Patricia: Part 2

Patricia was a 28-year-old single mother of two planning adoption for her unborn child, a son she said was conceived as the result of a date rape. After contacting an adoption agency and completing an intake interview with a social worker, she was referred to an independent counselor for pre-placement counseling. Her counselor, Liz, specialized in treating clients with grief and childbearing loss issues including problems or challenges presented by adoption.As Liz waited for Patricia to arrive for their afternoon meeting, she reviewed the file that had been given her by the adoption agency social worker, Jeanette Sizemore. Jeanette had taken detailed notes, describing the neat double-wide trailer Patricia and her daughters occupied, and including two Polaroid photos she had taken during her intake interview at Patricia’s home. The first photo was of Patricia, standing in her kitchen behind a Formica-clad island. She was an attractive brunette with a determined set to her jaw.

The second photo was of Patricia and her two daughters, cute little girls with dark brown hair like their mother’s. The girls looked to be around four and two years old. Liz shuffled through Jeanette’s paperwork, searching for the girls’ ages and names, and found that the older girl was almost five years old, and the younger almost three. Oddly, Jeanette had not written the girls’ names in the social history, but had used the initials “B” and “M” for their names. “Interesting,” Liz thought, “that she’d use only initials and that they happened to be ‘BM.’”

Liz idly wondered if there was any meaning to Jeanette’s method of notation, or if it was a social work or adoption practice convention to identify children merely by their initials. Or perhaps she had her own association to adoption as excrement, something she would have to consider later as she did her own inner work. Liz opened her personal journal and made a note reminding herself to ask Jeanette about the use of initials in her report, and whether this was standard practice for the adoption agency. She also placed an association exercise on her to-do list; she would need to discover what personal associations she had to adoption and to other elements of Patricia’s file.  

“A good analytical psychologist is regularly checking the rearview mirror,” she reminded herself, then smiled wryly over her choice of the word “rearview.”

That’s two base chakra associations in as many thoughts, she told herself. You’d better go ahead and call your own analyst and keep yourself an honest woman.

client and counselor meet

The chime on Liz’s telephone rang once, notifying her that her client had arrived. Liz stood and took a reflective breath before opening her door to greet Patricia. As Liz entered the waiting room, Patricia stood awkwardly and gave her a tentative smile. They introduced themselves and entered the office, with Patricia choosing a chair directly opposite Liz’s desk, placing the desk as a barrier between them rather than choosing the sofa or a chair in the less formal sitting area of the office. Liz made mental note of Patricia’s choice and recalled that she had been standing behind a counter in the Polaroid photo the social worker had taken. Liz wondered if her new client had a pattern of placing barriers between herself and other women. Other women were likely to carry her feminine archetype projections and symbolize or carry Patricia’s complexes–her emotional knots. Liz wondered what she symbolized to Patricia, and looked forward to finding out.

After giving Patricia a few minutes to get settled and acclimate herself to this new environment, Liz began to orient Patricia to herself as a counselor. Although Liz had a decidedly Jungian bent, her training and education had been boilerplate Marriage, Child, and Family Therapist fare. Any training in depth psychology, she’d had to receive on her own–and she had. After thanking Patricia for coming, she explained her views and asked Patricia about her expectations and hopes.

“I’m here because the social worker said it was part of the agency’s services, and because I’ve been thinking having some therapy would be good for me. But I’m very sure about my decision about giving up the baby, so I don’t want to get into anything like you trying to talk me out of it. I have my hands full with the girls as it is.” Patricia sat back in her chair and crossed her arms as if defying Liz to disagree.

Liz nodded sympathetically and told Patricia that her only aim was to support Patricia in her path. “If we were in high school,” Liz explained, “you would be the football team and I’d be the pep club, supporting you as you get through this season.”

Patricia grinned. “That’s funny,” she said, “because I was pep club president in high school, until things at home got so bad that I had to quit. Now the tables are turned and I get a chance to be supported.” The two shared a smile and Liz knew things were off to a good start; Liz had intuitively chosen a metaphor that was meaningful to Patricia. “Thank you,” Liz prayed, returning Patricia’s smile.

knots

“You mentioned your daughters, Patricia,” Liz began, “so tell me about them and about what your life is like at the moment.”

“Oh, they’re great!” Patricia exclaimed. “I couldn’t ask for better kids, but being on my own makes it hard, naturally. I don’t think with only us three girls together now that bringing a boy into the mix, with all the drama of his background, would be a good idea. I already spent my childhood protecting my little brother from a drunk and I just need to get as far away from my past as possible. I want this baby boy to have a chance that he won’t get with me.”

Liz nodded sympathetically and was about to ask what Patricia believed she had done to get away from her background when she realized she didn’t know the girls’ names. “I notice that Ms. Sizemore only included your daughters’ initials in her notes. What are the girls’ names?”

“Brandy and Margarita,” Patricia answered proudly as she fished her billfold out of her purse and showed Liz a couple of wallet photos of the girls. Liz smoothly covered her surprise upon hearing the girls’ names–both the names of alcoholic drinks–as she admired the photos Patricia offered. “Oh, they’re beautiful!” Liz commented, “Do their names have any special meaning to you?”

“Not really,” Patricia replied, “I just liked that old song ‘Brandy’ because my mom used to sing it all the time. And I think Margarita is a Spanish form of Mary, and around the time she was born I used to always buy those Virgin Mary candles at the grocery store, and light them and think good thoughts about being a mom. . . even though I’m not Catholic!”

Liz nodded supportively as Patricia spoke, noticing her own inner amazement over Patricia’s oblivion to the legacy she had given her daughters. The daughter of a violent drunk whose entire aim was to escape her past and not repeat it with her own children had in fact named her children with names of alcoholic origin. That she was unconscious to this indicated that she was probably habitually inviting and encountering her father’s energy and legacy into her life.

“Truth really is stranger than fiction,” Liz said to herself. “I couldn’t make this stuff up.” She would ask Patricia about the connection with alcohol at a later session, after they had established better rapport. Liz nodded attentively at Patricia as she explained her relationship to Brandy and Margarita’s father. The 45 minutes seemed to fly by, and at the session’s end it was clear that the two had hit it off.

Patricia was articulate, warm, determined, and smart. She was also apparently unconscious to some  of her major motivations. Liz was looking forward to working with Patricia and hopefully witnessing her awakening. “Let it be so,” she prayed inwardly as she arranged for their next session.

This entry is 8th my series on Leave-Taking:

1. Leaving Home
2. The Old Queen
3. Container
4. Great Mother
5. The Karma of Leaving
6. Case Studies
   • Patricia: Part 1
   • Patricia: Part 2

The Karma of Leaving

Show me the way in which the child was left, and I will show you the way in which that child grows up and later leaves others and ultimately leaves himself. This tenet might be called the karma of leaving by Buddhists, or the law of returns or sowing-and-reaping by Christians. Psychologists such as Melanie Klein called it “reparation,” by which she meant that we all manifest the lack or abundance of the parent-child bond as we go through life and seek to correct any deficits, and we do this most especially at critical points of our development.

During the course of my own training and analysis, and afterward through my work with others on their self development, I had countless opportunities to witness this dynamic. I am even now surprised at the elegance of how people pay their dues to their parents, and manifest as blindly as can be everything that signifies “bad parent” even as they say their every intention is to become “good parent.” It is no wonder that Jesus and all the other great teachers of history urged people to humbly seek wise counsel and to pluck out the log in their own eyes before attempting to dislodge the speck in a brother’s. But this we cannot do and will not do until we are finished making reparations to our first parents, who provided so much of the substance of the log in our own eye.

Especially in his later work, Jung sought pointedly to help people understand the risks of seeing things only from their own near-sighted perspectives. Analyst and Jungian trainer Murray Stein explains:

Why is it so important, especially in psychology, to understand the nature of ego-consciousness? It is because one needs to make adjustments for distortion. Jung said that every psychology is a personal confession. Every creative psychologist is limited by his or her own personal biases and unexamined assumptions. Not all that seems true to even the most earnest and sincere investigator’s consciousness is necessarily accurate knowledge. Much that passes for knowledge among human beings is actually, upon closer and more critical inspection, merely prejudice or belief based on distortion, bias, hearsay, speculation, or pure fantasy. Beliefs pass as knowledge and are clung to as reliable certainties.

“I believe in order that I may understand,” a famous remark from St. Augustine, may sound strange to our modern ears today, and yet this is often the case when people begin to speak about psychological reality (14).

It is a general psychological rule of thumb that the less good parenting a person has received in his or her life, and the more trauma, chaos, division, separation and difficulty in the family of origin (or first family of experience), the less likely it is that a person will be able to see his own behaviors clearly, and the more likely it is that he will project his unwanted stuff onto others and live a life of helplessly flailing against what was done to him. For all the wrong that was done to him, he unconsciously seeks reparations, and seeks to make reparations.

Having had the opportunity to work with, befriend, and mother numerous orphan-hearted folks whose mothers failed to give them “good parent,” I’ve noticed a straightforward and simple pattern. Great psychological theorists have written volumes about it, although they are volumes that help few lay people even if they do help other psychoanalysts.

It is the lay person who needs the help, isn’t it, when she hears that call to adventure, the call to leave the comfort of home and hearth, and to head out into the big world and do the Quest? But what of the person whose home and hearth held little or no comfort at all, the child whose childhood was fraught with peril? What of the little girl who never had the benefit of the mother’s good breast, or whose father’s (or step-father’s) creative penis was, instead, an emblem of terror, molestation, abuse, and early awakening? What of those folks? What of the child who never had the Divine Couple played out at home, but whose parents screamed at, hit, and threw things at one another, who sometimes hated one another (regularly) but then later acted as though nothing at all had happened, and did nothing to atone for their parental sins?

Someone pays. Someone always pays. Just as in religious terms someone must atone for guilt and sin and make sacrifices, so in psychological terms the equation is balanced just the same. This is one reason why I carry a bit of suspicion for people who absolutely reject religion as useful in any way, for being blind to the benefits of religion’s imagery and symbolism suggests that an individual may also be blind to the imagery and symbolism of the world. He will tend to extreme dogmatism in some way, or else to extreme subjectivity on the other. Either way, he cannot be whole, for everyone has done wrong and been wronged, and for every wrong some sort of reparation is needed. Whether one perceives this truth through religious symbols or by some other means, perceive it one must, or stagnate and perish.

So it is that theorists have written much about how we seek to balance the scales. What people do at critical times and thresholds of life hold much meaning, for they show great acts of scale-balancing. These important points of development occur at predictable ages and stages of life, but few are more telling than the ways in which people leave home. In what manner do they leave? Do they leave with or without a parental blessing for their plans? Do they even have parents able to bless? If not, how do they obtain the blessing? If so, do they accept it? Why might they refuse the blessing? Why might a parent withhold it? What’s the effect of no blessing? What is the effect of a parental curse? What is the effect of no-parent? Do they leave by choice or by force? Is the leaving forthright and honest or were they tricked, like Hansel and Gretel, into a sinister and deadly type of leaving?

After they leave, where do they go? Do they make a good place, similar to the “Good Mother” and “Good Father” place of childhood, the idyllic place of legend, or do they make a place that is like the one their less-than-nurturing, abandoning, or abusing parents gave them? By looking objectively at how people leave, what they do when they leave, what reasons and excuses they give as they do it, how much they need to defend the ways and goals of leaving, and where they finally settle down to live and bear  their own children, one can see much about the love and lack in a person’s life, their reparation compulsions, the complexes motivating them, and their level of consciousness.

It is quite a beautiful piece of psychological sleuthing when one is able to witness many leavings, and even in a month of writing I’m not sure I could do justice to the topic. However, I am going to try. Over the next several installments, I’ll be sharing case studies of leaving in order to illustrate how the psychological and manifesting mechanisms work in tandem to present an understandable and rather easily perceived picture of truth.

References

Stein, Murray. Jung’s Map of the Soul. Peru, IL: Carus Publishing, 1998.Klein, Melanie and Joan Riviere. Love, Hate and Reparation. New York: Norton, 1964.

Great Mother

In Container, the third article in my series on leaving home, I wrote briefly about what can happen when a child’s need for balanced “containment” and nurturance are not met in the family of origin, and she grows up uncontained, unprotected, and without nurture. The opposite can happen, of course, and a child can grow up over-protected by an over-involved mother or father, as in the case of some religiously home schooled children, for example. And it is to the concept of opposites and ends of the bell curve that we must now turn, for when we write in Jungian terms about mothers, we are writing not only one’s own actual mother, but about the archetype of mother, one Jung referred to as the Great Mother.

Jung believed that the influence of the mother on a child derived not only from the actual mother, but also from the Great Mother archetype, a universal image or symbol, along with influences from the child’s own psyche. The child’s idea of “mother” may or may not correspond accurately to the actual mother, then, depending on the child’s own temperament and personality combined with universally-held archetypes and the influence of the actual mother.

The Great Mother is an archetype of opposites, including at one end the sympathetic, caring, solicitous mother and at the other the devouring, seductive, poisonous mother. The first may be represented by the Virgin Mary, for example, while the latter might be represented by Kali, the mother who devours her young. Even though the child may understand that his personal mother is neither a Madonna nor a Kali, he may relate to her as if she were such a figure. Likewise, the undeveloped mother with a mother complex may constellate or manifest her own Good Mother (or Bad Mother), fail to integrate the two within herself, and give her child a mother-child experience that, for all practical purposes, is experienced very much as if the child had actually grown up with an archetype rather than a real mother.

Why might this occur? Most probably it occurs because the mother never came to terms with her personal mother’s dual natures and thus failed to successfully handle the Good Mother-Bad Mother split. To put it in the simplest terms, the child with a projected Good Mother may internalize Bad Mother and give only Bad Mother to her own child, or vice-versa. This legacy of a one-dimensional, split mother image may thus come to be handed down from generation to generation, with the parent carrying one image and the child carrying its opposite until someone awakens and integrates the two.

This rudimentary level of consciousness is referred to as participation mystique, a term coined by French anthropologist Lévy-Bruhl. The child identifies with the parent, and the parent with the child, experiencing no awareness that they are unconsciously identified with one another. This same type of identification may occur not only with parents or other people, but with objects or the career or any number of things. However, the earliest participation mystique occurs in the family of origin, and connects parents and children through the process of identification, introjection, and projection.

Identification is the unconscious projection of one’s personality onto that of another, causing the individual to behave as if two different and dissimilar entities are in fact identical. Through identification, the infant believes that he is the same as his mother. Introjection is an attempt to internalize experience or to take another’s personality, situation, or essence inside oneself. One possible positive use of introjection is empathy, or the ability to perceive or feel another’s experience as if it were one’s own. Projection, on the other hand, is the expulsion of an individual’s unconscious, inner content onto another person (or object). Projected contents are regarded as part of the other person, having been disowned by the one doing the projecting.

In analytical psychology, projection is seen as the way in which elements of a person’s unconscious world are made manifest to him consciously. The projection of one’s unconscious contents onto the external world is regarded as a valuable service to the internal world of the individual if and when a re-collection or re-integration of the projected contents takes place. This may occur through analysis, with the help of conscious and aware mentors or loved ones, when the target or carrier of another’s projected contents steadfastly refuses to cooperate, or (less often) when the individual him- or herself recalls the projections.
According to Jung, he process of recalling one’s projections occurs thus:

1. The person is convinced that what he sees in the other is the case.
2. A gradual recognition dawns of a differentiation between the other as she or he really is and the projected image. This awareness may be facilitated by dreams or events or other means.
3. Some sort of assessment or judgment is made of the discrepancy.
4. A conclusion is reached that what was felt was erroneous or illusory.
5. A conscious search for the sources and origin of the projection is undertaken. This includes collective as well as personal determinants of the projection.

Jung believed that analysis could only help the individual through the fourth step. All other real progress toward integration of the self could only occur within the individual, based on work undertaken on his own.

In contrast to Melanie Klein’s idea that projective identification leads to the elimination of separations, Jung believed that projection divided and separated people. I side with Jung on this one, believing that the splitting of the self through rejection and expulsion of inner contents onto another cannot possibly lead to unity between people, much less to unity within the person doing the projecting. I do, however, understand Klein’s point: the unconscious intent of projection is to achieve the appearance or feeling of unity within the person doing the projecting. I simply believe that this ploy cannot possibly work in the long term because the appearance of unity and real unity are two different things. Ongoing projection must inevitably lead to the decline, decay, and eventual dismissal of whole parts of the personality.