"Golden thread," elephants on parade...

Making soul-sense of history and its first rough-drafts

Greetings, with a newShrink that might well have worn a one-word title: Whiplash.

Spans traversed have been vast, lightning-fast, and

• Temporal: Past-to-present and back again;

• Geographic: American courtrooms from New York City to Wilmington, DE, (to name just two); and even

• Transatlantic: Windy beaches to stark waters-edge cliffs of Normandy, France, 80 years after the D-Day invasion that ultimately liberated Nazi-dominated Europe.

News stories and images are fittingly plentiful, just a few sampled and illustrated here.

for the record

Trump Guilty on All Counts in Hush-Money Case (New York Times, Thursday, 5.30.24)

Donald J. Trump, the former president and presumptive 2024 Republican nominee, was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in a case stemming from a payment that silenced a porn star.

Biden calls for solidarity with Ukraine at D-Day anniversary ceremony near the beaches of Normandy (The Washington Post, Thursday, 6.6.24)

President Joe Biden has marked the 80th anniversary of D-Day by pledging during a ceremony at the American cemetery in Normandy that “we will not walk away” from Ukraine

Witness in Hunter Biden Gun Trial Gives Intimate Portrait of His Drug Use (The New York Times’ continuing coverage of the trial that began this week in Wilmington, DE.)

In text exchanges between Mr. Biden and a former girlfriend, Hallie Biden, the widow of his brother, Beau, she urged him to seek treatment as he trawled the streets for drugs.

When feeling a travel-week calendar was too hectic, we might be glad it wasn’t this:

Far beyond energetic, starting with her Monday 73rd birthday First Lady Jill Biden spent three days in the Delaware courtroom of Hunter Biden’s gun trial. She was there through Wednesday to support the 54-year-old stepson she’s known since he was 5, mothered since he was 7. Thursday she joined the President in Normandy, France, for official state events commemorating the 80th anniversary of D-Day and underscoring US leadership strength in the world. Friday, Jill Biden was back in Delaware court during devastatingly raw family-member testimony detailing extent and impacts of Hunter Biden’s extreme recurring bouts of drug addiction. Then on Saturday it was back to France for required-presence at more state occasions over the weekend.

This story offers a seldom-reported view of Dr. Biden, her fierce unifier-protector roles and dynamics of a family loving and intensely cohesive, yet also complicated and with its share of tragedy in many forms.

First Lady Jill Biden ‘Boomerangs” between Delaware Courtroom and Normandy, France (NYT, Friday, 6.7.24)

On Friday night’s PBS News Hour recap of the week David Brooks and Jonathan Capehart bring nuance and empathy to these and other stories. I found Brooks’ observations about the Hunter Biden trial particularly insightful.

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“where were you, when…?”

It’s been a month or more of big-year graduation-anniversaries, reunions, commencements, Memorial Day — all soon after antiwar protests on college campuses across the nation inevitably evoked Vietnam-era memory and comparisons.

The current headlines further reinforce signs of the season.

Applying newShrink lenses of depth psychology, focus shifts slightly from center-stage, news-spotlighted events, issues and people. It turns instead to concerns and pressing questions coming to light from the margins.

Of late I had thought a lot about psychological dimensions of current news and history. The impacts are at both individual and collective-group levels of our nation, its institutions and subcultures. (A case example of the former, individual impacts might be that too-closely-followed recent U.S. Supreme Court presidential-immunity “hearing” that quite literally rendered me physically ill!)

Nationwide there has now been an extended time of profound, arguably increasing, fracture-to-complete fissures at collective group/institutional levels. These days, I am surely far from first or alone in being reminded somberly of Lincoln in the turbulent time leading up to the American Civil War. Recently in concerned conversation, I heard myself comment aloud, that many days it seems only the lack of a clear geographic Mason-Dixon line preserves our increasingly illusory united states. (Even less comforting at the moment, we in America share such overlapping complexities of geography, culture, most-holy aspects of different religions, ethnicity, and resources/wealth with perpetually war-torn, existentially-threatened-over-millennia… Israel. Perhaps a topic for another newShrink day.)

Amid such conditions and backdrop today’s themes can be distilled to a question:

How does, or can, the center hold, and through what bonds, forces, actions, people?

For individuals the fractures are both reflected and expressed in self-alienation and utter lack of the self-awareness required for wise, conscious decisions. Often day-to-day functioning, even by those charged with heavy responsibility, is irrational reactivity stoked and fed by disinformation.

However: So, too, can markers and patterns of hope, strength and resilience be found at society’s most individual and intimate-group levels.

At Omaha Beach and Pointe du Hoc

Examples of this were many, and compelling, if you caught any of the live or taped video coverage of the D-Day commemorations at Normandy. Albeit physically frail, the some-200 surviving veterans were very present, razor-sharp-aware near-hundred-year-olds.

At each of the two most widely covered days’ events, from wheelchairs or determined to walk, each would first gaze across those gathered, then encounter one another and nations’ leaders, including Joe Biden. They visibly, viscerally met — and were met — in tearful, sometimes clutching embraces.

Few, if any of them, knew, had ever known or individually met one another as fellow soldiers or as leaders. Yet the bond of recognition between them was palpable, deep and mutual.

The official descriptions of their challenge and mission accomplished unfolded — most notably on Friday with present-day Rangers and surviving D-Day veterans atop the high precipice-bunker at Pointe du Hoc. It was clear the same ironclad recognition and rallying bond among total strangers had been in full force those June days of 1944.

Mind you, these boys — the youngest of those present this week now 96 — at barely 16 years old, got this ineffable something. They staked their literal lives, and many of ours over the ensuing eight decades, to act on it.

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A Manhattan Criminal Court jury room

Prior to this second example is a good pause-point for some disclosure. The May 30th NPR news report of 34 guilty verdicts against Donald Trump on felony criminal charges broadcast on my car radio, as I left I-77 on the Exit 30 off-ramp into Davidson on my way to a friend’s house.

The news packed an emotional wallop I had never expected or sought. I may have spoken aloud my gratitude beyond this or any one verdict, just that in these fraught times the rule of law via verdict by a jury of ordinary citizens — older than America itself — endures. So far.

The jury process, ritual and confidential containment of the jury room itself have profound depth-psychological, archetypal near-sacred aspects not unlike those of the psychotherapy consulting room. These elements in both are in the service of well-grounded outcomes that are more likely to transcend individual egos and motivations.

On this Davidson car trip I was on my way to meet my friend Pam Kelley and make the trip together for an evening event at the Charlotte Museum of History. A friend since we were colleagues decades ago during my Charlotte newspaper-reporter years, Pam’s a gifted, incisive veteran journalist and author of Money Rock: A Family’s Story of Cocaine, Race and Ambition in the New South.

Along with what would be a large roomful of other current and former area journalists, we were en route to “The changes we have seen,” a 40-year look at news coverage in the city and region’s decades of dizzyingly fast, exponential growth. The local history-focused panel interviews featured veteran journalists — among them some favorite former editors, friends and a few newShrink readers.

All of us news-hounds had arrived, naturally full of this historic-first national news breaking “on our time” for the gathering. It was a lively panel and engaged crowd, with interesting takes, laughs and plenty of nostalgia in response to cues and prompts from Charlotte community historian Dr. Tom Hanchett.

The then-vs-now perspectives on the late-breaking national Trump-verdict news might have made for compelling reference point for discussion. Interestingly, in that whole room of journalists and history-buffs, not one of us brought it up.

What did come to mind, and later lingered, was musing more narrowly within such broad groups of valued former coworkers, colleagues, mentors, friends, fellow members of faith-community, civic or social club. I’m reminded here of a diverse handful of us working together at different levels and jobs in high-intensity corporate communications, during the peak years of massive bank mergers and acquisitions. Through some unknown recognition we’d connected around routinely sharing and talking about our dreams (of all things in a bank office!) In an early version of what’s now known as social or group dreaming, a few of us became able to identify or describe dream material “belonging to” or applicable to other(s) rather than the specific dreamer. In this odd context we became, and are, forever friends.

What I am curious about from the standpoint of depth psychology and soul, is what forms, constitutes, solidifies and perpetuates those fewer, quite special, enduring, by no means necessarily logical, often-quirky bonds of deepest relationship that cross miles, decades, monumental life-changes? (The kinds of bonds perhaps capable of scaling unimaginable German-bunker at Normandy!)

Then into this time of events and musings came…

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synchronicity!

A CA email request for help with an NC-based referral need reopened delightful connection with Dr. Pat Katsky. A Jungian analyst and Pacifica core faculty, she was one of my first, a favorite and most diverse subject-range professors in both master’s and PhD graduate programs in depth psychology at Pacifica. She and I have had particular shared affinity for dreams and dreamwork —she reports having saved and remembered a couple of those that came to me more than 15 years ago! She’s a charter-reader of newShrink, but I hadn’t been to California and we hadn’t had real-time connection in awhile.

(Our back-and-forth exchanges by text and phone addressed Pat’s need for an NC based therapist-referral. For me a lovely side-result of the process is reconnection and planned follow-up with fellow Pacifica alum, veteran marriage and family therapist and pastoral counselor, Dr. John Rowe, for several years now practicing in Charlotte. A lovely and generous friend, support and mentor through the early years of my graduate study and psychotherapy practice in the Lake Norman area, John for many years headed the community counseling center housed at Davidson United Methodist Church.)

During catching-up phone conversation with Pat — in a completely unrelated context or topic I don’t recall — she happened to share in passing a couple of “Jungian gems” that directly touched on my musings described above. I eagerly accepted her offer to send the full quotes and references from her teaching notes. These so directly address many of today’s newShrink themes that I’ll share them verbatim.

A couple of refresher notes on certain Jungian terms and concepts may be helpful:

• The capital-S-Self as used here refers to the deeper, archetypal or universal Self that incorporates the unconscious and is distinct from our conscious ego-self (lower case s).

• The Self is not God or god of any specific religion; the Self might be understood as our psychological/neurological capacity, as with hardware or hardwiring, for experiencing, receiving, engagement with the sacred or divine.

• In Jungian thought, articulated beautifully in the work of Dr. Lionel Corbett, there is an inherent religious function of the psyche represented by the archetypal Self.

• Worth noting also, for Jung all psychological functions, issues and problems are in essence spiritual ones. Jung himself was the son and grandson of a long line of Swiss Protestant ministers. A profound impact on his earliest psychological work was in response to his own minister-father’s complete loss of faith.

• Finally, you may recall that individuation is our continued, increased wholeness — conscious engagement with more of our unknown unconscious aspects — over the entire course of adult life.

• A prerequisite for individuation, and the major developmental task of mature adulthood, is what Edinger termed the relativization of the ego.

from Dr. Pat Katsky’s lecture notes

“A collective dimension of the religious function of the psyche seems related to Marie-Louise von Franz’s idea that, at a certain point in the individuation process, we gather a soul family around ourselves for the purposes of mutual individuation.  It also brings to mind a comment of Jung’s (1977) about those few, special relationships which have the mysterious component of mutual individuation at their core. After talking about different kinds of relationships, specifically mentioning sexuality and friendship, Jung observed::

“There is a third kind of relationship, the only lasting one, in which it is as though there were an invisible telegraph wire between human beings….I call it, to myself, the Golden Thread.”

Reference: Jung, C. G. (1977). C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters. McGuire, W. and R.F.C. Hull, Eds. Bollengen Series XCVII, Princeton: Princeton University Press,  p.31)

[from Pat’s lecture notes]

: …” the solidification of deep bonds of psychological connection… demonstrate in a visceral way what Marie-Louise von Franz referred to so beautifully as the process of bonding with and “gathering a soul family for the purposes of mutual individuation.” (von Franz, 1978/1980,  p.177). Von Franz explained:

“One might describe this as the social function of the Self. Each person gathers around him his own “soul family,” a group of people not created by accident or by mere egoistic goals and motivation, but rather through a deeper, more essential spiritual interest or concern: reciprocal individuation….[T]his kind of relationship, by way of the Self, has something strictly objective, strangely transpersonal about it. It gives rise to a felt sense of immediate, timeless “being together”…. There exists no individuation process in anyone that does not, at the same time, produce this relatedness to one’s fellowmen.”

Reference: Von Franz, M-L. (1980). Projection and re-collection in Jungian psychology. (W. Kennedy, Trans.) London: Open Court, p. 177. (Original work published in 1978).

Considering again the above description of individuation and its necessary relativization of the ego described by Edinger…

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more synchronicity!

In comes an online post from reader-friend Ann Ahern Allen, with one of her often priceless messages from the universe

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and more!

By this point all of the above material had me thinking in images of our life-animating, ongoing dance — between conscious ego and Self or others among inner archetypal figures that may be activated. There’s also the dance, both conscious and un-, in relation with another.

Music, poetry and dance itself of course can often be ways to acccess, explore and express this. On this I recalled working for awhile long ago with a Jungian analyst, who during group work would often play profoundly soulful, erotic Van Morrison songs as a way to encourage us to access and engage with the Self. The same sort of dance and material are involved whether with Self or beloved other. (But by way of caveat, be aware that communing-with-the-sacred-Self application of your favorite soulfully erotic song may interfere or spoil it entirely for the other context!)

So about the time of these musings, into my feed comes an illustrated meme and first stanza of a rare new-to-me poem-song from Leonard Cohen (which may be long familiar to everyone else.)

I looked it up, and found its multi-layered lyrics staggering, as is often the case with his work. On this one I read that it among other things was envisioning aftermath of Holocaust. (Hence such references as burning violin, witnesses to be gone, calming panic) To me this one works at both levels of the intra-psychic — conscious ego self-to-soul Self, and interpersonal relation with beloved other.

Maybe what most grabbed me first was the quirky grammar and syntax of the title and lyrics. It’s odd seeing/experiencing “dance” as a transitive verb, with “me” (or for that matter, “you,” "him” or “her”) as object. And the thing is in second person; suppose he could be submissive to a higher-power-capital-S-self… or calling on a beloved to take charge.

If this dissection hasn’t utterly ruined the song, you might want to listen wherever you access music. It’s kind of lovely beyond the lyrics too.

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Now before closing, as with every newShrink edition…

the elephants

Those reading awhile may have noticed the excerpt, or perhaps have pulled up the link to the entire William Stafford poem, that’s the closing message at the end of every edition. It’s a long favorite of mine, revisited often with others during and since my graduate school years in depth psychology.

Since newShrink’s earliest inception the poem for me articulates its essential purposes. Today it articulates themes from the news, Jung’s “Golden Thread,” and von Franz’s soul families.

On the personal front in recent years, this pictured “parade of elephants” has called up the poem with recurring delight, each time I opened one of my classic Babar children’s books for reading time with grand Miz E. (Alas, I fear those days are numbered if not past. This was before her own reading skills kicked in, along with voracious appetite for all things Harry Potter! )

Today’s closing excerpt is the more complete poem.

William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”

If you don't know the kind of person I am,/ and I don’t know the kind of person you are,/ a pattern that others made may prevail in the world/ and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,/ a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break…

…And as elephants parade holding tail-to-tail,/ if one elephant wanders the circus won’t find the park…/

So I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,/ a remote important region in all who talk:/ though we could fool each other, we should consider—/ lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,/
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;/
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —/
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

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And, that is all I have! Talk to you soon.

🦋💙 tish