Dr. Ann Belford Ulanov | Sexuality as Identity

Sexuality as identity, a lecture by Anne Belelfford Yulanov and Barry Yulanov. Part three of the conference set, Civilization in Transition, Jung's challenge to culture and crisis, presented by the CG Yung Institute of Chicago in March 1987. >> Or it may be also with an outer object or person. for example uh talks about how she acts whether she should act this way or not It doesn't matter this is the way at the moment she experiences it she says I act out of the male part of myself and I can only risk going all out if I

have some place to house the female part of myself if I don't I can't risk going all out for I fear the female part will be crushed. Or another woman, a professional religious woman, pastor, extremely effective in eliciting energy, stimulating interest and spiritual Excitement in the people to whom she ministers. But when she gets sick, overwhelmed, tired, and needs to be taken care of, this part of her that's so efficient and effective, she says it's as if it won't turn around and face her. It's as if she's looking at the back of a man who's

talking to the collective and will not turn around and get her a bowl of soup. The personal feminine, the body feminine Is not related to that part. In talking about Anima Anima's country leading toward the self, we're also talking about wounds, difficulties. A man in his 30s describes his wound. I've lost my adolescence. I've lost my soul. And I lost it, I think, when I was adolescent. He did not come into treatment saying That. He came into treatment with the problem of compulsive attraction to adolescent girls. Only after uncovering that he'd lost his adolescence and

his soul in adolescence did the underlying message come clearer. Both his parents suffered from alcoholism. His brother suffered from an entanglement with addiction to drugs. adolescence, he made a steely vow. He must not get into this family syndrome. He must get a hold of himself. He must coagulate in psychological jargon. He must get an ego. And he did. He did. Had a job. He had a career. He had a profession. He had a marriage. He had a public situation in his community. And then this bedeviling compulsion. And what was it that was calling to him?

He said, "In my adolescence, I just simply cut off all that dreamy soul idealism. I just cut it off." Now it comes back in the faces and the Bodies of the girls who were the age he was when he cut it off. So that what is a very difficult problem from the ego's point of view from the self's point of view pulling him to connect with the lost soul. The anima animus configurations which I'll speak about more detail the last part pull the ego beyond its own borders. In a sense, one could talk about it

in psychoanalytic jargon that They are borderline concepts. Hence, our sexual responses have a spiritual function to pull us through the personal toward the transpersonal that lives in the personal. Not to leave the personal behind but to imbue it to anchor it to find its rudder. Hence the anima anima's territory is a dangerous crossing as well as exciting. It is transition. It's a place where our hearts can get Broken and we can make steely vows without the benefit of a shaher zad to stay us in the execution of those vows without this helper without trying to

find a way to live in that threshold transitional space to struggle to meet the inner other. We will go on reading in our papers headlines where it says, "Woman hires thugs to murder her husband. Man beats girlfriend to death. Rapist plagues apartment Buildings on the east side to take some of the recent headlines from the city in which we live. The anima animus place gives over into self country where we come alive and are willing to risk. Sometimes the value feels so great we will risk betrayal carrying guilt leaving everything that is familiar whether it's

job attitude partner family. Sometimes we will even feel our life is Asked of us. Why? To be connected to that animating connection to being that is in the body. It is aeros in the body which is really sexuality and to secure relation to that truth by which we can live. It is truth in the body that makes your heart thump and your blood race. An animating connection to being a truth by which we can live. Isn't it nice that they've quieted that angry dentist in talking about the worlds of sexuality and of identity? We're talking

about worlds in which everything turns on process. I think I've aroused him again. We're talking about being as becoming a world in which our sense of movement is very clear. But if our sense of self emerges from these areas so much in the Body, so much in the spirit and in the psyche, we will find that the movement is more distinguishable by the space it inhabits than by the time it takes to evolve. We're thinking, Ann and I, as we present this material to you, of interior spaces, the spaces of identity, the multiple spaces of

that multiplicity which is the human identity, the identity of all of us, the identity of any one of us. It's a world which Presents itself to us allegorically, dialectically, in terms not merely multiple but so delicately plained that we're never sure at which level we find ourselves and as a result we're not at all sure that we do indeed find ourselves. Jung's idea of the collective unconscious of the archetypal is very helpful here. It gives us a world from which to work. It gives us a Vocabulary. Best of all, it gives us a fluidity, a

flexibility as we move in these worlds in which we recognize that it is always subject object working together. Never a neat, a simple separation of any one of us as subject from anything outside ourselves as object. We possess always what we take in, what we deal with, and that which takes it in. The gathering in is what is pivotal to understand this material. It has certain Typological elements. It has a profile which we often reduced to functions to types. But it is in fact a typology to end typologies. It brings us into the extraordinary balance

and imbalance of animus where double meanings abound and where every resolution that is not a reconciliation is to be held suspect. There's tension here. We can fool ourselves. We can find a vocabulary that seems to dissipate the tension. But the tension remains. The body will report it. The psyche will respond. We cannot go here looking for an easy finality. We cannot look for preconceptions to be fulfilled. The demanding texture, the only workable texture is a texture of constant Openness. It's a vigilance which doesn't look for precise elements but accepts whatever comes along. Obviously not without

some mediation, without some control, without some apparatus of judgment, but where we follow the sort of direction that the schooling in the archetypes give us, we discover something very special. we discover a resolute unwillingness to Accept stereotypes. We simply will not accept the reductive, the fixed, the prepared. For that purpose, it seems to me some very ancient guidelines are very helpful. those that reach back to the world in which this language was originally crafted, the world of the prescratic philosophers, the world of those who were looking Somehow to experience and define what the German word

says so well, the underlying essence, the underlying substance, the very beginning, an ultimate principle. But even there we must be very cautious. It's too easy to follow those who look easy who talk in terms that define too precisely. It's more an attraction which a post-scratic, the greatest of the Aristotle talks of a as of a kind of Boundlessness, a kind of running back and forth, a matter which yearns for its opposite as the masculine does for the feminine, the male for the female or the female for the males, says Aristotle. The best of the definitions

because the most various of them seems to me that of an ax amanda who talks about the aeron the indeterminate. A world in which you cannot ever say men are possessive or women are possessive. where you can never reduce the woman to the helpmate, the passive, or the man to one who needs to be helped, aggressive, confident, intellectist, as against his fickle helper, cleancut, and dominant against his recessive and gentle opposite number. The clumsy in body, the graceful. These reductions are ridiculous, but they are also with us, insistently With us, unendingly with us. It is

very difficult for us to accept that sexual identity is never any one single thing, nor can it ever be added up in such a way that it can be divided with a common conclusion. A very modern definition which is no definition and therefore the best definition is by the poet Louis Mcnes who says of this world world is crazier and more of it than we think Incourageably plural but still the persistent definitions there's one that I like to repeat because it's so entertaining and so wonderfully wrong a light verse writer of the 20s Samuel Hoffen

Stein in three quattrains talking about women. Talking about his woman. Your little hands, your little feet, your little mouth. Oh god, how sweet. Your little nose, your little ears, your Eyes that shed such little tears. Your little voice so soft and kind. Your little soul, your little mind. In the same rich vein, the last poet laurate of England, Sir John Bcherman, wrote about an old man. He was an old man feeling some of this in a poem called suitably enough sanex, an old man. Oh, would I could subdue the flesh which sadly troubles me, and

then perhaps could view the flesh as though I Never knew the flesh, and merry misery. To see the golden hiking girl with wind about her hair, the tennis playing biking girl, the holy to my liking girl. To see and not to care. to love her for her mind alone, her tiny little mind, to curve and color blind alone, but to the fact resigned alone that oh, she is refined. The pressure is enormous to make these reductions, whether to accept or to Reject. The feminists have given us some rich understanding and some gross overstatement. They have

blamed men and in a sense if only by the coarseness sometimes of their epithets have assumed blame. They have forgotten as many in answering them have forgotten that we're in a world of latencies. A world where measuring rods, even Lightning rods, report nothing. Where to reach back to an early Yungian resource, word association will give us association. It will not give us a conclusion. An image association will give us an even larger and most remarkable bracketing picture on top of picture on top of picture. But no final picture. There is no final picture. sexual identity

like the human spirit never comes to rest. We're talking of a world of opposites in Which the best we can hope for is a coincidencia postorum an acceptance of a simultaneity of what we choose to call opposites though that word itself is incomplete. I prefer stable and unstable assigning to neither animus nor anima in either sex the fruits of either one with exclusivity. We are neither more nor less stable any one of us in his or her sex. All of us have some extraordinary Working balance imbalance where we find fulfillment in the contemplation of that

stability and instability and recognize that we need it especially where we seek to define our working identity as men and women in precisely the way we need the extraordinary pairings with which we get through a day through a year, through a lifetime, tall to see, short, large to see small, dark to understand, Light. It is an interplay. And if we accept it as such, we accept, whether we recognize it or not, a world of grace, a world in which we know that what we want most urgently is to share our persons and to find other

persons eager to share theirs. It is a world in which we find words and gestures come with enormous difficulty. It's a world in which especially as we Move with whatever pain and suffering and instability toward love we know that it must continue to be in pairings in dualities where oneness depends upon tuness. A long time ago in the 17th century when love was for the first time moving from noun into verb. This is a fact and back again. When for the first time it was seen that love was a whole vocabulary. Andrew Marvel one of

the graced poets of our language wrote a Series of quattrains which he called the definition of love. And in it he spoke in geometric terms. These eight lines say so much as lines so loves oblique may well themselves in every angle greet. But ours so truly parallel though infinite can never meet. Therefore, the love which doth us bind but fate so enviously debars is the conjunction of the mind and Opposition of the stars. This understanding of love is not that understanding which Shakespeare mocks so bitterly with his starcrossed lovers Romeo and Juliet. This is a

most adult understanding and undertaking. If we meet, we meet so we can separate so we can meet. Marvel is saying we meet as parallel lines because if the lines were to bend enough to cross, we should indeed be Starcrossed and never meet again. Two cannot become one. He is telling us unless they remain two. As two they join and as always two always may become one if they remain two. That's not an impossible paradox or more precisely to use Kant's good word for it antinomy. It is the only possible paradox or antinomy. It is the

only one which makes us possible to each other. It is the only one which beckons us in Our sexuality where we find our spirituality and our defining identity to come to wholeness to fight against that anxiety of being with which we are only all of us too heavily and helplessly endowed. Jung's machinery here is a tutillary machinery and it too has a tutillary grace. It brings us in its postulation, let us not say its conclusion, its postulation of animus To that contemplation of being which positively is an adamation, an anticipation of wholeness and negatively which

is even more positive to the aeron to the sense of incompleteness which is another way of saying to some appreciation of infinity out of which we can gather our own finitude. This is more than otherness even though it's by way by the way of otherness. And this is not to lose oneself in the Holy other but to gain oneself. It's a constant moving toward. Perhaps this last suggestion may make it just clear enough and just muddy enough so that you may be able to trust that it is clear. The French philosopher Emanuel Levvenas makes a

big point about the French goodbye. Aure. He likes to hyphenate the two syllables. a Towards God and to talk about our being which is that becoming that I talked about myself to begin my moment here this morning to talk about that as a becoming a being in becoming. Our primary sense is a going towards and when we say goodbye we say we are going towards. Whether ours is a religious faith or simply a sense of something large toward which we move the infinite whatever adure it's a very powerful understanding So that even when we say

goodbye we're saying hello we're always greeting even when we seem to be leaving which is an appropriate time for me to Well, what did the animus make us go toward? We found most useful and I found useful in clinical work the image of the animaimus as a bridge. One side is connected to the ego world which is our shared world, our shared Conscious world with our conscious values and warmth and feelings, relationships and tasks and problems. And the other end of the bridge is connected to the world of the objective psyche centered in the self

which operates by different psychological laws and procedures. And the link between the two worlds is the anima animus bridge. It functions to mediate to the ego What has to do with our sexual and spiritual identities with special reference to the mode of being human that is opposite to our conscious identity. So you can see right away there's a great deal of room for variation in this. We would say that the anima anonymous is not a set content but is highly different from woman to woman man to man. And to give you an example, one woman,

highly Educated, research, PhD, post-doal work, a very skilled research scientific job, lots of speeches and verbalization necessary. Always had turn up in her fantasies and dream life and sometimes in the outer life of projections that would catch her. a figure of a man who is utterly silent. He never speaks. He's big physically. He's often linked with the outdoors. He's not a verbal or educated man. And He functions in her dreams consistently. He will lie upon her, not sexually, but as she says, to earth her. For her, the earth is masculine and the sky is feminine.

Or he'll stand next to her and breathe on her. This will quiet all the scintillating stuff in her head. Or another woman, sharp contrast, who feels herself dumb, which she isn't, and feels herself inarticulate, which she is, Had originally earlier in her life, animous figures, both outward attractions, inner dream figures who talk, who were brilliant talkers, entertaining, fascinating, storyw weavers, speech givers. In fact, she married such a man and some years later came into treatment because she was ready to kill him if he didn't keep quiet. So there it's a question of integrating that function

for herself or to take an Example from a man uh for him what comes across the bridge to think of it that way. What comes across the bridge for us, for him, what would pull him right out of his ego into a soul feeling is a woman figure of tremendous beauty, of beauty which utterly astonished him and made him feel reverent, even worshipful. This was behind a voyeristic problem that presented itself on the Surface or another man's anima figure is one of fire argument and fierce confrontation always challenging him not to deny not to run

away but to face what his experience experiences to confront it. So from this point of view, if it's a bridge, one way to ask about one's own experience is what comes across the Bridge? What is the selfineering in this anima anonymous mess I have landed myself in? What is the center trying to say to me? What is it the kernel of this package? Not that we can take off the wrapping and discard it. The wrapping is part of the package. The kernel is also in the wrapping. And it helps to distinguish the ego side of

the bridge from the self side of the Bridge, which is what we'll be doing in more detail this afternoon with the kinds of problems one gets into and how one works towards solutions. But for example, um, and I I hope you've all had this experience that I've had. You're in a vigorous discussion and you hear your voice achieving that certain unmistakable pitch uh that alerts you that something more as a foot than just the argument. In fact, you're being bombarded by a Whole army coming across the bridge that your companion in the argument must hear

now in full detail. And you drive your companion crazy because they are sticking to the task at hand, the logical sequence of whatever the issue is. And you're saying things like, you know, that tone of voice you're manifesting now. You get words like manifest. You had that tone of voice in September When we were talking about your companions holding their head saying, "What has that got to do with the issue? For oneself, it has everything to do with the issue." Or suddenly you have a burst of clear memory of every time you have discussed this

issue in the last 5 years and you remember the body posture not just the tone of voice the conclusion of each argument and what was said 3 years ago This of course inflames it too. Now what's happening here is that what's coming across the bridge is the impersonal side of the animus that functions according to different laws from the ego. It functions according to the laws of association not cause and effect. Therefore, I associate to your voice now a time when you sounded similar, which is completely relevant from this side of the bridge, but completely

confusing from the ego side Of the bridge. The unconscious folks uh functions according to the laws of contiguity, similarity, therefore I suddenly am bombarded with similar instances when etc etc. It helps to know that It makes conversation easier, assuming that's an important ego value. And it also makes the inner task more compelling to turn and see what is coming across the bridge that may be for my information, not necessarily right Away to my partner. Now, we're all familiar or familiar enough that the anima animus is like any other complex. has a personal level, has a

cultural level, has an archetypal core, has a body level, has a spirit level. Uh, obviously we can't go into these in great detail this morning. a little more detail this afternoon, but let me give you some examples that might make the concept vivid in terms of lived Experience and how this bridge at best is a threshold to the self. that it gives information about the specific ego identity one is struggling with and it gives information about what the self is engineering to pull you into it toward it uh from the personal level a woman fell

in love with a man and risked She also had quite a uh sensitive ethical Sensibility. She was appalled that in her struggle and openness to loving this man, she found herself wanting to dress him in different clothes. She hated the fact that he wore polyester and she hated herself that she hated the fact he wore polyester. She felt she was cheap, petty, picky, Bourgeoa, unworthy of this whoosh that was opening her. She felt she couldn't step out of her personal biases. She knew this. She struggled with it. And yet, she'd find herself looking through magazines

and saying, "Oh, look at this." Or on the street, steering him into stores under the pretext of buying him a present, remodeling his entire wardrobe. It's helpful to inquire about the personal roots of her image of what a man should look like. And there were very specific roots in her case. Her father died when she was 16. He wore nothing but rumbled tweeds. She lived in and worked in an academic environment. There one wears nothing but rumbled something. This is information for her about her image of what a man should look like. Just seeing those

personal conditioning factors gave her elbow room not to bully her partner. In fact, eventually to regail her partner with this struggle. I mean it was very funny and it became one of those things that couples can work through that become a you know it still drove him crazy but it was also very funny that sort of thing. Uh cultural example, a professional woman successful has operating in her a a negative Animous judgment now against herself, not against someone else. You must look different. You must be thinner. You must be like the fashion image, like a

pencil, tall and thin. Forget that that isn't your body type. Just forget that. It's got to be changed. Here's a cultural image we all find dimmed into us over every media. And her ego had fallen under the sway of that. What came across the bridge was not Information necessarily in this case about masculine images. What came across the bridge was a image of her body and it was an image of her body in bed. And instead of saying to it, "What you ought to be," she asked it what you want. And the image that transfixed

her was, she said, of my body. My big body just lying in bed doing nothing, getting bigger and bigger and bigger. As she allowed herself to stay with that Image, the bigness, the bigger bigness is what was numinous to her. What came out of it was a sense I am big in my life. I'm not like the image of what a woman should be. I got in my hometown, my home community, my family, my culture. I have done different things. I have left that world. I have taken new paths. And yet she never really acknowledged

That to herself. She always saw herself as smaller than in fact she was. And it was then as if the body carried the bigness that she denied. So one could say at least the body didn't forget who you really were. And just as she had broken out of childhood cultural conditioning, now this big body was trying to break her out of another cultural conditioning. the body type that the animus had Fastened on to. We find in this time of transition a great many new images coming up in the culture. We have access to more and

different archetypal images of maleness and femaleness that have not been accessible so easily to us before. We have for example images of the dark feminine, not angry but dark, different from nice and light. A source feminine in blood and guts or as one woman puts it, the uterus god. We also have images of the angry Feminine who sloughs off, rejects, pushes back against any image of being help, meet consort, maternal, etc. Instead, she goes her own journey and the hell with you. We have images of the cathonic masculine who comes from the earth, not from

the sky, of a masculine kind of empathy and nurturing that transforms from the ground up. Or as one woman put it, it's a the maleness always penetrates my thoughts and points them downward To a deeper root to go down deeper and then it points up making me say it, making me assert it, making me speak what I know. or in far reaches of development, we find increasingly examples of what might be called the exchange of roles where one man for example in reading Lady Julian of Norwich where she writes about Christ as mother, Christ with

breasts, says he feels a male presence grasping And articulating not so much a feminization of the masculine as a matching of femininity with masculinity that Lady Julian here is female but also male. She's crossed. We find some previews of that in to take just one example women who experience coming across the bridge images of homosexual males and that there's a numinous uh vision of a certain kind of masculinity there That both are looking for. Now, one last example and then I'll stop. Uh, from the archetypal level, what would that be like coming across the the

bridge? Uh, let me give one from a from a man. This is a negative one, however, where he he tells a little story about how he views woman feminine. The story is a fisherman's fishing on the beach. He Sees a lunch down the beach. He looks at it. He's hungry. Nobody seems to be eating it. There's nobody around. He thinks, "Well, maybe I'll go eat it." He waits. Nobody comes. Takes his line out of the sea, goes down, opens the sandwich. H looks yummy. Bites his mouth into the sandwich. And he feels a big hook

hook into the roof of his mouth. And then the line starts reeling. The line extends to the middle of the ocean and he feels himself reeled in Out to the middle of the ocean. He said that's what women do. Now that is an archetypal image coming across the bridge. What is the self-configuring? What way is it hooking us? What ethical issues is it putting in front of us? What body issues we're led to our particular style of the animating connection to being and the truth by which we can live. identity. Sexual identity is as much

a Matter of style as it is of process of being and becoming. It is a content but not a set content. It's a veering toward or away from. We can see it well if we look at the extraordinary examples, positive, negative, entertaining, defeating that come up to us from the arts, the popular arts, the private arts. Film has for years given us this kind of Range of styles. I'm not going to give you much from recent years. From recent years, we get mostly the fertility rights of the 13-year-old and those extraordinary heroes made, for example,

of erasers left on radiators to melt. You remember ET? I'm thinking back to the giants of an earlier age, not all that early in some cases, who show us the style of sexual identity In so compelling a way that quite apart from our own response to them and what they may really stand for, we're caught as they're caught as we were by the first comedians. and Eric Gain and I see it with my students when we show the old films of Charlie Chaplan, Buster Keaton, the great stone face or Garbo who remains a riveting penetrator

of the world of male authority herself with a kind of Authority that can be called masculine and not simply because of her at one time much chronicled large feet or her very few words laconic to the point almost of muteness. I'm thinking of a John Wayne with a masculinity always articulated in a swivel hipped fashion, a walk which seemed almost ironic in the face of his bristling patriotism that would have been better caught in permanent attention with no hip movement at all. I'm thinking of the fact that a Marina Dietrich even reduced to a voice

over in a soundtrack can fill at least New York film houses in the extraordinary film made of her voice to recall her body to recall her control and it was very much that of Anima and Animus elements by Maxmillian Shell. It is the parallel in image of the body that we have in the body's most lasting translation into art in architecture. We don't pay enough attention to the body and architecture. We don't pay attention to the bodified spirit in buildings that we think must follow, as Louis Sullivan says, form beyond everything out of function. We

forget that the form is the human form. You see it in Chicago. You have such a planitude of it here where modern architecture began in the buildings of Louis Sullivan where he mixes elegances of shape. The auditorium Arches for example with granitic structures out of the romanesque in buildings like the Rookery and the Manadnot building. They look almost impossibly somber, stalledly masculine until you see the elegant cornises, the moving fenestration, the presence of a beauty haunted architect with a clear imagination which though Directed to the eye comes to the taste and the touch, the hearing,

the smell just as well. because great art hits all of our senses. The greatest example of that from which much can be learned of the extraordinary balance imbalance which we are is P's reworking of his imagination in the Hesh the attempt to remember things past going over the Shakespeare sonnet when to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance Of things past I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought His remembrance is not simply of things but of identities. An identity teasingly offered to him but never quite extended. There is an

architectural as well as archetypal majesty to the structure he creates in this quest for identity. And nowhere so richly, so confusingly, so rewardingly as in the pursuit of Alberin Sim, a girl, as he says, with brilliant laughing eyes and plump matte cheeks, Dulled, he means black polo cap, whom we meet pushing a bicycle in her first appearance. Her laughter, he says, is somehow indecent in the way that the couping of doves or certain animal cries can be. Her hand clasp is so moving to him that he feels grateful to civilization. With her caressing finger, a

multitude of hopes invisible hitherto emerge in him, crystallize in him. He loves her. this fugitive being, this Knowledgeable one, this ambiguous one, revealed finally as a lesbian, which is P's way of confirming for us what we have known all along, that she is Albe, at least as much as she is Albertine. Sometimes, he says, it happened that the fictitious aim destroyed the real one. sometimes always. For though his dreams abandon her, give her up as a fantasy figure, as soon he says, as they cease to be nourished by the hope of a possession of which

I had Supposed them to be independent. And though he recognizes that she has inspired his pages, he sees that it is precisely because she was incapable of understanding them that she was so much their source. And that teaches us something very important about the nature of our contraexuality. It must remain a mystery like Albe Albertine a distant princess or prince to be more and more penetrated never dissipated. Anima and animus come together even within each one of us in this sort of tracing as being asserts itself finds not just a vague poetic semblance but flesh

p feels dizzy at the end of his long research weary even he confesses terrified he has glimpsed something far beyond the restricted place in which we ordinarily live a place prolonged past measure he Says, "Past measure in the dimension of time, place, space, we would say, where we touch epochs in our spaces that are immensely apart. What brings him and us so far is the energy unleashed by that sexuality, which is his identity and ours. We all know it. We've all seen it. If not in the actual flesh, than in the dream body. if not

in clearly apprehended Spirit than in fantasy. Our own are poets or painters and novelists or composers. Too often it's a trivialized version reduced in our pop art world to the yps of rock singers, a flash of rumbling anatomy in a film, or for those determined television viewers, the artificial insemination of a polyester actress with Texas oil. But it remains with us. However elusive and however unfortunate. It's our dream of completion. I want to give you two examples. One from of all people a Soviet writer Andre Bav, a gifted artist in a story called Life in

Windy Weather, which would give him some feeling of association with people in Chicago. His central figure is at a central point in his life. He and his family have just moved into a daca in the country. He walks with his son in his windy Environment. He argues with his wife. But then, like people who love each other and know each other too well, they forget their quarrel. He says he's made tired by an abundance of irritations, recollections, associations, thoughts, ideas. All that's lacking, he thinks, is some act of reckless despair. Reckless despair, act or not,

does not come. Two friends in the most benile of meetings come to see him. A man and a woman come To see him. Come to see his wife. He doesn't talk to the woman. He senses in her what he calls a mixture of freedom and embarrassment. As she listens, he sees in her some concern for himself. He seeks it. He hopes it. He never defines it. The bond grows through a series of ridiculous benalities, fatuitities, playing with his son, listening to the boy scream till he's brought into the company of the adults. But he feels

a growing excitement, Attention in her presence, an ease at the same time and naturalness. The girl sings. He's moved, but not because she's a great singer. It's simply a further assertion of that presence. Then the man and the woman leave. He sees them off at the station. He worries for a moment that this has been nothing, just in himself, the meaningful bond between himself and her, that she hadn't felt any of it. But when they say goodbye at the station, he Remembers the hand clasp that he felt. An extra squeeze that she seemed to give

him. And her wave seems an additional wave. He walks away. The wind throws rubbish into his face. A chill passes through him. He shivers. But after the visit, as the evenings pass, and he drinks tea with his wife, he thinks that this is happiness there. his wife, his eternal companion, his words, who sometimes sews, sometimes drinks tea, who, like his son, who can Be offered a toy, is there and there with him. He feels no need to leave. It seemed that he would remember this peace and quiet all his life. After all, who knows what

direction life might still take? For him, this has been a numinous experience, however trivial it may seem. As P looked for significations of a lasting identity in the brilliantly illuminated Parisian society of the early 20th century, Beetho seeks his in the immeasurably Flatter, duller precincts of Soviet Russia in the late 20th century. Their unfulfilled figures are curiously alike, for each conceptualization is finally enough. Not because the words have come, the work is done, a fantasy has been brought to earth, but rather because something more important has been accomplished. Connection. Even that wisp of connection in

his imaginings, in a handshake, in a farewell. He knows something more. We know something more Of our own identity rooted in our sexuality as a consequence. Finally, the example that defines this in words with extraordinary eloquence by the man who is for me the most considerable intelligence to attempt a novel in the 20th century. Robert Musiel mus i l who didn't finish his great work. He is the pascal of novelists like the pon fragments that go on and on. We finished two a third volume a bit of a fourth of their man on a shaft

and The man without qualities we translated more precisely the man without his defining identity which is not obviously a moving book title but is what I shaft has as a resonance in German. In the last volume, we have worked out for us the most complete, the most detailed, the most thorough understanding I think of in literature of Anima and Animus in a relationship with his sister Agatha, Olrich and Agatha, The man without qualities, without his defining identity, which verges on but never falls into incest, which is extraordinarily delicate and robust. In this last volume as

translated, we haven't everything clear in translation or in German yet, but enough. We have this passage. Urish reaching back into his immature sexuality to try to make sense of his grown-up feelings. Thinks of his early longing to be a girl When he was a very little boy. Yet he says, or his stream of consciousness says, his archetypal memory says, he already knew enough about it not to do what children so often do, dashing into some impulsive attempt to make the wish come true. And today as he tried to define that paradoxical state, tried to find

words for it, it seemed to him that it had been like groping in darkness for a door and suddenly encountering some Bloodwarm, warmly delicious resistance, pressing against it, trying to penetrate through whatever it was that seemed to be all tender, yielding to his desire without ever actually giving way before him. If one can define the indefinable, if the mystery of the human person can be reduced to this kind of reach into words where words simply don't go. This, it seems to me, does it. He had found enough, he tells us 400 pages later on, to

prevent the unending mirror reflection of aromitic of a hermit's love from coming into being. What he had found is what we've been talking about today, however incompletely, with whatever difficulty we must have trying to deal with this extraordinary subject, this confounding, this rewarding subject. What he is Talking about is his urge to share his person with that person who most wants to share her person. He will no longer look simply at mirror reflections. He must turn those reflections inside out. He must do what you remember Alice in Wonderland tried to do to go through the

looking glass. He wants his share. He tells us we can have a share. He doesn't give us a formula. He gives us, it seems to me, what Jung promises Us, an experience rather than a definition. Why don't we stretch for one minute? Questions are welcome up in front. >> We have some questions here on paper and if we have time we can take others from the floor. Uh this first one there's one for me and one for Barry. Maybe we'll start with that. Uh the first one anima animus as bridge. Are we talking about ego

identity or an ego self identity? a new Personality identity that is a perceptive question I think and it is the latter uh when one feels this bridge and it's really open not breaking down at one side or the other the center or the axis of identity does shift out of the ego to that in between transitional space if you like. So that it is more of an ego self identity, a new personality Identity. Do you want to comment on that or the next? >> Well, I I think because of time, we'd better just do as

much as we can in as little time as we can manage. I'm asked about whether I really mean to say body, a way of having a world, for example, a spiritual body or flesh. And the reference is made to Rudolfph Boltman on Paul. I mean to say both. I'm a relentless and hopeless Austinian. And for me, an inspirited body or a Bodified spirit is what we're always talking about. It leads to a further question about relating Jung's anima anonymous postulations to the doctrine of the incarnation in the Christian tradition. I'm sure Aml want to say

something about that. It is clear that whatever Jung's specific religious conviction or inclination if you prefer, he was speaking here out of a presence which is not very far From the understanding of what it is in theology that is posited as inhabiting us. One conventional term is to describe the body as the temple of the Holy Spirit. We find in our writing that we must struggle very hard at times to find parallel terms to move among spirit, soul, sometimes psyche not as apart from but gathered into soul and spirit archetypal contents. All of this I

myself am very edgy about distinctions that become so fine in the world of the spirit that we approach one of those confident and to me not very healthy natural theologies in which everything is defined and in which God comes to us in a series of telegrams as it were with everything worked out very tursly and clearly it's a very serious question and a very important question which I should like very much time to some time to take up At some length. I do in a course I teach I'm afraid that's all I can say about

it usefully if that is useful. Now >> uh I would add to that question that by body that is one of those eperon indeterminate terms. It mean we mean literally this body that we each reside in but also symbolically the the body of community the the body of our experience the subtle body that Jung is talking about and an addendum to that question is what about the anima animus Relation to Christian incarnation I think myself there is a very um keen specific relationship which I'll answer by giving an illustration. uh a a woman who is

a clergy woman dreamt she was invited to preach in a Catholic church and the Catholic priest was encouraging this and she said she had on her alb and her stole which she said were her marks of having been ordained. Hence very unusual for a woman to be preaching in the Catholic church as an ordained priest. She didn't know what she was going to say. She had no text, but she was seated with the priest and there was an empty chair which was not the bishop's chair, but in the dream it was called the Christ chair.

Then she goes to the pulpit and she points to the empty chair and Says, "We will not be whole until a woman sits in that chair." End of dream. Now her association to it is what comes to mind about answer to this last question. She said it is not as if Jesus becomes a woman. But by saying a woman has to sit in the Christ chair, what comes forcefully into me like dropping down to another level is that Jesus is incarnate in this woman's body, my female body. She said, "I've always sort of known That

generally, but I've never really known it at all." So that the that's a kind of animaimous experience that has direct theological implications for that particular theologian. Uh here's another question. I gather most of the time you were using sexuality to conote gender. How much of the time are you assuming that sexuality implies sexual intercourse in or outside of Marriage? May not the anima anonymous encounter or relationship you discuss involve no sexual union or only a limited amount of it. Uh my reaction to that is yes, a resounding yes. This is not just well I shouldn't

say just it's it's applies to interpersonal relationships sexual literal and sexual bigger sexual is not necessarily activity it's meeting with the mode of being human that is opposite to the conscious identity we Have but also it's an inner connection which may not directly involve any other actual ual people which would also be a bigger understanding of sexual. Perhaps you want to >> splendid examples of those very sexual women who to the best of my knowledge never had any experience that we would call sexual intercourse in the normal meeting of a man and woman. The three

great teresas, Teresa of Avula, Terz of Lisure about Whom I wrote a book, and Mother Teresa. They are all women, it seems to me, who have the most lively sexuality. I might suggest you Bernini's extraordinary statue at Santa Maria de la Victoria in Rome, which shows Teresa of Avula after she just received one of those extraordinary arrows. For allegorical purposes, he conceives it as a puto, a kind of little cherub pulling an arrow of love. She lies there, discalsted carmealite that she is, her Feet without shoes, turned over, helpless, spent with love. The terms are

highly sexual. The discharge is unmistakable. And yet there is no coarsening of the experience. There's no attempt in bringing together the fullness of female sexuality with the fullness of the human spirit and spirituality. There's no sense of it in any way being any less or any more than it is. You might look some of you when you have the opportunity at the recent Film called Terz, a series of diarama portraits of the life of Terz of Lisure, which is also pulsing with sexuality and with the spirit. We're asked also, >> wait, I just thought of

something else about that question. You could also take um the example of a lot of sexual experience that has nothing lasting in it that does not catch the spirit in it. And in that way, It's just it's not even body. It's sort of an epifenomenon. So that would be another illustration that the sexual as we mean it is quite big >> like the mating of exoplasm take that first >> you you take that I want to go mention this one we're trying to thread our way through these and not take up too much time can

a woman have an anima can a man Have an anima I will say just the various brief sentence or two about that we should remember here the etmology it means soul and in one sense it is outside gender even though it's very much a definition of gender we should remember that it is used by poets like Yates for example to speak of the anima mundi the spirit of the world and if we don't have we who are male some animus and if we who are female Don't have some anima our sense of the spirit of

of the world. Our possession of the spirit of the world is so negligible as hardly to exist. It must be in both with a particular emphasis and understanding which I think Jung has charted with remarkable delicacy as well as accuracy. >> This is a methodological theoretical problem that I must say I'm slogging my way through. So I don't know whether I'd answer that quite the same way as Barry. Uh if you say as some recent Yungians have been saying struggling with the clumsiness of this anima animus theory they revise it to say both are in

both not both sexual modalities are in both which certainly the theory says but a woman has an anonyim anonymous and the man has an anonyim anonymous I think the problem you get into then is that anonymous have set contents and I don't think that holds up Clinically. If we all have an anima, then we mean by anima a certain clump of stuff and ditto with animus. So that's a problem for me. Another problem I think in that uh formulation is that one is at risk of losing what is in Jung's original configuration namely the depth

dimension. This is not just masculine and feminine opposites. This is conscious and unconscious. If both have both consciously or unconsciously, you lose that tension, that torque, that pulling where you meet something coming up that pulls you down or maybe depends how one thinks about it. You may be down, it pulls you up uh or out. Uh so I am not sure the revisions are are as that useful. I think they bring as many problems as they try to solve. What I'm sympathetic about with them is that they're trying to get out Of the stereotype packaging

that everybody's trying to get out out of and the abuse of yungian theory that somehow you have an animus that is only thinking say which is silly because a lot of women are real thinkers and their animus are completely different. Now the last question is I think I'm going to have to ask Joan to a ask this question because I can't read one word. There >> has been suggestion uh in other union Works that the animous is the soul for women and as the ana is the soul for men. your earlier work I think has

taken quite a different position and talked about how the feminine is also functions as a soul for women. Now, in light of that, what you're saying today in the bridge imagery, I wondered whether you had changed your mind. Uh, did everybody hear that or does it need Okay. Uh, I don't think it's a roundabout change. I think it's a An expansion. Um what I objected to in in the first book on the feminine in uh Christian theology and yungian psychology was this too neat formula which I must say in defense of Jung he says every

time you make a theory there's an exception but this too neat defense that somehow the animus is thinking to the emotional woman and the anima's feeling to the emotional man that was one set of objections another was that it's Confusing for women to think of their souls as masculine and that their way to the self is masculine. It might be for some women but not necessarily for all. And furthermore, we don't live in a cultural vacuum. So that I think a lot of women's experience in the recent decades is quite different from the kind of

experience women had in the decades of this century that Jung was writing about. and the cultural Conditioning he inherited from previous decades to his own time. So that if you think of the bridge image, what will come across the anonymous bridge for a given woman will depend on personal conditioning, collective conditioning, what archetypal image is constellated for her. It might be I'm just trying to think if I've had an example. I have uh worked with some women who have felt their relation to a given man on whom they had projected the Animus was the soul

image was the link to the self. But in just recalling those examples, in every case there had to be a reckoning with that, a withdrawal of that projection and coming to house it in herself which called upon feminine links rather than just throwing everything into the opposite masculine. So I don't see it as an about face. I see it as sort of an expansion in more concreteness. >> I think when we talk about soul links, We're in very treacherous ground. My most considerable help there is a work this I'm afraid will seem impossibly obscure, but

it is now available in English which is some help written in the 12th century called the anticcludianis. It's a work in which the new man which turns out to be Adam is sought for in the personification of prudence. The personification is very much a woman And it's she who instigates the creation of Adam by her embassy to the courts of heaven. And it says something which I don't propose to reduce for you but simply to point out to you is an extraordinary allegory for men and women not simply for women not simply for men which

suggests that when we understand this if we ever understand this it will be in terms of some sort of and this I would accept feminine personification beyond That Alan Deil who wrote the book and I who read the book will go no further. Uh, one thing I'd add to that, you know, in Yung's original scheme, the archetypes behind the anima animus or the wise woman, the wise man, I think culturally we're moving into those archetypes and there the sexuality is congruent with the conscious body identity. So but again one can't make it too neat. Uh

so that one finds I think Increasingly selfim images sent across this anima animus bridge sometimes feminine for the female masculine for the male. I think the the differentiation of the feminine and the differentiation of the masculine is part of what's going on. And that's why I'd agree very much with Barry that it shouldn't be made too fixed. We're in a time of transition which is mess, not easy, but never Boring. I think maybe we better stop for lunch. Thank you. uh this part of the afternoon we'll alternate again and then have questions and then we'll

have a very brief break and then a similar pattern. This first uh section we're going to take up the problems when the bridge breaks and then later in the afternoon how we heal that or move toward healing That. Remember the anima animas have to do with the most intimate experiences, those that mark us, those that are the great messes we get into. And the image of the bridge, there's the ego with its shared world on one side and the objective psyche coming centering in the self on the other side. And a simple though not deterministic

way to think of the types of problems we Fall into is when the bridge breaks. Let me start with what happens when it breaks from the self side. I excuse me from the ego side. Do the self second. A hallmark of all the problems when the bridge breaks down is that the ego is always put in a passive secondary position. And whatever the contents are coming across the bridge, usually in personified form, but sometimes in gusts of affect and gusts of behavior that We're compelled to act out. All of that stands as if in front

of the ego and the ego is in a passive secondary position behind it. Of course I'm simplifying and abbreviating in interest of time but just to give some types of selected problems from the ego side when the bridge breaks. First one falls into identification with whatever the contents are that come Across the bridge and the ego does not emerge. It may be that the ego has never emerged. For example, a whole area of problem is the conscious and unconscious couples that are created between a parent and a child, a father and a daughter, a father

and a son, and where the anima is in that configuration. A mother and a son, a mother and a daughter. In some cases when the ego never emerges but stays identified In a child what the child has unconsciously dedicated him or herself to is being a bridge for the parent and never does a child get the bridge yet for him or herself. So that uh in one case for example a young girl who understood her father better than his wife understood him grew up to dream dream dreams such as this one. I am entertaining Hitler.

I don't want to. I hope if I keep quiet And don't say a word he will just go away. What falls out of the of the young girl growing girls uh reach is the clonic element both of the masculine the Hitler figure here and of the feminine because to deal with a Hitler thread in one's anonymous one needs a bit of the witch or something equally powerful. powerful. Or to take it from the man's side, the dream, this grown-up man who was a kind of Don Juan, dedicated himself to waking up women, enlivening them, stimulating

them, and the affairs always began, but there was never any middle or end. He was a bridge for the woman's psyche to wake her up to her own deeper desires. But never did the bridge operate for his psyche. And a quite shocking dream to him was the following. It turns out my body is a wheelbarrow and women hold my legs. That's the handles of the wheelbarrow. And my penis is the is like a plow or a rudder that digs up the earth. But it's in the women's hands. I am driven plowing up the earth. That's

one kind of identification. When that happens, what is lost is the bridge to one's own self stuff. and one finds oneself to com compelled To be the bridge for someone else's another kind of problem when the bridge breaks from the ego side and the ego falls in a secondary position secondary to whatever is coming across the bridge has to do with wounding experiences that have wounded us that Then the animus or the anima sort of armors over and behind the armor where there really should be an ego with reactions there's A kind of blank space.

It's like dead air space where there should be emotion, pain, howling, anger, determination, remorse. there's a a mute blank space and over that the animus or the anima contents armor. Give you another example. A man uh falls in love with a woman. It's very serious to both of them. They go out to dinner, some celebratory occasion. On the way out to dinner, she happens to mention that she got a call From a previous male friend. She didn't even take the call. It was on a machine. End of discussion. This eats away at him. And at

this celebratory dinner, he starts saying, "Well, what about this man? What was the relationship like?" And he digs and he digs and he digs. Now, what was another relationship like? And before they know it, he's in a jealous rage, sort of bullying her that somehow she's not really interested in Him. She's comparing him to previous lovers, etc., etc. What was skipped over there, I mean, but it made a complete mess of the dinner. Complete mess. Did not fortunately make a total mess of the relationship, but it certainly was a blitz for a while. What was

papered over, armored over, was that when she mentioned this casually, he was hurt. He suddenly felt unseen, unvalued, unappreciated, unrecognized. But he didn't know that that's what he felt. And only after a lot of digging was it not only that that was discovered, but that this was a pin prick on top of a bruise on top of a thousand pin pricks. So that there was a whole well there of not feeling validated, not feeling connected, easily just pushed out of existence, which she inadvertently stumbled into. And then he bullied her about as if she intended

to do it. But the wound was his and the jealous anima papered over it and attacked the partner. Sometimes that armoring can happen in a particularly devilish way. One gets tricked with false questions, false problems and gets carried along down a garden path away from the issue of meeting what's coming across the bridge. Uh for example, a woman in treatment Has an experience of feeling valued by the analyst, me, another woman. And she feels valued as the person she is, not just as a patient who pays. And more specifically, she felt that day valued as

a woman, one woman to another, which was true. There was a sort of urgency of feeling that came out of me about that. This uh sent her home and she wept. Then when she came the next time, she Said that was so important to her. She was afraid if she were conscious of it, she'd lose it. So to keep it, she decided not to be conscious of it. That's a trick. It's an anonymous trick. To save it, you have a a scheme which in fact takes you away from confronting whatever happened to you. In this

case, what came across the bridge was a missing bit of feminine something that was missing from her ego that she felt projected onto me came back to her. Now a third type of uh problem if the bridge breaks from the ego side is you get what we've called a split anima or a split animus. This can happen relationally. It can happen sexually. It can happen intellectually. It can happen spiritually. It can happen in terms of your authority. There are really thousands of examples. Uh typical interpersonal relation example is that you fall in love with unsuitable

Partners or you feel your own libido divided. you want to be related to women but in fact you're attracted to men or vice versa or a particular issue that can happen to women though less and less so but it used when I was uh still training in classes and things like that it used to be much more common problem that we all had where a uh a woman particularly would like a a particular theorist And instead of relating to that theorist Who held authority for her, who spoke her language, who embodied some truth coming across

the bridge by which she might live, she simply fell into identification with that theory. So she opened her mouth and Winnott spoke. She opened her mouth and Yung spoke. She opened her mouth and so and so spoke and what was missing was her original word even about yung or winnott or whoever. In other words, the ego fell into Identification with what? With a theorist who was attracting to her ego because buried in there somewhere was some word which spoke to her a truth by which she could live. And the task there is she she needs

to turn and say what is it that I like about this theory? What is it that I don't like about this theory? What is my relation to it? What do I need to reject about it? What do I Totally embrace about it? What is mine? That's the ego receiving the content rather than falling into a passive identification with the content. I think I'll leave it at that. Those three examples, identification, wounding or splitting. In this world of the problematic, one of the great ones is indifference. It may be lack of exposure, but only too often

it's an unclear identity Of the imagination. In the imagination, it's very easy to fall into. Our education, our conditioning in the world of depth psychology makes us often victims of explication, of systems that explain everything, that banish mystery and thus the imagination. Our education is really a fairly recent structure in the history of ideas. We forget that central disciplines in the World in which we live are a very recent origin. Even the discipline I profess I am a professor of English at least some of the time is less than two centuries old and psychology hasn't

been born yet in the list of disciplines and the kind of history they need to secure academic appribation. More important, however, within days almost of being established in a catalog, in a successful book, wherever an aura of authority can be Achieved, these disciplines, these systems, these sets of explications become tutillary. Imagination demands a belief. And here we have only too eager an imagination. Like Don Kiota, if it is written, it is true. We think you remember Don Kiota. He believed in books. Whatever was on a page, whatever was printed was ipso facto the truth. And

for it he would leave home, dawn rusty armor, conquer Windmills, sheep, or whatever dreadful enemies turned up. We do all of this because we know the imagination really exists. We can depend upon its certainty. What we don't know is we cannot depend upon these eager explainers or explanations. We tend then even with a vocabulary as useful as anima and animus, as enormously insightful, to reduce, To accept differences and similarities as if final and therefore to turn people and their experiences into abstractions. Point is, the anima and the anonymous always come to us in very sharply

differentiated colors. We tend then to package them if not in plain unmarked brown envelopes, at least in fairly flat covers, neat, indexed, reduced, explained. And thus the splits that Anne was talking about disappear and we easily reduce ourselves to the symbols themselves and not everything they carry with them. There have been strenuous efforts by the greatly gifted narrators of the interior life of our time, particularly in the drama, to show us how not to paper over, how not to cover up, how not to reduce Color to colorlessness. Ipsson's head of Gaba is a superb example.

all of Stinberg, especially after the five psychotic episodes which in the 1890s changed his life and made him the most significant chronicle we have even to this day of the interior struggles of Animan Animus in men and women in both UNESCO who has done such marvels in his Anti-dramas to show how we act out and as we act out Instead of expanding, diminish choice. The point of the evolving anima or animus is to enlarge choice. The depth of this great deepness in the psyche is that it necessarily provides choice. It seems to me one of

the extraordinary checks almost as an elegant mathematical proof Of this world of animus is the way when we come to awareness of it we see we must see it presents itself to us to see that we have choice sometimes in areas of sexual identity for the first time we become aware of the opposite sex not simply outside there in another living person but fleshified in our own selves fleshified. I mean it that firmly incarnate. The issue for men at this end of the 20th century to find that contraexual Presence is very serious. Not only in

terms of the most obvious kind of sexual identity. We have so many words now for it. their verility, their macho elements, but the more subtle kinds of identity without which their masculine qualities will never come through. They are easily made diminished as for so many centuries women were by worlds of they might think or feel excessive Confidence on the other side in the other sex. They are not aware of the opportunity they're being given, so many men who feel this, to find a larger sense of their own being. They don't see the implications for themselves

in the hostile or cautious or simply improbably diminished role. They see themselves now forced into implications for themselves visav not simply their wives, their lovers but Their children, their friends, their co-workers, their mothers, their sisters, their brothers, their uncles, their fathers, the whole world of relationship. They cannot accept that what may come out of this is that most startling of all possibilities that men of all people may end up being serenated. the way women were that there may be a whole new world of trouidors approaching us or should I call them troubadesses Who will suddenly

hold up for our inspection and even veneration men of all people male beatatrices and laoras in a sweet and holy companionship of the imagination as well as the flesh. This has been understood for a long time in several cultures which we've looked at with a mixture of longing and distaste or just wonderment but from a distance. In my next outing this afternoon, I will show you some pictures of the Hindu temples where men and women, men at least as seriously and with as much adoration as women, decorate Hindu temples to show us what a a

splendid art historian, a woman in Philadelphia, Stella Kromish, in a book on the Hindu temple has called the transsubstantiation of the body, meaning the human body, not simply Christ's body, any body, any male Body, any female body. Transformations which change our substance which ask us to examine in these ex impossible demonstrations of an athletic sexuality on the temples which we must never imitate at the risk of the most terrifying distortions of whatever bodily ease we may have. We're being asked in this athletic sexuality, this sometimes wildly manic sexuality to come back to the primordial male

and Female and locate it at the center of our devotions to worship in it and out of it. There are marvelous words that surround this approach to ourselves which answers this terrible problem world of the problematic. A woman writing in the Hindu tradition of cunning Krishna. And the substitution here is quickly made. Any male who fits. If any male is willing, is daring enough to allow himself to fit. See his Tenderness in love draws my heart to meet him. It is trying to break away from the pain of longing for him. His eyes flirt like

blue night liies in the wind. Or another line, his soft mouth moves like an open lotus. And another, his mellow speech is elixir of honey. And so on through his hands and feet, which gleam like hibiscus blossoms, and his color which deepens like rainheavy thunderclouds. We have equal and opposite devotions, verbal and actual, in our tradition. But we turn away too from that meaning. We color it over. We read John of the Cross and we see as we're meant to see a rich mystical theology. But would we forget how bodyrooted that theology is? That extraordinary

little porn with its endless plays on words, simple words. Delverbo Dino, the divine word of the divine word. The virgin weighed with the word of God comes down the road. If only you will shelter her. The Spanish is stronger with a lovely play on words and meaning. Pada if only you will give her an inn. And you remember there was no room at the inn. But John who says in his extraordinary writing about what is at no point open Sexual physically sexual meeting who says that the senses and he means the senses are refreshed by

this kind of contemplative experience. John is saying to us we must in another play on that word take her in. And I am saying that the parallel here between this tradition contemplative mystical and the tradition of the east is very clear. We must be open. We must venerate. It's a problem. We're not tutored in this. We're not taught how to do this. But we have so much that should teach us. In the 16th century, my last exhibit for the moment, there was a woman called Label Cordier, the beautiful cord maker. In fact, she didn't make

any cords, but her husband made cords, literally rope. Her name was Louise Labbe. Finally, as one of the dividends of the Renewed interest in women, by women, and perhaps a little more cautiously by men, we're getting her back in print. It's appalling that this extraordinary woman, the superb poet, should have disappeared for so long, except for those of us cranks who don't allow these people to disappear, even if we must find obscure volumes and steal them. Lab somewhere about the age of 16 had an experience that cauterized her. A love of such intensity it filled

her for the rest of her short life. And she wrote in honor of that love some 24 sonnets, a dialogue in verse several other poems. They are poems of so insistent as sexuality, so precise in identity, so welcoming, a sense of the inhabitant, her inhabitant who has always stayed with her. You see the problem posed and even though the anguish is unmistakable, I think answered. This is the sonnet That I think the first defines it best. Not Ulisses. No, not any other man, however astute his mind, ever long for that holy face, shaded with grace,

honor, respect more than I sigh for you. Nor can I turn my gaze, love, from your handsome eyes, which wound me deeply in my innocent chest. And though I have food, warmth, and tenderest relief, without your hand, all My hope dies. Oh, terrible fate. Suffering the scorpion to feast. On me, I seek protection from the pain of poison by appealing to the beast that stings me. Though I beg the sun at dawn to kill the hurt, if it burns up the stain of sweet desire, I'll die when it is gone. It's that remarkable ability very

much in the feminine. And men when they possess it have to say how much it brings the feminine to them in them with them to say go away while the gesture says come here. She's saying you must depart but when you do you kill me. I want you. I must have you though I can never. It seems contradictory. What it is is an enormously audacious, Wonderfully courageous way of telling us we live with that tension. We have the opposites within us. When we welcome them, even though sometimes it brings anxiety, anguish, and impossible difficulty, we

don't merely survive. We live. When we banish it, we don't simply have a problem. We have death. Even though all our vital signs may suggest we're alive. >> Trying to get our signal straight. >> Well, the time. >> Yeah, we started late. So, we'll save the questions till the end of this segment. That dying, that death, even though the vital signs are still alive, that's what it feels like when the bridge breaks. Let's look this time what happens what types of problems occur when it breaks from the self side. Still the hallmark is the ego's

in a Secondary position passive position. Added to that hallmark is another we fall victim to the unlived life. What would come across the bridge through the ego into the world does not have a portal of entrance or exit and from the self side it doesn't have a way to exit from the unconscious to enter into consciousness. energy does not get lived. So, it backs up. And creative energy that does not get linked up with, does not get humanized. It burgeons and creates very difficult experiences such as envy. envy that burns and corrods. For what is

it that we envy when we envy? We envy the good we see in our neighbor's life. We envy the good we see in another country. We envy the good we see in another school, another institute, another city and do not see the good, The crumb of good that is our own. This envy is between us, among us, within us. I once had a man who who felt envy toward his unconscious, his own unconscious that it knew things he didn't know in his ego. Very difficult symptom, very difficult for him and for me to unravel. The

presenting uh appearance of it was he would uh just before Something might come across the bridge, he'd fall asleep. He said it felt as if he was pulled. And one must think of this bridge. It's two ways. It's not just from unconscious to consciousness. It's not just from self to ego. It's also from ego to self. So what he was saying initially was I don't want to hear it. I don't want to know that you know anything I don't know. And to his uh courage and foolhardiness He would fall asleep in a group therapy session.

And of course everybody was ready to pounce on him like tigers which was to generate in others the hostility he felt in himself which then got it conscious. The ego from its side has to confront, has to inform, has to send back toward the self what its values are. The ego has to stand up to the animus. So the anima has to go out to greet it and tell It what what its own ego values are. But when the bridge breaks at the self side, whatever would come across has no way out and it sort

of bulges and burgeons and one feels full of something that is undelivered, unlived. Another kind of example of unlived burgeoning life is what has been called in religious circles ontological anxiety. Not just anxiety but anxiety about the very basis of being itself that you have no place To stand. Or one might also suffer an onlogical depression. It's not just a a minor discouragement that is intense while it lasts and then lifts. This will be a depression that would technically be called a clinical depression that might go on for months if not years. It's big proportion.

It's hard to get a net over it. It's full of omnipotence, big gun denial, And a particularly strong selfattacking quality. I'll give you some specific examples. One woman said she felt there were wizards, wizard voices. This would be what would come across the bridge, but they never got out of the self country. She even drew them. Wizards that stood at a gate, big gate. And the interesting thing in the dream was the gate wasn't closed. It was just like an arch. You could walk Right through it, but they never did. And they had the power

to say to her ego, to her to her consciousness, that isn't really important. You're really imagining this out of all proportion. That didn't really happen. You're just making something out of it. They had in in essence an invalidating effect. So that what started to grow in ego soil was just cut blighted and what started To come from the self side never got connected to. Or another woman spoke of an anonymous voice that she would hear directly. She wanted to speak up in a public situation or class situation. This voice would say to her, "What you're

about to say is trivial, trivial, shallow, and obvious. Just cut it off." Nothing could get generated. Nothing could get mixed. Not until the ego turned and argued and got That bridge end, built a gang was there possibility of Congress, of intercourse. or from the anima side, this burgeoning life a man felt in relation to women or to dreams that struck him with awe. But instead of being able to receive them, the effect upon him consciously was to make him feel too little, Full of shame, contemptable. One of the things that helped him tremendously was to

work in group therapy with among whom were many women in the group. And he brought once one of these numinous dreams and they were very big dreams. He told it, people heard it, received it, then utter silence. Then he felt too little ashamed and too small Because nobody said anything. But the women finally said, "You're not having any attitude toward this dream. You're not It's not coming into the room. It's as if somebody mailed us a dream in a letter and we read it. You have no stance toward it. You want us to be the

ego for the self-content. So the self-content never got into the room. One of the things that happens whether The bridge breaks at the ego side or the self side is that it whatever the contents that would come across the bridge are they get projected. So we project them into someone else. We project the ego's role into someone else. We project the holder of the self-contents into someone else. This is extremely important when the bridge breaks on the self side because then what should could get into the world into the community Into the collective does not

come through a personal ego trying to react to it, confront it, tame it, relate to it, harness it. It's like letting loose a bunch of wild horses or wild hippos or something even more lethal as this dream of a woman suffering a psychotic episode illustrates. I'm lying on my bed. There's a hole in my bed and up from the bottom of it up through the mattress swarm Swarm myriads of flying insects. There's no way she can relate to it in the dream. And through her, that's what's let out into the world. What happens then is

envy between the sexes to the point of contempt, rape, um, dismissal, anger, murder, savage emotional crimes, let alone Literal ones. What happens then is a proliferation of what if connected to the contents coming from the self side might enliven the community but unconnected deaden it with endless bureaucratic procedures endless memos and papers about positions but no persons having the positions. What happens is self contents flooding into the world like tidal waves, earthquakes, Fusions, bombs, things coming up from below that we cannot control. What is lost not only for the personal identity when the self side

of the bridge breaks but for the communal identity so that it is hard for us to be a group and we're more often than not remaining as a bunch a collectivity instead of a community is the loss of a middle realm A realm of dialogue within each of us and if struggled for within each of us mysteriously and quite wonderfully occurs among us and between us in that transitional space. It's a realm where one tries to turn toward the bridge and see who's there. See what is coming. Meet it. Fight it. Suffer it. Use it.

Share it. But the space inside comes from the ego turning toward and meeting the contents. So that what gets generated among us is a stance of looking outward and inward much more flexible almost like a dance that creates among us a realm where we can imagine and generate and cross sexual lines and sexual roles fractify, impregnate, penetrate, receive one another. And out of that space between us come the precious treasures of culture. Imagine we are tutored in this By the seeing which we are entitled to do. but which which we so rarely do. In a

moment, I'm going to look at some pictures together and we can see what the seeing amounts to and how it does in fact instruct, support, enlarge. As early as the second century of this era that farseeing man origin was talking of the vast forest that scriptural symbol Had opened up the mysteries as he says piling up before us poor in merit and weak in understanding he says we have the affronttery to brave a vast sea of mystery and I pun on that to see the mystery, the seeing of the mystery. There is a unity somewhere

in all of that. No matter how desperate the signs, confusing, confuting, the pain, the dread, the perplexity, they are proofs. They are emblems that warranty The depth of the riches. They offer a method, not entirely irrational, to reach the faceless wonder, of what must be accepted on the basis of things seen of those things that are unseen. The primordial contents, the stores of images and signs with their corresponding meanings for human identity. We are the object and we are the means Of seeing and ultimately enjoying. There is no sexual identity without this. We have to

have the imagination to take in the images. Perhaps we can look at some of these now. The scenes of Lebanon that goes back in its existence almost the time of the Song of Songs. This is over 2,000 years old. this tree and you can see the fleshiness. The living fountain of the waters is very much incarnate in these trees. And you can see why in the Song of Songs There is so much flesh symbol in the cedar of Lebanon. I'm going to show a series of pictures rather quickly in which you can see the tree

sign point. this by Van Go a remarkable picture of the tree positively alive and the next again I'll show in a moment see how much there is of the motion of a human being in that tree is an understanding which comes not out of anything aberrated in him but out of the fullness of reception of the World around him and again in this undergrowth where a figure as symbolic as the trees themselves and as rooted as the trees themselves something we'll see again and again in these marvelous painters at the end of the 19th century

of this world of living rooted image of the human in the extra human. This is simply woods with millstone by Paul Seaison. But look at the inclination of the trees. Look for a Moment to fix it on your after image. what you hold on to you when you look at a moving film, a motion picture film to see how it feeds this picture in which the bodies of these bthers have taken up life from the trees and have responded and corresponded with the trees. is one of the most artful paintings that I know and at

the same time in a very precise sense of the word artless because it is so much in our nature not simply in that impossible allegorical mother nature but In the living nature of all of us father mother >> seaison I'm sorry that was also seaison two pictures to show you that this is a moving station It's an entrance to one of the Paris metro stations, the year 1900. And you see how much in that very feminine city, the very most prosaic of functions in the same period contemporary with Seaison and Goan and Van Go Everything

was caught up in these things to show us the movement of the person in the movement of things. It isn't enough to say this is our nuvo. That's simply a classification. It's everything to say we are present. And I can think of nothing more unpleasant living as I do in the world's worst subway city. I can think of nothing more unpleasant to go down than to go down into that terrible underground which TS Elliott properly Characterizes as our universal experience of hell. In Paris, at least before one gets onto the train, there's a suggestion of

something more like paradise. This is Matis Luke's K from Bair in 1904. Again, the tree made polar and figures out of the earth of luxury, serenity, and the sensual, the voluupuous. The technique doesn't matter though. It's plantal east. It has a kind of Cousin relationship to surah. The quality of earth that roots the people. That's what I think so important here. And again the same title another interpretation of the luxurious, the serene, the voluuptuous. and see how much like tree figures he was very caught by those seaison paintings both of trees and of women bthers

it's contemplative it's on the edge of melancholy It holds these are courageous visions of visionaries the visionary he's saying in the very simple almost boyish girlishness of these figures which is given to us all this is where do we come from? Gog gas great painting it's translated differently the title by different people but where are we coming from whence and again it's the body and the body you'll notice with eastern religious symbol in the background Everything caught in a kind of serenity that's as precise and as voluuptuous as the matis and the sea gou went

to sahiti to learn something which presumably he could have found in Paris needed at the turn of the century. The freeing of an environment to find what is in all of us. We don't have to strip the loin claws after all to find our bodies. The question is, having found them, dare we contemplate Them and what they stand for, what their visibility gives us of their invisibility that may be more enduring and ultimately far more sensual. This is famous because in 1907 with this painting made demo Picasso clearly heralded what became cubism. In cubism everything

is to be seen all the details whether it's analytic or synthetic. It's two great stages. It's a flattening of the picture plane to the two dimensions which are the significant Dimensions of the material on which one paints whether it's a canvas or a board or a piece of paper. The association with the tree for me is this. In the world around us, there is a similar flatness. It isn't for most of us often enough populated by real being. A tree standing there is for us something that we have occasionally to give a certain delicacy to

a city street in the country. It becomes almost humdrum in its routine Nature. It is in fact in its roots, in its elaborate contour, in its fleshlike textures, our opposite number, our representative and our forecast in the world of nature. And these painters see it, know it, communicate it. They did from the very beginning of architecture in the very nature of architectural elements. We'll say it again in a moment. We still do it and the great architects understand it because it is instinct in us. We are trees. We are Moving trees. We have almost the

same kind of sexuality. And if we have the vigor, we have almost the same kind of sheltering, armoring, vitality. There's another tree. This may show it again. This is Mandreon before he discovered Lenolium. This red tree like no tree on earth but like every person potentially in earth is Mandreon's way of saying before he came to his linearity. See the way we turn around. See the way We imbue nature. Not only does nature represent us, we enter it. We become part of it if we dare, if we will. It's a marvelous painting. This is a

Montreal much too secret, much too little known, much too little exhibited. That's Frank Lloyd Wright. That's a house in Old Park, not very far from here. It's a temple of sorts. It's a great tribute, seems to me, to the way the very essence of building Comes out of the body, moves in and out of the street. The big city, you understand, was once upon a time seen as natural. It's hard to recognize that today because of the torture of living so much of the time in the big city, but there are places. This is one

of them. It survives to point us toward a reality, and I'm delighted that those young trees are there. This was taken, as you can see, by the automobiles a good many years ago. The trees would not Be so young today, but it was a replanting long after the original building. The planes here horizontal are turning trees on end. I won't push this too far, but I do think we should see this kind of architecture as rooted and even more obviously his building for the Johnson's wax factory in Rasi, Wisconsin. You see how those columns reach

out of in effect the bow tree. The tree sacred and the Buddhists the shape of a water lily at the top. But very Much the strength is given by tree structure right live in earth and asked us to do the same in his best architecture. This proceeds right out of it. Falling water building just outside Pittsburgh for the Calfman's now a public building. It can be visited as a museum. I had the privilege of writing and doing the voice over for a television show where I designed dance movements, put dances, a very distinguished cast with

a great Choreographer on each of these roofs. And the girls weren't afraid to dance to all the boys, the men, the women. They felt they were somehow entering in the concrete into the concreteness of the nature around them. The water, the trees, the art of being. Some of you must know this Jackson Pollock. It's called Blue Poles. This is from the 50s. I'm not trying to suggest that his painting is in any sense Representational, but there's no mistaking the kind of treelike feeling of those vertical elements. very important for a reading of this kind of

art. Joan Mitchell's hemlock. This has turned into an abstraction, but such an abstraction as it seems to me has more representational quality than an photograph of trees. And to show how far we can go with these vertical elements, whether or not trees in human sexuality Are intended, Andre Lanso's composition, painter of whom an I fond. We have several of his superb lithographs. He died just a few years ago, part of the Russians who settled in Paris after the revolution and some years later. He and Nicholas Dyel do marvelous with a body made into a kind

of flattened symbolic language. Here's Dyle's figures by the sea which shows you exactly how that becomes flat impostor pigment and yet Still reveals a body two bodies looking feeling becoming one with an environment. Now we have time if you would like for questions and then a break. I it's been a long time, but we'd be delighted to hear anything. Yes. >> Uh the question is what is the difference really between the break on the ego side and the self side of the bridge and that there I didn't make that Clear to the is that uh

sounded the same to you? Well, of course in life you can't divide it up so neatly. uh it helps in thinking about it to try to divide it up because it gives you a little different map in how to work with it clinically. For instance, an ego should not be facing a tidal wave. That's just hubris and omnipotence and you'll just get dashed to pieces. The if the bridge breaks at the self side, it Isn't the self that breaks it. There's some issue in the anima animus which could be going back to the parents. It

could be going into the culture. It could be too big an archetypal energy for the animus to contain. Uh that it isn't even a human humanized energy like the uh dream of the psychotic girl with the flying insects. There's there's just no way to relate to flying insects. Um so it isn't the self that breaks it. There's some problem in the inner Structure itself which is not strong enough. And the purpose of dividing it up conceptually and symbolically is so you can give a lecture about it. That's the first purpose in life. Forget it. But

it's also if you're sitting in a in a clinical setting or you're trying to deal with a piece of art, um it's a little different map. You look at this corner of the bridge instead of That corner. And that makes all the difference in the clinical setting. Uh for example, if the the content is somewhat clearly more than less personified coming across the bridge and the problem is the ego attitude is ostrich-like or too small or too nice, not witchy enough or not tough enough, then you deal with it such and such a way. If

uh then you work on the ego. If the problem is at the other end, It isn't really going to make a lot of difference what work you do on the ego. It's to try to find some way to deal with this burgeoning energy that hasn't taken shape yet. It's almost as if instead of a personification coming across the bridge, a a wind comes across the bridge or a tornado comes across the bridge. Then the ego takes cover or it tries to look at it with a Perseus shield. You see, not right at it. So that's

what I was trying to get at You. Yeah. >> I have another question for you. When you gave the example of split splitting process you still identification I didn't distinction between the split of uh the question is for clarification between the splitting of the anonymous and the processes where one can fall into identification with it uh let me see if I can make that clear because you you know we're dividing it up to make it Talkable about >> examples that were identificationist. >> Yes. And what the split is when you identify with a theorist you

what what falls away you get one piece of what comes across the bridge but you don't get the other piece you just get yung. You don't get what you think about yung or you don't get your not focusing on your what's ignited in you visa v yung so that you just talk yung You don't talk your idea stimulated by yung then you get what yung used to say it filled him with horror lots of little yungians running around where we're all going to pay you know in the afterworld for this uh but let me see

if I can give you another example of the split. It's as if uh part of the content comes across and part of it falls to the wayside. So that uh well it can happen in terms of energy, it can happen in terms of Sexuality. Uh you you have uh an ego that can't house what's coming across the bridge. You may have tremendous sexual impulses, but then when you want to call on them, you can't find them. They either invade or leave you high and dry. Or it's literally split up. As one woman says, I can

have a relationship with this man where I feel secure, but there's no fire. And all the fires with this man Who's exciting, but there's no security. So I feel if I go with him, it's at the expense of my life. And if I feel I stay with the one who makes me safe, it's at the expense of my life. It's just different. But identification can happen in either example. It's as if the the energy isn't housed. It splits away and walks alongside you to deal with the whole thing. That's or it may be that the

ego has to get a little bigger Before it can. We may want to but be unable to. >> It's the basic terror in education. The identification is almost impossible to dissipate at the teaching end if it becomes too strong and far from it clarifying the idea or person with whom the student identifies the idea and the person disappear. You get an attitude toward it in which the person has taken over the student and the student never really Understands. You need both. It is that kind of separation which unites which is the educational strength if one

achieves it. >> Yes. And I would add an example from the educational world at at the risk of uh getting my head kicked in. Um because it's a generalization and it is less true now than when I began teaching. But in the earlier decades, the the type of problem I would generally face with a female graduate student was to get her To come up out of the water and spit out what she knew. Her ability to present another theorist's theory was superb. But to get her to tell me what her view was, her original, that's

where it was pulling teeth. Whereas with the male graduate student, I mean, I'm just thinking of thousands of exceptions, so this typing isn't fair. That was another story entirely. They would be more apt to say what their view was. It was almost like uh Who's got the biggest banana thumping this view in contradistinction to the theorist. But to get them to relate their original view to the context of the theorist was the problem. And you see that for example in the followers of Freud. The men who differed from Freud most all of them started other

schools. The women who stayed with Freud who had original and differing ideas out of which came either completely new movements in the Freudian system or Completely different schools like Melanie Klene. They somehow had a way to have their original insights and still say they were explicating Freud. Whereas the men would have original insights and say, "Forget Freud. Now here's my thinking of black's essay on the process of individuation in which he speaks of the bridge so to speak between ego as self uh first the shadow which cross then the I was thinking I asking I'm

asking about the role of shadow in uh the autonomous and they relate the ego to the self. Well, certainly the shadow also could be described as having a sort of a bridge function to those things specifically that are opposed to the ego's uh point of view in terms of values, morals, ethics, etc., etc. Whether the ego is negatively Identified and the shadow brings up the positive or whether the ego is positively identified and the shadow brings up all the stuff we'd like to keep in the dark. What would distinguish the anima animus there is that

the what comes across the bridge are by and large images affects behavior patterns emotions personified contents that have to do with one's sexual and spiritual identity that have to do with the mode of being human that's opposite To one's conscious ego identity. So that's sort of theory. Then interesting things that come up in art as well as in in life uh are situations where the ego and the anima might gang up on the shadow and the anima. The shadow and the animus might gang up on the ego. Uh typical type of dream. I'm with my

boyfriend. My girlfriend comes along. My girlfriend and my boyfriend go off Together and leave me in the lurch. That's a the ego's deserted and both unconscious partners go off. Uh those again one tries to map them so one can talk about them but the actual experience of that is uh as if one has been abandoned, left high and dry. uh ganged up on, persecuted. It's it's a very difficult situation that has to be sorted out so Relationship can happen on both in both directions. You want to add something >> just the interesting example in Musil

who deals with precisely this situation. Ul the brother introduces the shadow calling it the shadow. Now Muzil was not a card carrying Yungian. He did understand animus extraordinarily well. Olrich introduces the shadow to explain to Agatha that they will not bring consciousness between them until they've dealt with Their shadow sides. And he explicates the meaning of shadow in those very personal terms. It is the bridge. He doesn't use the word bridge but it makes no difference. It's life that hangs upon the shadow. He's saying without it we live in a permanent and horribly disturbed unconsciousness.

And by that he doesn't mean simply dwelling in the unconscious. He means cut off from vitality, from the vivifying fact of their life. It's an Extraordinary thing. I wish it were possible to make this more accessible. In England, these volumes are still in print in translation and of course in German for those of you who read German. Just wondering if you use the word spiritual a lot and also spirituality not being facious but a lot of you don't use this terminology that often would you from your point of view if you want to share when

you're talking about the spiritual what you're pointing to and Then um second question would you see any difference between the work uh I said the inner work from a therapist point and work spirituality >> after Well, I I tried to allude to it briefly uh this morning, and you're quite right. We haven't gone into it, which is a whole other lecture really, by saying uh not only who's there, who am I, but what am I? So that the spiritual would be the Latter question. Not just who am I as a woman, what kind of woman,

what kind of opposite modality do I have to deal with and find in myself and that finds me. But what is that? What is the meaning of this and where they conjoin I think in life? uh as illustrated in the Russian story Barry cited this morning, here's this seemingly trivial little uh afternoon tea and a slight pressure of the hand. But for him, it wasn't just a uh penumbal sexual feeling, but it was a feeling of coming alive and and uh experiencing firsthand what matters. what difference it makes. What is it all for? So what

anyway? And I think the answers to those kinds of questions that besiege us are always in experiences like that, but they pertain to the to spirit to meaning questions. I Don't want to divide it up too much, but I think they often come through sexual meanings. And by that I don't mean necessarily literal though that wouldn't be excluded but the bigger meaning of sexual the meaning of otherness and something that happens between me and the other and the other may be an author or an attitude or a or a public event something you just get

a smell of something that answers the so what Question with an experience not a formula. I mean the kind of trick that happens to uh to women with an animous uh you let off is um it's a split situation in a way might be another illustration of that you get caught in asking verbally consciously insistently what's the meaning of this? So, it's as if you're making supper and you're peeling a carrot and it's what's the meaning of the carrot? Well, there Isn't any answer to that. It's ridiculous. I mean, the only answer to that is

to burst out laughing rockously. You can't answer that. It's a it's a bogus question. But a lot of us get caught up in what's the meaning of of this experience and it leads nowhere except to frustration. the kind of thing that answers it does answer it but answers it by a meeting or a greeting and I think it's in those uh experiences Where you feel your identity is touched enlarged by something other than yourself. So that this takes us off a little bit into theory. The person struggling to meet and integrate the contraual side becomes

more of a female, not less. It's androgynous only in the sense that you know you're not just one or the other, but the you become more the your own woman integrating the masculine. And that Isn't just sort of gym techniques of flexing your identity muscles. That's a feeling of being in touch with something that's shared among women that's shared with men. It's a it's like becoming a people. Now you can answer the second one which is >> I think both have plentiful exemplary answers in earlier practice and I think modern depth psychology must Face this

in the analytical session as the minds of the great mystics had to face it in their personal experience in the 14th century which is one of the three great centuries of mystical experience and is simply extraordinary the proliferation of works of quality but not simply as wonderful examples of language but of experience dealt with, examined and then represented. I have an example is very brief. This is in the 14th century and it's a meditation on The spirit on the Holy Spirit. The language I've somewhat modernized but it's very much to the point. It deals very

much also with materials I was trying to exemplify with the paintings that self-beholding which it seems to us is something that the analytical procedure must lead us to with what this meditation begins shall I purchase you the spirit or compare you and see how much of a sexual resonance this statement of the spirit has about The spirit with nothing except yourself. You must then give yourself to me that with you I may buy you. Anticipate yourself therefore and make me ready to receive you. And when you are received speak for me to yourself and respond

to yourself on my behalf. Ask of yourself your gifts for me and on yourself. Asking yourself from me bestow yourself. Now, oh most sweet, I see what you would have from me. That kind of dialogue which ultimately is with oneself and with whatever of the spirit one is willing not simply to postulate but to accept in oneself. That's where the spirit enters and the spirit willing remains. Now so that we all may have some more time to remain together we perhaps can take a five seven minute break and then come back for our last session.

We're going to close this uh afternoon, this whole project with trying to Concentrate on solutions and repair of the bridge to stay within that same image. I'll talk this section about repairing from the ego side and what sort of effects happen and then the last part repairing from the self side. We go back in our minds and think that the function of this bridge, what comes across this bridge is the to open the ego to the self, to open the self to the ego, to Establish sort of conversant relationship between them. The ego's job is

to have reactions, responses. They may be negative, they may be positive. They may be receptive. They may be rejecting. But it's to be there, present, involved, engaged, which right away means that any struggle toward repair amounts to the ego stepping out of its Passive secondary position into one of present presence and engagement. The anima anima's content is no longer in front of the ego like armor or protection. It no longer substitutes for the ego nor does it split away from the ego thereby splitting the ego itself. Now this is in the best of all possible

worlds. I prefer to use the word struggle rather than solve. How then does that happen? In essence, It means the ego tries to turn toward what's coming across the bridge. It's a bodily, soul, spirit, will effort, luck movement. One tries to turn toward instead of away. It tries to turn toward and withstand whatever reactions come up in one. Less to do than to be there experiencing really less to solve than to struggle. Now let me give you a lot of examples Because I think those are the clearest rather than just giving theory. When we're in

a secondary position in our egos, not meeting, not engaging with whatever is coming across the bridge, usually the contraexual factor is projected. We haven't met it. We haven't struggled with it. We haven't come into our very own identities. And usually the contraexual factor still stays carried By the parental figures even though we've left home physically. It's as if psychologically there's still mother as the carrier of the feminine or father of the masculine or sometimes it's reversed. Mother's carrying the masculine or father's carrying the feminine but it's somebody else the parental authorities. This is a particular

issue that comes up, I believe, in marriage, especially when a child has been born. No one ever tells You, and probably rightly so, how much work children are. If we knew ahead of time, we wouldn't get into it. And the exhaustion that new parents feel is really tremendous, particularly if the woman has actually given birth to the child. It's not an adopted child. So her body is shared not just the nine months before but usually at least nine months afterwards. One is bled into the other literally. And at that point the the danger for the

Couple is that they become mom and pop. And all the libido, all the self fire is carried by this little infant. And there simply is no time for meeting between one another. And the demands and the fright about taking care of this literally helpless new being seems so great that there's no time for what went on between us. It's a particular danger for a man at that point not to be tough and Call his bride back to him as the woman of his choice, as his mate, not just mother, not just mother of the newborn.

Personally, maybe because I'm remembering my own exhaustion as a new mother, I think the burden of that calling back falls more on the man than the woman who is really in the infant. But the problem for the man is he he's he feels and she will be the first to tell him if he doesn't feel that he's being like another one of the kids. He's Jealous. He wants her breast that the kid has. He wants her attention that the child has. And then he will get a shame, feel too small, too infantile, too greedy, too

something and not not be tough enough to say first things first. We all know theoretically that the happiest child is the one whose parents have a lively ongoing relationship between them and don't meet between with each other Through the child. So personally I think the burden is on the man to call the woman back to that visav so the whole relationship doesn't collapse into mother father and uh this can take very vivid anima form I'll just give you one man's example he comes home there are two children in this family he opens the door of

the apartment he sees his wife uh sees sees into the kitchen, sees his wife's back, and there's a certain way she stands when she's martyed, Overworked, and mad. He feels he he spots that and he feels coming at him which is also his projection greeting him from the outside a tremendous rush of energy that makes him feel like a bad boy or that he ought to be a good boy and run in and help with the dinner. And then what comes up in him is a red hot rage. Now that's pretty potent when you come

Home from work. See what's he to do? He's to struggle to turn to house those affects, those images, and get in touch with them. If he's not in touch with him, there's no way he can address his wife and and try to call her out of her overworked mother routine. And why is she in that? Because it's true. She is overworked. That's what makes these issues so compelling. It isn't as if she's just Being perverse or has had a bad day. She really is exhausted and tired. Another example uh this from this is a composite

example from a number of women who come into treatment complaining they cannot find a good relationship with a man. What comes out in all cases and the cases are very puzzling because these are very interesting attractive women who would make fabulous companions. So You wonder, you know, as they wonder what's happened to the men, this world people with troglodites, what's with these guys? But there's an underlying issue that has nothing to do with a man. Has to do with her and some feminine energy, feminine self, if you like, which is what comes across the bridge

to her that her ego has to turn and try to face. It's as if she does not honor the feminine herself, but projects that ego Task onto the male partner. Or if you want it in more mythological language, it's as if she herself does not worship the goddess. And the goddess's revenge is to always leave her left alone. Not until you turn and deal with your honoring of the feminine yourself can you then find a relationship because she's projecting that task onto the man and he has to fulfill it. And from the man's side in

one case I knew one of the Men. He said it's like that old fairy tale. there's a a thicket of thorns and nettles and I'm just exhausted by the time I try to get through that something that she should be doing she's asking me to do and it's just too tiring hence I'm not going to get through it still another kind of example which has nothing to do with partners or literally uh sexual relations but does have to do with the anima anima issue Animos issue In terms of one's connecting to the spiritual element if

you like. This has to do with inner transformation not outer partners. It has to do with fantasies that take up resonance in us sometimes for decades. They may be a theme in a sexual fantasy. They may be something you see in a film. They may be something you read. It's something that turns you on in a sense of connecting you within. The question is what do you do with Those fantasies? How do you live with them? How do you live them on further? Here I would suggest the problem of identification can intervene. Uh you see

somebody in a film that catches you. So you find yourself going off in fantasy, imagining a life with that character. That's substituting the fantasy for the real life you have. You lose your real life cuz you're measuring whoever's in your real life against the Fantasy figure. And you lose the fantasy connection. Compare it to reading a poem that touches you. You don't think you're going to become the poem. The poem touches you by putting you in touch with some undercurrent of life, some river of being that it forms a bridge to. Similarly, the fantasy puts

you in touch with a river of life within that you can't get in touch with any other way. The effort on the ego's side Is to turn and relate to that struggling, muddleheaded, not clear, withstanding the affect that implodes, risking the possession that might catch you pathologically. The healing from the ego side amounts to the ego struggling to turn toward what comes across the bridge, withstand the impact of it and sort out what one's reactions are. Here we get the idea that the bridge is Two ways. Here Yung's uh method of active imagination is quite

helpful where the ego sometimes takes upon itself the task to stand and face unconscious figures and tell those unconscious figures about the ego world about its values its ambitions its wishes and desires. It's almost as if the unconscious wants to know about our world as much as we want to know about its world. And with No sentimentality here, this isn't a cozy little tea party. And there's sometimes when the ego says, "No, I am not going to engage this content that's coming across the bridge. This is sick making. This is too dangerous. This is a

temptation. When the ego keeps making the effort to turn and have its own reactions, you get a kind of animal body sense. Sometimes you even get you're lucky enough to get body symptoms which tell you which Things to be engaged and which things to be avoided. In the Yungian vocabulary, we talk of the claims of the shadow. We're talking now of the claims of the ego. And those claims must be heard and must be accepted. We come and I'm going to give you in a moment some sound examples. music really sound which I think demonstrate

the nature of That most concrete of all experiences, the most human of all experiences where we experience ourselves and attempt somehow to articulate the ineffable which is within us to make the play on words is an ancient one, the ineffable effable. That's the great revolution. That's the great change. It's far more of a change than anything for which the vocabularies of revolution have been attached. It's to see ourselves part by part. And Nowhere are those parts seen so marvelously clearly as in the great artists who stop before what we call in the jargon of depth

psychology part objects. There is no understanding of the arts except in this way where we claim the ego part by part and there are no artists more ego centered sometimes to the point of madness than musicians. I spent my life among them I speak out of my own wounds and profound respect. What the best of them do is to live in that mixture of complimentarity and indeterminacy which the ego world enjoins. There is no verbal description possible here. The balance changes while you try to verbalize it. Thus its indeterminacy but it's there. Thus its complimentarity.

How do you capture it? The most audacious composers and improvisers have done so, I think, and done so with such Freshness, such honesty. They've given a house to their own imo worlds, to constellations of feeling and experience that come only to those who have deliberately hearkened to the feelings and experiences of. Let's never forget that when we say ego, we're saying I, the Latin pronoun. Freud was translated, unfortunately, from German too often, into Latin equivalent, as though in an English translation, and we've lost a lot. Ego is I. These are autobiographical works. I'm going to

play you four or five which very quickly in their samplings of parts in part objects I hope will demonstrate what we're talking about. >> Got to get a cable from him. I'll be right back. >> We're trying to get another cable. I We used to have in the jazz world a very simple statement was called vamp till ready. That's when a musician didn't Show up and what you did is you improvise something. you know, if you were a dancer, you did little shuffle off to Buffalo or to Brooklyn or wherever. I'm not just going to

vamp till ready. I'm going to steal from my last moments. So, you'll get this a little backwards the presentation not altogether distorted. I hope by this in the last 18 months of his life, the great philosopher Ludik Vickenstein wrote of all things on the subject of Color and as he always wrote in numbered thoughts. This of 350 brief brilliant apothematic statements is the 348th. So we are within two thoughts of the last written thoughts of one of the giants of thinking of this century. He says there seem to be propositions that have the character of

experiential propositions but whose truth is for me Unassalable. That is to say, if I assume that they are false, I must mistrust all my judgments. The issue in this kind of fidelity for that's what it is is not to be separated from oneself. I'm going ahead as I say from ego to self. But it is a two-way movement and as an suggested one must be able even when one has made the progression towards self or has accomplished Something that may be accurately so described described as self one must be able then again to make the

ego claim that's fidelity. It is a fullness of persuasion. Jane Austin certainly no depth psychologist in the book called persuasion says through two characters this same point says it in a marvelous conciseness. Her two lovers Captain Wentworth and Anne Elliot face each other. He the captain says to her, "Anne, you pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. You do us justice indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men." Our difficulty is to see that attachment and constancy in ourselves. If we reach the level of self, we've reached a

certain rhythm in the events of our lives, We've reached a kind of drama of self-possession where what we have been and what we are are somehow indisolubably united. The fullness of that possession of self is such that it reaches back beyond the human through the human. One of the most extraordinary examples of somebody freed to do this by yian analysis is the English poet, translator and critic Edwin Mure who with his wife did the first translations into English Of France Kovka. a superb poet. In his autobiography, The Story and the Fable, he tells the story

of what was a Yungian analysis. This boy from the Orcne Islands north of Scotland from a family that was almost, you would think of primordial in itself, in touch with the world before any world any of us can imagine existed. He Mure who died almost 30 years ago wrote in poems and he didn't come to poetry as a professional poet till his Middle and late 30s. Freed up by that analysis he reaches to the animals he says we must join again with the animals in friendship. Instead of the industrial emptiness, instead of the broken city

which we all know so well, he is telling us take in all the world around us. That undergrowth I showed that Van Go understood so well where the tree was part of his family. For him, Mure The attachment was to animal life. He says recreating the days of creation. Our life is changed. They're coming. The animals who come just before we come in that allegorization of creation in the six days before God rests. Their coming is our beginning. Our life has changed. Their coming our beginning. And in another poem, just four lines of a poem

called One Foot in Eden, time takes the foliage and the fruit and burns The archetypal leaf to shapes of tenor, terror, and of grief scattered along the winter way. the archetypal leaf on a tree again, huh? To shapes of terror and of grief, scattered along the winter way. He wants us to see that the world's day, as he puts it elsewhere, is getting late. And on our trees, the trees of our being, terror is written. Do we turn inside ourselves To the creation of all being which is there written to the archetypal leaf which is

on our trunk. It's very hard for most of us, but it's made easy if we listen, if we hearken to both the ego and the self, which grows out of that hearkening to the ego. An example which for me is of an awesome finality is another example from the Russian. It's a translation from the poetry of Baris Pastan. We know pastarch because of that great book Dr. Jivago, you remember, which came out of Russia, secreted out of Russia, was given the Nobel Prize, he but the book more particularly, which he was not allowed out of

Russia to accept. But he's never been altogether obscure because his poetic skills are so unmistakable. And this much must be said even in times of terror in Russia poetry At least in general is deeply honored. Aid Mandelam one of the greatest of the Russian poets of our time says Russia is the only country which takes poets seriously it murders them when they hold a position that is so unpleasant. Pasta because he wrote a poem with a few ironic lines about Stalin was sent off to a concentration camp and killed and because his wife the extraordinary

Nadesa Mandelto had memorized memorized so many of his poems Which could not be written down in those days. She was able to once again recapture them on paper and we have them this giant. Well, Pastanak was a poet even more than a novelist and a poet who had before he died a kind of total recall of the moments where his own contraexual life was so rich. If you know Dr. Jivago, you know how much he makes of two women in that book. The book is meaningless if one sees it simply as a love story. If

one Recognizes it in terms very museil, very pelike of a man and his contraexuality, it comes wonderfully alive. This says it very well. It's a poem called women in my childhood. I recall from my childhood days as I peered through an open window that our lane was dark like a quarry at midday under the trees. He didn't write this poem to help me with this lecture. He really does say Under the trees. And he does make the point. Twin rows of poppplers enclosed down the narrow lane in their shade. The roadway, sidewalks, basements, and the

church with its bulbous roof. A pathway of grasses and weeds cut through a neglected garden. And a neglected garden is what we're talking about this afternoon and finishing this presentation. It's he, it's we, it's our ego and then our self whose Claims are not attended to. The women who lived there imparted a mysterious air to our lane. The girls next door attracted a bevy of tatlas and friends. The fragrance of fresh musk cherry made sweet their casement windows. There, grownup, quarrelome women, worked up by their common abuse, stood cross in the doorways like trees that

border municipal rose beds. I sulked, enduring in silence their lashing tongues and twitter to love them became like science an act of devotion and wonder. You understand what he says when he says to love them? He they are still with lashing tongues and they twitter, but he loved them in an act of devotion and wonder like science. And then he says in conclusion to all I remember From childhood like shadows of days long ago I say to them truly I thank you convinced I am still in their debt. Extraordinary statement out of his depths in

his debt. It's that fullness which relieves the onset of despair and where past was despair was threatening. It relieves as a sense of the animals leading to humanity and bringing us back To humanity led Vure not quite right in his mind in his freeing from the constraints of uncertainty of self and unwillingness to yield to ego. Sexual identity requires this. It's extraordinary how often untouched symbolically even by the language, the images, the words of sexuality, we discover or rediscover our identity. When we find, however remotely, in animals, in distant women For whom we never felt

what we would think of as a voluuptuous response. When we find in these elements, textures, beings, our own becoming, it's the most becoming thing we do. I'll give this to an now and then if we have that after that perhaps we can conclude with some of the music. >> Why don't you do first and then we'll see. I want to close with some comments about Repairing the bridge from the self side and what sorts of things that leads to, what kinds of experiences when the bridge is more than less intact. One of the things that

happens to us is that we're pulled across it out of the ego world toward the territory of the self toward a world of otherness which increases the world of the ego because it's found a rudder. It's found an anchor even and a number of things happen usually. One thing that happens is that the personifications of what comes across the bridge, the anima figures, the animos figures emerge and develop. Certain kinds of personifications when received and engaged by the ego may simply disappear and then others take their place and then others and then others. So you

may Actually get a development of this contraexual figure. I'll give you one fabulous example. It's really like something you dream up. Uh and this was a series of dreams dreamt by a woman over a number of years about 3 years when she was working very hard on facing what came from the self side and receiving what the self sent. In the beginning, the kinds of dreams she'd have were of a man who was really a bum. Had no job. He had horrible clothes. He Was filthy. Some dreams are is even a suggestion of a smell

works works works. Next type of dream that came he's had a bath. Then he has clean clothes. Another several dreams he has a job. Then there was a very decisive dream where he has an office. Then the last cluster of dreams show this man with a life. And the very last dream is this. He the man calls me on the telephone and he says to me over the phone, "You are a dear woman. I will always love you." She never dreamt of him again. So there's a development of the contraexual figure itself. It's like characters

in one's inner population become more distinct. That's one effect. Another effect is that this middle realm I talked about earlier begins to expand And become a fact. It's like an interior space and there the mixing of sexuality and spirituality is very interpenetrating and which is which who knows from one point of view who cares? It's a place well Jung talks about it in one comment. He says we don't dream out of ourselves we dream from what is between us. So that one of the things that happens is that we become convicted not just Mentally but

in our guts how interdependent we are one upon the other one group mixed with the other and the other is not just us but it's all the uses inside us and you get quite different possibilities available in terms of to give one rather vivid example what one does with projections the ones that come from me and the ones that come toward me from other people there's a possibility Of interceding from the ego side on behalf of the content that is projected one gets familiar enough with what these contents are that one can engage them more

directly. If one is doing the projecting or if the projections are coming to us from other people, it may be that with more than less consciousness, we decide for a time to carry those projections and not in a kind of awful abuse of Psychoanalytic theory get too hygienic and as if to say you dirty projector, you take that back. First place it doesn't work. Second place there's a there's a compassion that's bred from the effort of trying to turn toward one's wounds and feel the pain and meet who's coming across the bridge. This compassion benefits

others as well. One might carry something for another person knowing one isn't that p person's Projected content but in some way one is also or even more intimate examples one may become dug up like a garden one's roots exposed by somebody else's projection and in carrying it. You're not just doing a favor for your neighbor. You're also being made conscious of something you would never be pushed into touch with Except through the force of your neighbor's projection on you, of something in them, which digs up something in you. Gets very complicated, but it's what makes

us a people instead of a bunch of individuals. Another thing that happens and with this thought I will round this off and conclude. Not only are we more clear about the world of otherness, the otherness of Other people and the otherness of the inner population and our bonding and depending on others. But we may be made more bold to risk union to risk conjoining connecting really saying this is it. I'm going to try this with something within or with another person without. Conjoint with this is the fantastic notion That our struggles with missing pieces of

our egos, pathological kinks in our uh shadows, our struggles with sexual problems, with spiritual matters. that all of these struggles that seem so small from the larger point of the world's ills really matter and really connect with the troubles in our world. It's as if we catch a glimpse that we join together in crafting the stone in improvising our own small identities by meeting these Contraexual contents. We helped craft ways in which the self can come into the world can come into society can come into worlds of nations. This is like living on a threshold

toward a bigger center and that center does not offer perfection but a way of living that is big enough to house all the parts. So that in old-fashioned fairy tale language there are some frogs who do not get turned into princes. They remain Frogs. There are some princesses who do not stay princesses but are reduced to frogs or bears or geese. And there's room for those too in this self country. There are some wounds we have that do not get healed but go on bleeding right into death. And there's room for those too. And sometimes

in the midst of those bleedings, the very wounds become A source of healing if not for ourselves than for others. I give you one of the first examples. I cited the man who felt he'd lost his soul and lost his adolescence in working on that somehow synchronistically conjointly in his job it came up. This was some years ago but here it is again in the papers he was asked to speak to a bunch of teenagers about the issues of suicide. He had a way of connecting with Them that was just fantastic. here his his own

wound, his own compulsion, working to contain that through that very wound. He has a voice that speaks to suicidal teenagers. Living in relation to the self, repairing from the self side means also living with our failures. For those two make us transcend the ego limits. We may never have the kind of love or ability To love that we seek and we witness to that love in our longing for it rather than in our fulfillment of it. We are made bold to risk uniting with what is truly given us to be that comes across from the

self side. And in this conjoining of ego and contraexual figure or figures, it's a successive experience. What gets born are images of the self, our own particular images. You'll remember for Jung the self was like a god image within. We would say that the self-im images that may get born are not God but they may be that within us which knows about God. So that these images, these affects, these glimpses, these are our precious, precious possessions. One through hard experience, often heart-rending Experience. But in this we join with each other hearing about each other's selfimages

benefiting from each other's risktaking to turn and meet what's coming across the bridge which gives birth to selfimages which feed into the world. Our sexual identities touch our spiritual identities. The anima and animus are the thresholds to this bigger country, this territory of the self. Now we'll try for some music. >> Due to copyright restrictions, the musical selections are not included on this tape. >> Now perhaps we have a few minutes as you would like. questions, comments, whatever. And then we can call it an afternoon. >> Okay. You're talking about contents of the ego probably

should not engage, right? >> And what do you do when they come Charging across? Well, you might step aside and let the herd of rhinos go forward. uh makes me think of that part of the uh Amora psyche myth where she has to go and get some wool from the rampaging rams of the sun who are very volatile and get very angry and just crush you and it has some interpretations talk about it as a symbol of primordial aggressiveness. and uh she waits till the sun goes down And then goes along the fence and gets

the wool that caught on the fence. So it might be something like that, standing aside, letting it rush past and just getting the little piece one needs. Sometimes the ego just runs and hides. uh sometimes uh I'm thinking now of a specific example which one might think the ego should not have engaged but this woman's ego did. The figure came in a dream that was so scary to her it woke Her up. Uh, it was a dream where she and some friends stopped at a sort of roadside cafe, get something to eat, and uh, a

man came in with a bunch of thug companions, and this man was huge and like those figures in the James Bond movies with big metal teeth, the Jaws figure, and they just started randomly ripping up the place, violence for violence sake. Absolutely terrified her in the dream. She woke up, but it Enraged her too, the way senseless violence sometimes can enrage. So, with a good deal of uh muscle building, she engaged the figure in active imagination, which when it works is very frightening. Um, and she found herself yelling at him, "Stop scaring me like that.

Why are you behaving like that? absolutely terrified me. In other words, what she found herself doing in the act Of imagination was giving emotionally, assertively all her reactions to this kind of senseless violence. And in this particular thing, it worked. He was a sort of dumb, brutish kind of guy, as if he didn't know that he had this effect. So she penetrated in with her frightened reaction and outrage. But you know there's no formula. Sometimes you run and hide. Sometimes you take the risk. Part of it is getting used to what works in the situation

and getting used To your own symptoms which go from your body up to your intuition so that you try a little bit. And if you get a signal this is trouble, you stop. You don't feed the devil or you try a little bit, it works. Try a little bit more. You sort of build up your own style really of putting the parts together. >> Well, if you try something, I mean, let's take this same active imagination. She objects and so forth, and he just Takes his big hand and hits her on the head or looks

as if he's going to hit her on the head. Obviously that um stance is not only not going to work in making contact, it's going to inflame the situation so that he's going to frighten her even more. So it would be foolhardy for her in active imagination to come and yell at this figure some more. That would just be feeding the Devil. you you uh feed the thing that's going to possess you instead of starving it. >> Well, there's an illustration right out of that rhinoceros. You remember what UNESCO did with the rhinoceros? You don't

identify with it. You may let it come smashing by in hordes of rhinocerai. For him, the rhinoceros became the great sign of Nazism and the Nazi occupation of France where everybody suddenly saw the marvel of the Rhinoceros head and in identification took on rhinoceros heads. What he was saying was that the rhinoceros head was the Nazi and people simply yielding to whatever came smashing