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Study Group

February 17, 2021 By whatashrinkthinks in Uncategorized

 

This is a bi-weekly/twice-monthly facilitated study group, meeting via Zoom,  open to anyone who would like explore archetypal literature in the spaces between depth psychology and mysticism in a supportive, inclusive, non-dogmatic setting.

The Spirit and Purpose of this Group

Together we may read and discuss the works of authors such as Hillman, Mindell, Castaneda, Levine, Huxley, Merton, Jung, Eckhart, Pinkola-Estes, Deloria Jr., Gurdjieff, Fanny Brewster, Barbara Holmes, Thurman – and many others that may emerge.

Many of these texts will be new, or as good as new, to me as well  – and I am looking forward to unpacking them together, speaking the notes I scribble in the margins out-loud. We will both plumb these writings for wisdom, and challenge their biases as we encounter them. I like to argue with books, repurpose and refine what is useful, discard what feels obsolete or distorted, and occasionally surrender to them when they defeat my skepticism with truths that I may be resistant to. For me, reading psychological theory and esoterica is like Jacob wrestling with the angel –  I hope that both myself and the ideas will be refined, confronted and transformed by the end of the encounter.

 

Meeting Day/Times:  Alternate Thursdays 5:00 Pacific, 6:00 Mountain, 7:00 Central, 8:00 Eastern,
Starting:  April 1st, 2021

 

For more information and to register follow the link below:

 

 

 

Study Group

Circling the Drain Workshop: Living Intentionally with Mortality

February 6, 2021 By whatashrinkthinks in Uncategorized

 

Announcing a new educational/experiential workshop launching in March – currently six spots open.

 

Circling the Drain: Living Intentionally with Mortality

 

This workshop is designed for anyone who wants to expand their ability to withstand and accept existential realities, and develop healthier, more related responses to encounters with mortality among their family, friends, and in the wider community and culture.

 

Dates/Time:

This workshop is sixteen weekly sessions, each session is 90 minutes long.

The workshop will be held on Mondays at: 4:00 Pacific, 5:00 Mountain, 6:00 Central, 7:00 Eastern via Zoom

Starting Date: Monday March 1st 2021.

Meeting dates will be:

  • 3/1, 8, 15, 29 – off on March 22nd
  • 4/5, 12, 19, 26
  • 5/3, 10, 17, 24, – off for Memorial Day
  • 6/7, 14, 21 & 28

Workshop participants will be limited to 12 people.

 

 

The Spirit and Purpose of the Group:

 

Many people, including helping professionals, feel fearful, overwhelmed, and unsure of how to best respond when they are in proximity to death, dying and bereavement processes. As death in the United States, has become an increasingly invisible and medicalized process our collective willingness, and ability to talk and listen about death and dying has atrophied, and is often left to specialists. The pandemic, the disruption of bedside vigils and funeral rites and enforced isolation has only intensified this dissociation.

 

For more information click here.

 

I was always terrified of wasting time. A cancer diagnosis made me reconsider.

December 11, 2020 By whatashrinkthinks in Uncategorized

 

 

This essay was published in New York magazine this week:

 

The room didn’t spin like they say it does. My life didn’t flash before my eyes. I had no difficulty understanding the verdict: It was incurable.

They could offer no prognosis. They had some general ideas about how they might treat me; it was considered “manageable” in its normal form, but in my case, there was no telling what would or wouldn’t work. They told me that if they could find an effective treatment, I should expect to be on it “for life….” 

To read more click here:

Seminar #84 “Visions: Notes on the Seminar Given in 1930-1934”

October 15, 2020 By whatashrinkthinks in Uncategorized

 

 

This subscription Seminar essay series will now begin to work its way through Jung’s “Visions” Seminar.

Because it is a very expensive book, and not easily available I will do my best to summarize and amplify what I see as the most useful and essential points of Jung’s teachings here – when and as I can. As you will soon see, the problematic aspects of this text and these historical events will require some direct and ongoing confrontation:

There is some truly extraordinary teaching in these lectures and discussions, but it is important that anyone reading these essays understand that the text we are exploring also reveals many of Jung’s personal, clinical, ethical and theoretical failures.

 

The Setting:

These weekly lectures  were presented in English, a third language for Jung, to members of the Psychological Club at the  Analytical Psychology Club House in Zurich.  The Psychological Club was founded with funds from Jung’s wealthy American patient, student, trainee and admirer, Edith Rockefeller – John D. Rockefeller’s daughter – who he had treated for depression, and who went on to become a prominent Jungian analyst herself. The meetings of the Psychological Club were attended by Jung’s admirers, patrons, students, as well as  former and current patients (many training to become analysts themselves) who often required additional structure and activities beyond their analytic sessions during their treatment stay in Zurich.  In many ways, the Psychological Club functioned as a kind of chaotic combination of psychosocial club, group therapy, training institute, and fan club.

A majority  (but certainly not all) of the club members were women, wealthy enough to travel to Zurich from all over Europe and America, and Jung was considered both a charismatic and handsome figure who attracted large admiring audiences as well as a significant amount of financial patronage.  Jung supported many of these women in their own professional development, and throughout his life many of his closest collaborators and disciples were the women who he had first treated and then trained as analysts.

As we can imagine, the boundaries in this space were messy. Many of the attendees were actively in treatment with Jung – caught up in the throes of their own complexes and conflicts, acting out competitive feelings towards other club members, seeking attention  and contending with thick idealizing transferences to the dynamic Dr. Jung.

Jung often used these seminars to form defacto group interventions targeted to the psychological development of his patients/audience and to emphasize themes that he felt were common to many of the members, as a kind of annex to their individual treatment.

 

The Characters:

These weekly lectures were to be a presentation and a discussion of his work with an American patient, scientist Christiana Morgan, one of the several patients who he first began to teach active imagination techniques. Active imagination was a method he had developed through the process of journaling his own contemplative visualizations in Liber Nous/The Red Book – in which he would sit in meditation, and allow a fantasy to emerge, and then would engage in imaginal dialogue with the characters in his fantasy. (for more information about active imagination see Seminar essay #25)

As Morgan engaged in this practice, she produced a long series of imaginal visions, and an accompanying set of paintings that Jung felt represented a deep archetypal template of a mythical initiation/integration process that was pertinent to Euro-American women generally, beyond Morgan’s own idiosyncratic healing and development. Jung’s intention was to present this to the Psychological Club as an archetypal journey through women’s developmental psychology. To that end, he chose to try to present the visions and the paintings completely detached from any personal or identifying information specific to Christiana Morgan.

Jung had presented these lectures in German to an earlier audience, and had done so with great excitement and respect for the un-named Morgan’s process and productions, and great enthusiasm for the archetypal template that he felt offered great insight into the psychology of women.  But this lecture and discussion series  proved to be very, perhaps, too stimulating  for many members of the Club, seemingly activating significant envy in many of the attendees, who often attempted authoritatively dissect the visions and pathologize the anonymous visionary.

Jung’s responses and interpretations throughout the seminar grow increasingly irritable, likely in large part with the club members, but this also seems to spill over into his perceptions and presentation of Morgan and her visions themselves. Perhaps he began devaluing the content to make it less threatening to the seminar members – but whatever the trigger and there are many – this seminar becomes an outlet for Jung’s more toxic misogyny – as he begins to express sexist contempt and strong negative feelings both about the case he is presenting and the audience.

Jung also uses the N-word at several points, in discussing the psychic effect of interracial realities in the United States. It is unclear if he is mirroring language that he has absorbed from American patients, if he has, with a limited English, confounded the N-word, with “Negro,”  if he used the word to seem skilled and proficient at American slang, or if he is enjoying and exhibiting an explicit belief in racial superiority.

(See: Visions: Notes on the Seminar Given in 1930-1934. Introduction by Claire Douglas, pp ix-xxxiii)

This is Jung’s unprocessed grandiosity and his white male supremacist shadow on full display – as he succumbs to the inflation of his devoted fan club, and asserts himself as an authority on women’s pathology, and seems to simultaneously enjoy and exert his authority and dominance while also trying to irritably extricate himself from the thick hero worship and its messy consequences in the room.

 

The Turning Point

 

It is also possible that Jung’s negativity is a response to his lost his faith in Morgan. For multiple reasons which we will discuss below, Jung becomes less enchanted by their treatment alliance, as is faced more and more with the aftermath of their work together-  this presentation is four years after their termination.  He seems increasingly upset with the visions and with Morgan, as he becomes hopleessly and destructively entangled in the longer term outcomes of the case and the boundary-less community that has he has built around him and that he resides in the center of.

Jung received direct updates from Morgan from the United States, where she became a Jungian analyst at Harvard – but he also learned far more about Morgan from other patients that  that knew her intimately through the small and incestuous Jungian community in the U.S.

In fact, during the course of this seminar, Jung was contacted for consultation by a former American patient of his, Henry Murray, who was  both Morgan’s co-worker at Harvard, and her current lover, and who contacted  Jung for help in leaving Morgan for another woman.

Additionally, another Harvard man, Ralph Eton, a colleague both of Morgan and Murray,  at the Harvard Psychological Clinic, described by his U.S analyst as “brilliant but unstable”  – had been involved with Morgan previously but been rejected by her and was unable to get over their breakup, also presented to Jung for treatment, and began attending the Psychological Club. Eton actually recognized Morgan’s visions, because Morgan had showed her paintings to him early in their relationship.

Eton, now attending a weekly seminar that waded through his lost- lover’s fantasy life – decompensated into florid psychosis – fled Zurich and returned to Cambridge where required hospitalization. He escaped the locked ward and committed suicide in the woods near Henry Murray’s home.

All of this chaos, tragedy,  and boundary crossing both exposes the messiness of Morgan, and the men in her world as well as the mess that Jung himself had made by establishing himself as the guru-leader of a school of thought, the entangled and enmeshed boundaries of his tight-knit community of disciples, his own poor clinical decisions, and his destructively inflated role in his patient/trainees’ lives.

“Finally, someone overtly breaks confidentiality about Morgan’s identity and the seminar ends abruptly” (Visions: Notes on the Seminar Given in 1930-1934. Introduction by Claire Douglas, p. xxiv)  

Lysis

Christiana Morgan found a place in the world and lived a flawed yet productive life, centered around her great romantic love for Henry Murray, and her work as a psychotherapist at the Harvard Psychological Clinic. Throughout her long life, Morgan returned again and again to the visions. She respected them as the core myth of her life but never succeeded in fully plumbing their meaning. (Visions: Notes on the Seminar Given in 1930-1934. Introduction by Claire Douglas, p. xxii)  

 

So: as you can see, there is a lot to learn about Jung as a limited human being, as a wounded healer, as a white man contending with his own conflicts around supremacy and the feminine,  who experiences the first hand and disasterous consequences of inflation and inflicts those consequences on others, about the historical development of a psychological discipline at time before secure boundaries were erected around transferences and before the community was large enough to avoid such enmeshments.  There is also some thoughtful, humble, generous and beautiful teaching mixed in among the damage and chaos.

I will do my best to sort through the useful, the meaningful, the toxic and the intolerable. I will offer my own interpretations and responses to Morgan’s visioning. I will try to confront and cut away the contamination and the  rot, and see what, if any, fruit remains when we are done.

 

If you are interested in subscribing to this essay series there is more information below:

Seminar Membership

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Circling the Drain: Essays from the Edge of the Abyss

September 14, 2020 By admin in Uncategorized

 

Announcing a new ebook:

 

Circling the Drain: Essays from the Edge of the Abyss

Psychotherapist Martha Crawford shares her encounters with death and dying in her clinical practice, as well has her personal experiences of care-taking, bereavement, and negotiating her own rare cancer diagnosis. The aim of this book is to help others contend with their own fears of death and loss, and to begin to consider living and dying as a natural, interconnected continuum rather than as binary opposites.

Many essays from this blog, and including several new essays. 

 

Available for purchase here.

 

Fall Dream Workshop – Registration Open

August 23, 2020 By admin in Uncategorized

 

This is a workshop designed to support therapists and counselors, artists and creatives, meditators and those engaged in spiritual practices and  anyone who wants to learn to work with their dreams in service of healing, creative or contemplative processes.

Workshop sessions will be convened via Zoom on Friday’s at 9:00AM Pacific, 10AM Mountain, 11AM Central and 12PM Eastern for one hour, over 10 consecutive Fridays – starting on September 25th.

Meeting dates: 9/25, 10/2, 10/9, 10/16, 10/23, 10/30, 11/6, 11/13, 11/20, (skipping 11/27 for Thanksgiving) and  12/4.

I prefer to have no more than 6 or 7 members in the group.

(If there is sufficient interest, I am willing create a second session on the same dates as above but meeting later – at 10:30 Pacific/11:30 Mountain/12:30pm Central/ 1:30 Eastern)

The topics covered include the structure and relationship between consciousness and the unconscious, understanding archetypes, anima/us and “the shadow, Jung’s method of dream “amplification,” the compensatory function of dreaming, “Big dreams” and dreams of the collective, healing and problem solving dreams, and contemplative and creative exercises that can help expand upon dream themes, an exploration of dreaming and synchronicity, and the relationship between the creative process and dream work. We will explore not only the useful aspects of Jung’s thoughts on dreaming, we will also confront and challenge the Eurocentric and misogynistic notions that exist in these texts and theories.

There will be time each session to for a respectful and boundaried exploration of dreams that are either shared by a participant or selected from the available readings.

For more information and to register, click here.

 

Becoming-Animal Becoming-Death: On Desire and Fear of the Wild

April 15, 2020 By whatashrinkthinks in Archetype, Death & Dying, Depth psychology, Dream work, Ecopsychology, Ecotherapy, Uncategorized

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Climate, wind, season, hour are not of another nature than the things, animals, or people that populate them, follow them, sleep and awaken within them… animal-stalks-at-five-o’clock.

(Deleuze & Guattari 2003a: 263 quoted in Dodds 2011, Psychoanalysis and Ecology at the Edge of Chaos; Complexity Theory, Deleuze|Guattari and Psychoanalysis for a Climate in Crisis, 147)

 

After a ten-plus hour flight with several hours of delays, a slow and hazardous cab ride through a snow and ice storm, over slick roads and through dense fog – two teenagers, myself, and three geriatric cats arrived at an empty house on the western face of a mountain in northern New Mexico on Christmas Eve, at two in the morning. We climbed up the steep icy driveway that no vehicle could scale, each dragging a carry on and a pet carrier through the pitch black night. The cats instinctively stopped their many hours of constant complaining as soon as they caught the scent of coyote, mountain lion and bobcat in the air. This was our introduction to the high desert, a new reality, one where the weather, the ground, the sky and the wildlife were all more powerful than we were.

 

A few days later the chihuahua and the beagle would arrive by car with my husband. A suburban car, a sensible station wagon, one that would make no sense at all on the muddy, icy winding dirt roads in the hills. We would turn it in within the week, struggling with our conflicting desires for a car with minimal emissions and maximum all-wheel drive.

 

It took several weeks of sleeping in our winter coats and wearing extra socks before we learned how keep the wood burning stove pumping out necessary heat. Start the fire with quick burning pinyon and then after the first few hours when it burns really good and hot, start adding in the slower burning apple wood. Keep it stocked, don’t ever let the embers burn out. A few extra apple logs before bed and it will almost make it through the night.

 

We were city folk after all, living and working our whole adult lives in and around New York City. We had moved impulsively.

 

I dream of a desperate injured squirrel that came clawing and dragging itself – very fast – out of a friend’s house in Española, into the court yard. We run to open the doors for it and hold the dogs back – the beagle particularly- so it wouldn’t be further injured and could hopefully escape, to live or die where it belonged.

 

Women and men who become with other life-forms are among the anomalies of horror cinema. Inhuman entities possess human bodies. Bodies without souls have non-human life of their own, and spirits without former bodies become ethereal… (Powell 2006: 64 quoted in Dobbs 2011: 129)

 

The “life-long” chemotherapy I’d taken for two and a half years for a supposedly chronic and incurable cancer was suddenly stopped – my blood, bone-marrow and MRI scans all showed no evidence of disease – a remission we had understood was impossible was declared. Over the next few months as my strength returned – I itched to move, impatient to shed an old a skin quite literally as my skin and hair texture began to change as a the medicine left my system.

 

I dream about a zoo I am surprised to discover that I own, filled with powerful, restless caged animals. “I have thousands of animals!” I realized.

 

As Deleuze and Guattari (203a: 29) write, ‘Freud tried to approach crowd phenomena from the point of view of the unconscious… he did not see that the unconscious itself was fundamentally a crowd’ ( Dodds 2011: 144)

 

The kids were up for an adventure –and so I flew out and found a house and a school in October and by the end of December we were packed and had left thirty years of our old life behind.

 

I spent January unpacking the house, getting the kids settled in their new high school, and when I could, venturing out on foot to investigate our new “neighborhood” of adobe homes scattered here and there in the middle of the high desert wild. I was, at first, frightened carrying a large stick with me to use both as a cane and a defensive weapon as I walked our effete city-dogs on the empty dirt roads and trails.

 

Deleuze and Guattari’s approach of “becoming-animal” distinguishes ‘Oedipal’ animals (pets, domesticated animals) from “State” or mythic animals –and from ‘nomadic’ wild or pack animals. (Dodds 2011; 134)

 

I dream my husband brings home an old traumatized mule to live with us in our new house. This sweet old mule is somehow a gift that is suppose to to make up for all the entertaining and company we had to foreclose on during “the troubles”. The mule, rescued, battered, hairless in places, skin scarred, stained or tattooed from being painted for festivals- was so affectionate. The mule will spend her senior years with us. I brought her into the house to stay warm. And then the mule herself led me to discover an ignored, forgotten back yard when she noticed and was excited- wagging her mule tail- to see some song-birds and a small kitten through the sliding doors. It was clear that the mule would be an integral part of our new lives in New Mexico

 

I am nature-starved after thirty five years in the city, but this landscape is totally “other.” I feel vulnerable, but I want to come to know this place. There are large stretches of land on my walks with no cell service. I have a slight limp from cancer-damaged nerves, and I wonder if I look like prey, if the chihuahua is the amuse bouche. I don’t want to get lost among the foothills and unmarked trails, and I don’t know how to live among coyotes and mountain lions.

 

Horror can be understood as an exploration of many of our deepest anxieties such as persecutory anxiety – annihilation, fragmentation, destruction, dismemberment, engulfment, retaliation, biting/clawing, poisoning… (Dodds 2011: 116)

 

I study the satellite view on Google Maps so I can learn which narrow dirt roads connect and where the dead ends are. I watch videos about how to “haze” any aggressive predator we encounter by making myself large and making loud sounds. I order cans of compressed air that make a loud SSSSSHHHHHHT sound.

 

At dusk I hear the coyotes howling, insane laughter like the witches of Macbeth around their cauldron. The sound makes something inside me feel wild myself, or fills me with a yearning to be. I try to mimic the noise at night under the stars but I am too self-conscious and “civilized” to release such a feral sound.

 

“… the fragile boundary between nature and civilization, animal and human… the lure of the uncanny; the desire of the human to return to its primitive origins…” Creed (2005: 137) quoted in Dodds (2011: 125)

 

The white-people who colonize this space tell us “That is the sound when they have made a kill” but the people who live in the Pueblo communities that we have met who are proficient in hunting and tracking, and farming and foraging on this land tell me that is ridiculous. The calls are a joyful greeting when members of the pack reconvene as a big group after spending the day alone or in smaller sub-groups. The sound felt more like laughter than murder to me, and I am glad to have my intuition validated.

 

I dream of Extinction Rebellion- convincing some former client (not a client I recognize) to take climate change seriously- and I start a small sustainable house & garden with her and her son. She seem to have also built a bunker – but I hope it is a root cellar – food storage seems a good and prudent idea to me. We go to an Extinction Rebellion meeting- and no one stops talking. I want to make use of my writing and psychological skills. But activists keep launching into speeches at me and no one listens to my thoughts or strategies. I sense my ideas are unconventional and have a low expectation of being heard. My dream client is effective with them – the group listens to her and her speech about her feelings of persecution. The client has armed the small house we built and is preparing for Armageddon, for doomsday and is organizing against her fellow man. My goal is not a defensive one. I do not want to live in a fortress. I want to stay open to the natural, animal and the human world at once, whether we are living or dying, good or bad. I decide Extinction Rebellion is not for me

 

City mice and cockroaches are not an issue here, as they were in New York. Here we have pack-rats – who gather up bits and pieces of anything and everything and make nests in any small space they can – collecting anything shiny, anything soft, any grass or straw any nut or berry or seed and “pack” them tight into their nesting space wedged under any loose shingle or crack or hole. I am initially upset and disturbed that we have to deal with “rodents” until I look them up online. Their eyes are bright and their ears are round and large – not like city rats at all. I think of them like squirrels and determine to accept them as part of our household in the high desert. When the cat brings me a dead one, I scoop up the corpse and toss it into the brush for the ravens or bobcats to eat. And I congratulate the cat. I tell her she is a fierce warrior with an impressive killing bite and I give her a piece of cheese in exchange for her labor.

 

This is unlike me, in my former city life. I was a mouse-a-phobe, and once made my husband disrupt a session and leave a patient to come home because the cat had caught a mouse and had trapped me upstairs with my little children – bringing us its writhing body in its death throes any time we tried to come down, the three of us screaming and crying with horror at the cat’s murderousness and the rodent-gore.

 

As well as terrifying sights and sounds, we perceive affective textures of a repellant nature, such as the wet stickiness of human blood or the slimy trail of the monster. (Powell, 2006:142 quoted in Dodds, 2011: 132)

 

Last night I had dreams I can’t remember but woke up thinking about how fear is a reminder of our embodiment, that we live in a fragile, breakable finite body. Other emotions may give us feelings of expansiveness but fear reminds us that we are not omniscient or omnipotent. We live in mortal bodies, and our loved ones do too.

 

I learn about rattle snakes and their brumation cycles and seasons. I hire a dog behaviorist to help me teach our hopeless infantilized dogs how to stay alive. I throw a rubber snake in front of them and if they go near I give a can of pennies a loud shake and bark NO! at them. The chihuahua, knows that he is out of his league and stops peeing or pooping entirely from dusk to dawn. Back east he would beg for two or three trips “out” between dinner and bed. But now he prefers to hold it. We are frustrated at first with the change, concerned he will find a secret pee spot in the house but once it is clear that this isn’t going to ruin our rugs we accept it as a Sullivanian security operation.

 

…Becoming-animal is closely linked to becoming-death. (Dodds 2011: 129)

 

The beagle comes alive in a world of extraordinary smells. She is a nose with a dog attached, and she quickly finds every prairie dog compound and every hole filled with burrowing owls. She cannot be trusted off-leash because although she loves us, her loyalty to a scent-trail overpowers all else. One afternoon she pulls into a bush and startles a beautiful Coopers hawk – who is annoyed that his lunch has been disrupted and sits on a fence post five feet from me – and glares into my eyes for a good five minutes, while the dogs sit frozen and staring and completely silent. When I see the hawk turn to eye the bush and see if the rodent or bunny corpse he was feasting on was still there, I pull the dogs away and let the annoyed hawk go back his meal.

 

Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘becoming animal” is no a matter of imitation, metaphor, analogy, or even identification, but a new way of being-becoming where heterogeneous elements recombine into new assemblages. (Dodds 2011: 135)

 

I learn about scorpion infestations and scorpion dangers – the redder they are, the more poisonous they are and their stings can be toxic to dogs. We learn that we should leave the giant fire ant hills along the driveway and the arroyo (the dry river bed which is essentially our “yard”) because they keep not only scorpions but millipede invasions at bay.

 

I learn the names of the plants, and what parts of the yucca, and the prickly pear cactus you can eat.

 

One morning I hear some strange sounds and walk outside and look at the sky: a flock of sandhill cranes circle overhead, calling to each other, their feathers shimmering like the gilded wings of angels in the morning sun.

 

The mule deer have huge ears like rabbits, and they “sproing” instead of run, but they rarely “sproing” away from me or the dogs. At most they simply meander along, and always it seems one or two hang back and tilt their heads and stare back as curious about me as I am about them.

 

I watch the ravens who fly though the updrafts like jokester acrobats – flipping over on to their backs and dive bombing and twisting into loop-de-loops. I observe three ravens call to each other and strategically drive a red-tailed hawk from the territory they wished to claim. The ravens are the animals I feel most “acquisitive” about. I want one to claim me, to befriend it. I want one to trust me enough to eat a dog treat out of my hand.

 

Back East I used to visit a crow several times a month at a rehab center who loved women with grey hair, and who would race to the edge of his cage when I would arrive and shout: “Hello Hello Hello!” and beg me to rub his shiny black beak. I know his contained life at the rehab center was a tragedy. But making contact with him made something feel alive in me that wasn’t alive in any other transaction or relationship.

 

So when I see these wild, smart, strategic, corvids and watch them soaring overhead – I want one to choose me as an ally and also for it to remain wholly wild. I toss dog treats along the path when we notice each other and they call to warn the rest of the “ unkindness of ravens” about my approach. I hope they will start to think of me as friend rather than a danger. I’d like to be accepted as a member of the flock, and although I know this is ridiculous fairy tale trope I still yearn for it.

 

The need for the concept of a mixed pack… a loose pack, an unpacked pack that reflects the diversity of pack phenomena, and includes wolves banished from their pack, dog-wolf hybrids, lone hunters that become pack-like only during mating season… (Genosko 1993: 617, quoted in Dodds 2011: 145)

 

And perhaps even occasionally the loose pack might enfold a stray werewolf, or a squirrel-mule-coyote-raven-woman, or the odd infant human adopted and raised by wolves, into the the pack

 

I wonder if I want to be a therapist anymore. I often want to talk about things that most my clients are not interested in. I want to talk about death and acceptance and climate breakdown and loss and grief and to have compassion for ourselves even as we struggle to comprehend our own destructiveness. I think of how species over-grow and damage a particular ecosystem if they find themselves tossed by wind or water into environments where they have no predators and abundant prey. Are we any more conscious, as a hive, as a collective, than a colony of beavers who flood and “destroy” a prairie and transform it into a swamp, or a swarm of locust who kill all the plants and all of the other species that require those plants to survive, or an infestation of stink bugs accidentally transported by some bird or mammal into a space where they cannot stop growing and consuming? We imagine we are conscious as a species, the “most conscious” species – but I don’t see much evidence of that. A swarm of the fire ants is social and complex, capable of remarkable feats of engineering, with differentiated roles and jobs and social strata. They are also aggressive and murderous.

 

It seems to me an ego-inflation to imagine that we are any more capable as a world-wide species of controlling ourselves than any other over grown species on this planet. How different are we humans, from a swarm, or from this virus – its arrival too soon, too violent, to traumatic to even begin to write about – that consumes its host and leaves behind a stack corpses? Or the beetles that destroy an entire species of trees, the very trees it needs to survive? Swarms can be destroyed by external threats, or by their own pathologies. All the birds are capable of flying in the wrong direction.

 

Astronomers and those who speculate about life on other planets sometimes postulate that the reason we have never been contacted by other “intelligent” life forms is that they have all succumbed to their own consuming and destructive technologies. What if the destructive aspects of our technologies always outstrip the collective ability to comprehend them? What if it is tragic and also natural and not so unusual for a species to be wiped out by disease, or plague, or to unconsciously fuck itself and its environment up? We are surely not the only species to harm or even eliminate other species, or to be eliminated or to eliminate ourselves. Viruses consume and spread and destroy their habitats, until the living systems they depend upon collapse out from under them, and then they recede, or sometimes extinguish themselves entirely.

 

To collapse in paralyzing guilt feels to me to be as grandiose a response to the destructive capacity of humanity as it is to imagine we have been granted dominion and control over the world and all it’s species. We are, I suspect, just as- and no more – conscious than our fellow species-peers, but far more overgrown.

 

I begin to try to visualize a new way of working, although I can’t quite imagine how I will piece it together. I imagine a stew of thanatological work, palliative care, and ecopsychology. I imagine sitting in relationship to the world and the animals and humanity and staying in relationship to all of it whether it lives or dies.

 

I dream I am walking my dogs on an empty dirt road in my neighborhood. There are large bushes on one side. The dogs are far ahead of me, when out of tbe bushes, the profile of an African lion (not a mountain lion as would be expected) with a glorious mane, emerges. He is supernatural and glorious and terrifying. The dogs don’t see him, and the lion doesn’t see me. I freeze, totally silent so the dogs will keep going, and hopefully escape while also hoping that the lion doesn’t turn and notice me. The lion is simultaneously benevolent and terrorizing, as ambivalent and numinous and arbitrary as a Greek or Hindu god or a Voudou loa. It all depends on what he decides about you.

 

Later in the morning I am reading an interesting poet/theologian and this sentences strikes me: “Like a wild animal- a lion, an eagle, a wolf, a bear- Yahweh stalks the creation. Also, the One Presence manifests in lightening, thunder, wind, rain, earthquake, and fire” – (Martin Bell, Distant Fire)

 

I begin to study the use of plant medicine to work through end of life anxiety. I take a distance learning class for my continuing education requirements in Ecopsychoanalyis. I imagine one day teaching classes or leading large workshops outdoors that help people breathe into their death anxiety and bereavement and climate guilt and grief and love the whole mess anyway, but I can’t imagine anyone willing to sign up.

 

In the unconscious the experience of death is common, and occurs ‘in life and for life, in every passage of becoming’. Intensive emotions tap into and control the unconscious experience of death. Death is enveloped by every intense feeling and is ‘what never ceases and never finishes happening in every becoming’ As every intensity if finite, and finally extinguished, so ‘every becoming itself becomes a becoming-death!’ (Deleuze & Guattari 2000: 330, quoted by Powell 2006: 52, quoted by Dodds 2011:129)

 

I don’t want to disrupt those who have the energies for the heroic battle against the unconsciousness of our species, or who want to fight the harms that we inflict upon the planet. I hope they can win. I hope they will. I hope as much of the life on this earth can enjoy this extraordinary reality for as long as possible. I wish the exact same thing for myself. But I have learned in the past several years, that it is easier to embrace and address the realities of life and death squarely when we are not driven by terror or paralyzed by guilt. And there will be so many and so much that will be lost. So much that will come to an end and will deserve a steady accepting, loving gaze to bear witness to the end of their individual stories, or the end of the whole story, and help them not to be afraid.

I dream of my friend Jason, who killed himself a year and a half ago. He takes me to the top of an unfathomably tall mountain. We sit at the edge of earth’s atmosphere on the brink of outer space and he shows me sunset after sunset after sunset. Thousands of sunsets. Each one is excruciatingly beautiful, setting the entire sky ablaze. After what seems like hours of this he turns to me and he says: “Do you see? Endings are the most important part.”

 

 

Why You Are Suddenly Remembering Your Dreams…

April 3, 2020 By whatashrinkthinks in Uncategorized

Sharing an interview about my new dream collection – Dreams of a New World  –  which is accepting dream submissions (Twitter feed @newwordldreams) as well as thoughts about pandemic dreaming from other dream workers and dream collectors  – at InStyle magazine – click here to read.

 

 

It’s in Dreams That Americans Are Making Sense of Trump

March 29, 2020 By whatashrinkthinks in Uncategorized

Screen Shot 2020-03-29 at 5.08.44 PM

This January, a few weeks  after  I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, I sat on the floor in my totally empty house and folded laundry while I talked on the phone with a writer named Stephen Marche about The 45 Dreams Project.

Today his very thoughtful account of our conversation was posted by The New Yorker. You can read the article here.

 

Seminar #65: The Wedding Carriage and the Angel

January 2, 2020 By admin in Uncategorized

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