The Psychology and Mythology of Trauma
I love fairy tales, the Brothers Grimm, the maiden who lost her hands to the devil, and the girl in the lovely red shoes who dances up a psychological storm. I remember to always be attentive to animals and dwarfs in the tales. I love all the metaphors, the wrapping of trauma in the Disney plots, and finally getting to the bottom of Hansel and Gretel.
Fairy tales would help us get into the dark world of trauma during a week-long session at the C.G. Jung Foundation in New York City. The class consisted of a priest, therapists, social workers and others who deal with trauma on a daily basis. I tell that my presence is personal and psychological. I was born in war and served in war. I have watched inter-generational trauma in my family for much of my life. I mention that I wrote “In the Shadow of the DMZ,” a book-length poem about the trauma in my life and family. I have more work to do, I say. Then I go quiet for a while.
The instructor reminds us that trauma not processed will inevitably be transferred or projected onto someone else, an unconscious act. I listen to my fellow students and realize immediately that trauma is everywhere, in the woman dealing with her husband’s Parkinson’s, the man going to AA, and the woman dealing with student trauma in the Bronx.
We learn that trauma can change the brain, shut down speech, and elevate raw emotion. In severe cases trauma can cause the loss of learned behavior. Blood flow is restricted and cortex can’t be activated. Trauma patients take whatever is on the inside and put outside. In this instance there is a pressing need for containers to help hold the trauma. This could be a parent, a psychologist or a safe space.
Those experiencing trauma are often unsafe inside their own bodies. In effect, the past remains alive and active, gnawing at a person, causing internal discomfort and somatic responses in the body. The challenge is to get to the root of the problem, that is the intense feeling and the affect that we are projecting or displacing on those around us. The usefulness of fairy tales is that they take us back, in miniature, to the source of the trauma, examining the wound at a distance. The tales might remind us that it’s all right to cook the witch in the oven. Or that wearing red shoes all the time to the point of pain might suggest that even good objects kill.
There’s an unwritten rule at the Jung Foundation that instructors should keep politics off the psychological menu, no matter how tempting. That’s easier said than done. Trauma is, after all, often transgenerational and part of the individual and collective shadow that colors everything. And it’s inevitable that we would get to Jung’s view of the psychology of the German people and Hitler during that Trauma called Word War II. Jung suggested in 1945 that Hitler exploited the trauma Germans associated with the defeat in World War I and feelings of inferiority and exploitation in the cultural collective. Central to Jung’s argument is that when the dark, shadowy material in our personal and/or collective unconscious is not confronted and made conscious, it is projected outward onto the weak, disenfranchised and those groups easily sacrificed to the whole. And we don’t have to look very far to find similar developments in the word today. Jung wrote that it is not morality that will save us from these dark, menacing evil forces that come from the collective unconscious; it is consciousness. We must become psychological.
This seems to be where Jung is more helpful than Freud in that the former seemed to fully understand the dark side of individual and cultural traumas in that these tend to be intergenerational and can be passed down through time. This state is an act of regression, abasement, a humbling, a slipping into the unconscious and at times moving into a trance-like state.
In its raw state this level of trauma can represent a kind of psychological dissociation, with archetypal roots, more tied to the collective than to the personal unconscious. The raw energy that fuels this state is, in Jung’s words, a feeling-toned complex that is activated by some outside force. The psyche has a tendency to de-pathologize a complex, making it unconscious and easily manipulated. Our task is to take the energy out of the complex and bring it into the daylight. No one is immune. The life force can turn on all of us.
As Jung suggested, more emphasis on psychology will better equip us to deal with the shadow elements in ourselves and our culture. As others have said, to have soul represents the adventure of life. These two remarks might well be interchangeable. For Jung, the image is central to soul and soul is psyche. Psychic suffering can contain healing truths.
He also said that the feminine is lacking in our culture. Jung sees the feminine in terms of the Anima principle and a soulfulness. But this is not fanciful; he is talking about play, imagination, fantasy, creativity, birthing and active imagination. Jung is talking about a cultural movement from a solar consciousness to a lunar consciousness, away from the white hot left side of the brain, literal, fixed, limited and conceptual toward the cooler right brain that is symbolic, relational and contextual. Our instructor added other elements to lunar consciousness including, the subtle body, the power of the heart and the imaginal eye.
Jung said that people will do anything to avoid their fate. But he was also very clear that we each have the power to transform and heal ourselves, a welcome coda to a difficult week. The soul or psyche has the ability to heal itself.
I will close with an excerpt from my recent novel, “Chanting the Feminine Down.” It is about the Neoplatonist Plotinus, writing toward the end of the third century. The main character Colette reflects on reading the philosopher:
“As Colette read Plotinus, she recalled her recent conversation with Professor Merkel about Carl Jung and his ‘Symbols of Transformation.’ Jung said image was psyche and central to a person’s soul-making activity. Colette sensed that she was hearing the same language and intent in Plotinus when he wrote that each soul has its own image-making facility which combined with memory that was not only remembrance; it was also a condition induced by past experiences and visions.
“She read that ‘soul in man was some sort of composite. All affection and experiences have their seat in the soul.’ The soul may feel sorrow and pain and every other affliction that belong to the body, but the soul seeks a mending of its instrument.
“Colette felt she had just prayed, not to some god or even to Plotinus; she just said thanks for a third-century reminder that the soul has the capacity to repair itself. For Plotinus a psychology of soul represented a psychology of the imagination.”
“Chanting the Feminine Down” took me more than two years to write, a project that represented a lifetime struggle, often traumatic, with religion. Plotinus, Jung and an amazing boatload of dreams showed me the way forward. Writing has been my salvation.
