychiatrist who knew only to medicate but, to his everlasting credit, after
a few sessions he said to me, “The kind of questions you are interested in I
can't address. You ought to go see a Jungian.” “Of course,” I thought, for I
had had a strong, mostly academic, interest in Jung for many years. Little
did I know that this was the beginning of the second half of life, and the
beginning of phase two of an heretofore unconscious wrestling match with
shame.
I have found that in most people's lives shame plays a role. It differs
from guilt in important ways. Guilt is, as we saw above, a confession of
something one has done or failed to do. Shame is the belief that who one is
is wrong, who one is is profoundly flawed. Shame comes from two major
sources, the first being the belief that we have to meet some criteria,
measure up, serve some demanding program, even be perfect. Much
shaming comes from religious institutions that emphasize correct behavior
over grace and forgiveness, and like many other therapists, I have often
had to work to undo this mischief in clients. Other shame comes from the
internalization of “assignments,” both spoken and unspoken, from parents
or others. I cringe every time I see a stage mother or Little League father,
for I suspect they are driving any enjoyment of those activities from their
children. Either those children will sacrifice their lives to meet their
parents' expectations, that is, live the unlived lives of the parents, or they
will bail out along the way, feeling shamed as “failures.” So many adults,
many of them highly accomplished in the outer world, suffer from a lack
of permission to really be themselves, to feel what they really feel, desire
what they really desire, and strive for the life that really wishes to be
expressed through them. Finding the seeds of permission and self-
acceptance under such a pile of manure is always very difficult.

I observed to a friend one day, “You do not believe in hell, but you
know you are going there.” He nodded, grudgingly. He was already in hell
because he knew at that hour that he really had to change his life, and no
matter what he did, the price would be heavy. Driven as he was by both
shame and guilt, and rejecting the metaphysical notion of hell, he knew he
was going there because he was already there, stewing in the broth others
had prepared for him so many years before. Although a very smart man,
given that every child is dependent upon his immediate caregivers and the
contingent messages of his environment, he remained a prisoner of their
collective assumptions, as all of us do to varying degrees. While he
thoughtfully and rationally rejected their premises when he made them
conscious, he was nonetheless manacled by history, scourged by
condemning ghosts, and consigned to the hell of a contaminated journey.
No matter how he sought moral perfection and the higher ground of
integrity and judicious choices, my friend who rejected hell felt its
imaginary fires licking his feet.
It is not easy for any of us to escape the confines of history, nor ever be
more than recovering children. As one sixty-five-year-old lady said to me
in our first session, “When I use the word self, I shudder because the nuns
used to strike us whenever we did, because it was selfishness.” Apart from
the question of how best to raise a child who is not afraid of being himself
or herself, one must grieve this fine lady's inner division. For her, too, guilt
and shame were the twin jail keepers of the cell in which she lived her
whole life. Even coming to therapy was an occasion for guilt and shame,
guilt that she was questioning those received authorities and shame for
being such an apparently inadequate person. How her caregivers could
have believed that these shaming messages could have served her soul
remains beyond me still.
In the face of compelling guilt and belittling shame, what chance does a
person have to breathe free and stretch wings of possibility? No chance,
unless he or she suffers through to knowledge, to understanding, and
outgrows these constrictive templates. It is easy for anyone outside these
individual frames of experience to see what another must do and how
easily it seems done. But then, reader, ask yourself where you are blocked,
stuck in your development, confounded by your desires and bound by your
restrictions. You may be certain that the binding agent for you, as for all of
us, will be anxiety. While the specific components of the anxiety will vary
for each of us, you may also be certain that wherever guilt or shame are
present, and they almost always are, the strength to take on what needs
done is sapped by these pernicious presences. Anxiety binds us to a
possible future, and guilt and shame bind us to a constrictive past. In
neither case have we gained sufficient purchase on the possible present.
So, then, how do we do that? This will be the subject of chapter 10.
Notes
1. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Maxwell Staniforth (New York: Penguin Books, 1964), 43.
2. Guillaume Apollinaire, “Hunting Horns.” Accessed at
http://poetry365.tumblr.com/post/1105868646/hunting-horns-cors-de-chasse-guillaume-apollinaire.
3. C. G. Jung, “Psychology and Religion” (1938), in Psychology and Religion, vol. 11, The
Collected Works of C. G. Jung (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958), par. 140.
4. This is the obverse to H. L. Mencken's definition of a puritan as a person afraid that someone,
somewhere, might be having a good time.
5. C. G. Jung, “Answer to Job” (1952), in Psychology and Religion, vol. 11, The Collected Works of
C. G. Jung (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958), par. 746.
 CHAPTER 7

Ghosts and Things That Go Bump in the Night

There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why
so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images
outside of them for reality and never allow the world within to
assert itself.
—HERMANN HESSE, DEMIAN
In an earlier book, The Archetypal Imagination, I wrote about my first visit
to the home of the Virginia painter Nancy Witt. In the room where I stayed
there was a portrait of a respectable couple whose attire suggested the
beginning of the last century. At first I thought the couple was Mr. and
Mrs. Freud, given his beard, countenance, and the apparent era of the
subjects, but on closer examination, they proved to be someone else.
Moreover, as I moved closer, I noticed that I could see through their bodies
to the furniture that sat behind them. “Who are these people?” I asked.
“My grandparents,” Nancy replied. “Why did you paint them like ghosts or
embodied spirits?” “Because they are always here. They were in my
parents, and through them in me,” she concluded. And so they are.
We carry the genetic code, the behavioral and cultural tendencies, and
the archaic messages embodied in complexes of many generations in each
of our gestures. While no one like us has ever existed before, or will again,
we carry all the past generations with us, always. Sometimes we hear our
father's voice or an expression from long ago coming out of our mouths.
Sometimes we catch a passing glance at ourselves in a mirror and see a
parent's face. In “The Photos,” poet Diane Wakoski writes of looking in
the rearview mirror of her car as she weaves in and out of Southern
California traffic and “there as I am changing lanes on the freeway,
necessarily glancing in the / rearview mirror, I see the face, / not even a
ghost, but always with me, like a photo in a beloved's wallet.” It is her
mother's face that stares back at her, now irretrievably her own as well, and
she concludes, “How I hate my destiny.”1 While fate has chosen her
parents for her, the poet apparently concludes that she carries not only their
legacy of influences, but that, flee as she might, they continue to create her
anew, her fate now unfolding as destiny. The past continues to work its
way into our present, and nowhere more powerfully or influentially than in
our service to their explicit and implicit messages.
I have also written elsewhere of strange experiences when I visited
Sweden, the homeland of my maternal grandparents. My grandfather,
Gustav Lindgren, came to America in 1900 and, a decade later, died in a
coal mining accident; his daughter, my mother, never knew her father.
Sweden was never mentioned— neither my mother nor her mother knew
Sweden from Switzerland, so there was no conscious Swedish influence
upon me whatsoever. Many years later I was invited to speak in
Stockholm, and while there I had experienced déjà vu repeatedly, a
mysterious but compelling situation. On our first night in Sweden, our
hosts took us to an outdoor restaurant, and when we all rose to respect the
playing of the Swedish national anthem and the lowering of the blue and
yellow flag at twilight, I felt a voice come through me that said, “I have
come back for you!” Instantly, I understood that I had served an ancestral
“assignment” and had returned to the homeland on behalf of those who
had once left it in economic hardship and were never able to return. While
I had no conscious thought of such a recondite assignment, the power of
that voice was clear and ineluctable. It was the first of many strange
experiences of having been there before, even though I had always
considered such things with a large measure of skepticism. To this day I do
not understand such experiences at all, but they were real to me, and they
occasioned more respect for the presence of the past than I had had before.
A central part of the American story, the story we tell ourselves, is that we
all start anew, that America is a place for the reinvention of oneself and
therefore of one's destiny. And while this story is profoundly true, I am
now convinced that we carry much more of that past with us than we could
ever imagine. Nancy Witt was right to paint her ancestors as ghosts
infiltrating the room, for surely such invisible assemblies are all present.
Many, now and in the past, believe in the literal existence of ghosts, and
perhaps they are right. But I am not persuaded. It is clear that we can turn
to depth psychology for a more reasonable explanation of how the past
persists in the present. Jung took the question of these spectral presences
very seriously. His mother was mediumistic and so was his cousin whom
he studied in his medical dissertation while in medical school in Basel. He
came to a set of compelling conclusions about these ghostly
manifestations, embodied in the concept of dissociation. In an essay
written in 1919, titled “The Psychological Foundations of Belief in
Spirits,” he observed that in all traditions there is “a universal belief in the
existence of phantoms or ethereal beings who dwell in the neighbourhood
of men and who exercise an invisible yet powerful influence upon them.
These beings are generally supposed to be spirits or souls of the dead.”2
Our predecessors believed in, because they experienced, the presence of
two worlds: the world of the senses and the invisible world haunted by
what we now call complexes and projections. An example of this is found
in how many people feel persecuted by their parents or others long after
the persons are dead. Recall that the German word Jung used to describe
these experiential states was Ergriffenheit, which may be translated as the
ego being “seized or possessed” by the power of the invisible other. How
often have exorcisms been undertaken to rid people ostensibly occupied by
evil spirits?
We can be possessed not only by “spirits” but by contagious ideas, fads,
fashions, and fears compelling enough to launch persecutions, pogroms,
and mass enthusiasms. In fact the word enthusiasm was once derogatory,
meaning that one was intoxicated by an alien, often heretical god (theos).
As I write, a large number of teenage girls at one school are manifesting
strange twitching behaviors, and no organic cause seems identifiable or
probable. We could accuse them of being insecure and wanting attention,
but the costs to them of this behavior have piled up in painful ways,
suggesting their unconscious has connected with the unconscious of others
and collectively they, like the maiden in Hans Christian Andersen's “The
Red Shoes,” cannot stop this unending twitching dance. Such phenomena
have occurred throughout history, even sweeping up entire villages and
sometimes entire nations, in a psychic Saint Vitus's dance, a mazurka of
contagion. Group hysteria demonstrates the contagious character of
psychic states and the power of an invisible form to occupy and possess
consciousness and render it in service to infectious beliefs. These
phenomena range variously from France's dancing plague in 1518 to
today's popular fads and fashions, stock market panics, and political
enthusiasms. As Nietzsche once observed, how intoxicating bad reasons
and bad music can be when one is mobilizing against the identified enemy!
 The human psyche is so vast, and the ego frame so small, that we can
never know ourselves fully. Safe to say, insofar as we are human, we carry
the full range of human possibilities, traits, tendencies, self-delusions, and
wholly unknown continents within each of us. Much of this dissociated
material constitutes what Jung called the shadow, those parts of our
personality that are unknown to us, but which play out in the world
surreptitiously, or those parts that when brought into consciousness are
disappointing, contrary to our professed values, or stretch our self-concepts
beyond the comfortable. Other shadow fragments of energy represent our
unlived possibilities, often passing unknown and unlived by us into the
collective sea of history.
Dissociation is one of the ways in which we protect the ego's fragility
by reflexively moving the disturbing affect outside the range of the known;
thus it operates all the more autonomously in our lives. (In addition to
dissociation, we might also cite avoidance, denial, procrastination,
projection onto others, and distraction as ego-protective mechanisms.)
How many of our behaviors can be tracked back to serving our
insecurities, parental imagoes, narcissism, or other unsettling agendas? We
all have multiple personality disorders as these splinter selves contend,
collude, and conspire to effect their fractal programs. Swedish poet Gunnar
Ekelof expresses it so graphically in “Etudes”:

. . . And we kings
and barons of the thousand potential creatures within us
are citizens ourselves, imprisoned
in some larger creature, whose ego and nature
we understand a little . . . 3

These vassals within a vassal state believe themselves free, but all are
subject to an invisible order. And we must remember that our ego—that
which we think we are at any moment—is but one vassal in a mob. Most
days of our lives we do not set out to bring hurt to ourselves or others, but
sometimes when we survey the stupid, harmful decisions we made and the
unimagined consequences which pile up like neglected harvests, we are
then “seized by a strange unrest” and we discover “that some of the
possible creatures have gotten free.”4 These released vassals roam the
world and our private lives and form our history, both the history we put
on our resumes and that which piles up in the lives of our children and our
children's children.
In addition to dissociation, projections are another phenomenon
common to all of us, every day. None of us are aware of a projection when
we are caught in its throes. But we live in service to many of them each
day. A projection occurs when activated unconscious content leaves us and
enters the world. When that energy falls upon another person, institution,
or situation, we begin to relate to that other through the valences and
expectations of our own unconscious content. The problem with the
unconscious is that it is unconscious, and therefore we are frequently in a
delusional frame of reference to the other, and know it not. When the
otherness of the other begins to erode the projection, as it will inevitably,
we experience cognitive dissonance, disorientation, and dismay. Often our
discomfort triggers the power complex, and we struggle to renew the
expectation of the projection, even by coercive acts toward the other. Only
when the projection collapses, and we experience the reality of the other
can we even begin to consider that we have played a substantive role in the
engagement. The rocky path of romantic love is especially fraught with
such projected dynamics, of course, and all of us have experienced the
flush of expectation and the crash of disillusionment. During those in-
between moments, we are occupied states, docile vassals in a dictatorial
regime, and only rarely are we able to trace the source of the compelling
activity back to our own psyche. As I pointed out in The Eden Project: The
Search for the Magical Other, no projections onto the beloved are free of
mother and father material, so in those ecstatic moments of romance we
are always freighted with the ghostly presence of our predecessors whether
we know it or not, and we are powerfully driven toward repetitions of, or
flights from, or hidden desires to redeem that past. But we are never free of
that past in any hour of that relationship, especially at its outset.
Certainly more sinister examples of projection are found in sexism,
racism, and bigotry of all stripes. Underneath most fear-driven ideologies
and movements is an elemental fear of the other which then gets projected
onto individuals or groups who are minorities or who are vulnerable. The
more turbulent the era, the more insecure the ego and the more such
projections are compelling, for they help a person separate or dissociate his
or her fears onto that other. Our history is riddled with witch trials,
pogroms, and persecutions. The more insecure the ego, the less it can
tolerate differences, bear ambivalences. Thus fundamentalisms and
militant groups of all kinds are fed by streams of fear and a violent need to
dissociate from the otherness that lies within each of us.
The mythopoetic imagination of the human animal phenomenologically
endows these moments of possession with the spirits through fractal
narratives: offended gods, hubristic heroes, and haunted descendents.
Homer writes of the wrath of Achilles when his friend Patroclus is slain by
Hector: “mad Ares possessed him.” The persuasive power of that invisible
world is such that some believe others can cast spells upon us, or we upon
them. This peculiar phenomenon is possible because of dissociation, the
ability of contents to be psychoactive outside the frames of volition and
consciousness. As Jung describes it, “Spirits . . . viewed from the
psychological angle, are unconscious autonomous complexes which
appear as projections because they have no direct association with the
ego.”5 Many of our ancestors describe this state of possession as a loss of
soul. An Egyptian text from three millennia ago has as its title The World-
Weary Man in Search of His Ba (soul). Shamanic healing traditions are
based on the premise that some noxious spirit has stolen a piece of the soul
and the shaman's task is to identify which spirit has so acted, appease it,
and help restore the missing soul to the conscious life of the suffering
patient. This is not unlike modern depth psychotherapy, which seeks to
address what instinct, what energy, what agenda has been captivated by a
dissociated complex and thereby enervates the person. Tracking that
complex and taking it on more consciously can bring about a restoration of
energy and a strengthening of intentionality.
Our less pictorial image for this dilemma is what we call neurosis,
having nothing to do with neurology but a lot to do with the interactions of
conscious and unconscious worlds. We may describe these events as not
feeling like oneself or being in the grip of a pervasive mood, out of sorts,
or even our own worst enemy. We gain little by simply replacing the
language of possession by malignant spirits with these neutral remarks,
and perhaps trying to medicate the troubling state away. Frankly, the
animated metaphors of our ancestors are far richer than our present
psychiatric categories, but at least we are less likely to attack our neighbor
for what we must recognize is our own psychic state. All of this is
testimony to the fact that in daily life we slip easily between worlds and
are seldom conscious of how often we are serving both at the same time.
We have all experienced such states of possession by spirits, for who
among us is not touched, for good or ill, by our zeitgeist of materialism,
hedonism, and narcissism. We are either fighting that ghost, that spirit of
our time, or serving it, but none of us is immune to its influence. All of us
have experienced states of psychic possession by economic uncertainties,
political conflicts, and tectonic shifts in the social order. These moments
are variously uncanny, frightening, alienating, and humbling and occur
wherever the dialogue with the unconscious is diminished or forgotten.
Any of us, myself included, can be readily possessed, and only when we
remember that the invisible world is not only real but is driving the visible
world our ego thinks is real can we regain purchase on a conscious
perspective. Such spirit-states are real, psychologically, but it matters how
we understand them. To fail to understand them as psychic states, energies
to which the ego is prey, is to be at their mercy, to be living unconsciously,
to be in the grips of the same malignant powers for which our ancestors
devised such elaborate rituals, exorcisms, and apotropaic gestures. We still
knock on wood to summon the tutelary spirit of the tree to stand by us lest
the gods think us hubristic, or say “bless you” to assuage the loss of soul in
a sneeze.
The integrative or apotropaic rituals of our ancestors, or the concerted
efforts of psychoanalysis, can sometimes make those spirits, that is, split-
off energies, available to consciousness again. Conscious scapegoating,
ritualized during Yom Kippur and Ash Wednesday, is the effort to confront
the invisible powers of guilt and collusion directly and to own them as
ours. When undertaken in the context of belief, there can be sincere
reconciliation for the participant. After all, atonement is about restoring the
state of being “at one” with the invisible powers. In those moments there is
a feeling of reconciliation and well-being because we are not dissociated or
separated from ourselves as before. We all know that divorce does not end
marriages, psychologically, nor does death remove the influences of the
departed, nor does time alone efface the psychodynamic presence of the
past. As Jung notes, “when a person dies, the feelings and emotions that
bound his relatives to him lose their application to reality and sink into the
unconscious, where they activate a collective content that has a deleterious
effect on consciousness.”6 When I observe that most people, even those
with achievements and productive lives, lack unconditional “permission”
to desire what they desire and to live the life they truly wish, what is at
work there other than possession by parental or societal formations? How
would we ever really grow up—which requires knowing what we truly
want, rather than what the parental or societal complexes want—and then
mobilize the courage and the constancy to live it into the world?

We may say there are no ghosts, that we have abolished them to the
superstitious halls of history, but we still submit to these unconscious
energy clusters as if they were gods, malignant spirits, or controlling
scripts. We can never obtain purchase on our own lives until we recognize,
in the words of Paul Hoover, that we live with many expensive ghosts in
memory's unmade bed.7 To pay conscious homage to the thread of
multigenerational voices which run through us, to know that much of what
we do on a daily basis is in service to a spectral past, is to light a candle in
the darkness of being, which is what Jung concluded is our central task.
Such a mindfulness tells us on a daily basis to reflect, to sort and sift, to
ponder, to acquire the discipline of discernment. Thus, we are obliged to
ask troubling but necessary questions. What is that energy in service to,
really?—for we cannot trust our first, conditioned response. What ancestral
presences are at work in our choices, our patterns, our relationships either
as repetition, as flight from, or as an unconscious effort to solve? What
ghostly presences inhabit the many rooms of our psychic mansions? What
figural gestures find their tangible cerements through our conditioned
behaviors?
As a psychological confession, rather than a metaphysical assertion, we
would have to say that there are ghosts and that we walk amid them daily.
A continuing reflection on such spectral presences not only is the requisite
task for the conscious conduct of life, it may well provide a less-divided
sensibility and a richer passage through these twin worlds we inhabit at all
times. Polish poet Adam Zagajewski gives us a warning as he slips along
the haunted streets of Krakow: “I walk the paths of Kazimierz and think of
those who are missing. / I know that the eyes of the missing are like water
and can't / be seen—you can only drown in them.”8 The past is not gone, it
is not even past; and it is the task of this moment to discern how these
worlds meet and infiltrate each other.
Notes
1. Diane Wakoski, Emerald Ice: Selected Poems 1962–1987 (Jaffrey, NH: Black Sparrow Press,
1988).
2. C. G. Jung, “The Psychological Foundations of Belief in Spirits” (1948), in The Structure and
Dynamics of the Psyche, vol. 8, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1960), par. 571.
3. Gunnar Ekelof, “Etudes,” translated by Robert Bly. Accessed February 1, 2013, at
http://edgarssecretgarden.com/deepin/ekelof.htm.
4. Ibid.
5. Jung, “The Psychological Foundations of Belief in Spirits,” par. 585.
6. Ibid., par. 598.
7. Paul Hoover, “Theory of Margins,” Chicago Review, vol. 47/48 (Winter 2001–Spring 2002), 205.
8. Adam Zagajewski, “Unwritten Elegy for Krakow's Jews,” Unseen Hand: Poems, trans. Clare
Cavanagh (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 73–74.
 CHAPTER 8

Betrayal's Lingering Ghosts

As we recall, every time we are gripped by a significant complex, we are
at least temporarily removed from this hour and relocated to an earlier
time. The more profound the complex, the more archaic, the less capable
we will be to do other than follow its original instructions to us: close
down, deny, flee, comply, or a host of other complicit, adaptive behaviors.
In collective circumstances, during socially distressed times—times of
fear, ambiguity, disorientation—we may share complexes with our
neighbors, losing hold of our individual perspective and feeling states and
becoming caught up in complex-driven, self-protective responses we later
come to regret. From such moments of folie à deux rise holocausts, racism,
war fever, and other forms of collectivized emotion. Any time we ask of
others, in retrospect, why they did not see what they were doing, we are
likely forgetting the many times we have come to regret our own reflexive
collusions, our participation in acts that hurt others or ourselves.
On the quite personal level, each of us will recall moments when we
were owned by the past with its reductive messages. How many times have
I seen people bemoaning a divorce twenty years later or a betrayal of their
hopes. Of course those wounding moments hurt, and still do, but implicit
in their perpetuation is our willing collusion with those experiences as
defining moments. How often do we allow the wounds and
disappointments of history to define us and enable that diminution to
persist in its wounding ways? How often have we failed to seize hold of
our own destinies and thereby allow the fates to dictate once again? How
often has our failure to show up in our lives revealed immaturity on our
part, a failure to grow up, a collusion in victimhood?

Most of us have experienced betrayal in life, sometimes even generalizing

that experience to feel that we have been betrayed by life itself. Hamlet
complained that his time was out of joint and what cursed spite that ever
he was born to set it right. Betrayal is always experienced as a loss. What
we lose may be our assumptions; it may be our naïveté; it may be our
insufficiently differentiated way of seeing the world which requires greater
subtlety on our part. The real damage lies in how we may generalize from
that loss, that betrayal, and extend it into paranoia and projective
identification. I have treated, unsuccessfully, two men whose mothers
abandoned them at critical moments in their lives and left them to the
mercy of strangers. In both case, the men became hyper-independent and
transferred to their wives both distrust and the expectation of betrayal. In
both cases they followed their wives, tapped their phones, subjected them
to accusations, and, predictably, drove them away, thus confirming the a
priori context and set themselves up for betrayal. The complex's flawed
“thought” is: “If my mother would leave me, no doubt so will you.”
At the archaic level of our psychological functioning, we often transfer
to the universe, the company, the welfare state, the marriage an expectation
that it will be “the good parent” and will therefore not let us down. Thus,
when grief falls upon us or disappointment overthrows our plans, we feel
betrayed, picked on, singled out, rather than summoned to a more
sophisticated appreciation of the radical autonomy of the universe and the
radical contingency of all things mortal. Even Jesus, in his darkest hour,
cried out to his Father, “Why hast thou forsaken me?” Robert Frost
observed in his sardonic way, “Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee,
and I'll forgive Thy great big joke on me.”
When we recall that the psychological mechanism of jokes is to relieve
otherwise unbearable tensions through the cathartic release of laughter, or
at least a grim smile, then we observe a very creative human effort to come
to terms with the experience of betrayal. As Horace Walpole did indeed
opine, life is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.
That such a term as betrayal is even used is a confession of a presumption
that one is dealing with a universe that operates on our terms, has our
assumptions, and ought to prove as reasonable as we are about these
matters. That such an expectation is nothing more than a projection onto
brute nature is a bridge too far for us, so we think of it as betrayal. If we
rather assume that there is nothing that is “supposed” to happen, then we
will move more quickly to acceptance than to the reflexive thought of
betrayal with its power to bind us to the past.
 While self-preservation is profoundly human, we naturally construct
apotropaic defenses against a universe which can so casually crush us. We
project the child's legitimate but archaic need for the protective parent onto
the universe and then are surprised when the universe does not comply
with our agenda. As a matter of fact, the great anguish of Western
Abrahamic theology, whether it be Islamic, Jewish, or Christian, rises from
this contradiction between the projection of the good parent as omnipotent
God onto the universe and the seeming lack of reciprocity we receive. One
branch of theology defined as theodicy specifically addresses the gap
between the expectation of a just, loving, involved, and powerful parental
imago Dei and the realities of suffering and injustice which abound. I was
once so driven to address this discrepancy that after college I attended
theology school with the specific intent of pursuing this theme in every
course I took. While I experienced many wonderful moments of learning
there, which inform my life to this day, I also learned that all “solutions” to
this problem of theodicy were only talk in the head and fell far short of the
demands of the heart. As we all know, and as Pascal observed in the
seventeenth century, the heart has reasons that reason knows not. By
seeking a “reasonable” solution to this discrepancy, I was hoist on my own
petard, namely, the assumption that the universe serves such a puny human
tool as reason or is subject to our rules for this peculiar game in which we
are enlisted.
Moreover, I was wholly unconscious at the time of the role of projection
operating in each of us, through which the mysterious other is always
construed as a simulacrum of ourselves. This anthropomorphism haunts
our thinking and leads us to what anthropologists and depth psychologists
call “magical thinking.” Magical thinking arises from the ego's incapacity
to discern the distinction between objective and subjective realities.
Magical thinking concludes: “I am sick because I have been bad, not
because I swim through viruses daily” or “I am afflicted because I have
disappointed or am inherently unworthy.” And how often have we
internalized the behavior of others as a provisional definition of who we
are: “I am as I have been treated. I am my history.” How many lives have
been tainted by this kind of subjec-tivized construing of a quite
autonomous universe? All, until we begin to figure things out for
ourselves.
As the Italian analyst Aldo Carotenuto observed,
 We can only be deceived by those we trust. Yet we have to believe.
A person who won't have faith and refuses to love for fear of
betrayal will certainly be exempt from these torments, but who
knows from how much else he or she will be exempt.1

As our needs, and therefore our expectations, are virtually infinite and the
capacity of such personages as parents, lovers, partners, and others is
finite, so disappointment will often seem like betrayal. In clinging to the
fantasy of betrayal, we are haunted by the past; we cling to a
misunderstanding by indicting ourselves, others, and the world rather than
critique our fallacious presumptions.
Another way in which the haunting by the past can betray us is how all
or any of us in any given moment will succumb to a proclivity for what
Freud called the repetition compulsion, namely, the tendency to repeat our
history, to relive even its most painful chapters. How many persons have
you known who found and married what they ostensibly wished to flee?
How many times have we backed into our past by making choices that
produced a repetitive future? How difficult it is to remember Søren
Kierkegaard's observation, made in nineteenth-century Copenhagen, that
“life must be remembered backwards, but lived forward.” Frankly, much
of the time, we look forward and live it in service to the dictates of the past
through repetition compulsion. Why do we do that? Again, in the face of a
large message, we have a tendency to repeat it—to serve its fractal script,
run from it, or try to fix it. In each case we are still vassals of an old
imperious, vested order, the more so as it remains unconscious, for we are
still in service to its dictating message rather than our own natural impulse
and desire. To replicate this received setup, this gestalt, this message in the
governance of our lives is to fall into the repetition compulsion. To run
from it is to blunder into a reaction formation, whereby in seeking the
opposite we are surreptitiously driven by the primal text. Or perhaps we try
to solve the problem by numbing behaviors, avoiding any analogous
situation or believing we are gifted in fixing it somehow. (This last
reflexive response is often the unconscious plight of the therapist who
suffers again his or her troubling past patient by patient by patient.) Thus, a
person who has experienced a parent as an invasive presence will seek out
and bond with a person who will do the same—perhaps in quite different
ways, which seduces consciousness into thinking it is all behind one—or
will flee intimacy, or will sail off into a life of distraction and
superficiality. Whatever the pattern, each is haunted by the compelling
pillars of the archaic imago, which has been absorbed and internalized as
part of the shaky floorboards upon which our conscious lives stand and try
to fashion a life.
As with guilt, any apprehension or expectation of, any protection
against betrayal unwittingly binds a person to the past. The only antidote to
this pathologizing haunting is, paradoxically, investing fully in a new
relationship, new ventures, new risks. To do so opens one up to betrayal
and disappointment once again, yet the failure to do so sustains one's
victimhood. If we are not willing to risk all, again, then we are precluded
from intimacy. This is not to endorse naiveté or blind obedience, but rather
to say that “in for a penny, in for a pound,” otherwise one colludes with the
perseverating effects of the original wound. The paradox of the
betrayal/trust dyad is that each is presupposed by the other, each needs the
other to be real. Without trust, no depth; without depth, no true betrayal.
Of course it is difficult to forgive betrayal, but the refusal to do so
ultimately binds one to the betrayer. To forgive is to recognize not only the
flawed humanity of the other but our own as well, and in the end it is the
only way to free the shackles of the past which bind us. When we see a
person hanging on to bitterness, however egregious the betrayal, we see a
person still married to the betrayer, still defined by that constrictive event,
still corroded by the acid of animosity. Life is so very short, and how
wasteful it is to continue to invest our most precious capital in the failed
stocks of bankrupt enterprises. While a person would refuse to invest
money in a failed company, he or she routinely invests something even
more precious, the soul, in an archaic imago that defines and directs each
party to a very old place.
Marianne was a father's daughter. Pampered and protected as she was by
a doting parent, she looked for his simulacrum to replicate his protective
presence. And sure enough, if one looks, one will find what one seeks. Her
husband, Gerald, had learned to take care of the expectant other, and guess
where he got that assignment? While Marianne chaffed at his “guidance”
and he at her controlling “neediness,” each was content enough for several
years to play out this archaic script of devoted father and grateful but
dutiful daughter. When a particularly bold woman came on to Gerald at
work and he responded, he found himself drawn out of the gravitational
pull of the old order. Although he was perhaps only serving a dominant
female other once again, he believed he was now relieved of his old duty,
and he announced both his independence and his departure to Marianne. I
have no knowledge of how Gerald fared, but I do know that Marianne felt
utterly betrayed by this abrogation of their sacred contract. Even when the
situation was addressed by her therapist, Marianne wholly missed the fact
that her husband's betrayal was her wake-up call, her invitation to grow up.
She remained girlish in her whining, petulant, and bitter moods. Gerald's
betrayal became her defining imago: unforgivable and universal. She
terminated her therapy, accusing her therapist of insufficient empathy, and
reportedly spent her next years continuing to whine and complain that the
world was not taking care of her. Naturally, she found fewer and fewer
people willing to care for her, fewer and fewer willing to play a role in the
parent-child fusion that had become her defining relational paradigm.
Paradoxically, Gerald had done her the biggest favor of all, not unlike the
dream of the woman in chapter 5 whose father and husband died (p. 000).
The difference is one chose to grow up and the other did not. The
invitation to rise above the haunting was refused.

There is a form of betrayal that haunts all of us to some degree and rises
out of what we might consider another form of magical thinking. This term
has been popularized in recent years by writer Joan Didion who wrote of
the death of her husband in A Year of Magical Thinking. She describes in
great detail how she came to terms with his passing, her evolving
adjustments to trauma and separation. Then one day she realized that she
had kept his suits in the closet, and this innocuous fact forced her to realize
that she was consciously not in denial, but was unconsciously expecting
him to return.
We all have moments like this. Magical thinking, again, is the failure to
differentiate interior reality from external reality. Both forms of reality
have an autonomy disturbing to the ego, and through both we nevertheless
have to pick our way. Perhaps our most common form of magical thinking
is found in our assumption that we can make deals with life, deals that are
binding on our part, and on the part of all the other persons and “divinities”
we encounter. We can swear eternal allegiance to the other, and still betray
them. We can, as in Frost's couplet, feel betrayed by the universe itself.
How many deals does one strike with the universe, promising good
behavior in return for good fortune, for benevolent treatment by the
universe? As children, many of us recall adhering to the admonition, “Step
on a crack, and you break your mother's back.” Well who would wish to do
that? As children, we tried to make it all the way to school, with so many
cracks in the sidewalk, and how mortified we were if we missed one, and
in what state of psychological readiness would we have been for learning
that day? (Today, thanks to Freud, we would recognize the hidden wish
such a forbidding statement might embody. But to a child's fragile ego
such ambivalence is intolerable.)
The case of Terence is illustrative of this haunting on at least five
different levels. He is a man who experienced betrayal directly in
discovering that his wife was having an affair, and when it was brought to
light, she chose to leave an otherwise settled family. This story is a
common occurrence, repeated multiple times in multiple ways, and the one
left behind frequently wishes for the magic of therapy to talk the departed
partner into “good sense” and to restore the status quo ante.
Naturally, Terence was traumatized by this turn of events, and while he
was willing to look at whatever part he may have played in the situation,
he firmly believed that no provocative causes reached the level of this kind
of radical sundering of his view of the world, his marriage, and his sense
of self. At the first level of betrayal Terence experienced a profound
dissonance in his assumptions, in his beliefs about the universe and how it
ran. “If I act fairly, I will be treated fairly,” he believed. He had not made
this assumption consciously, but the events in his marriage brought this
thought—this tacit contract with the powers that be—to the surface. The
traumatic events raised a primal angst within him, the feeling that one
could not count on the solidity of the earth upon which we walk, the
floorboards of assumptions and good faith through which we operate in
this world.
Second, Terence reexperienced the dilemma of our common ancestor
Job. The book of Job borrows from a legend of the ancient Near East
wherein a good man, a man of faith and good works, is brought into a
radical confrontation with the autonomous powers of the universe. An
unknown Hebrew poet wrestled with this conundrum nearly 3,000 years
ago and is obliged to move away from a casual assumption of his time and
place, namely, that if we do the right thing, the universe will do right by us.
When a ton of misery falls on Job's head, his friends, who have also
bought into this assumption, assume that he is either unconscious of his
shortcomings, in denial, or duplicitous. The Party of the Second Part goes
so far as to presume to summon God to testify on Job's behalf and to attest
that His servant has been faithful in all ways. Finally, the Party of the First
Part shows up and reveals to Job that he was not some unwitting
miscreant, but that he hubristically presumed his actions could somehow
contain, finesse, possibly even control the autonomy of the transcendent
powers. To his credit, Job acknowledges his unconscious inflation, repents,
and is blessed in return. He moves from being a pious, conventionally
good boy to a man who has had a “religious” experience. (Beware of
seeking religious experience; one might find oneself provided with an
encounter comparable to Job's.) Terence struggled with what this Joblike
metanoia asked of him, and how, without bitterness or cynicism, he had to
revise his sense of being in this mysterious universe, a universe in which
contracts do not exist, or at least do not exist in the form we would have
them.
At a third and mostly unconscious level, Terence was suffering the
trauma of primal separation once again. We all experience this radical
severance from the other at birth. Our needs wholly met, untroubled by the
disturbances of a clouded, conflicted consciousness, we are thrust violently
into this world, incapable of survival without the contingent protection and
nurturance of others. Fortunately, most of us get enough to survive until
we can begin to draw upon our native resources, but those initial passages
are wholly perilous and outside the range of our fragile powers. Every
infant longs to return to that primal safety but cannot, and then seeks
surrogates in the form of a thumb or a favored blanket and, inevitably,
desperately begins to look for alternative, reassuring constancies in its life.
(Another analysand spoke of the rituals she invented as a child to try to
bring order to the disorder she perceived around her. If she moved in one
way, she had to repeat it, desperately seeking symmetry, predictability, and
order. It was only when she reached college and saw other, less troubled,
students that she was able to slowly wean herself from this obsessive
compulsive treatment plan.)
The etymology of the word religion is a confession of estrangement,
separation, and longing for connection. Theologian Paul Tillich even
defined sin as “separation from the Ground of Being.” How many
petitionary prayers are offered up in this fevered hope? How many rituals
of flagellation, self-abuse, and ritualized self-abnegation have been placed
on the altar of fearful solicitation of this mysterious, autonomous other? As
a result of his experience of primal loss, this recapitulation of earlier
losses, Terence began to question the religious values with which he had
been raised, values that he had sought to honor in the best way he knew
how. Yet, absent those reassurances regarding the recondite other, one feels
even more betrayed, even more at the mercy of the unknown, and even
more alone. If we cannot count on reciprocity with others, on what may we
base our decisions, our sense of self, our ground of being?
We all tend to treat the vicissitudes of our lives and the anfractuosities
of our unfolding natures as insurgencies, usurpers of our control and ego
frames, and we stoutly resist growth and change, even though this is the
natural order of all things. Consider how we are periodically pulled
unwillingly into the next stage of our lives, just when we thought we had
figured out the former, frequently exhausting the various anxiety
management systems in place to contain the unknown. Pan, the little goat
guy, seemingly innocuous, lives in the wild, and whenever we visit his
domain, minus any map that might have worked outside his thicket, we
experience anxiety, even panic. Think this is an exaggeration? Examine
how most feel about aging, the progressive decline of the body, or an
unexpected and unfavorable medical diagnosis. If the nature of nature is
change, forever destroying the old and bringing the next, whether wished
for or not, then our reflexive resistance is in proportion to the degree that
we are invested in the fantasy of sovereignty over nature. Thus, to a
fortified ego, secure in its delusion of security, the depredations of nature,
of time and tides, seems a betrayal of sorts, a betrayal of a presumptive
contract which in fact does not exist. Such a contract, the deals we all
make with the universe, repeats the story of Job over and over in our
separate biographies. This is what makes him our brother. Would that we
might also come to accept his humbled wisdom in the end. If we do not,
we will be led to the same ends in any case.
At the fourth level—the experience of a marital vow violated— Terence
had much work to do, for there was much pain to metabolize. To his credit,
he quickly acknowledged that he had surely played a role in the outcome, a
role that grew as he gained more and more insight into himself. Because
such work is humbling and asks much of us, we can see why a person
might wish to remain stuck in the posture of blaming and victimhood. It
takes strength, courage, and humility to acknowledge that every
relationship is a shadow dance of mutual complicity, even though one
party may carry more of the responsibility and is judged more
blameworthy for enacting what is in fact going on for both of them
already.
Terence remained somewhat traumatized by his wife's betrayal, but
increasingly he came to realize that clues to their increasing distance had
been evident years before, as is always the case, and both of them had
betrayed their commitment by avoiding difficult discussions. Even more,
he came to realize that however sincere the launching of the experiment
called marriage, both had been bewitched by a certain state of mind,
limited by a certain level of maturity, and bound to a certain portfolio of
expectations. All of those presumptions proved frangible in the face of
realities unconsciously coursing through each of them, and undeniable as
they later burst into conscious enactments. At one point he even joked that
the church allowed annulments when one or both parties were not in their
right mind, and who, he wondered, ever is when they are in the flush of
such psychological states. How many times have I heard from people,
good people, “I knew I wasn't in love the day I got married,” or “Very soon
I knew it was wrong, but I stayed for [x number of] years because of [the
kids, my parents, finances, or some other reason].” But it is always easier
to blame the other than recognize at how many stages of the process we
betrayed ourselves, sustained denial, and perpetuated what was already
outlived.
At the fifth level, Terence came to acknowledge the infantile parts he
carried within himself, parts we all carry. The core dependencies, the fear
of change, the fear of growth, the fear of loneliness, the fear of the
disapproval of others—all are enough to veto executing what we know to
be true for us. Nowhere do these archaic agendas emerge more profoundly
than in the field of intimate relationships, because these go most deeply
into our histories, our vulnerabilities, our residual parental needs, and our
fear of growing up.
In the context of one of the workshops I offer I include the question,
Where do you need to grow up? No one has ever asked me what I meant
by that term. Generally, participants start writing in their journals
immediately, suggesting that we all know where we are not showing up in
our lives, where we are not conducting a conscious, accountable, mature
life. Accordingly, betrayal is something we have been doing for a very
long time, so long that now it is a habit, a provisional existence, a mode of
being. How could we stand to deconstruct this papier-mâché assemblage
we present to the world and to ourselves? Betraying our own souls has
been with us so long that we often forget we have a soul and that it is
asking to be served even more urgently than our dependencies and our
infantilities. Jung once noted that “the dread and resistance which every
human being experiences when it comes to delving too deeply into himself
is, at bottom, the fear of the journey to Hades.”2 Yet, we may also
remember that we live down there anyway, and that Dante reserved the
most desolate place in Hell, the place devoid of any warmth of human
feeling, for the betrayers. So parts of each of us live there in any case,
acknowledged or not. Terence took his loss seriously, his marriage
seriously, his responsibility to himself and their children seriously, and
therefore took this voyage through the Tartarean depths seriously and has
emerged a much fuller man, and now even more worthy of relationship.
He deserves relationship, for he has lived through betrayal, refused to be
defined by its historic haunting, and can now approach the prospect of
starting over with enthusiasm rather than paranoia, risk rather than
repetition compulsion, and a larger range of choices than a sabotaging
adherence to the messages of the past.
One of the ways we are betrayed by the past, driven by our haunting, is
by not acknowledging how much we are owned by our wounding—not
only betrayal but the myriad other internalized messages to which we
cling. What was once experienced, internalized as a statement, overly
generalized rather than being merely a singular, ad hoc event, remains
unchallenged and thus plays an inordinate role in the governance of our
lives. The “betrayal” of betrayal is found not in how it wounds, and wound
it surely does, but in how we cling to it and divert the work it asks of us to
grow beyond its defining boundaries. As Jung once observed, we don't
solve our wounds, but we can outgrow them.3 The flight from doing so is
the real betrayal. What choice then does history, not having been addressed
and worked through, have but to haunt us?
Notes
1. Aldo Carentenuto, Eros and Pathos: Shades of Love and Suffering (Toronto: Inner City Books,
1989), 79.
2. C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, vol. 12, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1953), par. 439.
3. C. G. Jung, “Commentary on ‘The Secret of the Golden Flower’” (1957), in Alchemical Studies,
vol. 13, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), par. 18.
 CHAPTER 9

The Sailor Cannot See the North

The Haunted Soul of Modernism

In 1867 Walt Whitman watched a “noiseless, patient spider” at its fretful

work, launching filament after filament, seeking to connect. He could not
help but intuit a connection between the urgent agency of this lowly form
of life and his own spiritually troubled state. “And you, O my Soul,” he
writes, likewise flinging forth its yearning into the vast vacancy “till the
bridge you will need, be form'd—till the ductile anchor hold; / Till the
gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul.”1 With similar
urgency and in a quite different mood, contemporary poet Alicia Ostriker,
in a poem called “Fix,” surveys the vacancy of modern Americana and
dissects the general, nonspecific malaise of our time. As a can-do culture
we would quickly “fix” it, she says, “if we knew what was broken.”2 In
Whitman we see a person still able to use the word soul with a measure of
comfort and expectation of conventional understanding. Ostriker does not
use that word, but she knows full well it is a matter of soul. She concurs
with the observation of playwright Christopher Fry, who decades before
her proclaimed that “affairs are now soul size.”3
Of all the haunting of which we have spoken, the most powerful,
profound, and pathologizing is our culture's psychic haunting by the lost
gods of old. The eroded tribal mythologies, which once helped people
locate themselves in time and space, the tattered divine narratives that gave
meaning, purpose, connection, the faded cosmic story have lent a tenuous
edge to all our dialogues, despite what a culture of denial and distraction
may protest. While many cling still to the faded narratives of their
ancestors or in anxious fury vociferously reiterate their ontological and
soteriological claims, the truth is most people perceive in their bones the
vast vacancies in which they swim, and they therefore cling to distraction,
drugging, and denial as much as possible.
 As Matthew Arnold pointed out in “Dover Beach,” the sea of meaning
ebbs and flows throughout history.4 Yeats, among others, observed that
when the death of Pan, that is, the archaic goat-god linkage to guiding
instincts, was reported some three thousand years ago it produced
widespread panic throughout the Mediterranean. St. Augustine wrote De
Civitate Dei to assuage the anxieties of the faithful in the fourth century
C.E. as the Roman Empire, the central ordering structure of their time and
place, collapsed before their frightened eyes. In The Way to Rainy
Mountain, N. Scott Momaday described the collapse of his Kiowa
ancestral locus when the last wild bison, the totemic link to the gods, was
slain. Whenever centers of meaning or tribal myths collapse, there will be
great fear and anxiety, dispersion of the faithful, and the rapid rise of
snake-oil salesmen of all stripes and persuasions. Such is our time:
whether they are hawking cars or salvation, all one has to do is turn on the
cable channels to see them in coifed finery and full flummery.
With deliberate hyperbole, one might argue that the last time the
Western world made collective sense to both king and commoner alike was
around 1320. That was when Dante portrayed a comprehensive and
comprehendible Weltbild, or world picture: a three-story universe, a fixed
moral order, and a set of normative rules for choices and their attendant
consequences. At that time, king and commoner alike could look in one
direction and see a large structure that claimed both divine and secular
sanction called the cathedral, and in the other direction find a similar claim
vested in a castle. Together they provided the spiritual longitudes and
latitudes that allowed people to know where they stood, spiritually and
psychologically speaking. While I have tracked the reasons for the erosion
of those absolutistic claims elsewhere, suffice it to say here that their
present claims do not make many inroads into the secular mind and this-
worldly values of our time.5
By 1600 we have both the first recognizably neurotic modern in the
tortured anguish of Shakespeare's melancholy Dane and the first
empirically grounded approach to mystery in the articulation of the
scientific method by Francis Bacon. The Polish astronomer Copernicus
shifted us from a privileged, anthropomorphic position at the center to an
increasingly peripheral and ambiguous location in what are now counted
as billions of galaxies. (That is billions, not dozens, hundreds, or even
thousands.) There is no “up there” anymore, only here and somewhere else
“not here.”
By 1800 the sage of Königsberg, Immanuel Kant, ended the fantasies of
traditional metaphysics, the delineation of reality, by asserting that we
cannot experience reality directly but only our subjective rendering of it. In
so doing, he made psychology, especially depth psychology and
phenomenology, necessary. By the 1960s, the social fixities of class, race,
gender, sexual identity and orientation, and absolute moral claims, as well
as the presumptive probity of institutions, had been deconstructed, leading
of course to widespread cultural ambiguity, attendant anxiety, regressive
moves to rigidity, fundamentalisms of all stripes, and a culture of denial,
addiction, and mindless distraction. (Except in the details, things are pretty
much the way they were for Dante Alighieri when he awoke on those
Tuscan mornings seven centuries ago.)
Jung described what happens when we experience a shaking of our
beliefs, our orientation, and our sense of who we are in the world. What
one sees so often is what he called “the regressive restoration of the
persona,” the rapid retreat to “the way things were,” or once seemed to be,
whether or not they have outlived their service to us. Faced with a spiritual
vacuum, humans will seek to fill it as quickly as possible with political
ideologies, as was regnant in Europe in the 1930s, leading to the
catastrophic collision of fascism, capitalism, and communism shortly
thereafter. In the Western world of our time, the emergent triumph of
materialism beggars all other beliefs. The goal of life is not an afterlife but,
apparently, to enjoy this one. But the materialist vision of our time leads to
this dilemma: if the numinous is not experienced in the outer world, it will
manifest either as somatic illness, internalized pathology, or we will be
owned by our search for it among the objects upon which we have
projected our existential yearning in the outer world. Thus, shiny new
objects, seductive technologies, sex and romance, hedonism, self-
absorption, and most of all, distraction constitute the chief “spiritualities”
of our time. Our spiritualities will be found not in what we profess but in
where our energies are most invested most hours of most days.
As a result, masses of humans, even the distracted ones, feel ill at ease,
not at home in this world, and are looking, always looking for something,
like the chindi, or “hungry ghosts” of which the Navajo speak. In his
memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung put it this way:
 [Are we] related to something infinite or not? That is the telling
question of [one's] life . . . If we understand and feel that here in this
life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes
change. In the final analysis, we count for something only because
of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is
wasted.6

Because most of us do not feel that we are part of a larger story or that we
are living out some psychological and spiritual truth, we are generally
adrift, dissatisfied, dissociated, and distressed.
When we consider that the role of tribal myth was to address four great
mysteries, and hopefully connect people in feeling ways to them, we
realize how sterile our time actually is. These four orders of mystery,
which do not go away, are still being considered by our unconscious, and
our felt disconnect from them is manifest in psychopathology, sociopathy,
mass movements, fads and fashions, and collective projections onto
numinous figures who are frequently flooded by that archetypal
expectation, as so many fallen pop stars and destroyed celebrities
exemplify.
These four questions that never go away are:

1. Why are we here, in service to what, and toward what end? (the
cosmological question)
2. How are we as animal forms, empowered with spirit, to live in
harmony with our natural environment? (the ecological question)
3. Who are my people, what is my duty to others, and what are the rights,
duties, privileges, and expectations of my tribe? (the sociological
question)
4. Who am I, how am I different from others, what is my life about, and
how am I to find my way through the difficulties of life? (the
psychological question)

These questions, seldom asked consciously, are nonetheless always being

asked in our unconscious, and we often find the putative “answers”—get a
job, make money, have a good time, resist aging and the natural decline
toward death—to be profoundly unsatisfying, anti-natural, superficial, and
soul-denying. But then who really believes he or she has a soul these days?
In place of the gods of old, we rely instead on materialism, hedonism,
narcissism, and distraction to get us through the night. And just how well
has that worked for us?
Of all of the great pioneers of the psyche, only Jung really
comprehended that the issue underlying most of our yearnings, and most
of our pathologies, was a profound but frustrated search for meaning and
the replicative symptomatology of psyche's stubborn refusal to be
hoodwinked by the lesser goods our time proffers us. Jung argued that
neurosis is inauthentic suffering, but note that he does not rule out
suffering, only that which pursues phantasmal will-o'-the-wisps and the
myriad superficial surrogates so readily available. We can be sure our
psyche will know the difference, and let us know, if we bother to pay
attention. This is why there are so many restless, unfulfilled people in the
Western world despite material abundance unparalleled in history.
The vast majority of our contemporaries fall between the cracks of the
medical paradigm and the old ecclesiastic doctrinal models. Just how
satisfying or connective will a prescription or a platitude prove to us
today? As the patient turns to either doctor or clergy,

both . . . stand before him with empty hands . . . even when we see
clearly why the patient is ill: when he sees that he has no love, only
sexuality; no faith, because he is afraid to grope in the dark; no hope
because he is disillusioned by the world and by life; and no
understanding because he has failed to read the meaning of his own
existence.7

How provocative that last phrase is: “because he has failed to read the
meaning of his own existence.” And from whence will that meaning come:
external authoritarian sources, traditional formulae which do not address
the shifting textures of a postmodern world, someone else's sincere
opinion? How far we have been driven from our own resources, our own
experiment with the wondrous and terrifying invitation to our own
journey! In that vacuum, mass ideologies and personal anodynes naturally
fill the gap quickly, for our species ill tolerates ambiguity or uncertainty.
We have all forgotten what our presumptive saints, mystics, and prophetic
voices earnestly proclaimed: that if we wait upon the dark, it grows
luminous; if we abide the silence, it speaks. We look to others to fix it all
for us, and they fail us, because we have asked too much of them, because
they are broken themselves, and because we have ignored, even fled, our
own resources. No wonder we find it so difficult to love others when we
have seldom learned to love ourselves in a form which serves neither
narcissism nor self-denigration.
Driven to my own desperate ends at midlife, I undertook my first hours
of psychotherapy. I do not recommend such a choice to all, especially
since many sincere practitioners in the field have not had their own
therapeutic experience, but I do believe that finding the right person with
whom to work would help many of us, at any stage of this journey, reflect
more consciously, more profoundly, and more effectively on the nuanced
layers of our lives. We will be obliged to consider the various hauntings
that keep showing up in our lives and, therefore, the lives of those around
us, such as our children, partners, and colleagues. What I have ignored,
you as my friend, partner, client will be obliged to deal with sooner or
later, and vice versa. Just how conscious, how loving, how fair, how
considerate is that? How can I not work on myself when not only I but you
and others suffer my many avoidances?
When I admit that the only person present at every moment, in every
scene of the long-running soap opera I call my life is me, then I am obliged
to admit that, despite the profound ministries of fate and the choices of
others, I am somehow responsible for the patterns, the replicative
consequences, and the many estrangements from self and others that keep
showing up in my life. As the reader considers this dilemma and the
summons to accountability in the words on this page, they not only make
sense but may seem obvious. In practice, the implications are stunning,
humbling, and intimidating. While I cannot directly speak of that of which
I am unconscious, that which is unconscious continues to spill into the
world and to affect you, me, and everyone around us.
How scary it might prove to conclude that I am essentially alone in this
summons to personal consciousness, that I cannot continue to blame others
for what has happened to me, that I am really out there on that tightrope
over the abyss, making choices every day, and that I am truly, irrevocably
responsible for my life. Then I would have to grow up, stand naked before
this immense brutal universe, and step into the largeness of this journey,
my journey.
 What keeps us from taking this step into largeness, what make the
largeness intimidating, is the peculiar haunting of history common to us all
wherein we, once small, learned that the world is big and we are not, that
the world is powerful and we are not. While these existential realities are
explicitly true for every child and quickly ratified by the conditions and
exigencies of life, it typically means that we progressively ignore that
which is nonetheless large within us. What if it were proved that we have
trustworthy guiding sources within each of us? What if it were
demonstrated that the autonomy of the feeling function, the energy
systems, the formation of dreams, the bodily states, the intuitions which
approach us, are in fact resources with which each of us is equipped not
only for the journey of life but for a more productive pattern of choices? If
we had had some exposure to these ideas, some individuated modeling in
our elders, some practice of disciplined respect for the inner dialogue, we
would more easily know that our source of guidance is close at hand after
all. Our history the various literatures of depth psychology, mythology, and
scripture, and ancestral embodiments are abundant, but to step into their
possibilities will ask so much more of us.
According to the reclusive poet of Amherst, Emily Dickinson, the sailor
cannot see the north, but knows the needle can.8 Why would she have
written that sentence so many decades ago if she did not intuit in her bones
the dilemma common to moderns? Can any of us find such a compass
within and risk trusting our life to it? Can we afford to really ask questions
such as, By what values am I really living my life? If I bring them and
their consequences to consciousness, can I really endorse them, stand with
them, and live or die on their behalf? While the false self is protective and
adaptive, it also constricts, binds us to a less-empowered past, and
alienates us from the gods. (This is why Jung said that a neurosis is an
offended or neglected “god,” that is, where we are aligned through our
attitudes, practices, adaptations against our own nature's intent.) Can we
really afford a serious discernment process, namely, the sustained,
disciplined sorting through the many “voices” that claim our allegiance?
The book of John (4:1) asks that we “test the spirits” and differentiate the
archaic hauntings, learn the difference between adaptive protections and
the summons of the soul.
Jung noted that every patient he treated knew at some level when he or
she entered therapy what decision, what necessary action, lay before him
or her. I have found this generally to be true. One thoughtful woman came
to me and spoke of her work on her marriage, the worth of her partner and
children, and her deep investment in family and social belonging. As she
left, as her last sentence in her first hour, she said, “I want you to help me
find the courage to leave my husband.” As a total non sequitur to what we
had discussed theretofore, her sentence made no sense; as a summons to
accountability before the task that awaited her, it was her showing up,
finally. One man I saw knew that his life had been protected by walking
around the periphery of every emotional confrontation. As a child in a
troubled family beset with mental illness, he survived by avoidance,
silence, and codependence. Choosing a partner to repeat this pattern was,
of course, wholly unconscious until his depression and self-medication
brought him to therapy. What was both so obvious and so difficult to grasp
was that his dilemma was not really about the marriage, as such, but about
the haunting of history and its message of adaptation over authenticity.
Raised to be a nice boy, he became a nice man, but such niceness ceased to
be nice when the depression arrived. His decision was clear, yet the
haunting of history was his enemy, not his troubled partner, and it took
more than two years of steady work, repetition, and ego development to
bring this otherwise gifted man to finally take care of himself for the first
time in his life. In the face of his acculturation, he would no longer be
allowed to have a statue placed in a nearby town square in honor of his
saintly sacrifice, but he might be able to live a journey that was his for a
change. He was at last discovering a secret which so many of us have to
find the hard way, “that I stand in need of the alms of my own kindness,
that I am the enemy who must be loved.”9
The strange paradox of our adaptive lives is that what once provided
protection is now constrictive and unwittingly constructs self-imposed
prisons in which we live. Sounds simple enough to deconstruct, but in fact
how much residual anxiety might be aroused if we stop the old
protections? What would be the price to those who are comfortable enough
with us the way we have been? And, as far as that goes, how might a
person live any better than with the adaptations that seem to work up to the
present?
All of us have a plethora of messages flowing through us at any time. It
is busier inside our skulls than the air traffic control towers at ORD, or
JFK, or LAX at rush hour. How can we distinguish our voice from the
many others? The answer can be found only in a sincere discernment
process over time. Any of us can respond to an impulse of the moment, an
urgent projection onto a person, a new job, a geographic location, and then
live to regret it. Any of us can serve a complex inherited from our family
of origin, or a pressure to conform, or a self-serving motive. This kind of
reflexive response is what runs our lives most of the time. Discernment. on
the other hand, takes time, sorting and sifting, considering and weighing
costs; however, in the end, action is always called for, possibly including
action to ratify the present, but it must be a considered action. My analyst
in Zürich many years ago said, “We Swiss would take years of planning to
consider living in a foreign land, and then we probably wouldn't do it. You
Americans are crazy. You get on a plane and arrive, and then figure out a
way.” I thought he was being critical of me, but he went on to declare that
he admired that willingness to risk. We all know that there is a difference
between an impulse and a considered risk, but the trick is to know that
difference at the decisive moment.
It has been my therapeutic experience that most people, even those most
accomplished outwardly, lack a core permission to live their lives: to feel
what they feel, desire what they desire, and to pursue what their soul
intends. Such permission cannot be granted by another; it must be seized
by a person who decides that it is time to show up. Such a life must be put
together by a person who understands that the mythic task has inexorably
shifted from the tribal images and rites, the sacred institutions, to his or her
shoulders. Even those who stay within traditional forms and collective
expressions need to sort through the traffic and figure out what works for
them, that is, what is confirmed by their experience and opens their life to
greater personal development and to meaningful social engagement with
others.
Of course, our most distant ancestors knew all this. They knew that if
we wait upon the darkness with enough humility, faithfulness, and
patience, it grows luminous. They knew that if we listen to the silence it
speaks in time to us. Similarly, we all have a feeling function. While we
can override our feelings repeatedly, sooner or later they break through our
suppression or repression and show up in our dreams, our behaviors, our
addictions, our bodies, or our children. Feelings are qualitative analyses
regarding how things are going as seen by the psyche, not the ego. Sooner
or later, they will express themselves in ways supportive or subversive to
the ego decisions. We all have energy systems. If what we are doing is
really right for us, the energy is available and supportive. If we
continuously override what is right for us, that energy will first flag and
then fail us. Our dreams will oppose us, support us, or compensate for the
one-sidedness of consciousness, and in any case they provide an
autonomous commentary from a place anterior to, and wiser than, ordinary
ego consciousness.
Paradoxically, while many of our ancestors would claim that reports
from their interior were expressing “the will of God,” and perhaps
sometimes they were, one would wish that so many who claimed to have
acted on the will of that divine voice might have exercised a more
discerning, patient consideration, a more disciplined testing of the spirits.
Perhaps then we would have suffered fewer holy wars, fewer inquisitions,
fewer oppressions of the life force within. So many have been slain, so
many atrocities committed in the name of religion when personal
accountability, discernment, and the testing of the spirits was short-
circuited by complexes, narcissism, and the fear-based agendas of the
faithful. One might say that, paradoxically, the true test of the faithful will
be found, if it is to be found at all, in the ability, or lack thereof, to carry on
a dialogue with their own complex-driven voices within. What I fail to
recognize within me will sooner or later meet me in the outer world
through whatever projections I have upon the outer. To summarize once
again, then: what I refuse to face within myself will meet me in the
exterior world through you, not as you are, but as I have so construed you.
Putting it even more directly, if guiding wisdom transcendent to ordinary
ego consciousness is not experienced inwardly, it will manifest within us
pathogenically as somatic illness or neurosis or outwardly as projection
onto objects of desire, and we will come in time to be possessed by that
which we wish to possess. So great is the power of the individual human
soul that sooner or later it exercises a profound statement in all our lives.
The only matter over which we have a measure of control is whether we
can mobilize the courage to take it seriously, establish a dialogue with it,
and live in accountability to the soul in this present world.
What Emily Dickinson's aphorism asks of us is not to find the necessary
compass in others, for that is a flight from our personal accountability in
the world, but rather that we find it within ourselves. It requires that we be
more conscious of the provisional lives we actually live through our daily
choices. Either we are in service to received instructions, archaic adaptive
patterns, or we have accepted some responsibility to the inner life. Those
of us who understand where we live in history know that we have personal
accountability and freedom unsurpassed in human history. The project of
modernism, from roughly 1800 through 1945, was first to critique and then
to dismantle the received tribal authorities and transmitting institutions.
For the most part, these days governments, religious institutions, and
privileged persons no longer reign by divine fiat but by the consent (or the
timidity or laziness) of the governed. We know that however pious or
pretentious their claim, they are as riddled with shadow behaviors, agendas
rooted in fear, and narcissistic motives as any of the rest of us. We all
know, whether we accept the charge or not, that we alone are accountable
for the election of our values and the venues through which we serve them,
and that no self-proclaimed authority can trump our obligation to our own
souls unless we permit it to do so.
The project of postmodernism, from 1945 to the present, as exemplified
in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Harold Pinter's The Dumb
Waiter, is to figure things out for ourselves, to sort through the traffic.
While this great freedom, as Sartre observed, constitutes a terrible burden,
we all know, or at least our psyches know, the difference between mauvais
foi and bonne foi. And whatever psyche “knows” will show up as
symptomatology, either in our private or our public lives, or as a
supportive presence for the task of life.
Probably no one reading this book would deny that responsibility for the
meaning of one's life rests entirely upon one's own shoulders. That we
would likely all agree on this notion confirms our intuitive awareness of
the erosion of such received authority as illumined the lives of our
ancestors. In this we would join Whitman and Dickinson. So, each of us,
then, is left to answer these really important, and very personal questions:

1. How do you find true north in the conduct of your journey?

2. Do you know that you have an inner compass and how to access it?
3. Have you learned to trust it and to converse with it?
4. Do you know that your compass goes with you wherever you travel?
5. How do you plan to consult it more often in the conduct of your life?
If we know we have such a compass within, must we not then take greater
care to—in the words of Madison Avenue—“never leave home without
it”?
Notes
1. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1900). Accessed February 4, 2013,
at http://www.bartleby.com/142/208.html.
2. Alicia Suskin Ostriker, No Heaven (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005).
Accessed February 4, 2013, at http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2008/04/17.
3. Christopher Fry, A Sleep of Prisoners: A Play (London: Oxford University Press, 1952),
epilogue.
4. Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach.” Accessed February 4, 2013, at
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172844.
5. See James Hollis, Tracking the Gods: The Place of Myth in Modern Life (Toronto: Inner City
Books, 1995).
6. C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaffé (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961),
325.
7. C. G. Jung, “Psychotherapists or the Clergy” (1932), in Psychology and Religion, vol. 11, The
Collected Works of C. G. Jung (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958), par. 499.
8. Emily Dickinson, Emily Dickinson: Selected Letters, ed. Thomas Herbert Johnson (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 175.
9. Jung, “Psychotherapists or the Clergy,” par. 500.
 CHAPTER 10

Dispelling Ghosts by “Going Through”

We can come to God
Dressed for dancing
Or
Be carried on a stretcher
To God's ward.
—HAFIZ
In earlier chapters we witnessed how so many of us, probably all of us, are
bound to the directives, rapacious fears, anticipatory anxieties, and lack of
permission dictated by our separate pasts. All of us, in short, live in
haunted houses and at best coexist with those spectral presences. Only in
rare moments of emergency, sudden insight, or the exigencies of necessary
action do we tend to break through them. Once in a while we step naturally
into an enlarging psychology naturally, effortlessly, as a consequence of
our innate developmental process, but that is rare. We may outgrow a
habit, move away from an old friendship, or even leave a stuck place, but
most often we circle around the same old, same old over and over, and its
powers are thereby reinforced.
So the question perplexes us: How do we exorcise the haunting of our
separate histories? How do we see outside the lens ground for us by fate
and by the internalized exigencies with their attendant messages of our
history? How do we ever break out of those self-contaminating judgments
that say “I am inadequate as I am; I am not enough in myself. I suffer
worse than, or less than, all the others. It has always been this way and
always will be. I am worthless, hopelessly limited.”
All of us persist in the old magical thinking, the confusion of outer and
inner, between what happens to us and who we are. So we feel
contaminated by our wounds, our shortcomings, and our past failures,
rarely acknowledging that our neighbors, whom we often assume have it
all together, are likewise barely managing and hoping that the rest of us
won't notice. If we were to hear their stories, as I have often been honored
to hear, our defenses would melt and bless them and hope for them,
perhaps even more than ourselves. Compassion and sympathy are words
whose etymology suggests the capacity to feel the suffering of the other,
but if we remain caught within the circling loop of our own self-pity and
self-loathing, we will never feel their dilemma, nor realize that we share a
common misconception. The old French proverb that to know all is to
forgive all would challenge us to hear the story of the other in his or her
faltering journey or, failing that, to at least understand that the other has
such a story which would, upon our hearing, melt our icy hearts and fear-
driven defenses. Like the conditioned mill horse, it is more familiar to
continue in the same fruitless path, each dreary circuit deepening the
trough in which we walk, but what a desolate track that is.
The difference between us and the mill horse is our capacity for
imagination. The thing about all complexes, splinter personalities, and
fractal assignments is that they have no imagination. They can only replay
the old events, scripts, and moribund outcomes of their origin. But we do
have an imagination, the power to image something new, or at least
alternative. The German word for imagination (Einbildungskraft) describes
the power of constructing an image, a picture other than, perhaps larger
than, or at least alternative to, the embedded picture of self and world that
each complex incarnates. The imaginative limits of the mill horse condemn
it to repetition, but the human power to imagine another is the key to our
liberation.
In his seminal work Thus Spake Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche
presents us with a peculiar parable of this liberating possibility:

Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over an

abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous
looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping. What is great
in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in
man is that he is an overture and a going under.1

What a peculiar metaphor this is, and yet in it we finally see the
possibilities of stepping out of the haunted house. The overman of which
the haunted prophet of Basel spoke is the evolved person, the more
conscious individual. But what a metaphor . . . a rope across an abyss? Yet
recall that the problem is that the complex that comes up for us around any
affect-laden issue can only keep us affixed to the past expectation and the
past outcome. How scary it is to step out into the abyss. The German word
for abyss (Abgrund) suggests the ground of certainty and predictability,
dismal as it may be, falling away from beneath our feet. Yet without such
an event, what would ever change, what would ever bring us to a truly
different place? Like Orpheus or Lot's wife, we may look backward,
nostalgically, to that dismal past and lose all thereby, or we may step into
the unknown future, heart in hand, and experience what it might bring us.
Thus it would seem that we have to walk across ourselves, that is, our
own imaginative possibilities to cross over to another possible place. The
abyss is our engulfing angst, our diminished sense of possibilities, our
foregone conclusions. The crossing over is the possible step into our larger
selves. The dumb beast is our mill horse repetitions of the familiar; the
overman is the evolved possible intended by the gods. This freedom of
possibilities is terrifying because it asks of us a largeness unfamiliar to us
and certainly alien to the constrictive purview of the complexes. As the
poet Antonio Machado concluded:

Mankind owns four things

That are no good at sea—
Rudder, anchor, oars,
And the fear of going down.2

As natural as our fears may be—those futile but familiar instruments of

management—they are utterly irrelevant to any great adventure on the
high seas of the soul. While it is terrifying to be out there on that dancing
wire between the known past and the unknown future, it is no time to look
down, hasten back to the safe but dreary familiar, or freeze in petrified
possibility. We are out there on the high wire of all of our possible futures,
and we belong there. The gods want us there because they want something
more of us than the comforts and certainties of our timorous egos. Pascal
once noted of our ventures in his Pensées that it is not a matter of whether
or not to set sail—we are already launched. Kierkegaard observed in his
personal journals that merchant ships hug the familiar shores, but
battleships open their orders on the high seas, out there where the powers
really contend. And novelist Lindsay Clarke observes, “Believe me there
are moments when loyalty to the inner light can feel like stepping into
outer darkness.”3
But what else is there to believe in if we have no relationship to an inner
source of guidance? Many have trusted in the will of God, but when the
god speaks can we tell it from a complex, or even something differentiated
from our own will magnified? How do we “go through” when we are still
confusing who we are, and whither we are intended, with what has
happened to us? And how do we sort out the myriad voices to which we
are subject at any given moment? How do we accept, finally, that we are
not our history but our unfolding journey?
Let me provide some examples to see this process at work firsthand.
Louise was the child of a narcissistic and domineering mother and a
mostly passive father. Early on she got the clear message that she was
powerless before that necessary other, and yet she was to maintain a
smiling, cooperative composure at all times. Was it any wonder that she
became a social worker and spent her adult life serving this dual
assignment? How painful it was to recognize that her troubled husband had
only replaced her mother, how painful to separate and start anew, and how
awesome the weight of history that she always carried, and carried with a
smile for all. All of this had transpired before she entered therapy. She had
met another man, remarried, and found, to her dismay, that the old
depression had returned. Uncharacteristically, she treated this second go at
marriage with a passive-aggressive control that had never been part of her
repertoire before. It was as if she could not help but settle into the archaic
frame of relationship, to be powerless before the needful other. At least
this time, ostensibly still powerless to step into her own larger role in an
equal relationship, she would exert some measure of management of her
life by passive-aggressive manipulation. She didn't like herself in this new
guise, and rightly so, for her new stratagem was still based on the imago of
powerlessness. Thus, she found herself back in the old swampland of
depression, the pit of learned helplessness. Louise knew that this was her
private hell. With Milton's Satan she could cry out, “Which way I fly is
Hell; myself am Hell.”4 Or with Christopher Marlowe's lamentation,
“where we are is hell, / And where hell is must we ever be.”5 But Louise
was also clear that the one consistent presence in her whole lifetime was
not her mother, not her father, not her two husbands, but she herself. This
seemingly obvious recognition is quite radical for it is the first step in
climbing out of hell. As Jung put it, we are “as much possessed by [our]
pathological states as any witch or witch-hunter in the darkest Middle
Ages . . . In those days they spoke of the Devil, today we call it a
neurosis.”6
As long as our personal devil remains unnamed, left to spin his devious
web in the nether regions of the unconscious, we will do his bidding. But
such a devil is within us as a haunting, an embodied phenomenological
encounter with the forces of life, along with their attendant messages.
Because Louise was determined not to be bound forever in this hellish
repetition, she invited her partner to join her in therapy. First she confessed
what she found despicable within her, her hidden power drives to
compensate for her earlier sense of powerlessness in the intimate dance
with another. Then she confessed her deep shame, and her deep longing for
a trusting relationship with the other. Fortunately, her husband could
respond with empathy and understanding, and together they painfully but
progressively risked more and more openness, more and more
vulnerability, and more and more trust in themselves and in each other.
(Paradoxically, trust in themselves was the prerequisite for trust in each
other, for they had to learn that they could actually access their own truth
and then risk standing for it in the face of both outer and inner pressures to
cave and comply.) They both learned that what had been protective for
both of them in the past proved constrictive today and bound them to a
disabling agenda.
As obvious as this situation, and its evolution, seem to us as outsiders,
we each have our places of defended tenderness, our own complicity with
a totalitarian, internal shadow government. Each of us has an internal
Vidkun Quisling who, in the name of avoidance, or ambition, or
expedience, will quickly trade our souls for security, after which we wind
up with neither. Once that tradeoff has occurred a few times, it becomes
easier and easier to collaborate. Until we reach midlife at least and have
acquired some ego strength and some patterns upon which to reflect, we
are not able to take on any of the ghosts that own us or bear the thought
that while things have happened to us, we are most often the ones
executing the orders of these inner dictators.
 Let me give you another real life example from a man who would not
consider himself heroic, and yet his struggle with the compelling powers
of the past provide an example to all the rest of us. Charles is a fifty-five-
year-old business man who grew up in a highly conflicted family. His
respite during those troubled years came from sports and intellectual
pursuits. At one time he was taken in by priests and was strongly inclined
to become a priest, for the church seemed to offer a more inviting family
as well as a potentially noble channel for his humanitarian concerns. But
he soon felt as constricted by this new family as he had by the old, and he
began to feel that their proselytizing had been more about their needs than
addressing his. Nonetheless, the imprint of those years of spiritual
formation, that is, indoctrination, was deeply embedded in his psyche. He
dutifully married a good woman, and they had a large and flourishing
family together while he pursued a quite different calling in the world
outside the church. Still, the never forgotten call to the life of the spirit
haunted him, and late in his fifties, Charles came to therapy. His discipline,
his devotion to the process, produced a very energetic examination of his
dreams and his relational patterns. He had spent much of his life, as we all
do, either in service to the implicate, guiding messages or trying to run
away from them. Like most of us, Charles was until now still seeking
permission to answer the summons of his own soul.
Intuitively grasping that the primary task of the second half of life is the
recovery of personal authority, Charles is now undertaking the process that
was too large for him in his youth. Decades later, much more skeptical, but
bearing still the imprint of the hopes and demands that once exercised so
much power in his life, he returns to this decision in his life via a dream
that takes him back to his old hometown.

I am back in Cincinnati preparing for a march. It is a march which

is to take us several blocks past the headquarters of the
Archdiocese. [I join the march and] find myself gliding past the
headquarters but notice the headquarters are surrounded by a
ghetto. A priest enters this ghetto to make a sick call on an elderly
black woman.

When he reflected on this dream, Charles said the one thing he always
admired and continues to respect about the church was its social mission,
its social conscience. As a young man, he naturally was looking for both
mentoring and external authority. Through the years he had slowly claimed
his own authority and outgrown that need, but his commitment to social
justice remained a constant.
In recent years, Charles went through major surgery at the Texas
Medical Center in Houston, which not only saved his life but summoned
him to a new fidelity to his individuation journey, a summons he was
honoring by entering into the depth dialogue with himself in therapy. As a
confirmation of this and of his slowly acquired authority, another dream
has him entering into a spirited dialogue with surgeons who are
considering his case. While most of them believe that his situation is not
salvageable, he argues with them, taking his place among them as an
equal. This is a far cry from the youth of deficient or uncertain authority.
Who better would know what is best for our “treatment” than us, if we
gain sufficient consciousness, own that perspective, stand by it, and claim
personal authority?
In still another dream, Charles finds himself with his extended family by
marriage and while he treasures these kin, he also chaffs at having to
submerge his serious journey with the distractions that occupy so many of
them. In this dream he is summoned to join them in a group game, and he
tells them they should not count on me to play. Meanwhile he sees a
beautiful toddler playing as a butterfly alights on him. The child plays
with the butterfly in a different game and the toddler is laughing and
smiling.
None of us are likely to be imaginative enough to conjure these scripts
consciously, but nightly they do appear as visitants from regions outside
the purview of ego consciousness. Note that each one of these dreams is
calling Charles to a sustained differentiation between what has happened
to him, his individual haunting, and who he is. The “family” dream does
not represent his denial or rejection of his acquired family, which in fact he
preferred over his family of origin, but rather his acknowledgment that his
“game” was not the collectivized form, the family distractions and
diversions, but something far more fundamental. The beautiful child is the
part of him that he, and we, leave behind through our necessary
adaptations. It is the immortal child, the archetype of being, futurity, and
developmental possibilities inherent in all of us. The butterfly is one of the
ancient symbols of the soul, an etymological source of the word psyche,
and it visits the child in playful forms. The child's spontaneous
engagement in the game, the play of the psyche, is what we all left behind
but what screams out from the depths to be recovered. This is an essential
part of Charles's second-half-of-life process of recovery of himself, a
process to which we are all summoned. If we do not go there voluntarily,
the pathologizing gods will drag us there sooner or later. Even then, we
may flee such an invitation to homecoming as we have so often done
before. Why we would flee this invitation is a mystery, but it surely derives
from the child's perception of its powerlessness in the world and the
imperative that it adapt to the outer authorities. In so doing, we lose
contact with the original soul, the being that is meant to be nurtured and
brought into this fallen world as our healing gift. How many of us ever
come back voluntarily, as Charles has, to tackle this possibility? More
often we are driven by crisis or suffering to undertake this reconsideration.
Either way, the gods await our showing up.
Notice how these dreams, in addition to the ones excerpted and
summarized in earlier chapters, call upon Charles to differentiate his
journey both from his historic roots and influences and from his current
extended family with its ethos and nomos, namely, the socially constructed
roles that so often define our instructions and constrict our journeys.
Notice how his dreams call upon him to claim what is of perduring value
in his religious vision, the call to social justice, without submerging his
personhood in all the other vested authorities and hierarchies that so often
come with prescribed values and role expectations. Second, note how he is
called to take a decisive role in the management of his health and well-
being, even in the face of scientifically vested authorities. After all, it is his
body and his health at stake. And third, he is supported in affirming his
familial commitments without sacrificing his quite separate journey.
Families are healthiest when they serve as launching pads for each person
en route to his or her separate journey; they are most pathogenic when this
project is subverted by its most narcissistically needy members or by the
collective timidity of others to grow up, show up, and strike off on their
own separate journeys. Charles was loyal to all three of these outer forms
of authority, but he had an appointment with his own journey, his own
summons to address the meaning of his life, and, in his fifties, he was
showing up.
 In addition to gaining some permission for this reclamation project from
his dreams, Charles also undertook the process Jung developed called
active imagination. Active imagination is not meditation, self-hypnosis,
guided imagery, or wish fulfillment, but rather an effort to activate the
unconscious and to have a dialogue with it in an interactive, responsive
way. Sometimes people write down the dialogue that ensues, others paint
or dance, though any plastic form can receive the imprint of our inner
dialogue and embody its dynamics. In one such active imagination,
Charles experienced a shamanic visitation by a hawk who first seemed to
attack him and then illuminate him. I cite here an abridged report of that
encounter.

The hawk is in the air, and I hear its screech. The hawk flies about
me, then I can feel its talons on my scalp. It lets go and faces me. I
look into its eyes. The hawk is ancient yet I seem to know who he is.
The hawk speaks, “I am the spirits from the past, and I come to you
because it is difficult for you to come to us.” [When Charles resists
the hawk digs its talons into his face and pecks at him.] I fall on my
back and shout out to the hawk that I will follow his commands. The
beat of the hawk's wings heal the wounds as if I was never attacked.
I gaze into the hawk's eyes and see unhappy spirits walking
among the trees in single file. They are roped together and walk in
silence, gloom, despair. At the front of the line are my parents, and
behind them are their parents, and parents going back in time.
The hawk tells me that I must loosen the rope that binds them
together. I tell the hawk that I do not know how to do this, but the
hawk bestows a feather on me and tells me that I “have one life in
which to free these spirits. And do not forget that the spirits need
you.”

This spontaneous conversation generated by a dialogue with the

unconscious lights on a traditional symbol of a far-seeing, prophetic
creature, the hawk. The ego's ambivalence about undertaking such radical
conversations is common to us all, but voluntarily or not, the gods will
speak to us, especially the disowned and rejected ones. Reluctantly,
Charles is compelled to engage with this creature and to pay attention.
Through this archetypal lens, Charles is able to see the trail of ancestors,
his spiritual and psychological antecedents, stretching out before his
vision, all bound, like Rodin's Burghers of Calais, by tyrannical forces of
history. Moreover, he is told that he has this one life to live, too short
perhaps, but he is still both privileged and charged with the task of freeing
these bound generations.
Here again we see the dual theme of freeing ourselves from the ghostly
weight of history, its oppressive complexes and diminishing directives, and
thereby freeing others around us in some small way as well. As a tool to
assist this transformation, he is granted the gift of a metonymic feather,
that is, an embodied image that intimates something far less tangible, albeit
equally real. Feathers have often served spiritual perspectives, given their
origin in the creatures of the air. In the Brothers Grimm tale “The Three
Feathers,” the central figure is given feathers to set alight on the air, where,
guided by the pneuma, or movement of the spirit, he can find the right
path, make the right decisions. To be in touch with this spiritual gift
permits one to move through this tangible world with much greater
discriminative powers. Charles, as a man of courage and accountability, is
working on this project as I write. A personal authority too awesome for us
to hold in youth is now both one's summons and a proper source of
guidance.
When we look at Charles's process from a synoptic perspective we see
that he left home, as we all do, in search of guidance and support from
others and in need of the clarity of a map which might provide assistance
in traversing uncertain terrains. Naturally, like us, he had to try some
things, many things, to see if they worked—all part of that inevitable and
necessary bumble we call the first half of life. He sought guidance not
from his troubled parents, but from parental surrogates—professors,
educational and religious institutions—and learned that they did not fit
either. He moved on to the social roles of marriage, family, and business
that awaited him, and quite successfully so. But now he is well launched
into the next stage, his second adulthood, in which he questions what in
fact he is really serving with his finite but precious life energies and what
aspects of his outer life and commitments still serve his journey. Many
who feel such deep discords within are confused by this summons to
consciousness and switch jobs, partners, or ideologies as though
rearranging the furniture in the room will make a new home.
 To piece together the threads of this elaborate tapestry, Charles not only
has to sort and sift myriad influences and messages but discern which ones
are truly his, which ones are merely acquired, and which ones deserve to
be jettisoned. To that end, he confesses that while he cognitively rejected
certain religious institutional injunctions long ago, they still lay claim on
parts of his psyche. With regard to work and family, he affirms and loves
both still, and yet must continue the journey his soul seems to be
demanding of him as an independent being inescapably charged with
bringing his own unique personhood into this world. Thus, his recent
dreams are revisiting this mélange of pasts and rendering their haunting
messages more conscious. If he, and we, do not undertake an occasional
survey of that vortex of messages, we may be sure they will continue to
haunt us in symptomatic ways, as persistently as my strange encounter
with General Grant in the netherworld of dreams.
Over and over I see really fine people who express a general malaise, a
desire for something different. Their job is okay, their marriage is okay,
their relationship to life itself is okay . . . but then again it is not. When one
begins to push against this malaise one hears over and over: “But that is
just the way I am.” “I am too old to change now because . . . [I am too near
retirement; we don't have the money; the kids would not understand].”
And so on. All of these outer “facts” may be true, but psychological
mischief is almost never about what it is about. Sooner or later the real
issue will be found in that complex, that affect-laden idea, that acquired
message which stands in the way of growth.
If we pull apart the blocking message, we see a learned helplessness, an
idea deeply reinforced in our history, a reticulated admonishment with
which we remain stuck, in stasis, with its attendant calculus of cost. As we
know, life is always more powerful, more imposing, more intractable than
any of us can consciously manage, and still we are asked to show up.
What is stopping these good people is not lack of desire, for desire is
ever present within us—even in depressed times—as the engine of life.
Rather, a metaphoric octopus hovers over the soul and threatens to engulf
it; a boa constrictor of compelling histories squeezes the spirit. But what
are these animalia? What gives them their powers? Their presence is a
legacy of the disempowerment of childhood and the magnitude of the
powers around us at that time. One may argue over what past matters have
to do with the present stuckness, but where else would such blanket
statements of stasis and defeat come from? Why would otherwise
thoughtful and functional people be so blocked and self-sabotaging? To
say that “I am stuck and can't get beyond this point” is to be in the grip of
some circuitry that leads to the psychic basement. Down there, in lower
plateaus of our histories, is the terror of abandonment, the loss of the
approval and necessary support of the other. Down there is the terror of
incursive forces that annihilate or at least wound grievously. Yet
underneath this oppressive weight of the repetitive past which curbs and
contains, desire, the elemental life force, courses still. Desire is the engine
of life, even as disorders of desire mark all of us in singular ways. Beneath
each disorder of desire there is nonetheless a profound urge to grow, to
express, to serve life more fully. Into the realm of desire and its various
disorders is precisely the place we have to go to redeem the life we are
meant to be living, to serve life and render the ghosts less haunting.

The early work of Sigmund Freud and his colleagues opened the world of
desire for us as a legitimate region of investigation. He and such
colleagues as Josef Breuer initially worked with what were then called
“hysterics,” namely, people who suffered significant physiological
impairments which could not be addressed by the conventional medical
model (today these are called “somatoform disorders”). They discovered
that some of the cases of blindness, paralyzed limbs, or anaesthetized vocal
cords were compromise formations that embodied the ambivalence of a
legitimate desire but one forbidden to the person. How else could a
“respectable” person acknowledge a violent response to an oppressor or
sexual intent toward another, or endorse values inconsistent with his or her
conscious conditioning? The collision of these vectors within produced an
acceptable “compromise” in the guise of symptomatology. “I cannot
murder if my arm is paralyzed . . .” and so on. Freud and his colleagues
worked in Victorian times, which have been characterized as excessively
repressed. Lady Gough, the Amy Vanderbilt of her era, seriously opined
that the works of male and female authors should not be placed side by
side on a shelf unless, as in the case of the Brownings, they were married.
A woman in Paris saw to it that the snowmen and statues in the city were
properly clothed. And language was full of general admonitions such as
one should use the word limb rather than the scandalously erotic leg. (Lest
we think this internal split between the natural orders of desire and the
imposition of constrictive values has been left behind in our “permissive”
age, we should remember that quite recently, an attorney general of the
United States considered it imperative that a classical feminine statue of
Justice be swathed in cloaking garb at the Department of Justice in
Washington, DC.)
Granted that the anarchic desires of the infant, narcissistic and
imperialistic, within each of us must be mediated by the legitimate
demands of the social contract, those who are blocked in the natural
development of their natural desires have no doubt had something terrible
happen to their lives. The hauntings of fear, the hauntings of imposed
oppression, block their fundamental life energy. Etymologically, the word
desire derives from the Latin desiderare, “to long for,” and from de sidere,
“of the stars.” Our disorders of desire arise from our losing contact with
our guiding stars. If one is a mariner on the wine-dark sea and has lost
contact with that star, one is perilously adrift and at the mercy of whatever
sea changes or currents of the hour may impose themselves. As mariners
on the high seas of our lives, we need the star of desire to know toward
what to direct our energies, lest we fall into the whirlpools of the deep—
depression, despair, desuetude. How did the worship of the goddess Venus
come to be venery? And how did passion, whose root is passio,
“suffering,” become so domesticated that we find its expression in the
shadowy corners of romantic novels, pornography, soap operas, and
infantile titillation in advertisements?
How different the world would be if each parent could say to the child:
“Who you are is terrific, all you are meant to be. And who you are, as you
are, is loved by all of us. You have a source within, which is the soul, and
it will express itself to you through what we call desire. Always respect the
well-being of the other, but live your own journey, serve that desire, risk
being that which wishes to enter the world through you, and you will
always have our love, even if your path takes you away from us.” Such
persons would then have a powerful tool to enable them to change their
lives when it was not working out for them. Such persons would be able to
make difficult decisions, mindful always of the impact on others, but also
determined to live the life intended by the gods who brought us here.
Surely we have all tried, and continue trying, to fine tune the operations
of our lives, but suffering awaits no matter what choices we make. The
suffering of authentic choices, however, at least gives a person a meaning,
which the various flights from suffering we undertake deny. One form of
suffering enlarges, one diminishes; one reveres the life which wishes to be
expressed through us, and one colludes in its sabotage. The poet Rilke
reminds us of our inheritance:

. . . we do not live, as the flowers, for a single year.

For through us an immortal sap rises through our limbs.7

In the world of psychiatry and psychotherapy, our old companion

depression has been replaced by something more exotic, more chic:
dysthymia. Thymos is the Greek word for strong feeling. So desire
apparently is no longer being “pressed down.” Rather, we lack “strong
feelings.” Actually, we are never absent of feelings for they are
autonomous responses of the psyche to how things are going. The ego may
be overrun by them, threatened by them, may blunt them, deny them,
project them onto others, but feelings occur in every instant. If one has a
historically reinforced guardian with a scimitar guarding the entrance to
the palace of feeling, then one will be aligned against one's own source of
direction, one's guiding star.
The good news is that the desires of psyche never really go away. The
very presence of psychopathology, or symptoms, are expressions of the
will of desire to be heard through whatever twists and torques it must
undergo to reach the surface. Like a tendril seeking light, it will burrow
through stone if need be, through repression and denial if necessary. Desire
may even drive us to our knees from time to time until the beleaguered ego
is finally forced to cry out, “What do you want from me?” Then the god
Eros is once again invited to the celebration of life by incarnating through
the individual.8 Each of us then is the scene of a sustained civil war, a
contention between the natural desires of the organism for self-expression
and the repressive powers of adaptive history. Even the temporary triumph
of the haunting of history will not prevent the fact that, in the end, we all
will nonetheless be haunted by the unlived life, which is the subject of our
last chapter. Meanwhile, as W. H. Auden wrote in his commemorative
poem “In Memory of Sigmund Freud,” “sad is Eros, builder of cities, / and
weeping anarchic Aphrodite.”9 When we risk honoring these neglected
“gods,” serving desire consciously and respectfully, we are again in service
to life.

During this therapeutic day, I spent eight hours talking with folks who are
navigating various rapids and impediments in their lives. Two, a mother
who lost an adult daughter and a therapist who recently lost her husband,
described how it never goes away, the grieving, the hollow feeling in the
midst of even good days, the memory which sucks the energy from almost
any moment. (And I too know those moments well.) Yet each has chosen
to “go through,” to open their hearts to the world around them and to the
great grief in which they swim. My well-meaning physician offered me
antidepressants when we lost a son. I took them home and put them in the
garbage. I needed to honor my son with the reality of his loss. “Going
through” means that we have to experience what we do not wish to
experience, for to flee it is even worse. Unprocessed grief becomes
depression or sometimes something even worse. Some of us know the
depth of that terrible but irrefutable observation of Aeschylus in his play
Agamemnon:

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget

falls drop by drop upon the heart
until, in our own despair, against our will,
comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.10

Still another analysand is wrestling with a devouring parent who is his

partner in his medical practice and a devouring partner to whom he is
married. Only in therapy did he realize that the former preceded the latter,
which is obvious to an outsider, but he has recently discovered how a
childhood with the narcissistic parent, internalized as a constituent element
of the intrapsychic imago of self and other, led to the adult's choice of that
particular marriage partner as well. As outsiders we would have to expect
this forty-two-year-old man to walk away from both, but to do so is to stir
up the overwhelming anxiety which every child experiences if he seeks
liberation from the other upon whom he is also dependent. What this good
man has to do is go through his fear and start his life anew.
 Talk is cheap, and we can all be free with insight, even advice, from the
outside, but perhaps each of us should have to ask where we are similarly
blocked in our forward movement. In various interactive writing
workshops I have asked people to describe where they are blocked in their
development. As yet, as mentioned earlier on the question of stuckness, on
four continents, from Moscow to Vancouver, to Sao Paulo to Atlanta, no
one has ever asked what the question means. Instead, within seconds they
begin describing the stuck place in their life. That we can identify such a
place so readily tells us that we know we are stuck, and in every case we
are stuck not because we lack knowledge, but because getting unstuck stirs
the archaic fears within each of us and shuts the necessary change down.
For the parents grieving, and for the physician intimidated by the
magnitude of the task, the only way to go is through.
For those of us who are or have been in the torments of hell because we
are stuck, it is hard to imagine that the alternative would be somehow
better. Perhaps no one suffered more acute torment than Oedipus who,
despite his intentions, lived out a sour fate, slew his father, married his
mother, and begat children with her. When he was brought to recognition
of his complicity, this man, who was known for his wisdom, realized that
he did not know that simplest of all things—who he was. He was so
appalled that he blinded himself before the searing vision of complicity
and asked to be slain. But as a more severe punishment he was sent into
exile to fully bear the consequences of his choices. Tradition tells us that in
his ninetieth year Sophocles returned to this story which so intrigued him
and wrote its finale in which Oedipus, after years of humbling exile and
genuine penance, came at last to the sacred grove at Colonus where he was
reconciled to and blessed by the gods and granted an apotheosis.
I am reminded also of the elder Yeats, ailing and suffering so many
heartaches and defeats in his life, who writes in his 1929 poem “A
Dialogue of Self and Soul,” “We must laugh and we must sing, / We are
blest by everything, / And everything we look upon is blest.”11 No young
person would be allowed to get away with those lines. We would simply
say to him or her, “Wait a few decades. We know you mean well, but wait
and see what life has in store for you, and those whom you cherish, and we
will talk about all this then.” But Yeats had suffered through, as Oedipus
did, and as many have. We can say that blessings may come to those who
go through whatever miasmic swamplands the gods put in their way. They
will have earned those blessings the hard way. No one who has sought
some easy path around difficult times or has fled the task that always
comes to us to grow or diminish can go through and receive the richness
that follows. As youth, we are not yet capable of bearing such experiential
richness and trials as going through requires, an abundance born of depth,
transformation of vision, and a humbled respect for the mysteries of this
universe.
The therapist in supervision who recently lost her beloved husband said
that many of her patients are amazed, fearful, avoidant, and curious about
how she could show up to do therapy with them when she is so recently
traumatically stricken. Would they expect, perhaps prefer, a person who
collapses and is unable to do what she is called here to do? Whom would it
serve for her to stop being who she is, a grief-stricken but brave woman
who cares for herself, her work, and her patients? By going through she
embodies the profound message that we all have more strength than we
imagine, that we all may be obliged to draw upon reserves of our humanity
which we did not know we possessed. Not all of them will appreciate her
powerful example of sitting with constancy and fidelity before them, but
she herself embodies their greatest, most therapeutic gift: the message that
we are here to be here, to go through it all, and to retain our dignity,
purpose, and values as best we can. That is all we can do, and all that life
can ever ask of us.
Nietzsche's odd paradox has it right. We have to walk out into that abyss
of the unknown and find that something supports us even when nothing
supports us. In continuing to undertake that risk there is more spiritual
freedom, more amplitude of soul, than we could ever have imagined. But
that is where we are meant to be, living not as fugitives, but as mariners on
a tenebrous sea, going through to a richer place.
Notes
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Penguin,
1977), 126–27.
2. Antonio Machado, Times Alone: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado, trans. Robert Bly
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1983), 113.
3. Lindsay Clarke, Parzival and the Stone from Heaven (London: Voyager, 2003), 136.
4. John Milton, Paradise Lost, line 75.
5. Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus, lines 121–22.
6. C. G. Jung, “The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man” (1934), in Civilization in Transition,
vol. 10, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964), par.
309.
7. Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies; my translation.
8. Recall the dream of the graduate student in chapter 5 who was called to the dance of life, set in
the mansion of early death, and the powerful complex that pulled him away from that invitation (p.
61).
9. W. H. Auden, “In Memory of Sigmund Freud.” Accessed at
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15543.
10. These words were cited by Senator Robert Kennedy to the troubled crowd in Indianapolis the
night Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, and shortly thereafter they were placed on Kennedy's
own tombstone at Arlington Cemetery. Accessed at http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Aeschylus.
11. William Butler Yeats, Selected Poems and Four Plays, ed. M. L. Rosenthal (New York:
Scribner, 1996), 125.
 CHAPTER 11

The Haunting of the Unlived Life

The most painful state of being is remembering the future,
particularly the one you'll never have.
—SØREN KIERKEGAARD
Throughout these pages we have focused on how we are haunted by
presences. But we are also haunted by absences. We are haunted by
missing parents or parents who could not be present for whatever reason to
meet the needs of their children. We are haunted by those deceased upon
whom we once depended or need still for solace, conversation, insight, or
simple encouragement. Last week I awoke knowing that I had dreamed of
holding a lovely child in my arms and telling him how much I loved him.
He responded warmly with a familiar smile. As I reflected consciously on
the warm image which resonated into waking life, I recognized him from
his tan and red childhood pajamas as my dead son. I had not seen or
thought of those pajamas for decades. and I wept. A patient of mine tells
me how every day she thinks of something she would like to share with
her dad and cannot. The list goes on and includes all of us. As one woman
said who had lost her daughter, “You don't get over it, ever; you just find
new ways to go on living.”
All we can say of this phenomenon is that absences are still presences
and that death, divorce, or distance do not end relationships. One of my
clients, a nun who lost her mother at birth, joined an order seeking a
healing family and found other lost daughters instead. During a retreat she
had a dialogue with the intrapsychic mother imago and experienced a
living connection to this maternal source that had never been present to her
in outer life. Even those estranged from parents or relatives grieve as they
recognize that not everything gets fixed, that there are more loose ends
than we will ever repair, and that we all bleed somewhere from the
raggedy edges of life's unfinished business. All of these absences are
presences and play a role in the governance of our lives, whether we know
it or not.
 In one of my workshops I have an exercise in which participants are
asked to speculate on the particular values of their separate parents, what
their mother valued, what their father valued, what preoccupied or worried
them, and how they served the implicate “marching orders” of their lives.
The purpose of this exercise is to help participants more fully recognize
the ubiquity of the messages that haunt their lives and drive their
behaviors. In many cases we can only speculate on what our parents
actually felt or believed or the scripts they enacted. What is more
important is what the child they once were internalized as the explicit or
implicate message their parents were daily passing on. In many cases
participants indicate that they do not know what the parent in fact believed
or served, and many, of course, had lost a parent through death or divorce
or emotional absence. Nonetheless, these lacunae are filled in by all of us
—through implication, speculation, or necessity. In other words, what is
not there is still there, and we are emotionally obliged to make do, jury rig
a plausible fill-in for these messages, especially those who never knew
their parents.
Strangely, perhaps synchronistically, in one two-month period I
encountered three sixty-year-old daughters, one Swiss and two American,
whose fathers had died during the waning days of World War II. Two of
the daughters were therapists and the other had spent her life in a related
helping profession. All three were deeply driven to know more about their
fathers, a task rendered more possible today with the Internet. One of them
tracked down survivors, attended reunions of her father's unit, and even
took a tour with them to the battlefields of France, so deep was her
longing. So we cannot say that absence does not also haunt us. James Tate
wrote a terribly moving poem, “The Lost Pilot,” in which he imagines his
father's face still bobbing in the cockpit of the plane resting at the bottom
of the Pacific Ocean. How haunted he is by this absent presence, as if he
were “the residue of a stranger's life.”1 Are we not all, in fact, at least
partially the residue of other people's lives: carrying their messages, living
their unlived lives, serving their tribal values, suffering the limits of their
ancestral complexes?
And then there are those absent who have been removed from the fuller
expression of their lives by fate, fortuitous illness, bigotry, segregation, or
discriminatory beliefs and practices. When my inner whiner shows up I
often reflect that children my age were on those trains to the concentration
camps, while I was safe, warm, and loved. What could I possibly have to
complain about when I grew and flourished, and they perished with no
chance to live their journeys? There are those who are blocked by social,
economic, and collectivized practices which legislate against their
possibilities, impair their permission, and stunt their souls. Just as there are
personal complexes, so there are also social and cultural complexes that
usurp our ego states and drive our behaviors. There is no religious, civil,
educational, or social institution in our society which has not in some
fashion constricted the rights, the opportunities, the encouragement to
fulfill potential of some of its citizens. The discriminatory practices of
gender, racial, sexual, ethnic, and cultural definitions have harmed us all.
By limiting any of us, all of us are deprived of the richer possibilities, the
dialectical magnification of our world by the delimitations of the few over
the many or the privileged over the disadvantaged. None of us lives
untouched by the ghosts of institutions past, most of them privileging some
and oppressing others. Anyone who denies this, who believes himself or
herself free of contamination by these oppressive histories, this slanted
playing field, is, no matter their present beneficent intentions, the inheritor
of their privileging consequences. People of conscience are haunted by this
fact; others manage to sleep untroubled.
I am presently honored to live in what has become America's most
ethnically diverse region.2 Moreover, an overwhelming percentage of my
fellow Houstonians believe that diversity is our greatest strength. Even so,
the haunting legacy of poverty, racism, and ethnic discrimination remains
with us and plays out in the air our children breathe. If that is true here, a
city that celebrates diversity, how much more so in other cities around the
world? In whatever urban or rural community, we all live side by side,
breathe the same air, and cherish the same hopes for our children. And we
all die sooner than we wish. Why then would any sane person persist in
fear-based responses to others? Why then would any of us contribute to the
absence or oppression of the other, which the prejudicial diminishment of
any of us eventuates? Why do the fearful still exclude those of different
persuasion from their community? The only answer is fear and immaturity,
and we all have a long way to go before we are fully postmodern. To be
postmodern is to understand not only the modernist critique of the old, still
haunting, fixities that locked people into categories but to recognize that
we now have to approach each other, see each other without the lenses of
privilege or oppression, without categories, as simply other human beings
who belong on this planet as much as we do. To afford ourselves that
freedom we have to grant others the same freedom. But to do so, we all
have to start growing up—a very daunting proposal indeed.

Another far more subtle haunting is the refusal we all, in some form or
fashion, have made of the gift of life, of the invitation to show up.
When Jung formulated his concept of individuation he did not mean
narcissistic self-indulgence—quite the contrary. Individuation is
profoundly humbling. It obliges us to stand naked before the gift of life,
the summons to personhood, and accede to the demand that we show up
and contribute our small part to the big picture. From afar, that sounds
reasonable, even doable, but in practice we all are intimidated by what it
asks of us. Our well-being once depended on our fitting in, being
adaptable, agreeable, accommodating. Individuation asks that we actually
serve a separate summons to be different. The difference asked for here is
not that of the adolescent who so painfully opposes parents and school
authorities and adopts countercultural clichés, but rather that of risking
who we are when someone else, perhaps almost everyone else, will not
like who we are, feel challenged, even threatened by us, and oppose our
very being. Who really wants to risk that?
Two literary examples of the profound ambivalence we have to this risk
of becoming come to mind. The first is a short story by Delmore Schwartz
who fittingly borrows his title from W. B. Yeats: “In Dreams Begin
Responsibilities.”3 A young man attends a film at a neighborhood theater.
It is an old-fashioned romance. Slowly he begins to realize that he has seen
these people before, yet not so . . . . As the film unwinds he watches the
courtship of his parents, their youthful meeting, marriage, and the
imminent issue: himself! Horrified by this prospect he rushes up the aisle
shouting for someone to stop the film. In other words, he is fleeing the gift,
and the burden, of his life which the parental conjunction brings. He
awakens from his slumber on the dawn of his twenty-first birthday and
concludes it is only a dream, a bad dream. The line from Yeats that
Schwartz uses as his title reminds us that dreams come from the Self, the
deep organic wisdom of the psyche that gifts us with the daunting
summons to become. The youth, though chronologically an adult, would
flee that gift, obliterate his birthright and his challenge, and in so doing
flee his individuation.
Another example, with a different outcome, is found in the poem by
Sharon Olds titled “I Go Back to May 1937.” In her mind's eye she
similarly sees her parents meeting, courting, and then their slow, inevitable
trail toward the procreation of her. She too wishes to yell at them to stop,
to tell them they are going to do things to each other and to their children
to hurt them, things they will not intend to do. But unlike Schwartz's
dream-youth who clearly wants to end the picture show and even prevent
his own conception, she does not refuse the summons to her life but rather
takes it on and proclaims: “Do what you are going to do, and I will tell
about it.”4 Perhaps the horrific experience she describes in poem after
poem diverted her from an otherwise “normal” course, or perhaps her
calling as a poet of marriage gone bad, among other topics, is a result of
this experience. In his famous elegy, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” W. H.
Auden wrote: “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.”5 Perhaps her parents
hurt Olds into poetry, and her real calling was to be a country and western
singer, a long-distance truck driver, a ballet dancer—who knows? But for
sure, profound meaning and productivity is found in her being a poet, a
scribe of the suffering she and her family experienced. Her individuation is
forged through the sacrifice of her ego desires in the crucible of received
life, and the music which comes from her then is wrested from the fiery pit
of her familial Hades.
All of us fail in so many ways to show up, to step into the largeness of
the soul. This shortfall is quite natural. The necessary adaptations to the
conditions of life presented by fate, most often in the theater of family
dynamics, obliges adaptation, and the natural instincts of the child are
quickly found costly and soon forgotten. But these destiny-driven drives
are not forgotten by the unconscious. The unconscious remembers
everything. Think not? Then you have not really taken your dreams very
seriously, for if you do, you will find the unknown architect of these
spectral visitants remembers everything. The detritus of our lives shows up
in remarkable ways, linking us to affects left behind, the people, the
commitments, the hopes and oppressions consciousness has forgotten or
conveniently shelved. But psyche remembers and, if neglected, will
escalate into psychopathology. Psychopathology, literally translated from
its Greek roots, means “the expression of the suffering of the soul.” Why
would the soul suffer if it did not have its own will, its own desires, its
own plan—all of which are thwarted by the ministries of fate, by the
derailments of our adaptations, and by our complex-driven choices.
The greatest haunting we all suffer is the lost relationship to the soul, to
the original mode of being that proved too costly for us to sustain beyond
age two or thereabouts. We evolve into apparent compatibility with the
world around us, becoming chameleons as we take on the protective
coloring of changing environments. Among the many who populate our
intrapsychic life is a betrayer who expeditiously forgets principle in
service to fitting in, being liked, modulating the pressures around us. As A.
E. Housman put it, in his poem “The Laws of God, “I am a stranger and
afraid / In a world I never made.”6 This adaptation, while protective and
often necessary, is also a collusion in the abridgement of the soul's agenda.
We can get away with this collusion as long as we remain distracted,
unduly anxious, or afraid of our calling. Becoming a person is actually a
very difficult project, and yet it has a purpose transcendent to fitting in, to
the ego's understandable desire to live as conflict-free as possible, even as
that same ego admires historic figures who, summoned to the sacrifice of
that same agenda of adaptation, chose differently and gained history's
respect.
Jung is right, it seems to me, when he claims that the individuation task
is synonymous with, or analogous to, what our ancestors called a divine
vocation: answering the summons of God. It obliges us to serve that which
pulls us deeper than is comfortable, wider than is convenient. From such
push and pull comes a more capacious life, from such dialectic comes a
longer, richer life story. “The achievement of personality,” Jung writes, “is
an act of high courage flung in face of life, the absolute affirmation of all
that constitutes the individual, the most successful adaptation to the
individual conditions of existence coupled with the greatest possible
freedom for self-determination.”7 Notice that he distinguishes between the
ego adaptations which bring us understandable relief and perhaps
acceptance by the collective, and the adaptation that nature asks of us,
which often obliges the sacrifice of the ego agenda for a larger purpose. As
one of those exemplary figures who summon us to sacrifice the ego's petty
agenda, Jesus, put it, “Not my will but Thine” (or Dante's phrase, in la sua
voluntade e nostra pace, “in his will is our peace”). All of this is much
more than the ego bargained for, desires, or feels comfortable in
confronting. But the alternative, the flight from individuation, is worse.
Then we are stuck with our frightened, diminished selves, in love with
possessions which disappoint, power which fails us always, and
presumption which always proves insufficient. To be stuck in such
narrowed quarters is to bump up against our inauthentic being, over and
over, which is a form of hell. As all the great tragic dramas exemplified, as
long as we expect to understand the big picture and arrogate to ourselves
powers reserved for the gods, we will be brought back to a troubled earth
and a defeated agenda. When we observe and serve the mystery found in
nature, in each other, in ourselves, in good work, we are living on the edge
and grow inevitably, and we are thereby rewarded by the inherent richness
of the journey.
Delmore Schwartz's dream-youth fled that summons, and one imagines
that the dreamer, if he ignored the message, therefore led a fugitive life.
Sharon Olds accepted her role as scribe and savant for her sinking family
ship. While she could not save those on board, she could swim to the shore
and convert her anger and grieving to song, thereby becoming much more
than her early environment provided for her. What is it in any of us that
allows us to persist, push through the obstacles toward something real,
something authentic in our lives?
We cannot say for sure, nor can we find it in everyone's life, for there
are, sadly, many, many defined, even destroyed, by their environmental
fates. But what Jung called the Self, the natural wisdom, the organic drive,
and the will to meaning, lives in all of us and waits for us to show up, keep
the appointment. How many of us really keep the appointment in our
lives? How many cancel out and offer a shabby excuse? I certainly have
from time to time. And yet something within always aches and keeps
knocking on my door, often at three or four in the morning when I cannot
distract or repress. In those hours of desolation, one's meeting with the
unlived selfhood is most poignant and most penetrating. With each day's
dawning, the summons, the task awaits. It awaits me, it awaits the reader,
as much as it awaited Marcus Aurelius on the Danube those centuries ago.
He confronted his desire for relief and refuge, and cold, and no doubt
fearful, he chose to show up. Will we?
 In “Haunted Houses” Longfellow reminds us that, inevitably, “There are
more guests at table than the hosts / invited.”8 In this study of haunting,
notice how little attention was paid to the old perplexities of ghosts, evil
spirits, and possessions which troubled the minds and spirits of our
ancestors. They were right to notice strange and persistent events, occult
invasions of daily life, right to try to understand the mystery of how certain
energy systems could take over their lives from time to time. They were
right to seek through their shamanic, exorcistic, and apotropaic rituals
some means to rid themselves of these energies. Sadly, sometimes too
often, they instead projected the source of these invisible presences onto
their neighbors or the people on the other side of some boundary, and
history's most tragic and unnecessary events have flowed from these
misunderstandings. We now know that we are the carriers of those
paradoxes. We are those accountable for the contents that spring from our
unconscious and for what possesses us through our complexes and spectral
presences.
We are all, still, possessed as easily as our ancestors by these errant
energy systems. We are still as prone to blame others as our ancestors did
or seek to medicate away our distresses and internal conflicts or
anaesthetize them with distractions. Notice how many still indulge in
bigotries in all forms or zone out through many brands of analgesics, or
plug their souls into the Internet and keep a constant buzz going, or circle
down to darksome layers of depression and desuetude—as if these
unconscious treatment plans will spare them being haunted by their
unlived life and held accountable for the avoided, shunned, diminished
journey with which they were gifted. But we also have today a somewhat
greater purchase on the idea that such energy presences are really within us
and potentially accessible by our consciousness.9 We are perhaps to a
small degree more able to look within for we know there is something
called the unconscious, and while it remains obdurate and opaque, it
follows us everywhere, into every scene of our life. The practice of
psychiatry soldiers on: describing, diagnosing, and medicating such
“disorders,” but cataloging them as phobias, addictions, dysthymia, or
whatever does little more than sprinkle the magic dust of “naming” on
invisible energies. It is as if naming them gives us power over them. This
fantasy, this hubris, means that the spectral presences have even more
power in our lives. The more we think we have them, the more they have
us.
The real question is can we track those energies, those spectral
presences? From whence do they come: the gods, the environment, the
tribe, or oneself? What do they ask of us? How does consciousness
appraise that demand, wrestle with its quandaries? What will we have to
serve if we serve those hauntings? What change, what risk, is asked of us?
Do we really endorse those values, those outcomes, once we have made
them conscious? What if we run from them? What is the price for that
flight? What is the cost of a fugitive life? What tasks await us if we
confront them, work through them? What new values may be asked of us
if we are not to serve the diminishing message of the haunting?
Of all of the hauntings we experience, both as cultures and as
individuals, the flight from these sorts of questions are the most telling, the
most persistent. We now know too much not to know that we have to turn
back toward these hauntings, face them, ask them what they want of us,
negotiate as necessary with them, but retain the final freedoms of
conscious beings in the end. Of all of these hauntings, the greatest is the
one we alone produce: the unlived life. None of us will find the courage, or
the will, or the capacity to completely fulfill the possibility invested in us
by the gods. But we are also accountable for what we do not attempt. To
what degree does our pusillanimity beget replicative haunting in our
children, our families, our communities, our nations? To what degree does
our flight from the honest struggle with our various and separate hauntings
burden the world to come with additional hauntings? As Jung put it, what
we deny inwardly will have a tendency then to come to us as outer “fate.”
And what do we owe others during this process, this unfolding journey
we call our lives? We owe them courtesy, respect, support, and most of all
the example of a mature, independent journey we ourselves have
undertaken. We can support their efforts, but we cannot live their lives for
them, any more than they can live ours. We all have separate appointments
with destiny, and we all have a separate accountability to the divinities.
It remains true that every day we awaken to find the old gremlins of fear
and lethargy at the foot of our bed. They never seem to ever really go
away. Fear says: “It is too big for you—this life, your life. Figure out a
way to slip slide away. Avoid it any way you can, this life, your life, till it
is done, finished.” Lethargy says: “Chill out, turn on the TV or the net,
have some chocolate, tomorrow's another day. In the meantime, you may
slumber on.” And no matter what we manage today, those darksome twins
will be there again tomorrow and the day after. They are the enemies of
life, and they are the primary progenitors of the hauntings we pass on to
those who follow us.
Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth-century mathematician and mystic, once
anguished that “the silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.” So, he
noted, the culture of his time invented distractions, diversions, scapegoats,
and inebriations of all kinds. Similarly, at the end of the nineteenth century,
while still an undergraduate at the University of Basel, Jung observed of
his time what seems also to describe ours, a time in which the summons to
encounter one's own mystery seems both intimidating and isolating. His
citation of Nietzsche, himself once a professor at Basel, is familiar: “The
world about us is full of ghostly doings. Every moment of our lives is
trying to tell us something, but we do not care to listen to this spirit voice.
When we are alone and still, we are afraid that something will be
whispered in our ears, and so we hate the stillness and anaesthetize
ourselves through sociability.”10 What, we now must enquire, might be
whispered in our ears which is so troubling? What might be asked of us?
After all these years, resistant as I have been to writing this book, I am
still called to account, still asked to show up. I am compelled by that
profound psychological truth embodied in the words of the itinerant Jewish
rabbi Jesus, that only when we die shall we live, only when the ego can
surrender may we step through fear, rise from lethargy, into the next stage
of our journey. I resonate to Jung's concept of individuation as a summons
to both service and humility. I could not have borne such ego submission
as a young person, but life's misadventures and nettle-some ministries have
readied this bumbling pupil to a present availability. And how meaningful
Beckett's admonition is to me today: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter.
Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Rilke's paradoxical words also draw me
onward still toward the unlived life that haunts all of us. Our task, he
writes, is to be “continuously defeated by ever-larger things.”11 While the
ego is apprehensive about the idea of defeat, the soul welcomes such ego
defeat and the expansion that comes from ever-larger challenges. And
Rilke adds, each of us may find “room for a second huge and timeless
life.”12
 As encrusted, perhaps even as contaminated, as the concept of soul may
be (in the Greek, psyche means “soul”), we might surely agree that
whatever that word means that we might provisionally use it to refer to our
essence, our deepest being, our deepest longing, and our deepest
possibilities. We can deconstruct all concepts—even the idea of soul—and
show how they are but partialities which privilege one limited form of
viewing over another, but in the end, we have all to confront the
ineluctable mystery of being itself, the unfathomable mystery of our own
existence and the plethora of energies (a.k.a. the gods) which course
through history and through us.
In the Zofinga Society lectures, the undergraduate Jung drew also upon
the great philosophical presence of Immanuel Kant. “I confess that I am
strongly inclined to assert the existence of immaterial natures in the world,
and to class my own soul among these beings.”13 So each of us, in this
most materialist of ages, has to ask: Do I have a “soul”? What could be
meant by that? What does that mean to me? What does that ask of me?
What does it mean to “show up”? Can I mobilize the wherewithal to
engage that soul and serve it? What happens if I do not? While this
paradoxical calling forth is challenging, it is what makes us most fully
human, namely, when we also embrace and embody our spirit's intent. And
how will any of us ever know that immanent mystery for ourselves if we
do not step into the great opening life brings us? It is natural for us to
experience this openness as a menacing abyss, but as Martin Heidegger
reminded, the abyss is “the openness of Being.”14
The paradox of being human is found in the fact that generally
consciousness, processed through biological organs, can only apprehend
the material forms of our being. If the soul were material, it would be an
object and show up in our MRIs and CAT scans, but as an energic system,
it courses through the material forms of blood, bone, and brain and
expresses itself repeatedly in venues that are only in limited ways
measurable. Yet, clearly we are forever driven by, and in service to, the
immaterial energies of the psyche. This duality, this dilemma was
articulated by Jung many decades ago. Given that we

regard the human soul as already, in this present life, linked with
two worlds of which, it being joined in personal union with a body,
it clearly perceives only the material; whereas on the other hand, as
 a member of the spirit world, it receives the pure influences of
immaterial natures and distributes these influences in turn, so that as
soon as the union with the body has ended, nothing remains but the
communion in which it continually dwells with spiritual natures.15

Is it possible to conclude then that even among those of us highly skeptical

of most religious formulae the invisible world coursing through our
material form, what Yeats called “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart,”
is also our being, our identity, our journey?16 If we can embrace the
profound mystery of our own being, perhaps we will be less frightened by,
less owned by, those other energies that impede our histories and haunt our
journeys.
Hauntings are only integrated when we turn on the light of awareness
and see the nothing that is there, the invisible that is present, allied with the
challenge to take part in the construction of our story with a more
differentiated consciousness. Hauntings may move us from fugitive
pathology to summons when we stop running and turn and face our
spectral visitants. Hauntings are transformed when we bring the unfolding
mystery that we are to engage the mystery to which they invite us. As
surrealist poet Paul Éluard observed, there is another world, and it is in this
one. When we grasp his dictum, we know that here, in us, between you
and me, is the meeting place of both the visible and the invisible worlds,
the permutating movement of spirits that in the end are one. Both worlds
wait upon our showing up, being present in this visible world while
remaining mindful of the silent ministries of the invisible one as well.
Both our fate and our task, then, is to live more consciously, more
thoughtfully in both worlds, knowing that our way of seeing is—along
with the assimilation of enlarging experience and the generative powers of
the human imagination—profoundly driven by the past. As the epitaph on
the gravestone of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, drawing on the last sentence
from The Great Gatsby, reminds us: “So we beat on, boats against the
current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” And what is the task of
consciousness then but a sorting through of messages, recriminations,
impulses, and longings in service to the journey?
Who will ever tell the mystery of it all or name the ghosts which haunt
us, drive us, impel us forward? Is not this life a series of repetitions, a set
of variations, a series of investigations, experiments, and pummeling by
the past? Bent forward, creatures of desire, driven by teleological
urgencies, we seek our story amid the many stories that drive, surround,
and overwhelm us. Much good work awaits us. It is our work, our lives,
and we are responsible for it. Even then, as Thomas Wolfe, amid his own
swarming “spectral presences,” confessed in 1929 in Look Homeward,
Angel:

Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his
father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent?
Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone? O waste of loss, in
the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright
cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten
language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound
door. Where? When? O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come
back again.17
Notes
1. James Tate, The Lost Pilot, accessed at http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15580.
2. Jeannie Kever, “Houston region is now the most diverse in the U.S.,” Houston Chronicle, March
5, 2012. Accessed on February 8, 2013, at http://www.chron.com/news/houston-
texas/article/Houston-region-is-now-the-most-diverse-in-the-U-S-3384174.php.
3. Delmore Schwartz, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories (New York: New
Directions, 1937).
4. Sharon Olds, accessed at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176442.
5. W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” accessed at
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15544.
6. A. E. Housman, “The Laws of God,” accessed at http://ninaalvarez.net/2007/09/23/poem-of-the-
day-from-last-poems/.
7. C. G. Jung, “The Development of Personality” (1934), in The Development of Personality, vol.
17, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954), par. 289.
8. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Haunted Houses.” Accessed at
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19993.
9. A recent New Yorker cartoon (July 16, 2012) shows a mother putting her child to bed and
presuming to comfort her by saying, “The only ghosts you need fear are the ghosts of your past—
which will gnaw away at your soul, riddle you with self-doubt, and ultimately sap you of your will to
live.”
10. C. G. Jung, The Zofinga Lectures (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 73.
11. Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Man Watching”; my translation.
12. Rainer Maria Rilke, “In the Dark Hours of My Being”; my translation.
13. Jung, The Zofinga Lectures, 26.
14. Martin Heidegger, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed at
http://www.iep.utm.edu/heidegge/.
15. Jung, The Zofinga Lectures, 26.
16. W. B. Yeats, “The Circus Animals' Desertion,” in Selected Poems and Four Plays, ed. M. L.
Rosenthal (New York: Scribner, 1996), 213.
17. Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1929).
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 ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Hollis, PhD, was born in Springfield, Illinois, and has degrees from
Manchester University, Drew University, and the Jung Institute of Zürich,
Switzerland. This is his fourteenth book, many of which have been
translated into sixteen languages. He is a co-founder of the C. G. Jung
Institute of Philadelphia and Saybrook University's Jungian Studies
program, director emeritus of the Jung Center of Houston, vice president
emeritus of the Philemon Foundation, and an adjunct professor at
Saybrook University and Pacifica Graduate Institute. He resides in
Houston, Texas, where he conducts an analytic practice. He lives with his
wife Jill, who is an artist and therapist, and together they have three living
children and eight grandchildren.
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