Trauma, Memory and Healing
There is a full house for this class at the Jung Center in New York City. Our teacher, a Jungian psychologist, is an affable guy who grew up in nearby Brooklyn and shared during the day a basketful of tales about his old Italian neighborhood where there was always wine in the cellar as well as the dark deeds that go unsaid and unreported. He will get into the world that holds what we repress and suppress.
A literal bookend to the class is the novel “The Forgotten” by Elie Wiesel. It’s a fantastic and chilling book about a psychologist who is losing his memory. The father tells his son about his heroic and shameful war experiences. This becomes the son’s task and his fate. He must remember and endure what his father cannot.
The instructor reminds us that forgetting can be useful, necessary and even psychologically helpful. He refers to the New York expression “Forget About It” as a cultural manifestation of this statement. From a psychological perspective the real question seems to be, how can we live what we have seen? The instructor mentions a Yiddish tradition of “Memory Collection,” an implicit acknowledgment that memory never completely goes away. So he asks, rhetorically, where do memories go and why do we so dread losing them either through dementia or amnesia?
Freud and Jung saw memories differently. The teacher suggested that Freud took a more personal view of memories. We repress and suppress memories we don’t want to remember. For Freud, memories were more literal, as if residing in our personal cauldron. Freud wrote that we repeat what we don’t want to remember.
If Freud viewed life in a contiguous line, as in past, present and future, Jung saw life as an ongoing series of psychic patterns of behavior that are preformed fields or archetypes. Jung wrote that what we don’t face consciously comes back as fate. And fate is driven by memory. How we react psychologically to these fields will determine whether our life will be a blessing or we will go to ruin. Fairy tales are a good illustration of this dynamic: being a slave to the past, repeating eternal patterns. The characters never get out, never break the pattern unless they get psyche and reframe memory. This is accomplished through working with archetypes, working with energy fields, and identifying patterns of behavior.
At this point the psychologist from Brooklyn recalled waking up one morning unsure whether he was remembering something, was dreaming or perhaps was dead. We stayed with his story. It was the smell of meatballs his wife was cooking which took him back, transported him to the world of his youth. It was as if he was at his childhood home sitting at the Sunday dinner table.
Someone mentioned Proust’s “Remembrances of Things Past,” where an image, sense or smell gives rise to another in a perfect fictional tapestry. The instructor said that memories, perhaps more so than the image, provide evidence of the field we live in. And these fields don’t just dry up when a loved ones dies. Jung differed from Freud and others because he was emphatic about the reality of the autonomous psyche, that field of psychic energy, home to archetypes and the personal and collective unconscious.
A female student told the story of her elderly father with dementia. She said she reminded him that he was involved in inventing the computer and knew Dizzy Gillespie, the band lead and jazz trumpeter. She pleaded with us to tell stories to love ones in a similar state. Speak to them; they are not stagnant. Look for that one pinpoint of memory. The cry of “I’m still here” comes from the voice of the forgotten.
There seemed to be a lot of pain in the room. I think of those I have known with dementia who could not be reached because I had not found the right memory point. The teacher shifted briefly to the neuroscience of this, mentioning a pianist who had his brain destroyed by a virus but could still play expertly. When asked how he did this the pianist replied, “I don’t know.” There is plenty of evidence that, after a stroke, memories, dreams and life stories can be recovered by a re-activation of the energy field.
We are in more comfortable territory with a discussion of an autistic child who, with the help of Disney characters and archetypes, was able to overcome his autism after not speaking for almost four years. The boy, now a young man and in college, found in the Disney characters archetypes that would give him speech and a way out of his silence.
The instructor, quoting Jung, said emphatically that we can’t walk away from archetypal truths which touch the heart of the dream called a feeling-toned complex where energy and emotion reside. He said the same dynamic takes place with memory. Through dreams and memories we are listening to our elders and articulating the fields of life.
The teacher touches on the notion of false memories which briefly share the spotlight with notions of fake news. The Jungian, who stayed away from the overtly political, reiterated that archetypes will not be silenced by contemporary versions of the truth. As he intimated earlier, he considered archetypes natural patterns and objective constants as immutable as the seasons.
But like politicians, psychologists are also capable of bending the truth to their advantage. He referred to Freud’s famous seduction theory as an example of the distortion of truth. Early in his career Freud believed assaults reported by his female patients (usually fathers abusing daughters) were examples of actual trauma. Over time, whether due to lack of acceptance by his peers, a patriarchal profession or his close association with a doctor who was making outlandish claims about the relation between female sex organs and the nose, Freud revised his seduction theory. The trauma reported by his patients he now considered a fantasy.
However, this shift was not merely a change of heart or opinion. Our teacher said there is evidence that Freud actually eliminated from his letters and written case studies references to the actual trauma of his patients. There remain ongoing questions about the direction of psychoanalysis if the patients’ memories were treated as real wounds and not fantasies.
The instructor mentioned a test a female student had to take at the Jung Center in Zurich to receive her diploma. The test consisted of only one question. The examiner asked the woman how she would explain individuation, the process of bringing the personal and collective unconscious into the psyche, to a street cleaner in Zurich. The student used the sailboat metaphor to explain to the worker the winds that changed direction and intensity, capturing the spirit or prefiguring danger. The winds occupy all the compass points and can lift the sail boat with power and grace or send it to the bottom of the sea.
I can almost see the street cleaner nodding his head.
