Shrink-Wrap Sunday 3.13.22
Soul-in-Place, Soul-in-Motion and.... Type-Casting?
Greetings, and happy spring-forward Sunday from newShrink! I hope the later sunset brings welcome beauty to your area.
(With a little luck, maybe this edition will make its way out to you before sunset is completely over today!)
“It’s ALIVE!”… a few notes on process
Where conventional wisdom has it that the devil is in the details, with soul-tracking work like newShrink it’s something more like the psyche is alive, well and actively playing in the work. I’m reminded here of a bathing-slippery baby image in a charming New Yorker short story that I shared in a post awhile back.
Some examples of what this looks like:
🌀As in recent weeks, the above photo-collage was simply an organizational tool to bypass some Substack design limitations and provide readers a sort of map or guide — kind of like a slide deck when you’re giving a speech or presentation.
🌀It’s not until late in the process of gathering, sorting and writing the week’s material that I’m looking at it visually. This week that’s Saturday morning coffee time, with wartime Ukraine temporarily offset by a background loop and written coverage of the ACC basketball tournament.
🌀That had included lamentations over UNC’s abysmal loss in the previous night’s semifinals, with the Duke-VA Tech game final still looming that night. (I was already surprised — OK, dismayed — to be unable to ignore or omit from this post what clearly was the best, most psychologically astute written profile piece I’ve read in awhile. Its subject: Retiring Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski.)
🌀 The visuals come alive when brought together — and once they do I have to figure out what to do with them. There are surprises.
🌀 I had no idea how Coach K would wind up talking, as the picture indicates, with the late-yet-still-animated Jungian Marion Woodman. (A conversation well worth some eavesdropping, I’m sure…)
🌀… or that Kierkegaard’s comment on spring-forward Sunday would suggest unwitting humor and prescience about… time.
🌀That Ukraine’s emerging global hero of a President Volodymyr Zelenskyy would so literally illustrate what happens when our deeper authentic selves come from behind the curtains of type-cast roles and scripts (one of today’s core psychological themes)…
🌀… all with autocratic-invader Russian President Vladimir Putin a pair of inscrutable eyes peeking through the small opening of a vast and still-unknown white space…
🌀 And then bringing the perspectives and ghosts of history’s other wars and wartime figures, we have the First Lady of the Confederacy Varina Howell Davis, portrayed in historic-novel form. (This is my book club’s selection up for discussion this week. Later in this “Women’s History Month” I hope to revisit both Varina and her close friend Mary Boykin Chesnut, an astonishing life and body of writing work explored in a Shrink-wrap last fall.
With this entirely new foreword, today’s edition now tackles how, or even whether, these ideas and individuals connect and overlap with relevance to current news.
connecting themes with stories….
Some weeks the newShrink focus is on the wide array of events — the “what, why and how” of news with a bit of comment from psychological and historic perspectives. Others, like this one, are planned as Shrink-wraps, providing more context with only a few examples from recent dominant news. A Shrink-wrap applies themes and thinkers both new and recently mentioned from depth/soul-engaged psychology, history and individual life-story.
So continuing from concepts touched on last week, rather than events and outcomes the focus is on the who, the where and context. Here are themes to consider in your ongoing reading, listening and watching:
🔷 The subtle body. Jung’s term encompassing the profound ways we become aware and attuned to the soul through the body’s five senses, its movements and patterns both conscious and unconscious;
🔷 The ways an expression of this embodied psyche is our intense human sensory and instinctual connection to place, and places — the “where” of journalism. We see this in our lives and in the news at the individual, family or tribal, group and certainly national levels;
🔷 The role and primacy of both history, at the cultural and global level, and the unfolding of our individual life-story, our individuation; and
🔷 Type-casting. To borrow the phrase from theater, film or TV, type-casting means actors perform in or are repeatedly selected in predictable, prescribed roles. By contrast, in a depth or soul-engaged life and psychology we are not type-cast. We’re not solely our roles, not just our personalities.. We are more than merely an ego-self, that “resume version” of ourselves — we are also what Jung termed the “capital-S or soul-Self.”
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1. the soul embodied
Jung wrote extensively about the subtle body, which he viewed as a — or the — meeting point between body and mind, with the point of connection most conscious and the depths of the physical body most unconscious.
Among many ways Jung describes the unconscious psyche or soul is on a continuum with two poles. One is the instinctual or embodied, sensate, connection with earth and matter and the other the archetypal dimension of images, spirit, intuition, and the numinous.
Here I introduce one of my favorite thinkers and contributors in this area, the late Jungian analyst Marion Woodman. She was an author, educator and pioneer in somatic psychotherapies such as authentic movement — another of the depth psychology greats I was fortunate to be taught by and know during years at Pacifica. Some of her ideas:
“Soul to me means ‘embodied essence’ — when we experience ourselves and others in our full humanity: Part animal [Jung’s instinctual pole], and part divine [Jung’s archetypal pole.]”
“Often the wisdom of the body clarifies the despair of the spirit.”
“The harder we look at our aches and ailments the more we will be startled by the painful truths they are trying to convey about our dangerously disembodied way of life.”
“An addiction is anything we do to avoid hearing the messages that the body and soul are trying to send us.”
“At the very point of vulnerability is where surrender takes place — that is where the sacred enters. The sacred, and the healing, comes through the wound.”
On what she considers vital connection between engagement with the soul and creativity:
“If we fail to nourish our souls, they wither. And without soul, life ceases to have meaning. The creative process shrivels in the absence of continual dialogue with the soul. Creativity is what makes life worth living.”
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the soul in place… and places
When thinking about and responding to the news in any arena, from international war zones to politics to sports and the arts, why does it make sense to consider how the unconscious or soul is related to our connection to places, in ways that can be quite mundane and physical?
In simplest concrete terms, this is the “where” of journalism and its future drafts in history.
I’m sure you are getting a vast amount of news, information, features, images and back-story on this unfolding global tragedy in and beyond Ukraine. A sampling of news coverage reflects the themes of place, disputed maps, language and history as enormous with Russia's invasion of independent democratic state Ukraine — and Putin’s propagandizing it as “de-Nazification” of Ukraine.
Former U.S. diplomats Marie Yovanovich (Ukraine) and Michael McFaul (Russia) offer excellent details and perspective in recent interviews I highly recommend. (Browsable on many news channels plus remarkably in-depth discussions with Stephen Colbert’s Late Show.) McFaul decodes graphically the messages of Putin’s 58-minute speech declaration of invasion (and believes we should take seriously that Putin’s desire is to kill Zelenskyy and all in his government):
“‘De-Nazifying’ — That’s against a Jewish Ukrainian president Zelenskyy. Whose first native language is Russian. Whose grandparents fought in WWI against Nazi Germany. For Russia.
In a bit of other coverage:
How the Russian invasion of Ukraine upended Germany (Pro Publica)
In many ways, Germany has rethought its place in the world—all in two weeks.
Ukrainians Find That Relatives in Russia Don’t Believe It’s a War (NYT)
The memory of Nazi atrocities has come to play a role in Russia’s war against Ukraine (NPR)
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the soul in motion: soul-making, the verb
In an apt description of Jung’s concept of our process of continued individuation throughout our adult lives, the poet Keats goes on to say:
“There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions, but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. “
And in his seminal work Revisioning Psychology, James Hillman said:
“The work of soul-making is concerned essentially with psychological faith, the faith arising from the psyche which shows as faith in the healing of the soul. Psychological faith begins in the love of images, the sacred and the relational.”
Again from Marion Woodman, here is her full quote regarding the individuation process for each of us who rise to the challenge of uncovering that eulogy version of ourselves and our story:
“Storytelling is at the heart of life… In finding our own story, we assemble all the parts of ourselves. Whatever kind of mess we have made of it, we can somehow see the totality of who we are and recognize how our blunderings are related. We can own what we did and value who we are, not because of the outcome but because of the soul story that propelled us.”
Many of which themes, and a host of others from the depth psychology and soul perspectives, run through Wright Thompson’s excellent ESPN profile piece on Coach Mike Krzyzewski.
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2. From butterflies to Bobby Knight: The mysterious forces behind Coach K’s last run
As mentioned, this piece is the best such profile from any arena that I have read in awhile — from newShrink’s standpoint of psychological astuteness and maturity.
Here, as I find often is the case, in today’s world about the closest we come in American culture to a living relationship with myth, the archetypal realm or a version of Mount Olympus is via the public square of news. Its venues are the sports arena… courtroom… religious or spiritual sanctuary… legislative body… halls of academia… or through the arts and entertainment. For a depth psychologist these are rich areas for passionate mining — not so much for team outcomes, verdicts, sermons or decrees as to be among and with the living archetypes!
Whether you’re a fan or even follow basketball, I highly recommend reading the profile or streaming the entire video version of the Coach K story. Here are some of my thoughts:
🌀 First from the depth psychology perspective, there is ample recognition and owning of the coach’s shadow aspects here — by the writer, many of those long closest to the coach, his recently deceased spiritual guide-priest, and to some extent the coach himself. (Some of the descriptions are quite jarring and sobering. Guess this is why the soul venture is called a spiritual journey and a practice… )
🌀 I think that imaginal conversation above might please Marion Woodman with the demonstrations here of the level of conscious masculinity required for Coach K to demonstrate such positive, strong conscious relationship with the feminine. (This surprised me a bit, given some of the toxic-masculine excesses of the coach’s professional domain in which he has excelled, his own behavioral excesses and what can be the oppressive patriarchy of his faith tradition.)
🌀 Living, breathing forces throughout the profile are Krzyzewski’s animated (ie, ensouled, living) relationship in life and beyond with his strong late mother, Emily — to whom he prays audibly during tense moments. Also moving to me is his visible, palpable connection with wife Mickie. Strong relationships with his adult daughter and other family working on his professional staff come through as well.
🌀For me a pivotal — “initiatory threshold” — point in the coach’s psychological individuation came during his young adulthood. The profile describes in eloquent detail his agonizing decision to give up a very successful military commission after shining at West Point. It required him to oppose his Polish father’s fervent lifelong ambition/expectation of him — for a career in basketball, instead. His lifelong friend aptly describes this as Krzyzewski’s having had to “give up the brass ring, in order to go for the gold one.”
🌀I’ll leave for your pleasant discovery many of the piece’s moving and revealing details, from relationships with his beloved Labrador(s) to the deeply personal nature of his Catholic faith.
🌀Please do be on the lookout for his candidly and graphically described, sheer numinous soul-moment — in the form of that near-universal symbol of the unconscious psyche… a living butterfly.
Next a very different time, life, and life-story…
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3. First lady of the Confederacy considers her painful past
This New York Times review offers a glimpse of the fact-based Charles Frazier historical novel and its real historical title character, Varina Howell Davis. The Washington Post review of Varina is good, too.
As mentioned above, I’ll save my comments on this and revisit Varina’s friend Mary Boykin Chesnut after this week’s book club discussion — most likely sometime later during this so-called “Women’s History Month.”
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In the introductory photo-collage philosopher Søren Kierkegaard similarly reminds us of the importance of both historic and living-the-story forward perspectives. In her Letters from an American newsletter shortly after the Russia invasion began, political historian Heather Cox Richardson brought echoes:
“Southern novelist William Faulkner’s famous line saying ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past,’ is usually interpreted as a reflection on how the evils of our history continue to shape the present. But Faulkner also argued, equally accurately, that the past is ‘not even past’ because what happens in the present changes the way we remember the past.
Russia’s attack on Ukraine and the defiant and heroic response of the people of Ukraine to that new invasion are changing the way we remember the past.”
All of which underscores the need for us to both revisit and weave the past forward.
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Now we come to the above image of Putin’s eyes peering through an expanse of blank white unknown space. It’s the accompanying art for a column from The New York Times’ David Brooks that I find excellent in many ways. I provide it here for you to read and ponder — even as I need to continue to do the same.
4. This is why Putin can’t back down
Brooks makes several compelling points that make this a worthwhile read. Here are a few of my early thoughts, which may change over time and reflection.
🌀One positive example is his apt echoing of Nelson Mandela’s warning: “there is no one more dangerous than one who is humiliated.”
🌀 The piece also has some of Brooks’ usual slight misuses of psychological concepts, language and terminology regarding psychodynamics. I can ordinarily disregard these as nits resulting mostly from the fact that he’s a journalist and author, a good one, not a psychologist or therapist. (He uses terms like the diagnosis narcissism and psychodynamic ego-inflation so generally and casually that he doesn’t quite nail how they are related — clumsy at best, inappropriate at worst.)
🌀 For me here, those peacetime nits are a bit heftier now, in precarious times on the brink of war abroad and still-profound social and political divide at home.
🌀Casual or inexact use of terms like identity politics, political correctness or cancel culture — that are meant to protect and turned to derogatory use — are still largely t-shirt, bumper-sticker, dog-whistle words in American culture. But in Russia, and now in today’s besieged Ukraine, they are used to further marginalize, target, jail, even kill the identified members of the very groups they’re supposed to protect.
🌀As you may recall from many posts, I’m a longtime and pretty committed reader of Brooks as a valued moderate-conservative voice. Given his scope of influence as widely read Times writer and author — and his continued growing interest in and commentary on psychology, I want him to get better at this part of it.
I need to re-read and think more on this further when I’m fresher, and may revisit it in a future newShrink. I welcome any of your thoughts, meanwhile.
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Next, and for now, I am going to allow the photo-collage images and the above discussion of the idea of type-casting (and its soul-enlivened opposite) to speak mostly for themselves. This is partly for time and stamina reasons, and knowing we all are receiving and absorbing a vast amount of information and imagery from Ukraine and about its leader.
Also, I think the images largely do speak for themselves, at times better than words… as images often do. Below is one more, from Zelenskyy’s “Churchill moment.”
5. “Zelensky calls for more help in address to U.K. Parliament.”
Lawyer-activist Robert Hubbell captured some key moments from this in his March 9 “Today’s Edition” newsletter on Substack:
“On Tuesday, President Zelenskyy remotely addressed both houses of the British Parliament. Zelenskyy affirmed his belief that Ukraine would prevail against Russia, borrowing a line from Shakespeare:
‘To be or not to be?’—You know this Shakespearean question well. Thirteen days ago, this question could have been asked about Ukraine. But now, absolutely not! [The answer] is definitely, “Yes—to be”. It is obvious, we will be free!
Zelenskyy also invoked Churchill, saying, “We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. . . . we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.” President Zelenskyy’s heroism and leadership is giving Ukraine a fighting chance against Russia, to the surprise of nearly everyone, most especially Vladimir Putin. Leaders around the world should note what courage looks like in action.
🌀 A style note regarding spelling of Zelenskyy’s name, of which several different ones are the choice of different news organizations I follow: As is my style of personal preference and choice when I have one, I try to go with the self-identity and spelling that Zelenskyy himself uses and chooses most currently — the communications he puts out himself. This is different from ways he has done it in the past, as is the language he speaks instead of his first one, Russian. If he changes it again I will aim to do the same. It’s his name, not mine! (For me, when I have the choice the same logic applies on things like race, ethnicity and gender.)
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In the interests of getting this out with a remaining glimmer of sunset, I’ll leave you with a few lighter notes. First, a treat if you haven’t yet seen the Ukrainian President in his previous roles as a very talented dancer and comic actor. (And if you have, as friend and former journalist Jodi noted when she shared it, here’s “one more reason to love this guy.”)
…. A seasonal encore of a favorite from best-ever cartoon curator, newly retired journalist, friend and reader Ann Ahern Allen…
Just because…
And, that is all I have! Talk to you next week.
🦋💙 tish
•🌀🔵🔷🦋💙
… 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.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”
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PS: Some new options + stuff that isn’t changing
• For those of you who read and/or subscribe to several Substack newsletters and writers’ other work — especially those such as Heather Cox Richardson and Robert Hubbell who publish daily instead of weekly — you may find the new Substack app a convenient one-stop place to find everyone.
• The app is just for IOS users now, but there’s a signup waitlist for Android.
• None of this affects or changes the usual newShrink email newsletter in your inbox and posted on the website from my end.
• A general note: With time and other demands of my mom’s eldercare varied and unpredictable, I’m not planning more dramatic newShrink growth or expansion either in frequency or by adding a paid-subscription option. (And in any scenario you will always have a free subscription if you want one.)
• As always I’m so happy you are here and grateful to have you reading! If you try the app I’d love to hear and pass on your feedback to Substack.
🦋💙
