Wilderness of Childhood

(1st Published @ www.ashevillejungcenter.org/blog/ )

I tore an essay by Michael Chabon out of the July 31, 2009 issue of The Week magazine nearly a year ago and retrieved it from a stack of magazines early this morning.  The essay first appeared in the New York Review of Books http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/jul/16/manhood-for-amateurs-the-wilderness-of-childhood/ under the title “Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood”.  Chabon begins by describing the joy and wonder of explorations in the Wilderness of Childhood.  For some of us it was a real wilderness of varying degrees of tameness.  For me, it sometimes consisted of nothing more than riding my bicycle eight to ten miles to South Miami where my brother and I fished for gar along the banks of canals and hooked each other as often as the stolid fish. In the Wilderness of my youth, development hadn’t pushed large tracts of strawberries or sugar cane deeper into the Everglades.  

The Wilderness of a child is devoid of adults.  Children’s writers understand this.  There is a realm of childhood wherein adults have been expelled.  Children’s writers like C.S. Lewis, Charles Schultz, and Paul Pullman understand.  Apart from the watchful and too often stultifying view of adults a child encounters the Wilderness in which she engages the adventure of her life.

Contemporary urban or suburban, American children may miss the joy of  Wilderness.  They are victims of our collective fears of abductions, preventable injuries, drug abuse, and more.  Parents are more determined than ever to provide children every available opportunity to thrive, learn, and excel.  Given such vigilant attention, there is little room left for Wilderness.  The Wilderness of childhood hasn’t been civilized as much as it's been strained of nearly all traces of danger and unpredictability.  

According to Chabon, our children have become “...cult objects to us, to precious to be risked. At the same time, they have become fetishes, the objects of an unhealthy and diseased fixation.  And once something is fetishized, capitalism steps in and finds a way to sell it.”

Chabon wonders about the impact of closing down the Wilderness upon children's imagination.  Perhaps the answer is glimpsed when we see children dining with their parents at the Rain Forest Cafe or visiting Disney’s Animal Kingdom.  Those of us who never let our children out of our site, who schedule our children’s activities, who strive to enrich them, may unwittingly be extinguishing the sparks of adventure that can later ignite into flames of creative inspiration.  From Wilderness beginnings where dangers lurked in the shadows behind tree trunks and sticks became rifles come novels, films, inventions, and new business ventures.  

Jung’s Red Book created a stir among Jungians.  His inner explorations and his artistry are a torrent of illumination.  Below are two paragraphs from Frank McLynn’s book Carl Gustav Jung (St. Martin’s Press).

“At around the age of four Jung developed a morbid fascination with death and corpses: he was fascinated by the dead body of a four-year-old boy found near the Rhine Falls and, clearly -- Jungians would say -- at the unconscious level, wished he was that boy. Accident proneness was much in evidence. Firstly he fell downstairs, then he fell against the leg of a stove, scarring himself so badly that the wound was still visible in his senior year at Gymnasium. It is a familiar idea that accident-prone children tend to have problems with their mother and 'self-destruct' because of rage against the nurturer who has failed them. The preoccupation with the corpses also fits the scenario of rage against the mother.

"More serious than the falls was an accident on the Rhine bridge at Neuhausen when the child Carl Gustav had one leg under the railing and was about to slip through when the maid caught him. Jung himself attributed these untoward events to an unconscious suicidal urge or a kind of fatal resistance to life in this world. But while still alive and an international figure he explained his `corpse preoccupation' as simply a means of trying to accommodate to the idea of death."

This is not a childhood without a measure of Wilderness. And here are two more from the first chapter of McLynn’s book.

“It was just before he went to school that he had one of the most significant dreams of his life; although Jung claimed this occurred when he was aged three or four, clinical evidence points to five or six as the more likely time.

"In the dream Jung was in a meadow near Laufen castle and discovered an underground passageway. He descended and in a subterranean chamber found a kind of altar or king's throne on which stood what he thought at first was a tree trunk, some twelve to fifteen feet high and about two feet thick. The object was made of skin and naked flesh, with a rounded head and a single eye on the very top of the head. Later he would recognize the object as a ritual phallus. He was awoken by his mother's voice, as it were from outside, crying out, `That is the maneater!'”

Jung is not accompanied by adults on this subterranean adventure, and, perhaps this prepared him for the solitary explorations he would undertake in later years.   His mothers voice, an adult voice, retrieves him from the adventure.  

Let yourself recall the Wilderness realms of your own childhood, and if you can bring yourself to do so, release a child to have an encounter with their wilderness.  We can scarcely predict where this leads. Chabon closes his essay this way:

“Art is  form of exploration, of sailing off into the unknown alone, heading for those unmarked places on the map.  If children are not permitted--not taught--to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?”

Projections and Introjections in Global Politics: Obama, da Silva, Merkel, Sarkozy, and Mandela

Projections and Introjections in Global Politics: 

Obama, da Silva, Merkel, Sarkozy, and Mandela

(1st Published @ www.ashevillejungcenter.org/blog/ )

But the people refused to listen to Samuel. "No!" they said. "We want a king over us. Then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles." 1 Samuel 8:19-20

In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes. Judges 17:6

The constellation of forces that are activated between members of society and their leaders is among the topics being explored in “Symbols and Individuation in Global Politics: The Case of Barack Obama” on September 10, 2010.  This blog entry explores one portion of that realm involving projection and introjection.   It suggests some ideas for how any citizen might engage his/her leaders as part of their individuation process.  

I offer a simple definition of terms.  Introjection is a maneuver characterized by the unexamined incorporation of traits of another.  Individuals with weak ego boundaries are more prone to use introjection as a defense mechanism.

Projection might be considered its antithesis in that one’s own unconscious content is projected outward upon another.  What is projected is then encountered as if it actually belonged to the other to begin with.  It is a fundamental mechanism by which we remain uniformed about ourselves.  A word of caution is in order. 

The recent discovery of mirror neurons in primates including humans should give us pause to cast all projection and introjection into some pathologic basket.  These neurons are present in the motor cortex and are activated when we observe someone executing an act.  It is as if our own motor strip is carrying out the act we observe, a sort of rehearsal.  So, neurobiological underpinning of projection and introjection continue to provide rich territory for further understanding.  

Political figures who are charismatic and able to resonate with individual & cultural complexes are likely to activate processes of projection and introjection in the individual.  These forces may illuminate unconscious material and facilitate its integration into the personality.  But it is also possible that political figures may become targets of our projections and also possible that we might introject aspects of these figures into our personalities without having authentic encounters with the Self.

President Obama’s ability to galvanize the electorate and to generate widespread participation was unprecedented.  There remains some doubt about the claims that the vast majority of Obama’s contributors made small donations (under $200) but the breadth of participation that he either engendered or “appeared” to engender is notable.   Individuals were lifted up during the campaign and a sense of unity among people of different backgrounds and even across national borders was kindled.  Such broadly appealing (or irritating) leaders provide fertile ground for projection and introjection to take root.  

Ask yourself what sort of relationship you developed with Obama during the period leading up to his election.  Consider what sort of relationship you have with other leaders.  How did the rise of President Lula da Silva, a union leader with limited formal education  engage your projected hopes and/or fears?  What role did introjection have in celebrating the indomitable and noble qualities displayed by President Mandela?  How does President Sarkozy’s noble Hungarian family roots or his marriage to Carla Bruni contribute to his wide appeal?  (He might a target for projections of royalty with a common touch.)  Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi affords another powerful example of how leaders may receive our projections and introjections.  Does Berlusconi’s alleged ties to organized crime and his triumphs in several prosecutions tap our own desire to be outside the law?  And then there is the fascinating example provided by Chancellor Angel Merkel, a scientist whose family enjoyed unusual freedom of travel between East and West Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall.  How has her own personal capacity to unify opposites within herself captivated the German people who were struggling to unify East and West?  When Chancellor Merkel resisted EU pressure during the sovereign debt crisis what feelings toward the German people were provoked in your psyche?  

In asking those questions I am inviting each of us to explore how leaders become lightning rods for our own psychological process.  I was a youngster when President Kennedy was stuck down by an assassin’s bullet and watched in horror the reports of Dr. Martin Luther King’s murder.  Within two months I endured the defeat of seeing Senator Robert Kennedy gunned down.  President Obama was the first political figure to heal those wounds and I engaged more than I had ever engaged.  I allowed myself to hope and in the course of those months I remembered the painful wounds I’d suffered at a tender age.  Loss of several idealized objects produced a sort of exquisite corpse to which President Obama added the most recent touch.  I have remained deeply afraid for President Obama but I have also been delivered from what had been a forty year political slumber.

Not long ago my sister expressed her outrage at what she perceived as President Obama’s betrayal of campaign promises.  He had cozied up to Wall Street’s powerful elites, I offered a more sober perspective.  I suggest that President Obama’s presence in office alone might have more lasting and transformative effects than many (perhaps all) the policies he pursues.  It will be difficult to look upon the Office of the President in the same way now that an African American has occupied that hallowed spot.  Though I know very little about President Lincoln’s tenure in office, the impression of a self-educated man capable of writing beautiful and lyric words (the Gettysburg Address) is etched into my political character.  

I am dimly aware that President Obama helped illumine the inner landscape of my childhood losses.  If projection and introjection were at play, the result was helpful.  But there is an unconscious domain to my relationship with this man I call President.  I am a Cuban-American born on US soil.  I have lived on that hyphen with a measure of uncertainty about where I fit in to the fabric of American society.  I suspect that President Obama receives my projections about the immigrant experience.  Early in his candidacy, conversations about whether or not he was black enough combined with the vehement attacks upon him for attending Rev. Jeremiah Wrights church struck deep chords in me about what it means to succeed in White-Anglo culture and the price I’ve paid for blending in.  But I have also marveled at the President’s capacity to reject the white majorities definition of him.  His example empowers me to be less concerned with what others might think about a passionate, expressive, festive Cuban spirit that has always been an irrepressible part of me.  

Whatever negative aspects of projection and introjection that have been aroused by my relationship with President Obama remain unconscious.  I suspect my desire to have a deliverer, a king in the mold of the ancient Israelites is one complex that has been aroused but there are likely many more.  I am hopeful that projection and introjection may recede with time and that in its place will emerge a mature political self. That political self may be better equipped to take full advantage of the psychological impact that leaders exert while avoiding the dangers that anyone who attempts to escape from freedom.  

Take a moment to examine your own psychological relationship with Obama or any other political figure.  We are interested in hearing from you about the psychological dance you’ve had with political leaders.  

Len Cruz, MD, ME

Pathways to the Personal & Collective

(1st published @ www.ashevillejungcenter.org/blog/ )

Recent discussion about the movie AVATAR conducted in an online forum led me to the following thoughts.  What other films, pieces of literature, poetry, paintings or sculpture, or music that others have encountered that touched a plucked a chord in you while also making a "collective" chord vibrate?  For example, the progression in "Adagio for Strings" by Samuel Barber evokes that effect. http://www.amazon.com/Leonard-Bernstein-Conducts-Barber-Schuman/dp/B0000CD5GJ/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1273284763&sr=1-5 

Another is "Herman Melville" by W H Auden. The first four lines stand alone for me in producing the effect.


Towards the end he sailed into an extraordinary mildness,
And anchored in his home and reached his wife
And rode within the harbour of her hand,
And went across each morning to an office
As though his occupation were another island.

Goodness existed: that was the new knowledge
His terror had to blow itself quite out
To let him see it; but it was the gale had blown him
Past the Cape Horn of sensible success
Which cries: 'This rock is Eden. Shipwreck here.'

But deafened him with thunder and confused with lightning:
-- The maniac hero hunting like a jewel
The rare ambiguous monster that had maimed his sex,
Hatred for hatred ending in a scream,
The unexplained survivor breaking off the nightmare --
All that was intricate and false; the truth was simple.

Evil is unspectacular and always human,
And shares our bed and eats at our own table,
And we are introduced to Goodness every day,
Even in drawing-rooms among a crowd of faults;
He has a name like Billy and is almost perfect
But wears a stammer like a decoration:
And every time they meet the same thing has to happen;
It is the Evil that is helpless like a lover
And has to pick a quarrel and succeeds,
And both are openly destroyed before our eyes.

For now he was awake and knew
No one is ever spared except in dreams;
But there was something else the nightmare had distorted --
Even the punishment was human and a form of love:
The howling storm had been his father's presence
And all the time he had been carried on his father's breast.

Who now had set him gently down and left him.
He stood upon the narrow balcony and listened:
And all the stars above him sang as in his childhood
'All, all is vanity,' but it was not the same;


For now the words descended like the calm of mountains --
-- Nathaniel had been shy because his love was selfish --
But now he cried in exultation and surrender
'The Godhead is broken like bread. We are the pieces.'

And sat down at his desk and wrote a story.

_______________________

Are there works that succeed at evoking a strong effect at the personal level while also opening you to the collective realm?  If so, share them (possibly with a hyperlink that allows others to enjoy the uplifting or expansive effect you've had.    

Special Theory of Relativity for Psychotherapy

Special Theory of Relativity for Psychotherapy

Years ago, I taught courses in psychotherapy and supervised residents in training and psychology interns.  I drew some conclusions that coalesced into a sort of Special Relativity of Psychotherapy.  The recent excerpt from Dr. Stein’s Individuation about first visits from a Jungian perspective got me thinking about how Einstein’s theory pertains to the work of therapy.

In 1905, Einstein “On the Electro dynamics of Moving Bodies” described that the frame of reference of an observer determines what is observed.  For example, an observer moving at a speed close to the speed of light will encounter drastic effects upon their perception of objects in different inertial frames.  Your inertial frame governs what you observe.  This is strikingly like psychotherapy.  To the Freudian and Neo-Freudian analyst, the analysis of resistance and will help expose libidinal impulses that have been obstructed by conflicts with a strict super-ego resulting in neurotic structures employed by the ego.  A Self-psychologist may seek to illuminate the connection between early relationships (and their representation as internal structures of introjects, object representations, self-object representations, etc).  The Cognitive-Behaviorally oriented therapist will apply herself to identifying negative, unproductive cognitive schemas that contribute to symptoms.  It begins to appear that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  I could go on with other examples.  One thing I concluded about schools of psychotherapy is that like Einstein’s inertial frames of reference, they determine what a therapist will observe.  (No problem provided we understand that is the nature of our discursive thinking is always constrained by our frame of reference).  

Another thing I concluded when teaching psychotherapy was that any model of therapy helps the therapist feel secured and anchored.  The result is often that the therapist can provide a non-anxious presence to the client.  In so far as the relationship is the critical element of healing in therapy, a non-anxious therapist allows the client to explore their interior life with less contamination.  In this regard, almost any philosophic stance will do.  Acknowledging this generic feature of therapy can help therapist in training (and all of us are truly therapist in training) to embrace the value of being well schooled in at least one frame of reference about how therapy ought to be conducted.  

Not all schools of psychotherapy are created equal.  In addition, the therapeutic approach that proves well-suited to one person may be ill-suited to another.  Psychotherapy is not an exact science; it is nothing like testing for antibiotic sensitivity or resistance with acute infections.  Instead, a therapist is guided by some amalgam of evidenced based science and deep intuition.  An excessive reliance on either often proves detrimental to a client.  

There is a natural inclination toward being purist in public while being far less dogmatic, and much more adaptable in our consulting room.  This is reminiscent of the difference between those poets who can write metered or rhyming verse who choose to compose free verse and those who cloak themselves in the mantel of vers libre simply because they have neither the gifts or discipline to cultivate metered or rhymed verse.  We suspect one another of being less dogmatic behind closed doors.  And why shouldn’t we; we know what we do?  

While we are striving to maintain a suitable stance with clients it is our duty to notice when we deviate.  We strive to remain alert to those deviations, to be alert for those moments when our process adversely influences the work of the client (and vice versa).  But we are never impeccable.  Instead, we endlessly seek to remove ourselves in service of the other.  

In the process of monitoring our process and its potential impact upon the other we honor Einstein’s discoveries in our own way.  We begin by reconciling ourselves to the fact that we cannot extricate ourselves from some frame of reference.  We can acknowledge that any system of ideas supports the illusion of certainty and this, it turns our, fosters in us a non-anxious presence.  We end up focusing less on defending dogma and more on present moment, mutual discernment.  We admit that in the midst of our striving toward a relatively pure theoretical stance we encounter detours; we allow others to know that the mystery of therapy can never be circumscribed by a theory, no matter how sound that theory appears.  

Ask yourself the following three questions.

1. How would I articulate my personal theoretical/philosophic stance about the work I do with clients?
2. Where do I see evidence that having a stance helps me relax enough to really be with my clients?
3. When I depart from my theoretical/philosophical stance, what causes can I recognize?

I have found the following to be true about the last question.  Sometimes, my deviations from a coherent stance occurs because I am slothful, I do not always maintain highest degree of vigilance when conducting therapy.  Mostly, these tend to be minor deviations, worthy of note but hardly exploitive or destructive.  Sometimes, I am visited by my own complexes that insert themselves in the process.  This is fertile ground for me and especially fertile ground for my client when I attend to it.  Sometimes, the client’s process is so intense that it warps the fabric of our relationship like a massive object warps the space-time continuum.  I may deviate because there seems to be no recourse for the moment but these are the most fertile realms of exploration.   

As I seek to balance all these forces I am reminded of the closing lines of Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” 

Ulysses 

Tennyson 

...Tis not too late to seek a newer world. 

Push off, and sitting well in order smite 

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds 

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths 

Of all the western stars, until I die. 

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: 

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, 

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. 

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’ 

We are not now that strength which in old days 

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; 

One equal temper of heroic hearts, 

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will 

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. 

In Arizona, Brown is the New Black: Immigration and the Other

"THEY CAME FIRST for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
THEN THEY CAME for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
THEN THEY CAME for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
THEN THEY CAME for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up. (Martin Niemölle)
Arizona passed a new law intended to deal forcefully with illegal immigrants.  the law makes it a state crime to not have an alien registration document and requires police to question persons they suspect of being in this country illegally.  Comparisons to Nazi Germany are partly hyperbole and partly true.  Let’s examine the psychological roots of this controversial law?
The Other
There are signs that the controversy unfolding in Arizona is reflective of how we deal with the other when the other looks different from us.  There is a xenophobic thread running through North American cultural paralleled by European’s growing discomfort with Muslim immigrants, or Asian’s distrust of Caucasian, western, capitalist immigrants.
Miroslav Volk, a Yugoslav theologian who admits to the difficulty he has reaching out to Serbs says that no matter what someone has done to you, you must be willing to begin the process of making your enemy your friend.
Newsweek’s (September 9, 2009) cover story titled “Is Your Baby Racist?” described the research of Birgette Vittrup out of the University of Texas has studied racial attitudes among families in the Austin area and found early evidence among infants and toddlers that they recognize racial difference.  One researcher noticed randomly assigned school children to either a group who wore a red T-shirt or a blue T-shirt.  The children were otherwise not treated differently.  Quickly, the subjects identified with the group wearing like colored shirts and assumed an inherent greater worth and value to being a member of their like colored T-shirt group.  What’s worse was the natural tendency to vilify those wearing the other colored T-shirt.
Anyone wishing to discover their own implicit bias might be interested in Harvard’s Project Implicithttps://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/research/ .  This 10-15 minute test may surprise you when you discover that we have implicit associations about race.
It is the tendency to vilify and denigrate the other both explicitly and implicitly that dwells in our unconscious.  It is from this oceanic realm that pogroms, ethnic cleansing, the Holocaust, and other atrocities emerge and in their collective power unleash destructive forces.  But I am suspicious of quick, easy remedies.
Fishing in a Bass Pond
The Asheville Police Department (APD) recently conducted a raid on a local nightclub frequented by Hispanics.  Reportedly they separated the patrons who looked Hispanic and proceeded to interrogate them and uncovered a number of undocumented persons.  Their professed intention was to address gang related activity.  The following week a client expressed her passion and outrage at the incident and fully expected that because I am a Cuban-American I would share her sentiment.  I did not.
First, I noted that if I took my children fishing for bass, I might consider going to a stocked bass pond where their chances of catching a fish would be substantially better.  The police were doing something similar.  By isolating the darker skinned patrons who looked Hispanic, they were improving their odds of success.  As a long-standing member of the ACLU I see enormous, substantive issues regarding constitutional protections against search and seizure.  However, I also acknowledge the efficient methods employed by the APD.  I know she was dismayed by my upside-down perspective on the incident that drew public protests.  However, I believe she was also unsettled by my unexpected reticence to let my tribal identity rule my heart and my head.  The normal response is to align with your tribe and vilify the other.  I did both and neither.

Ambivalence & the Other
Arizona’s recent legislation has stepped into the center of a minefield of ambivalent content.  Let me enumerate some of the ambivalent elements:

• We enjoy a cheap supply of labor (lower food costs, lower expenses in hospitality industry, low cost construction labor, etc) but resent undocumented workers for their downward effect upon wages.
• We accept tax payments through withholding from persons who will never collect the benefit while vigorously complaining of the drain undocumented workers place upon an already taxed social safety net.
• We proclaim the value of free trade and through NAFTA advance initiatives intended to integrate the Americas while acting toward our southern neighbors like we would toward an infectious agent that must be quarantined.
• We focus upon the surge of Mexican gangs who control drug importation into the United States while we fail to craft effective policy that addresses the demand on this side of the border that creates the market opportunity gangs exploit.
• Many Americans believe we are under siege from Muslims in our midst but it is easier to engage undocumented individuals from Mexico and Central America than it is to address other potentially volatile immigration related issues, particularly while we are at war in two Islamic nations.

The list goes on.

Take a Stand
Each of us will be called upon to fend off our tribal instinct while also honoring it.  At the moment, the debate rages over Arizona’s brazen experiment in applying immigration laws at the state level.  There are likely to be citizens in Arizona who see their state as disproportionately burdened by the federal government’s ineffective enforcement of existing immigration laws.  They may feel a tribalism about being an Arizonan and perhaps they are right, after all, what does a citizen of Arizona have in common with one from Maine (where 1% of the population is Hispanic) on this issue.
Here is a challenge you may find interesting.  Where are you noticing your tribal instinct being aroused.  Try to refrain from starting with the broadest trends that stir you to identify with your own kind, things like Brazilian, French, German, Israeli, North American, Jungian, man, woman.  Instead, bring the inquiry to a more granular level.  My company vs the competitor, my friends and companions vs those I share little affinity with, fans of my favorite sports team vs fans of this weeks opponents, people who know how to drive (like me) and those who appear deficient.  Cultivate the ability to recognize when you are being swept up by a tribal impulse to align with others like you and see if you can uncover the quality by which we exclude the other.  And whenever you can, see the folly in such dichotomies and explore the realm where you stand astride both, holding them in tension, without rejecting or inflating either.  Consider this a novel form of taking a stand, one informed by our appreciation for how psyche works.  I offer the following poem by John Milton as a subtler exposition of this blog entry.
WHEN I CONSIDER HOW MY LIGHT IS SPENT
John Milton
When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest He returning chide;
"Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?"
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need
Either man's work or His own gifts. Who best
Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at His bidding speed,
And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.


Len Cruz, MD

Remembering, Repeating, Working-Through: Working with the Shadow

“Everyone carries a shadow”, according to Jung, “and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is."
Being an irrational realm, the Shadow is prone to being projected so that our own inferiority ends up appearing to us as a deficiency in the other.  "The projection-making factor (the Shadow archetype) then has a free hand and can realize its object--if it has one--or bring about some other situation characteristic of its power."
In dealing with Shadow, three phases of our engagement can be seen.  In the first phase, a person is either unaware or so dimly aware that the only evidence that can be detected consists of the projected contents.  These are reflected back to a person in the form of other’s deficiencies.  Another phase consists of revealing of Shadow in its true form, that is, as disowned, unacceptable aspects of the Self.  This is a phase of recovery of projections.  An individual begins to be emancipated from the  enslavement to Shadow.  In the course of this phase the bondage imposed upon others by the projected contents is diminished.  We might compare this phase to the aroma that wafts through the air, it does not sate the appetite but may arouse the appetite for the actual victuals.  Finally, there is a phase that involves integrating Shadow into the personality. Here Shadow becomes integrated into the whole Self.  There is no longer a need to stow The Secret Sharer of our unconscious below deck.
In Freud’s essay, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through” he offers relevant insights that can be adapted to the work with the Shadow.  In order to adapt Freud’s ideas you must overlook how his thoughts are encased in his theories of psychosexual development.  Patients, according to Freud, begin by repeating.  “As long as the patient is in treatment he cannot escape from his compulsion to repeat and in the end we understand this is his way of remembering.”
“...the patient yields to the compulsion to repeat, which now replaces the impulsion to remember.”  Substitute projection of Shadow for repeating in Freud's essay.  Where you see Freud discussing remembering replace it with the notion of recognizing and recovering the project Shadow elements.  Finally, Freud credits the handling of transference as the main instrument for converting a patient’s compulsion to repeat into a motive to remember.  “One must allow the patient time to become more conversant with this resistance (to remembering) with which he has now become acquainted, and work through it.”
What striking similarities exist between Freud’s evolving psychoanalytic techniques and the work with the Shadow proposed by Analytical Psychology.  Both render the unconscious realm as pressing itself upon life in the form of either repetition (Freud) or projection (Jung).  Both assert a critical role for remembering (Freud) and becoming conscious (Jung).  And the notion of working-through (Freud) and integration (Jung) seem to be one in the same.  Both Freud and Jung were pointing toward a cauldron of unconscious, instinctive, irrational psychological stuff that plays out to the detriment of all concerned when it remains unconscious and can be incorporated and dealt with through therapy.
Ask yourself what means you have found to work with Shadow.  How do you foster the ability to move from projecting (and repeating to do so) to recovering projections?  How do you encourage the arduous task of helping clients make the journey from repeating to remembering, from  projecting and recovering a projection?  And finally, what have you found helpful with regard to working-through (or integration of Shadow)?
References
Jung, C.G. (1938). "Psychology and Religion." In CW 11: Psychology and Religion: West and East. P.131
Jung, C.G. (1951). "Phenomenology of the Self" In The Portable Jung. P.147
See http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/220 for a text of "The Secret Sharer" by Joseph Conrad.
See http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/classes/201/articles/1914FreudRemembering.pdf for a copy of the essay "Remembering. Repeating and Working-Through:

Len Cruz, MD

Mother Knows Best: of volcanoes and global warming

Global warming is a growing concern among industrialized nations.  What about indigenous people, do they worry about such man-made effects?  Perhaps indigenous people are more attune to Gaia.  As we become aware of human impact upon the earth there is a place to consider that the earth may be capable of reversing such impact in dramatic ways.

The volcanic eruption in Iceland was pouring out an estimated 750 tons of ash every second.  An estimated 26,000 flights in and out of Europe were grounded.  that represents a significant amount of carbon that was not dumped into the atmosphere.  Previous volcanic eruptions have cooled the earth.   Our destructive human influence reversed, albeit slightly, by this single natural event.

As Jungians we honor the natural movement toward integration and wholeness.  We suppose that the transcendence of opposites, the integration of shadow elements, the embrace of anima/animus to be a grand opus. Given the opportunity, a person not only heals psychologically, they will thrive and unfold themselves as individuals.

There is a certain hubris in supposing that human beings, a small portion of the biomass, should be able to impose an insurmountable stress.  Tonight Nightline featured a report about Mother Nature reminds us of just how vulnerable we really are.   Perhaps we can open to a larger vision of the destructive influences of global warming.  Just as stress upon an individual often foster psychological growth and integration, the same may be true of Mother Earth.  Mother Earth has been through warming periods and ice ages many times.  She endures.  While we may be unique among species in our ability to orchestrate our own annihilation, that does not imply that we are destroying the earth.

Just suppose Mother Earth let off a massive amount of dust into air  in order to cool her skin.  If we were living in closer relationship with the earth we could see such things as signs.  Between the indigenous person and the modern person spans a long distance.  But when a tsunami’s hit the Pacific several years ago certain indigenous people took refuge on high ground.  They knew the language that mother earth speaks.

When the dust and ash from the volcano will we listen to Gaia whispering?

To balance the alarm about global warming let’s consider the vast, unintelligible features of Gaia, our primordial mother.  Without dismissing the reality of global warming it is possible to consider that Mother Earth can adapt.  Mother knows best and we’d do well to listen when she speaks.

Len Cruz, MD