Remembering What We’re Forgetting
When Marion Woodman spoke to our class during the first session, she discussed the threat of not knowing who we are at the core, and consequently losing a sense of our bodies. The physical body has a wisdom of its own that informs the ego, the conscious psychic body. “Without that interplay between spirit and body, the spirit is always trapped” (Woodman 16). The soul cannot dance the dancer if it is ignored and shut away in a dark closet. In my experience, the disembodied spirit cannot drum the drummer.
If I forget to play congas for over a week due to paper writing or work demands, my stress levels rise notably. Drumming brings consciousness back into my body; during a drumming session and many hours after, I incarnate in ways that the most profound reflection, meditation or thinking cannot duplicate. Why, then, do I often forget the most important soul-making aspect of my life, even when I intend to do it every day? C.G. Jung’s answer is, “man is not a master in his own house” (Jung 13), and the unconscious often has different plans for its subject in spite of the ego’s best intentions. Jung goes on to say:
It is just as if the complex were an autonomous being capable of interfering with the intentions of the ego. Complexes indeed behave like secondary or partial personalities in possession of a mental life of their own. (Jung 14)
Furthermore, the psyche takes incredible measures to protect itself from the pain of separation felt in the post-modern world. One of these ways is by distancing and detaching from the body and the physical world, in the form of forgetfulness or dissociation. Susan Bordo looks at the disconnect from matter, or “flight from the feminine,” as a prevalent symptom in modern life: “Cartesian objectivism and mechanism, I will propose, should be understood as a reaction-formation–a denial of the “separation anxiety” [... ], facilitated by an aggressive intellectual flight from the female cosmos and “feminine” orientation towards the world” (Bordo 100).
My early childhood was spent in a lone dreaminess. I was never truly alone since I was always with my mother and my sister, but I preferred my own company and the peace and contentment that came with the life of being a loner. At least this is how I remember my early childhood. Now that I am entering the memory banks of my childhood, I realize I was cut off from my own sense of self and had in turn disconnected from the rest of the world-at least the human world. Each night, I saw spirits in my room. At first, my mom told me that these were my imaginary friends, but I knew they were not just images projected by the mind. As naturally soul-seeking creatures, humans long to find connections, even in places that by nature are disembodied. I recently remembered that my prevailing dream pattern throughout childhood generally went like this:
I awake within the dream and find that there are all kinds of people in the room with me, who are exceedingly joyful. We play together and then they tell me it's time for them to fly home. But I don't feel like I'm home, and decide to join them on their journey. And then we fly out of my bedroom window into the night air.
Each night I traveled to a new land, a new country; I even remember one particular young girl who lived in Morocco and we played together in a fountain made of colorful tiles.
I always knew that the dreamspace was not truly home, but at the same time I felt more at home there than in the material, physical world. “The sense of “place,” on the other hand, is the experience of “fit,” of belonging where one is, of having a home” (Bordo 71). I was not connected to a “home” on the physical plane because I was not connected to my body. Once I discovered drumming at age 15, I seemed to gain a better sense of the boundaries surrounding me, as well as the bridges connecting me to “others” of the physical world. Finally, I began to relate.
The loss of traditional religiosity is not something that seems to have impacted me prior to age nine, the time when my parents’ marriage ended. My parents were practicing Catholics and we attended church every Sunday until they divorced. Afterwards, when I asked why we were not going to church anymore, my mother simply explained that our church did not agree with divorce and forbid us to attend.
The aspect of going to church that impacted my psyche the most was the sacrament of Communion. Communion with Jesus and God, the Father, was synonymous with what Marion Woodman described as experiencing “presence” during the class lecture. Drumming, in a sense, replaced traditional religion, Catholicism, and became my ritual, my method of incarnating the Divine energy of the universe. Still, connecting the body with the intention, or will, of the mind is difficult when it is a part of our culture to constantly live in the future or the past. True “presence,” the generative life force, is lacking when the head is cut off from the body.
As Jung has pointed out, we are so busy doing and achieving that we have lost touch with our inner life, that life which gives meaning to symbols and conversely the symbols which give meaning to life. (Woodman 19)
The Cartesian anxiety that pervaded 17th century life, extended into the modern world and ushered in the separation of spirit from the earth, nature and the body. The enchantment of the world has been lost; the autonomous archetypal energies personified by faeries/nature spirits, angels, orixas, gods and goddesses have never left, but perhaps have moved on to new territory.
In his essay “The Opposition of ‘Individual’ and ‘Collective’ Psychology's Basic Fault: Reflections On Today's Magnum Opus of the Soul,” Wolfgang Giegerich tries to demonstrate that the numinous, or religious function in human beings moves from one medium to another. One of the main points brought out by Giegerich is that the world soul, anima mundi, is a dead point. “In my view the road to the anima mundi is closed” (Giegerich 1996).
Giegerich attaches religious meaning to the literal places, which incidentally may also be virtual, not physical, where the human psyche is concentrated. Today the soul is found in globalism and commerce, not in nature. However, I am curious about his thesis because globalism and commerce, as places for the soul to reside, are both plastic and materialistic, a sort of inorganic matter. Modern humans in most of the Western hemisphere have fictionalized entire worlds within the universe of Capitalism (one of the new gods?). I find this notion even more disturbing because living an inauthentic life, attached to materialistic images is not the same as being attached to Mater, matter and earth.
The confounding part of this point of view is the paradox that Giegerich’s argument shows a Cartesian split, yet within the realm of soul and individuation. Perhaps, religious meaning to Giegerich is intellectual eroticism, the mind given free reign to move wherever it wills. He refers to it as soul, but the phenomena he is describing may be cut off from an authentic relational, “participating consciousness” (Bordo 100). Now how is this connected to incarnation, presence and the notion of remembering?
Dr. David Miller once mentioned in class, “Think with feeling, and feel with intelligence,” and I took this to mean that he believed in soul thinking, or embodied intellectual expression. The Cartesian mind/body split is false and illusory. It is a “fiction” (Bordo 15), a way to overcompensate for the anxiety created by immense social, economic and intellectual change. I am intrigued by the idea that, even though the Cartesian worldview is pervasive in modern culture, the territory of individuation, and perhaps thinking itself, is ever-changing. My question at the present moment, what is the prevailing worldview morphing into? The answer that comes up for me is one that I will wrestle with in the second process paper and at the same time, I have the desire to repress and forget. I will only reveal two hints from popular culture of where psyche may be going: the Left Behind book series and the HBO original series “Carnivale.”
Stay tuned.
Works Cited
Bordo, Susan R. The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism & Culture.
Albany: State U of New York P, 1987.
Giegerich, Wolfgang. “The Opposition of ‘Individual’ and ‘Collective’ Psychology’s
Basic Fault: Reflections On Today’s Magnum Opus of the Soul.” Harvest: Journal for Jungian Studies, 1996. V. 42, No. 2, pp. 7-27. 10 January 2005.
Jung, C.G. Psychology and Religion. New Haven & London: Yale U Press, 1938.
Woodman, Marion. Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride.
Toronto: Inner City Books, 1982.
If I forget to play congas for over a week due to paper writing or work demands, my stress levels rise notably. Drumming brings consciousness back into my body; during a drumming session and many hours after, I incarnate in ways that the most profound reflection, meditation or thinking cannot duplicate. Why, then, do I often forget the most important soul-making aspect of my life, even when I intend to do it every day? C.G. Jung’s answer is, “man is not a master in his own house” (Jung 13), and the unconscious often has different plans for its subject in spite of the ego’s best intentions. Jung goes on to say:
It is just as if the complex were an autonomous being capable of interfering with the intentions of the ego. Complexes indeed behave like secondary or partial personalities in possession of a mental life of their own. (Jung 14)
Furthermore, the psyche takes incredible measures to protect itself from the pain of separation felt in the post-modern world. One of these ways is by distancing and detaching from the body and the physical world, in the form of forgetfulness or dissociation. Susan Bordo looks at the disconnect from matter, or “flight from the feminine,” as a prevalent symptom in modern life: “Cartesian objectivism and mechanism, I will propose, should be understood as a reaction-formation–a denial of the “separation anxiety” [... ], facilitated by an aggressive intellectual flight from the female cosmos and “feminine” orientation towards the world” (Bordo 100).
My early childhood was spent in a lone dreaminess. I was never truly alone since I was always with my mother and my sister, but I preferred my own company and the peace and contentment that came with the life of being a loner. At least this is how I remember my early childhood. Now that I am entering the memory banks of my childhood, I realize I was cut off from my own sense of self and had in turn disconnected from the rest of the world-at least the human world. Each night, I saw spirits in my room. At first, my mom told me that these were my imaginary friends, but I knew they were not just images projected by the mind. As naturally soul-seeking creatures, humans long to find connections, even in places that by nature are disembodied. I recently remembered that my prevailing dream pattern throughout childhood generally went like this:
I awake within the dream and find that there are all kinds of people in the room with me, who are exceedingly joyful. We play together and then they tell me it's time for them to fly home. But I don't feel like I'm home, and decide to join them on their journey. And then we fly out of my bedroom window into the night air.
Each night I traveled to a new land, a new country; I even remember one particular young girl who lived in Morocco and we played together in a fountain made of colorful tiles.
I always knew that the dreamspace was not truly home, but at the same time I felt more at home there than in the material, physical world. “The sense of “place,” on the other hand, is the experience of “fit,” of belonging where one is, of having a home” (Bordo 71). I was not connected to a “home” on the physical plane because I was not connected to my body. Once I discovered drumming at age 15, I seemed to gain a better sense of the boundaries surrounding me, as well as the bridges connecting me to “others” of the physical world. Finally, I began to relate.
The loss of traditional religiosity is not something that seems to have impacted me prior to age nine, the time when my parents’ marriage ended. My parents were practicing Catholics and we attended church every Sunday until they divorced. Afterwards, when I asked why we were not going to church anymore, my mother simply explained that our church did not agree with divorce and forbid us to attend.
The aspect of going to church that impacted my psyche the most was the sacrament of Communion. Communion with Jesus and God, the Father, was synonymous with what Marion Woodman described as experiencing “presence” during the class lecture. Drumming, in a sense, replaced traditional religion, Catholicism, and became my ritual, my method of incarnating the Divine energy of the universe. Still, connecting the body with the intention, or will, of the mind is difficult when it is a part of our culture to constantly live in the future or the past. True “presence,” the generative life force, is lacking when the head is cut off from the body.
As Jung has pointed out, we are so busy doing and achieving that we have lost touch with our inner life, that life which gives meaning to symbols and conversely the symbols which give meaning to life. (Woodman 19)
The Cartesian anxiety that pervaded 17th century life, extended into the modern world and ushered in the separation of spirit from the earth, nature and the body. The enchantment of the world has been lost; the autonomous archetypal energies personified by faeries/nature spirits, angels, orixas, gods and goddesses have never left, but perhaps have moved on to new territory.
In his essay “The Opposition of ‘Individual’ and ‘Collective’ Psychology's Basic Fault: Reflections On Today's Magnum Opus of the Soul,” Wolfgang Giegerich tries to demonstrate that the numinous, or religious function in human beings moves from one medium to another. One of the main points brought out by Giegerich is that the world soul, anima mundi, is a dead point. “In my view the road to the anima mundi is closed” (Giegerich 1996).
Giegerich attaches religious meaning to the literal places, which incidentally may also be virtual, not physical, where the human psyche is concentrated. Today the soul is found in globalism and commerce, not in nature. However, I am curious about his thesis because globalism and commerce, as places for the soul to reside, are both plastic and materialistic, a sort of inorganic matter. Modern humans in most of the Western hemisphere have fictionalized entire worlds within the universe of Capitalism (one of the new gods?). I find this notion even more disturbing because living an inauthentic life, attached to materialistic images is not the same as being attached to Mater, matter and earth.
The confounding part of this point of view is the paradox that Giegerich’s argument shows a Cartesian split, yet within the realm of soul and individuation. Perhaps, religious meaning to Giegerich is intellectual eroticism, the mind given free reign to move wherever it wills. He refers to it as soul, but the phenomena he is describing may be cut off from an authentic relational, “participating consciousness” (Bordo 100). Now how is this connected to incarnation, presence and the notion of remembering?
Dr. David Miller once mentioned in class, “Think with feeling, and feel with intelligence,” and I took this to mean that he believed in soul thinking, or embodied intellectual expression. The Cartesian mind/body split is false and illusory. It is a “fiction” (Bordo 15), a way to overcompensate for the anxiety created by immense social, economic and intellectual change. I am intrigued by the idea that, even though the Cartesian worldview is pervasive in modern culture, the territory of individuation, and perhaps thinking itself, is ever-changing. My question at the present moment, what is the prevailing worldview morphing into? The answer that comes up for me is one that I will wrestle with in the second process paper and at the same time, I have the desire to repress and forget. I will only reveal two hints from popular culture of where psyche may be going: the Left Behind book series and the HBO original series “Carnivale.”
Stay tuned.
Works Cited
Bordo, Susan R. The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism & Culture.
Albany: State U of New York P, 1987.
Giegerich, Wolfgang. “The Opposition of ‘Individual’ and ‘Collective’ Psychology’s
Basic Fault: Reflections On Today’s Magnum Opus of the Soul.” Harvest: Journal for Jungian Studies, 1996. V. 42, No. 2, pp. 7-27. 10 January 2005.
Jung, C.G. Psychology and Religion. New Haven & London: Yale U Press, 1938.
Woodman, Marion. Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride.
Toronto: Inner City Books, 1982.
