Sunday Postcard 4.17.22
Remember the Eggs, the Inventors... the Esteemed Ex-Presidents
Greetings from newShrink, and seasonal wishes for renewal, rebirth and nourishments!
A bit of spring-break from heavy current news emphasis, this Postcard edition tilts toward the more imaginal, playful and historic of psychology’s morsels.
By newShrink tradition this one is also a holiday tableau in honor of granddaughter Miz E, who’s away on a spring-break trip and shares this 4/20 birthday week with Easter. (This month’s logistics of tax deadlines and overlapping celebrations here or Asheville may affect scope, timing and focus of the next edition or two.)
Meanwhile…
a theme is… hatched
At first the eggs came out as prep for an earlier seasonal extended-family gathering.
Then the longer they stayed nested visibly about, the more they brought to mind images, quotes and symbols from the artistic, archetypal, and literary… the psychological, soul-engaged and dream… the biological, nutritional and culinary… and some giggle-worthy silliness.
In this way emerged today’s theme — lots of eggs, served-up many styles:
🔷 As images, including those powerfully evoked by words. This is the symbolic dimension of soul or psyche on the depth-psychological spectrum. (It’s the archetypal pole according to Hillman and Jung before him — universal human experience spanning time through history across cultures, geography and religions.)
🔷 Eggs in nature, biology, body — and food! (The instinctual pole or end of the spectrum.) and
🔷 Just-for-freestyle-fun.
archetype and symbol
To dispense up-front with some of the corniest clichés, “which comes first?” is clearly not in question here. Nor is the risk of putting them all in one basket; they couldn’t possibly fit.
The array of eggs pictured here reflects that archetypal spanning of time, culture, geography and symbolic meaning. Just a few examples: Geographically, there’s a carved, blown-out ostrich egg from a 1987 trip to Australia and some hand-painted in wood from Lithuania. Historically one is from my infancy and at least one is from my 94-year-old mom’s childhood. (Most of hers, plus a vast number of her very tiny miniatures, come out only when she is here or Miz E is using them to create tableaux. We continue a long process of sorting, culling and downsizing many of my mom’s lovely things while keeping some that still have meaning for her.) Several include religious or nature images while others are intricately designed in lead crystal or cloisonné.
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Here is a seasonal piece highlighting symbolic egg lore, ritual and tradition across time and a range of cultures and religious practice. (From The Huffington Post, Religion Section.)
“Easter Eggs: History, Origin, Symbolism And Traditions”
Brightly decorated eggs, egg rolling and egg hunts have become integral to the celebration of Easter.
However, the tradition of painting hard-boiled eggs during springtime predates Christianity. In many cultures around the world, the egg is a symbol of new life, fertility and rebirth. For thousands of years, Iranians and others have decorated eggs on Nowruz, the Iranian New Year that falls on the spring equinox.
The Easter egg is also associated with pagan roots. Before Christians celebrated the resurrection of Jesus, ancient pagans in Europe observed the Spring Equinox as the return of the sun God ― a rebirth of light and an emergence from the lean winter.
Some point to the Venerable Bede, an English monk who wrote the first history of Christianity in England, for evidence of the pagan connection. Bede argued that even the word Easter derived from a pagan fertility goddess named “Eostre” in English and Germanic cultures. However, other scholars have noted little evidence of this goddess outside of Bede’s writings. And in most other languages the word for Easter ― Pascua in Spanish and Pasques in French, for instance ― derives from the Greek and Latin Pascha or Pasch, for Passover.
For Christians, the Easter egg is symbolic of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Painting Easter eggs is an especially beloved tradition in the Orthodox and Eastern Catholic churches where the eggs are dyed red to represent the blood of Jesus Christ that was shed on the cross. Easter eggs are blessed by the priest at the end of the Paschal vigil and distributed to the congregants. The hard shell of the egg represents the sealed Tomb of Christ, and cracking the shell represents Jesus’ emergence and resurrection. Historically Christians would abstain from eating eggs and meat during Lent, and Easter marked the end of a long abstinence with the first chance to eat eggs. (Orthodox Christians continue to abstain from eggs during Lent.)
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All of these eggs in the house, arrival of peak deviled-egg season plus a dream snippet (surely influenced by both) reminded and inspired me to revisit the delicious little feast of a book pictured above. From earliest course reading in my clinical masters program some 15 years ago, it wasn’t just foundational training for the work of psychotherapy — which was expected. In particular the title-chapter essay experience of writing as a psychological, imaginal and psychoactive process also expanded — actually more like exploded, enlivened, cracked-open, transformed — what had been my entire adult professional life as a writer in some form or other and a lifelong passionate relationship with the written word. (With this week’s revisit of the book, all of that had distilled as: “It’s Alive!”)
Words as Eggs: Psyche in Language and Clinic. Chapter-essay and book by Jungian analyst Russell Lockhart.
If you’ve been reading newShrink awhile you may have noticed the affinity and habit I have for tracking and talking about origins and meanings of words and their roots, their etymology. (I even do it as a routine daily ritual with the everyday 5-letter Wordle-solution word.) It has so long been with me that until this week I’d forgotten I may have learned it first, at least in the psychological dimensions, from Lockhart. He opens here with echo of familiar Biblical New Testament language:
At the beginning of everything is a word, a word as seed, a word as egg. “There is not one thing in our civilization that has not first been in the imagination,” says Jung. Images into words. Man speaks his images into words just as he puts them in clay or paint. So etymology [from etymos - truth] is a kind of truth-telling, and if we are to go to the depths of our words, we must learn what sort of truth is being told there, in these images at the origins of words, in the plots of the word’s story, in the events of the word’s history.
(An aside: It strikes me here that Lockhart’s very name rather nicely cracks-open, or maybe un-locks, in several ways… with either or both heart and hart opening more possibilities.)
He explains and emphasizes Jung’s extensive writing on the difference between a symbol and a sign — a distinction he considered essential in grasping the psychology of the unconscious. Jung defined symbol as “the best possible expression of something not yet fully known,” ie., something invisible. By contrast in Jung’s view, symbols are not synonymous with signs. Signs include labels, badges, markers, and symptoms. (In the therapy room, for example, signs are the labels used for symptoms, diagnoses, modalities while symbols are the felt experience of suffering and healing shared through words “cracked-open” via story and meaning.
Applying this to his egg theme Lockhart explains that the shell is the egg’s visible sign, label or badge while its symbol is the invisible interior that is both nourishing food to be eaten and all of the creative energy and potential of new life.
On the process of tracking-unpacking the psyche or soul in dream, in therapy and in life, Lockhart describes the work of “freeing the poetic at the bottom of words.” He elaborates by citing Emerson, the quote partly pictured above from the essay “The Poet:”
Every word was once a poem… Every thought is also a prison, and the poet unlocks our chains. (Full reference at the bottom of today’s post.)
Lockhart explains that while the boundaries and clarity of logic, thoughts and words — applied simply as labels and badges to distinguish one thing from another — are necessary, “the shell of words can be prison and must be cracked open.”
Current meaning and definition are too often only the shell of a word. We use words but do not know their soul—or even care; we are all word abusers. Anything that will help free us from the prison of current meaning, the literalness and speed of the present, will help us to free Psyche from her prison shell. Words take on life, induce images, excite the imagination, begin to weave textures with one another, and tell whole stories, if we but scratch the surface of the word.”
Why and how does any of this matter, in our day-to-day lives or in how we process the news of our collective public life?
🌀 Lockhart’s “egg” captures an essential, needed and desperately lacking psychological marriage — and constant marrying process — of both the Logos/logical and the Eros/animated-soul aspect of every human experience.
🌀Of course it’s more complex than this or any one symbol or paragraph can hold.
🌀But from Jung’s depth-psychology perspective there is a down side to our too-fixed, one-sided conscious stances, positions, viewpoints and actions, out of one of these poles or the other. They inevitably wreak a counter-balancing unconscious havoc in pretty much every individual or collective human difficulty, dilemma and suffering-inducing conflict in which we find ourselves.
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Shifting now to that other end of the psyche’s spectrum, the instinctual…
eggs as nature, biology — and food!
With the variety, frequency and volume of discussion of psychological and other dimensions of sexuality that are inherent sometimes in newShrink’s routine tracking of news and public figures, today we’ll mostly leave the many and obvious reproductive aspects of eggs a duly noted given. With that said, Anne Sexton’s tender observation pictured above brings to mind with a smile a long and somewhat mystifying practice by granddaughter Miz E… (which is not that kind…)
kissing the eggs…
Since she was held in arms, barely yet verbal and “helping” prepare her pancakes or baking project, Miz E has insisted on kissing the eggs before they can be cracked open. I’m not sure how it started, though surely nobody demanded it of her. When asked why the kisses, her answer is one of those matter-of-fact, “because I just know I need to” (with eye-roll invisible and “well-duh” implicit.)
Now soon to be six, she’s long been a voraciously learning and creative cook with a dramatic flair for flavor-testing and combining seasonings. (She loves and is good assistant for my specialty-favorite deviled eggs — while so far refusing to eat a finished one.)
Which brings to mind just how many, multi-dimensional, long-lived and varied all of my own egg-images and associations are. Some examples:
🌀The “egg came first” idea is pretty literally true. If not quite the first memory considered so big to child psychologists, I’m fairly sure deviled eggs, and the variation for sandwiches, are of the first food — and the first food-preparation variety. With my maternal grandmother, at not much past toddlerhood. I loved the way the egg mixture went so nicely back into their little edible containers (and still do.)
🌀Deviled eggs and the ritual of making them are still a short-list food favorite. (A favorite cooking-trick involves them, one of many magic ones from dear friend and reader Nette, whose genius and supply of such tips is infinite. With this one 36 or 48 hard-boiled eggs essentially peel one another cleanly, with minor assistance, in about 10 minutes or less. It’s a process so cool it needs a sound-track.)
🌀 More generally eggs are a favorite, pretty perfect and versatile fare in most every form and use.
🌀And somehow eggs have managed to be on the scene or around the edges of many of my pivotal beginnings and threshold times in relationships and life experience.
🌀Where many ask for jello or ice cream on coming out of surgery — which I’ve been fortunate to experience only a couple of times — for me it’s been egg salad on dry wheat toast, please.
🌀And then there are all of these deviled-egg trays, for every season, in every imaginable material and design. I think it’s 11 or 12, all of them mine not inherited and none of them bought or made by me. How did this happen? Other than books, and plants when first creating garden spaces, I’m not generally or intentionally a “collector.”
Eggs alive and silly, indeed…
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this week in history, and soon…
The newShrink focus on current news will return. This week’s has been rich — and a little spooky — in historic milestones. Taking these in reverse-chronological order:
a nation’s inventor
Today, 232 years ago, April 17, 1790, Benjamin Franklin died at age 84 in Philadelphia. The still-new, two-part/four-hour Ken Burns documentary on PBS is excellent, thought provoking on many levels including the psychological. I highly recommend and will be discussing it soon in newShrink. If you have seen it I’d value hearing your thoughts.
emancipator president
With Friday’s milestone, here is political historian Heather Cox Richardson’s lede from the day’s Letters from an American (heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/April 15, 2022.)
Early in the morning of April 15, 1865, [157 years ago] President Abraham Lincoln breathed his last. The night before, he and his wife had gone to see a play—a comedy. One of the last men to talk to him before he left for the theater said it seemed the cares of the previous four years were melting away. The Confederacy was all but defeated, and the nation seemed to be on its way to a prosperous, inclusive new future.
unfathomable shipwreck
On April 14, 1912 — 110 years ago Thursday — on its maiden voyage the massive luxury ship Titanic struck an iceberg with 2,435 passengers, 900 crew and only 16 lifeboats with maximum capacity of 1,178 aboard. By the end of the next day, April 15, the vessel had sunk in the north Atlantic. Of the 1,504 who perished, 816 were passengers and 688 were crew.
president in perilous peacetime and the world’s biggest war
And with Tuesday’s milestone here is Richardson’s lede from that day’s Letters from an American (heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/April 12, 2022:)
On April 12, 1945, a visibly exhausted President Franklin Delano Roosevelt jerked in his chair while having his portrait painted in Warm Springs, Georgia. FDR put his hand up, said “I have a terrific pain in the back of my head,” and lost consciousness. He died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage within hours.
Both the full Lincoln and the Roosevelt HCR posts linked above provide her usual thorough, intensely relevant connection-points of this history with current news events. And for me with the Ben Franklin biography, the current Will Smith news story alongside his two star-performances — in biopics — fresh in mind, the attention heads toward its usual psychological directions.
FDR: on biography and psychology
Of course there is no such thing as a happy death-moment scene. But the depth-psychological and individuation dimensions have long brought particular poignancy to the FDR one captured above, and more generally to FDR’s final years. (This period is covered movingly in the 2005 HBO biopic Warm Springs, with Kenneth Branagh, as well as in several excellent biographies of FDR and his accomplished wife Eleanor.)
Some thoughts:
🌀 FDR — and Eleanor, too — exemplify so many of the public and historic figures we so passionately hold up as heroes for all of our collective projected idealizing — and as demons for all our collective projected shadow.
🌀FDR shares with all of us and history the public “shell” of a long and storied public life of pivotal moments and actions critical to national, even world, survival.
🌀Yet so much of the interior yolk — both the life-giving joy and unspeakable suffering — of a long-battered, pain-wracked body and emotional-psychological life are those invisibles described in the Lockhart book. All of that life hovers just off-stage and camera, out of the picture, the newsreel — the official narrative “resume” version versus eulogy. With his literal life-review portrait being painted even as he dies.
🌀In the Roosevelt story the death-scene presence and late-life companionship here of long-separate-and-forbidden, by-then-widowed Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, is as tragically fitting and symbolic as the dying former President’s wheelchair and leg braces. (The most thorough scholarly historic biographies of both Franklin and Eleanor don’t edit her out. And though a historic footnote and afterthought, she too has a life-story.)
🌀Some of you who have been reading newShrink awhile may recall the focus of years’ research for my 2014 PhD dissertation and passionate enduring curiosity ever since: The psychological biography/life story of people we have elevated, willing or unwilling, to public eye.
More specifically I am ever-curious and concerned with:
🌀 These public-people’s overt and depth psychological, soul and emotional lives…
🌀The entire phenomenon of living out the most interior and vulnerable elements of one’s deepest interior life under public scrutiny, and…
🌀Maybe of most intense interest for me, the question of what purpose a very pervasive cultural pattern is serving for each, and all, of us.
🌀What are we learning, needing or wanting to learn that makes us so voraciously hungry for both the adored talented hilarious Will Smith with his power-couple talented wife and the fallen-kicked-to-the-Academy-curb and publicly wounded ones?
🌀Or: What might we perhaps be capable of learning and applying toward better, more fulfilling public and private lives — perhaps at least a capacity for empathy, humility and compassion?
The still-fresh Ben Franklin documentary and the lingering interest not only in individual biography but the phenomenon of biographies suggest there are surely shrink-wraps on these people and topics coming soon in newShrink! (An interesting piece of this is a thoroughly tracked and trackable trend toward explosive public interest and success of biopics in every medium from theater, film and memoir to TV, podcast and even comics.)
So far just ponderings here, as yet unhatched…
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I’ll leave you now with a discovery: Who knew that our waterfowl, too, have bucket-lists?
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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Additional non-linked references mentioned:
Emerson, R. W. “The Poet.” In The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Blacks Reader Services Co. p. 215.