Sunday Sampler 5.8.22
First Drafts, Supreme Leaks... and the Great-&-Terrible-Mother in Us All
Weekend newShrink greetings, at the close of a gut-punch news week that in razor-sharp irony converges with our celebration of… motherhood.
With that in mind, as preface I dedicate today’s Mother’s Day edition to honor and remember:
🔷 All people who are, have ever been or will be mothers of every kind: Biological. Living or deceased. Grand-, great-grand-, step-. Surrogate, adoptive, honorary. Symbolic, soul-level, teacher-guide or spiritual-figure. And yes, also those in the animal kingdom, from whom we humans might do well to learn much. Especially this week.
🔷 All who have ever been, are, will or might possibly become biologically/physically pregnant with a fertilized human egg; and
🔷 All who grew to sustainable individual life, then emerged to the first startle of human consciousness, from within and through the physical body of a biological female.
I think that about covers all of us.
Since Monday I am still reeling and processing the news that’s riveted newShrink and personal attention, both to content and unprecedented delivery and tone. That is the leaked first draft of the U.S. Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, and with it constitutional rights and fundamental body-autonomy that it has guaranteed and protected for nearly 50 years.
Along with the week’s timing for a Mother’s Day focus, this news landed as I continue to reflect further and more deeply on a core theme of the recent edition News-Wrap 4.24.22, “Imprints and Blindspots: A Bifocal Take on American ‘Wokeness’ “. From the standpoint of depth psychology this whole idea of intentionally staying alert in order to grow more and more conscious has become an overarching newShrink lens for looking at news, public figures and features of our culture.
So today’s Sampler is sort of an ironic-Mother’s Day version of the February “Strange Valentines.” It’s an assortment of different items and news in these general areas which may, or may not necessarily, connect closely around common threads and themes.
As visually summarized above, topics and themes to read, listen and watch for are:
🔷 That ideal and process (or lack) of individually and collectively growing more and more conscious or awake, on purpose — especially as applied to the Supreme Court Roe v. Wade news and also to the other stories;
🔷 Mothers, and motherhood, from the societal, legal, medical, and most of all the biological/physiological — what Jung termed the instinctual pole — aspects of our humanness; and
🔷The archetypal Mother end of that psychological spectrum shared by us all. As archetype this upper-case Mother — in both her Great and Terrible/shadow dimensions — is universal across history, cultures, ethnicities… and both biological genders due to the embodied nature of our own birth experiences,
The usual navigating details for accessing all links and references on the newShrink website are at the bottom of this post after closing comments, along with credits for various non-stock photos and images.
… the stories
Like me you have probably noticed it’s been a week with lots of first drafts circulating — and not the journalism versions of history once described by the late newspaper publisher Phil Graham. Before getting into the gnarly Supreme Court kind I’ll begin here with the lighter-and-livelier top-left photos.
1. Mother’s Day First Drafts
This one borrows from a favorite recurring holiday Late Show feature with Stephen Colbert and his crowd-favorite wife Evie — who delightfully enjoy and clearly kind of adore one another. Evie presents first a sweetly appropriate final greeting card, and then they open its funny or offensive first-draft version.
(You can decide which of these should be the first draft!)
🌀The first photo is an over-the-top assortment of kitschy Mother’s Day gift paraphernalia, from pink and lavender balloon bouquets to lots of scented, sweet and alcohol-themed stuff.
🌀All of which must be popular, for as with Valentine’s week at my same local supermarket I could barely get inside before being bombarded with the displays — this just as I’m first absorbing NPR’s news of the Roe v. Wade leak.
🌀Those broad-stroke gestures like balloons and flowering plants can be a big help for the many of us navigating increasingly limited ways to touch or engage with parents or others in memory- or other long-term care.
🌀That only intensifies my longing for deeper, more complexity than that, among the rest of us.
🌀In the other photo are a few pieces and images I have, depicting both Great and Shadow archetypal Mother along with the personal. (A usually reticent longtime preteen male client I worked with in my former Davidson office would gaze around the room at the statues and images, extending what from him was a high compliment: “Maaaaan, you are soooo strange…”)
🌀The clay rustic folk-art bust piece spoofs the Jungian tension of the opposites idea, with “the devil on one shoulder, angel on the other.”
🌀To its left is the delicate porcelain Madonna figure that my mom displayed lighted against a silvery sea fan backdrop during Christmas. At right is my Black Madonna carved by a Haitian artist, which in my holiday displays is beside the lighted white one.
🌀In front of the bust is a black-and-white snapshot of (from left) my great-grandmother Eliza, my mother Jane, and my (gorgeous) grandmother Ruby, all around a baby… who is me.
🌀And in foreground is a print of the mother-and-child charcoal sketch by CA artist Luke Holden. The mother is his, Joanne — my dear friend, reader and godsend of a massage therapist during years of frequent long plane trips and class days and nights of California grad school.
Now for that Supreme Court first draft…
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2. Exclusive From Politico
(Precedent-breaking story reported Monday by Josh Gerstein and Alexander Ward)
Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows
“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” Justice Alito writes in an initial majority draft circulated inside the court.
‘Roe v. Wade’ Appears Poised to Fall. These Documentaries Show How We Got Here.
(PBS "Frontline,” both embedded video and read-versions)
“It’s Really A Scary Time”
(from USA Today, with embedded video link)
Reaction
This nationwide story is one in which pictures are literally worth thousands of (newShrink) words.
See protests grow across the country as the Supreme Court deals with Roe v. Wade leak:
NPR member station photographers from Seattle, Portland, OR and Sacramento to St. Louis, Denver, Houston and Boston shared photos of what they saw across the U.S.
Leaked Threat to Roe v. Wade Stuns, Then Energizes Americans (The New York Times)
Opponents and supporters of abortion rights had expected for months that the Supreme Court would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, but the leaked draft opinion late Monday came as if out of the blue, setting off shock, outrage and jubilation on both sides of the nation’s deeply polarized abortion debate.
Activists took to the streets to declare their intention to fight harder, especially over control of Congress in this year’s midterm elections. Candidates sought to raise money off the news. And in states that are poised to ban abortion or guard access to it, politicians and governors declared that they were ready to act.
Yet many Americans woke up stunned, not realizing — and some still not believing — that Roe and the constitutional right to an abortion that it has guaranteed for five decades could disappear within a matter of weeks.
Crowds protest at Supreme Court after leak of Roe opinion draft (The Washington Post)
In cities across the country, demonstrators on both sides of the abortion issue hit the streets
“Bans off our bodies” (The Wall Street Journal, with embedded video link)
Roe v Wade: Protests over leaked draft of Supreme Court Opinion
Opinion & Commentary
Justice Alito’s Invisible Women (NYT)
Abortion case leak shows a broken Supreme Court (From Bloomberg in The Charlotte Observer)
Whatever the leaker’s motive, the result is very bad… Leaks are damaging for the court because the rule of law should speak with a final voice, not a tentative one. A draft opinion is a tentative thing, a work under development. It isn’t the law… The whole way the court reaches decisions is now poised to change. There is the loss of trust. All the justices will surely blame other chambers for the leak. Suspicion, doubt and distrust will follow. What’s more, the chief justice will have to run an internal investigation to see what happened and to sanction the leaker. Such an internal inquiry will be destructive and debilitating for the court’s staff, not to mention the justices.
The justices can’t be fired for leaking. They have life tenure. Anyone else can.
🌀Oh, great.
Here is an online post from a guy named Jim Fairfield, which is a bit long but expresses a point of view I found fresh and compelling.
Every time the abortion discussion pops up, I like to point out this piece by Dave Barnhart, a traditional Christian pastor:
“The unborn” are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you, they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage the you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. It’s almost as if, by being born, they have died to you. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim to love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe.
Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible. They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.
Some of my thoughts…
🌀I am increasingly haunted by the prospects for staying “awake” and increasing consciousness — perhaps because the draft opinion in so many ways strikes a harsh blow in the opposite direction. Not only against autonomy and rights but consciousness itself — it’s effectively a “go back to sleep NOW.”
🌀I’ll limit comment today to this psychological dimension, having written more broadly on abortion and Roe v. Wade previously, as in News Notebook 12.3.21, “Supreme Courting Chaos, A Little Shadow Music... and Icing on the Cakes.”)
🌀And having thought, questioned, ranted, read, agonized about all of these matters of gender in our politics and culture — quite literally over my entire life as a woman — I keep feeling I must be missing something that explains the entrenched, intractable, deeply unconscious and powerful nature of misogyny and patriarchy, including the internalized kind inflicted by women against self and other.
🌀It is commonly stated — I believe, accurately — that slavery and systemic racism are America’s original sin, a deeply rooted and difficult multi-tentacled one perpetuated today..
🌀And then throughout common-era history and its dominant patriarchal religions, the world’s original sin is… woman — specifically conscious woman, as in the various forms of Garden of Eden stories. There’s Mother, but only in her unconscious-virgin aspects; the embodied, wise, aware, expressive, vocal, creative dimensions are relegated to the unconscious, then projected, punished, acted-out.
🌀In the top photo the great quoted question about those burned as witches, vs those doing the burning, is from friend, reader and longtime therapist Linda Bird of Lake Norman.
🌀In pondering all of this I have wondered if bringing more conscious awareness and relationship to these matters of biological gender, procreation, sexuality, gender-based roles etc. might be most difficult precisely because we all share that common birth experience? It was completely embodied — pre-verbal and therefore more deeply, powerfully, even frighteningly unconscious and hard to reach.
Some of these increasing-consciousness themes around both race and motherhood echo through this next wonderful interview-story about the new book, Child. The interview story is by friend and reader Dannye Romine Powell with author Judy Goldman, whose previous works I have devoured and cherished.
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3. She loved her Black caretaker. Now, Judy Goldman explores if Mattie Culp loved her back
(From The Charlotte Observer, interview by Dannye Romine Powell)
Charlotte’s Judy Goldman grew up Judy Kurtz in Rock Hill, a privileged child on a street of manicured lawns and camellia bushes. In 1944, when Judy was 3, her parents hired Mattie Culp, a Black live-in maid, to cook and clean and care for their three children, but especially to look after Judy, their youngest — to iron her dresses and fry her over-light eggs. Judy and Mattie slept together in one bed, Mattie’s quiet hymns “jesusing” her to sleep. By day, the two walked to Woolworth’s for crepe paper, which Mattie fashioned into ruffled dresses for Judy, so magical they looked like dance costumes “for an MGM musical.”
“Our love was unwavering,” Goldman writes in “Child” (University of South Carolina Press, $19.99 paper), her memoir about Mattie. But she also knows that love was “uneven.” Now, at 80, Goldman, vowed to get this “jumbled up love story” down on paper.
How, she asks, do you measure love when one person is paid to care for another?
Here, also, is an excerpt of a beautifully written review that Judy shared on Facebook from juncture workshops.com newsletter:
Writing Complicated Love: Thoughts on a new memoir by Judy Goldman
Now eighty and looking back, Goldman wonders her way into Mattie’s broader world—imagining Mattie’s life as a child student in the “small crate of a building” that was Mattie’s two-room schoolhouse, imagining Mattie as a young woman unable to attend high school, imagining Mattie as the mother of a child who remained mostly out of sight so that Mattie could mother Goldman. Goldman’s memories of her young years with Mattie glow; in Child, they are gorgeously, seamlessly rendered—lovely and tethered sentences held within the clasp of short, compelling chapters.
🌀In keeping with today’s mother focus I highlight this discussion and reflection on Mattie’s experience and feelings as a mother of her own child. I haven’t yet, and eagerly plan to read Child and then revisit it in future newShrinks.
🌀I know Judy only peripherally through mutual friends and our connecting as Facebook friends. But we share a unique bond that is special to me: Judy’s long-time friend, on whom a lovely recurring peripheral character in one or two of her wonderful novels was based, happens to be my lifelong closest “honorary aunt” and friend of my mother since their childhood.
🌀A recurring aspect of Dannye’s excellent interview with Judy —and Judy’s entire effort via the book — is a calling-up and re-experiencing of Mattie from a more deeply authentic, adult level as an autonomous person separate from Judy. (I keep wanting to ask Judy whether, and how, Mattie appears and speaks in her dreams… or if perhaps she might, via active-imagination.) I believe Judy probably hears Mattie’s authentic voice a lot more clearly and accurately than the input she and Dannye imagine her getting from the late James Baldwin.
🌀For me this captures the kind of “aha, awake!-consciousness” moment, a compelling, even breakthrough adult-growth point, that happens in the psychotherapy consulting room. Often by connecting with timelines, eg. “what was going on with a parent at the same age I am or was,” it’s becoming aware of one’s parents or caregivers as separate, individual people with lives, virtues, faults and dreams — and not an extension of oneself, like an essential hand or arm.
🌀For many people, it never happens regarding their parents, either during their lives or with internal work later. As with all conscious relationship, it begins and deepens via the moments of stepping outside the back-and-forth dance of our interactions and feelings to shift focus and conversation to “the hey, what is going on between us and how it feels” kinds of things.
All of which brings me to more on the consciousness theme with the next photo-image.
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4. “Awake!”
This apt Shakespeare quote, from The Tempest (Act II, Scene 1) came from favorite hawk-eyed Charlotte reader in response to the “wokeness” edition (and before the Supreme Court Roe v. Wade leak.) In my view awake! — with the exclamation point — is a preferred term for this depth psychology theme of ever-increasing consciousness. And the quote applies even better now, both in the current abortion battles and the complexities around race and motherhood that Goldman probes in Child.
The revisit to The Tempest also turned up an humbling gaffe on my part, from within the same act and scene of the play:
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5. newShrink’s first official We-Were-Wrong: It’s “What’s past is prologue” — not prelude!
In a highlighted version of the quote repeated in several editions I had somehow converted the bard to a musical composer. My decades-ago Observer colleagues might recall these dreaded WWW’s tabulated annually like demerits on performance reviews! One stellar high-praise year, a favorite editor opened the topic with, “Believe it or NOT, you seem to have had NO WWW’s this year…”
Well, maybe next year for newShrink, too…
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6. “The Great Mother vs the Terrible Mother: The dual nature of the Jungian archetype — Lady Lazarus”
(By Jennifer Linton from her Jungian website.)
For space and stamina reasons I’ll let this visual speak for itself, along with the link.
First a note about terminology:
Archetypes are shared, emotionally charged patterns of felt-experience common to all humans, which might be activated by events in our personal lives. Experiencing a death, falling in love, marrying, or becoming a parent all are among many examples. The activated archetypes are like personal subgroups of the collective unconscious. They aren’t literal, but show up as intensified emotional energy or what psychologists call affect. (We don’t become the Great Mother, or Lover, Trickster, Bride or Warrior. But when activated they intensify the personal to bigger-than-individual-life scale and level.) When a personal experience activates or “hooks” the universal archetype I like to describe it as kind of like pulling one personal fish-hook from a tin of them — and the whole wad of interconnected hooks comes up to be dealt with too!
And finally with a departure and some relief from the week’s content here is a feature story that moved and inspired me — probably not surprisingly.
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7. He was told he had less than 18 months to live. That was 3 years and 3 marathons ago.
(From talented Théodon Janes of The Charlotte Observer)
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Now I’ll leave you with a hopeful repeat-image that you may be seeing more of here from time-to-time, after weeks like this one…
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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Photo and image credits
The New Yorker cartoon, Ali Solomon
Photo of Mattie Culp in The Charlotte Observer courtesy of Judy Goldman
Photo of Judy Goldman by Laurie Smithwick
NPR Seattle photos by Megan Farmer of KUOW
Business Insider at U.S. Supreme Court, Brendan Swallowski, Getty Images
Runner Frank Turner, Melissa Melville-Rodriguez of The Charlotte Observer
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