The Single Hair Which Stirs The Sea: A Look At The Similarities Between Zen Buddhism And Archetypal Psychology

While I am not a serious practitioner or a devotee of Buddhism, I do admire its philosophy as well as its psychology, and one of the most appealing aspects to me is the highly developed aesthetic sensibility that enfolds Buddhist theology, and how, out of its many expressions, there emerges a way of being in the world that is elegant, compassionate, and artful. Perhaps it is Buddhism’s emphasis on the use of skillful means which accounts for this; it creates an opportunity for the expression of art in every situation, in every nuanced gesture, and in every relationship one enters. Through the effortless effort of mindfulness, one becomes saturated with a sense of soulfulness: the starkly magnificent sand and rock gardens maintained in monastery courtyards; the beautifully calm, relaxed, yet thoroughly engaged posture of meditation, together with its delicate and precisely formed mudras, and peaceful half smile; and the total sense of presence one may feel when looking deeply at a flower, an insect, or another human being.

It is not surprising then, that beautiful visual art and poetry have arisen from the intermingling of Buddhism with the arts. Wood block prints, haiku, and Japanese No dramas are but a few of the most widely known, and perhaps most widely enjoyed, forms of “religious” art which, at this point in time, are inseparable from the Zen Buddhism found in China and Japan. To the extent that beauty is present in this form, so too is soul (although I realize that Buddhists may not choose to use that particular word). The soul of which Archetypal Psychology speaks, also lays claim to a lineage of cultural beauty; it is heir to the great soulful art, literature, and philosophies that penetrate the mechanistic illusions of the Western world and expose the animated, succulent underworld of soul. It doesn’t come out of the East as does Zen, but out of the south, up from below–from the depths, and often finds itself imagining in ways that parallel Zen thought.

In James Hillman’s view, soul “performs as does a metaphor, transposing meaning and releasing interior, buried significance.” This is exactly what I consider to be the greatest function of poetry, and Zen poetry in particular executes such an intention as well as any form of poetry can. If I could express the relationship between soul and poetry in one sentence, perhaps it would be simply this: soul expresses its beauty through poetry, while poetry expresses soul through its beauty.

I do not claim any particular expertise in the area of Buddhism, art or poetry generally, but I do know what touches me–what seizes me–and gives me to understanding that I am in the presence of something numinous and beautiful. Good poetry, east or west, does exactly that, and it is that poetic soul, which is shared by Buddhism and Archetypal Psychology, that I would like to explore in this essay. Poetry can be phenomenally powerful in its ability to convey emotion and bring the very nature of ourselves into our consciousness, what Herman Melville called “the shock of recognition,” and it does it in such a way that is often, at first blush, unnoticed and unassuming. One expects great revelations (and often one does not receive them) from a tome so thick that to simply carry it from place to place is exhausting, but the complete surprise in realizing that a little, three-line haiku can offer a glimpse of the hidden truths of our existence, is nearly crushing in its clarity. For instance, we find Basho and Issa addressing nearly identical thoughts with images that are at once beautiful, poignant, and painful:

Come, see
real flowers
of this painful world.
–Basho

Never forget
we walk on hell,
gazing at flowers.
–Issa

Other forms of poetry besides haiku have been used to express a Buddhist world view. For instance, the title of this essay is taken from a poem by the Japanese poet, Shutaku:

Mind set free in the Dharma-Realm,
I sit at the moon filled window
Watching the mountains with my ears
Hearing the stream with open eyes.
Each molecule preaches perfect law,
Each moment chants true sutra:
The most fleeting thought is timeless,
A single hair’s enough to stir the sea.

The above poem contains the elements so familiar to Zen: an undeniable life affirming humor, and the stark contradictions which so effectively communicate the paradoxes of our existence.
That poetry can be so compelling and revealing is not new to adherents of Archetypal Psychology. James Hillman asserts that the mind is inherently poetic and that the poetic image “is the self generative activity of the soul.” In this vein, the images that manifest in our dreams and fantasies, the various personae we assume in different situations, the “reality” we imagine we inhabit, are all poetic. As such, even the coarse and painful experiences of life may be seen as poesis, and seen in such a light, these seemingly random twists of fortune may be seen through, allowing us to experience the larger gestalt forming the background of a single, noticed event.

The shocking, the horrible, the terrifying, the painful, the unspeakable, are all subjects of poetry as often as are the beautiful, the peaceful, and the lyric. A single poem can become a massive psychic vessel that contains the opposites–the paradoxes of experience–and somehow presents them in a unified, unconflicted and yes, in a beautiful way. In such a poetic crucible one can, without much difficulty, come to know the Buddhist notion of emptiness, which is to say that nothing exists alone in isolation, or as phenomena separate and unrelated to ourselves. Emptiness, in this manner of seeing, is really fullness; everything is present at once, and in one instance so there is no experience of separation or judgment. In poetry, as in this notion of emptying, I believe ego consciousness expands to previously unrealized dimensions and embraces the unity of phenomena, the depth of soul, the peaks of spirit, and is able to adequately entertain the fundamentally paradoxical nature of existence.

Recognizing our lives and our experiences as the apparatus of poesis brings us to a deeper place of life, to the depressions and hollows which the soul inhabits and where it finds sustenance. It is where we begin to see the interconnectedness of all things; poesis is exactly the place where images (and therefore the minds and souls of us), to borrow a phrase from Thick Nhat Hahn, “inter-are.”

Zen poetry, more so than any other form of poetry, seems to be able to give us ordinary unenlightened beings who have yet to realize that we’re Buddhas, a glimpse of a reality not readily available to us, a glimpse of the dharmadhatu–the deep cleft or void out of which every phenomenon arises. This is not to say that enlightened poetry is the sole province of Asia. In fact, there are many Western poets who seem to have a distinctly Zen-like flavor to their work: T. S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, and William Blake, to name only a few. When soul breaks through and is noticed in art, or in any of the forms of the world for that matter, it looks much the same, it is unmistakable regardless of the cultural or religious lens one employs to see it.

Blake and Hillman are in a deep accord with one another in describing the essential nature of the soul. Listen to Blake describe in his own words what Hillman calls soul and archetype:

[T]he Poetic Genius is the true Man. and that the body or outward form of Man is derived from the Poetic Genius. Likewise that the forms of all things are derived from their Genius which by the Ancients was call’d an Angel & Spirit & Demon. . . As all men are alike in outward form, So (and with the same infinite variety) all are alike in the Poetic Genius.

It is clear to me that Hillman’s conceptualization of soul and mind as fundamentally poetic is equivalent to Blake’s concept of Poetic Genius. Both Hillman and Blake parallel Zen thought in that each dismantles ego, each refutes the independent existence of self and the pseudo-separation between things, each urges an experience of life that is not simply tied to the tangible, the factual, and the temporal. How much like a Zen poet is Blake:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour. . .

Blake’s poem contains the same sort of contradictions, the same paradoxical pairings, the same effect of transporting one’s self out of the usual way of thinking and listening, and into hearing and feeling with one’s soul, that one finds in Zen poetry.

In reading the Western poets who seem to reflect a Zen sensibility, we can begin to apprehend a fundamental truth. There is nothing inherently Zen in poetry, even in the Asian forms of haiku or tanka. It is the author who alone brings Buddha Nature (soulfulness) and Zen to the form, not the other way around. In fact, even more than the author, it is soul that expresses its own essence in the form. Stryk recounts his discussion about Zen and the arts in an interview with Roshi Gempo Nakamura, a Rinzai master, who said:

[I] am aware of the way most Westerners associate Zen and art. I would caution against assuming that the connection is absolute. Far from it. There’s nothing intrinsically Zen in any art, in spite of the way some seem to reflect Zen principles. It is the man who brings Zen to the art he practices. . . The problem is more complex than one would suppose. I’m simply maintaining that few works of so called Zen art, including haiku and sumie, have true Zen. . . Awakawa quotes, by the way, a fine story concerning one of the Kano School painters who would always tell disciples they must be in a constant state of enlightenment. One day, it appears, while the master lay sick in bed, though it was raining hard, his disciples came to visit. Suddenly the conversation was interrupted by loud singing in the street. “An interesting man,” the master said. “Do you understand his state of mind as he walks singing in the downpour? That’s how you should feel when painting.” the greatest practitioners of the arts we’re discussing were profound Zenists–none would deny that. It doesn’t follow, however, that when a man lifts brush or pen he is automatically engaging in Zen activity. He may not be the kind to sing in the rain!

The art, or in the case of this essay the poetry, that looks like Zen and even feels like Zen may not have true Zen embodied in it. One may, as Dogen said, be mistaking the finger for the moon, or more likely mistaking the form for the Zen. Viewed through the lens of Archetypal Psychology, one might say we mistake spirit for soul and pneuma for psyche. Nakamura goes on to tell Stryk that it doesn’t even matter whether the creator of a work has truly injected the work with Zen, suggesting that “One knows at once whether work has Zen dynamism balanced by composure. There is zenki [Zen spirit] or there isn’t, whatever the man calls himself.”

How does one know if a poem contains Zen? Often a poem can contain beautiful images and a lyric rhythm, but doesn’t penetrate one’s being beyond the merely sensate experience. Feeling completely possessed by the image–feeling as James Joyce suggested, a “seizure of the heart”–is a relatively rare event. The Rinzai school of Zen believes that true enlightenment is the rarest thing in the world, and takes extraordinary effort and resolve to achieve it. Satori is not quick, easy, and convenient; quite the contrary, it is elusive, shape shifting, and mercurial. It is here one instant and gone the next. One can never see “it,” one must feel it in the depth of one’s being; one feels the zenki in the soul and lives with it, romances it, and longs for it. My sense is that satori is not found accidentally, say, like the jolt one receives from walking into a door; it is both courted and tempting, tantalized and tantalizing, it dwells within and without, all at the same time.

A willingness to engage in work designed to bring about a deep encounter with the dharmakaya is crucial to experiencing the awakening, but what’s more, the willingness to simply allow the awakening to occur must also exist. It is here, at the edge of this new awareness, on the brink of the deep emptiness of satori, we often become faint with the fear and apprehension of death because, make no mistake, it is death we face at this moment; the death of our old understanding, our old ways of being in the world, and our old ways of relating to our individual lives–the existence we have always (and only) known. It is at this boundary, in this borderland, where once again, from an Archetypal perspective, one encounters the figure of Death attending the formation of the soul.

Death poems of the Masters, which paradoxically communicate the essence of life, are along with enlightenment poems, among the most contemplated of poems by students of Zen. Perhaps that’s because as one nears death, amid the full blossoming awareness of impermanence, that one’s life may be most cherished. Death can define one’s thoughts and feelings with a laser like focus that makes one aware that the most important thing in life is the deeply felt experience: the recognition of being profoundly connected to those who are important to us, the feeling of actively inhabiting this fragile body, and the determination to drink deeply from the well of mystery and wonder this existence offers.

The following are poems written by masters who knew their times to die were drawing near. The different poems reflect the different attitudes with which death was met:

The word at last,
No more dependencies:
Cold moon in pond,
Smoke over the ferry.
–Koko

Sixty-six years
Piling sins,
I leap into hell–
Above life and death.
–Tendo-Nyojo

Seventy-six: done
With this life–
I’ve not sought heaven,
Don’t fear hell.
I’ll lay these bones
Beyond the triple world,
Unenthralled, unperturbed.
–Fuyo-Dokai

Smoke over the ferry, indeed. There is something so beautiful and yet courageous about the willingness to forsake the known for the unknown, and in fact, in the act of leave-taking the intransience of the soul can be discovered.

In the above poems, the poets accept the extraordinary with the same unattached, but deeply felt, way they encounter the ordinary; one is not valued more than the other, and with such an eye on life, literally every experience and everything becomes a treasure because the emptiness that Master Shigetsu speaks of is, as an internal experience, an indescribable fullness accompanied by the awareness that nothing exists independently of its own accord. Archetypally speaking, realizing the dependent nature of all things leads us to the awareness that soul forms the background out of which all things arise–the Anima Mundi or Mundis Imaginalis , and it is soul which connects us all.

Alive in the constancy of change, participating in the dance of impermanence, the smoke of our lives is in eternal motion, appearing and disappearing, over the ferry. There is irony in that often we’re the smoke, and frequently we’re the ferry; and the question becomes one of each appreciating the other, and knowing that a relationship exists between two very different ways of being.

The soul’s relationship to death is of the utmost importance to archetypal psychologists, too: “First, ‘soul’ refers to the deepening of events into experiences; second, the significance soul makes possible, whether in love or in religious concern, derives from its special relation with death (Hillman).” If we were never to die, never to realize the impermanence that pervades life, we would never realize its beauty. It is that ineffable miracle living at the heart of the mystery of existence that makes life beautiful, and when we follow the trail of beauty back to that from which it springs, we experience the soul.

Like a circle, or a wheel, the poetry of Zen and the poesis of Archetypal Psychology continually bring us back around (or down) again and again, like Syssiphus and his rock, to see the same old things in a brand new way; to see distinct images and feel unique feelings, all the while looking for the common circle of soul, the dharmadhatu from which all things arise and which binds all things together, too.

This circular route of the soul allows us not only to develop awareness about our own, and other’s experiences, but also fathom how we have discovered a meaning and a depth to our own development. It is the circuitous flow of energy that allows us to retrieve what we’ve left behind, reclaim lost energies and tap into heretofore unrecognized strengths.

The archetypal depth that the soul inhabits is the same kingdom in which the Buddhist notion of emptiness lives. This territory is not a void, and it is far, far from hell even though its territory may be the underworld. William Blake knew this territory well, and I would like to end this all ready too long essay with the last half of one of his poems that describes where the work of emptying, the work of soul making, is to be done–in the dell, in the valley, and in the vale. It is only in the depths of one’s own being that one may encounter the fullness of life. It is a poem that is found, significantly I think, in Blake’s collection called Songs of Experience, and is titled, “Little Girl Found:”

Follow me he said,
Weep not for the maid;
In my palace deep,
Lyca lies asleep.

Then they followed,
Where the vision led:
And saw their sleeping child,
Among tygers wild.

To this day they dwell
In a lonely dell
Nor fear the wolvish howl,
Nor the lion’s growl.

Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Suspicion: A Shady Cinematic Look At The Archetype Of The Puer Aeternus

Since the notion of the Puer Aeternus, the eternal child, is interesting some who have read my last post, I thought I would use an example from film, an old black and white film that I love, to illustrate this particular archetype. Cary Grant is perhaps my favorite film actor, and Alfred Hitchcock, my favorite director. So when the two of them team up, as they did in several films, I am a very happy cineaste indeed. In his 1941 film Suspicion, Alfred Hitchcock directs Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine (who won a Best Actress Oscar for her performance) in a movie about a notorious playboy and the wallflower whom he marries. The question is did he marry her only for her money, and will he murder her to get it?

I think this film uses Cary Grant’s natural charm wonderfully, helped perhaps by Grant’s own puer nature, in order to illustrate the darker aspects of the puer. Again, the question of how much any filmmaker is aware of archetypal concepts is hard to ascertain, but Hitchcock is masterful when it comes to the feat of allowing images to tell a story.

The archetypal theme I want to focus on in this picture is primarily that of the puer, particularly in its undifferentiated and split off aspects. Cary Grant, as Johnny Aysgarth, embodies an unrepentant puer. Joan Fontaine, as Lina McLaidlaw, is a rather spinsterish and vivid example of the senex, despite her youth and obvious beauty. But I’ll touch on the senex another time.

As the movie opens, we see Lina on a train, comfortably seated in her first class compartment when Johnny enters and sits across from her and begins to manufacture an excuse for why he’s now occupying her compartment. He obviously lies as to his presence in the car and even attempts to persuade the conductor that his third class ticket is a first class one, but Lina seems not to mind and is rather intrigued by this dashing fellow. At the end of this scene, the camera pans down to the book that Lina is reading and shows us the title: Child Psychology! There can be no doubt now that Johnny is representative of the archetype of the child.

Lina soon learns that Johnny is something of a playboy and often pictured in the pages of society magazines in the company of women, and never, it seems, are they the same women. They meet again at a fox hunt, where Johnny sees Lina skillfully reign in her rearing horse and realizes that the girl from the train might be able to just as skillfully keep the bit in his mouth. This, I suspect, both intrigues and repels him.

We learn that Lina is bookish, very shy and socially awkward, “a very carefully brought up young lady.” Johnny arranges to show up at her house in the company of several other women who know Lina and invite her to church. As the others enter into the church, Johnny takes a surprised Lina by the hand and they sneak away to the high, beautiful and windy oceanside cliffs nearby (another typical example of the puer with his “head in the clouds” and occupying, as James Hillman would say, the peaks of spirit).

On these same cliffs Johnny attempts to touch her, to rearrange her hair, and Lina pulls away afraid. “What do you think I was trying to do, kill you? Nothing less than murder could justify such violent self defense,” he says to her mockingly. He continues to tease her and even moves in to kiss her, but she turns away and the camera focuses on the snapping shut of her small handbag, used in this scene as an obviously Freudian symbol, as if to say entering her is out of the question until he is willing to take the bit into his mouth, just as her horse had been willing earlier.

They walk back to her home where she overhears her parents saying that she will never marry–that she’s foreordained to occupy a sort of prematurely old, dried up, essentially senex archetypal experience for the rest of her life. As Lina overhears their conversation she turns to Johnny and spontaneously kisses him, a demonstration of her unwillingness to surrender to her fate.

At dinner there is discussion that Johnny is “wild,” a cheat, and a womanizer. Lina is silent and looking forward to being accompanied to the Hunt Ball by Johnny, but he calls and breaks his date and deeply disappoints her because he’s brought something into her life she now misses: a bit of spontaneity, the joy of living life, and excitement. As von Franz suggests, “. . . the child is also a uniting symbol, bringing together the separated or dissociated parts of the personality. . . (100). Lina feels more alive and more complete than she ever has, and Johnny’s absence only serves to highlight what she has been missing.

Johnny has let Lina know at the last moment that he will indeed attend the ball. Not having an invitation, he once again manipulates, this time to get into the ball. He is constantly flaunting the rules because, as Jung states:

Such a type of man is to be bound to [nothing] whatsoever. There is a terrific fear of being pinned down, of entering space and time completely, and of being the specific human being that one is. There is always the fear of being caught in a situation from which it may be impossible to slip out again.

Johnny and Lina leave the ball and go for a car ride during which he tells her about all the women he’s been involved with. He says there are such a number of them that he counts them to help him fall asleep at night. Franz would say that Johnny “takes too much from the anima of the women around him. . . then suddenly, one day he has had enough, and just walks out.”

Lina tells him she loves him. He doesn’t like this, for he has strong feelings for her too. They stop by Lina’s home to have a drink, and Johnny asks her father’s portrait, which hangs unmistakably and imposingly above the fireplace, for permission to marry Lina. As if to signal the impending disaster resulting from the union, the General’s portrait falls of the wall.
Lina and Johnny elope and take an elaborate honeymoon around Europe. They come home to the beautiful new house Johnny has bought and decorated (expensively), complete with a servant. Johnny evades questions Lina asks about how he could afford it. It isn’t long before Lina finds out. A telegram arrives requesting Johnny repay the money he borrowed to finance his honeymoon trip. He confesses to Lina he’s been broke all his life, but adds that she’ll have plenty of money some day when she receives her inheritance, so why not live for the moment! Lina, finally seeing Johnny more clearly, tells him that he’s incredibly naive and that he should find a job. But Johnny resists, saying that if “worse comes to worse,” they’ll simply borrow more money. True to the psychology of the puer, work seems to be the most repellent thing to him in the entire world. Franz writes that Dr. Jung noted but one cure for the puer–work. “Work is the one disagreeable word which no puer aeternus likes to hear, and Dr. Jung came to the conclusion that it was the right answer.”

The film goes on to show Johnny going to work for his cousin, Captain Melbank, managing Melbank’s estate. At the same time Johnny’s good friend, Binky Thwait shows up and introduces himself to Lina. Binky is wealthy, stupid, and childish; a child in an adult’s body, and the perfect friend for Johnny. Binky knows all of Johnny’s manipulative and shady behaviors, and finds him all the more attractive because of them. Eventually we learn that Binky has a fatal vulnerability: when he drinks hard liquor, he has a violent, choking, coughing fit that Johnny ominously says will kill him some day.

Learning from a busy body that Johnny hasn’t quite gambling, Lina goes to Capt. Melbank’s office to speak to Johnny. She learns from Capt. Melbank that Johnny has been fired for embezzling funds, and hasn’t worked there for over six weeks. Capt. Melbank tells Lina that he won’t immediately prosecute Johnny, and he’ll give him some time to pay back the money. Things are getting tough now for Johnny. Lina’s father passed away and left her only her current allowance, so no financial boon is in the offing for Johnny who is beginning to fear Lina will leave him now that she knows he’s lost his job. Subsequently, Johnny and Binky form a partnership to develop real estate. Johnny comes up with the plan, and naturally Binky comes up with the cash. Indeed, Binky signs his assets over to Johnny under the terms of their partnership. Eventually Johnny comes to the conclusion that the real estate development plan won’t work out and calls it off.

Johnny, Lina, and Binky are playing anagrams and Lina is absently fingering her tiles and realizes that she has formed the word “murderer” with her tiles. She fears that Johnny will kill Binky for the money that has been set aside in their partnership. A close call at the cliffs results in Johnny saving Binky’s life. Lina is relieved to find that her fears are unfounded, and Johnny plans to accompany Binky as far as London on Binky’s trip to Paris to dissolve the partnership, but she later learns that Binky has died while in Paris from a choking, coughing fit after drinking a large glass of liquor offered to him by an unidentified Englishman.

Lina of course fears that it was Johnny who fed Binky the liquor that killed him. She visits a friend of hers named Isabelle, who is a mystery novel writer. Isabelle describes her most recent novel in which a man who cannot swim is led across a damaged footbridge. He falls into the river and drowns. Isabelle compares this to what happened to Johnny’s friend, Binky. She also mentions she has loaned one of her book’s with a similar plot to Johnny some time earlier.

Meanwhile some letters arrive for Johnny, and as he bathes, Lina reads them. One letter is a reply to a request Johnny made to borrow money against his wife’s life insurance policy. The insurance company tells him they can only pay upon the event of his wife’s death. Lina begins to fear that Johnny may try to kill her. She doesn’t want to believe it, but can’t stop herself from having such thoughts.

Johnny and Lina attend a dinner party at Isabelle’s house. In attendance is a forensic pathologist, and the conversation turns to murder. Johnny remarks that it would be easy to poison someone, and that there must be thousands of murderers walking around free. Lina asks Johnny if he thinks they are happy and he simply replies, “why not?” Later at home Johnny and Lina are completely alone; the servants have the evening off. Lina is terrified that Johnny will kill her–poison her, and she’s overwhelmed by her fear and falls into a faint.

The next morning she awakes to find Isabelle attending her. Isabelle tells her that Johnny has been “worming” all of her secrets out of her, such as the poison, which is untraceable. Lina is now absolutely convinced Johnny is planning to murder her, and asks Isabelle about the poison, “Is it painful?” Isabelle replies, “Not in the least. In fact I should think it would be a most pleasant death.”

The next scene is quite famous. In it Johnny is bringing a glass of milk up the stairs, to Lina lying in her bedroom. The milk is brightly lit while everything else in the scene is dark. Lina, as are we, is led to believe the milk is poisoned (Hitchcock put a light bulb inside the glass of milk to illuminate the milk). Johnny kisses Lina good night tenderly, as if it were for the last time.

What we are seeing in this film is Cary Grant increasingly filmed in shadow, as if to highlight a growing malevolence–and this malevolent cast is often the shadow of the puer. Speaking of this shadow von Franz says: “Here, usually, is a very cold, brutal man somewhere in the background, which compensates the too idealistic attitude of consciousness and which the puer aeternus cannot voluntarily assimilate.” Even more to the point of illustrating our John Aysgarth in this film, von Franz goes on to say, “This brutality, or the cold realistic attitude, very often appears also in matters related to money. Since he does not want to adapt socially, or take on some regular job and work, he must get money somehow.”

The denouement: Lina wakes up and plans to leave Johnny. He insists on driving her, and she is once again convinced that he will try to kill her. As she struggles with him in the moving car, Johnny brings it to a halt and tells her of his shame at being unable to provide for her the way he (and everyone else) thinks he should. It becomes clear that the poison is for Johnny; that he was going to kill himself, not Lina.

This wish for death–suicide– is a classic puer move. According to von Franz, the puer aeternus always keeps his revolver in his pocket and constantly plays with the idea of getting out of life if things get too hard. The disadvantage of this is that he is never quite committed to the situation as a whole human being; there is a constant “Jesuitical mental reservation. . . I shall not go through the whole experience to the bitter end if it becomes too insufferable . . . Transformation can only take place if one gives oneself completely to the situation.”

What we see in the movie’s final scene is Johnny’s apparent willingness to commit himself “completely to the situation.” He and Lina experience a rapprochement and return to their own home transformed in themselves, and in their relationship, with a chance to start their life together anew.

This film deals with the shadow of the puer in such a way that few films seem to. Often in film, the puer is depicted as purely charming and child like; mercurial and clever in the way of Hermes The Thief, or hard to pin down romantically like an Eros figure. In this film, Hitchcock shows the darkness of the puer–the potentially cruel and calculating aspects that one does not always think of when thinking about the puers in our lives.

There are other archetypes present in the film as well; along with her father, Lina herself seems to embody a great many of the characteristics of the senex. Another nice result of this film is that we get to see how, as James Hillman describes, when puer and senex are united, both are invigorated. The senex is not merely a dried up old goat that devours his/her own creations, but is able to develop a wisdom and generativity that ages gracefully and vitally. Similarly, the puer takes on a wisdom and a groundedness that makes him genuinely charming and graceful; not merely a caricature of childhood, but a responsible adult who can encounter life with a light, deft touch. Knowingly or not, Hitchcock has demonstrated these archetypal images very well in this film, but this frequently happens in cinema. There are any number of movies, particularly movies that become perennial favorites or cult classics, which reflect strong archetypal patterns, and they are memorable because, in the reflected archetypes, we find our own lives and ourselves.

Eros: What Price a God?

Relationships, love relationships in particular, are at various times puzzling, painful, compassionate, frightening, comforting, nurturing, crippling, paranoiac, exciting, spiritual, sensual, compatible, horribly unsuitable, forgiving, full of recrimination, and shameful. Frequently, when we encounter the darker aspects of relationship, we don’t know what to think or what to do. The culturally sanctioned messages about relationships are so far removed from the daily experiences of the average people in them that these messages (and accompanying images) appear to be artifacts from some strange, exotic world in which people are never stressed, never confused, never in doubt about anything, and oddly, never in need of dental work. My friends, my clients, and I, myself, live in a very different reality.

In my experience of reality, love–and what it is to be loving–is not something we are well taught by our culture. Instead, people in long term, committed relationships too often seem to settle into a routine of long-suffering perseverance, they develop habits of increasing withdrawal from one another, only to settle into a detente-like coexistence while an ocean of indifference separates two rich inner lives, lives that, once upon a time, beat to the rhythm of a single heart and now are lives that can now barely sustain their own individual heartbeats. They have become separate, lonely lives which are seldom shared at all any more.

Despite the reality of relationships, or perhaps in spite of such a reality, love still seems to be regarded as the Holy Grail, the organizing principle of our society. In Western culture the greater part of music, cinema, literature, and art all seem to dance around the theme of passion and love. Without a doubt Eros sells, and the result is a mercantile arousal to passion and sexual kabuki that may be seen on billboards, on televisions, and magazines scattered across the country, even reaching into the most remote and Victorian hamlets in America.

But just who is it that’s buying? Because the picture presented is often one of scantily clad young women in a puzzling, and frequently bizarre, relationship to automobiles, power tools, toothpaste, beer, gyms, undergarments, jewelry, and sports gear–just to cite a fraction of the items hawked in this manner–it would appear that the intended targets of these ads are men; men who are spending nearly every disposable cent they have in hopes of being able to purchase the masculinity they believe themselves to have been born without. They are men who are convinced that in order for them to be truly masculine and powerful they must own–and I do mean own–not only the advertised products, but also the closest approximation they can find to the female shown alongside the merchandise (or draped over it, as the case may be). Such men do not seek out the feminine for its own unique qualities, but rather for its perceived ability to draw attention to the masculine.

The men who are caught up in such beliefs drift from one purchase to the next, one girlfriend to the next, and one place to the next hoping that just around the bend, or over the next hill, someone or something will appear which will fill the emptiness they feel inside themselves. They look for increasingly exciting, rare, or glamorous relationships. Like carnal Columbus’s they look for fresh feminine territory to claim for themselves, new positions, new risks, and new experiences through which they can be the first to “discover” a magical infusion of self regard, fully unaware–or uncaring–that they are walking this path for the umpteenth billion time in human history, hoping each time, against all odds and common sense, that this time “something new” will fill the void within them.

Susan Faludi calls this phenomenon “The Ornamental Culture. . . [which] reshapes [a man’s] most basic sense of manhood by telling him that masculinity is something to drape over the body, not draw from inner resources. . . that manhood is displayed, not demonstrated.” The beliefs of an “ornamental culture” inspire the hope that putting oneself on display results, for men and women alike, in judgments being made about one’s inner self based entirely on outer appearances. For instance, if a man has the accouterments of wealth, he must be a very good, very competent, or at the very least, a powerful man. And, perhaps it is just that our society has difficulty drawing a distinguishing or drawing a line between two very different, and often antagonistic, belief systems. On the one hand, there exists a belief that that quality which is valued most, esteem, emanates out of a moral center; in other words, one takes it that one must be a very good, nay, a saintly person to inspire such regard. And on the other hand, such esteem or regard inspires one to think that one is the sole possessor of indescribable power. The collective thinking of a society has made an a priori assumption that one must be inherently smart or clever, more handsome, wise, benevolent, or somehow superior in some unique way, to have achieved and maintained the position of great power. Then, again thinking collectively, society receives a thrill of schadenfreude, while pretending all along to be terribly shocked and saddened when we find that the recipients of these positive projections fail to act in a responsible, or even minimally moral ways.

Such a scenario is frequently no less true for women, except that men (and often other women) frequently equate feminine power with an appealing, erotic sexuality. The women who conclude that their only chance at respect and power emanates from their looks, are the counterparts to the men I’ve described above. They are the women who are able to “get” the powerful, “alpha” men. In order to do so, they stretch, augment, aerobicize, tuck, lift, suck, and bake their bodies in order to achieve that certain look; the look of the sleek, sexual, seductress who is fawned and fantasized over, and has the power to either make men appear foolish, or make men appear to be gods.

How many times have I heard the lamentations of men suggesting that it is woman who has all of the power in relationships! Usually the men articulating such a complaint make a fundamental error by equating power with a desired physical attribute. All too often the exterior of a person is judged to be representative of the interior, or soul, of that same person. Like the fictional Thomas Ripley, it leads people to conclude that “ . . . it’s better to be a fake somebody, than to be a real nobody.” At the bottom of men’s desires for these “ideal” women lurks a narcissistic motive. In fact, such men pay little attention to the intellectual or emotional aspects of these women, they are only interested in the image they themselves project, the characteristics of potency, power, or superiority attributed to them simply because they were able to win such a woman.

That the exterior of a person can lead one to conclusions about the interior certainly isn’t a new idea. Shakespeare, for instance, characterized Richard III as a “bunch-backed toad,” clearly suggesting that Richard’s deformed, evil soul was reflected in his misshapen, hunch-backed appearance. There is no historical evidence of Richard III having any physical deformities, and assigning him such an unsavory appearance was simply an act of dramatic license, which allows the audience to feel a visceral revulsion toward him–to experience Richard’s malevolence unconsciously by looking at his homely physique, as well as consciously through his words and deeds.

I fear that by embracing a such a superficial experience of life, we have become a society of Puers and Puellas, eternal youths who, unable to integrate the thoughtfulness and wisdom of the wise, old senex, are not compelled to look too deeply at anything–let alone their own inner lives–and constantly move from one shallow experience to another, knowing that if one situation or relationship becomes too difficult to manage easily, another is just around the corner. Yet in the midst of all this superficial posing, we still somehow long for a deep, meaningful, and fulfilling existence.

The position of being outer and other referenced, which I have tried to describe above, is compatible with a regressive and infantile psychic move designed to, as Eugene Monick writes, reenter “the comforts of the mother.” The wish for fusing with a mother figure, even the archetypal mother, is the hallmark of the puer, and keeps him from genuinely experiencing reality, wishing instead for the easy, golden existence of a favored child. Marie-Louis von Franz quotes Jung as saying that the puer carries a “. . . secret memory that he could be given the world and happiness through the mother.” James Hillman notes:

Puer figures often have a special relationship with the Great Mother, who is in love with them as carriers of the spirit; incest with them inspires her–and them–to ecstatic excess and destruction. . . Whether as her hero-lover or hero-slayer, the puer impulse is reinforced by this entanglement with the Great Mother archetype, leading to those spiritual exaggerations we call neurotic.

Puers want to stand out, to ornament themselves–they often desire fame– but they run from being known in any intimate way; they won’t be pinned down, and often resist an ordinary life in any way they can; order and conformity are anathema to the Puer, and just as Dionysus, he wants to have it all, with no delimiting boundaries. “Eating one’s cake and having it too,” is a powerfully seductive idea. The wish that one can have a relationship while, at the same time, not exposing much of oneself secretly operates within psyche and disrupts whatever intimacy might exist between two people, not to mention the havoc such an unconscious fantasy wreaks upon the individuation process.

Granted, this is a formidable problem for men in a society such as ours, who are increasingly fatherless–in an actual sense due to physical absence, or in practice because fathers who have not been suitably fathered cannot father. These are men who were without the benefit of the wisdom transmitted from an older mentor successfully integrated in senex and puer, in age and youth, a father or father figure who successfully laid the foundation for growth and intimacy in their sons while they were still, legitimately, developmentally children. Without such a father, these men have grown up to be, themselves, inadequate fathers. The lack, or failure of fathering often results in the most corrupted, the most grotesque, and in the most picaresque expressions of Eros which in turn degrade and corrupt both the masculine and the feminine, and it keeps men running away from any hint of pain or fear in their lives. Where they run to, their refuge, is often an unconscious compensatory attitude of meanness and cruelty that erupts in violence, sexism, and bigotry which, at its essence, is symptomatic of a loss of soul.

To grow beyond the erotic and to enter into intimacy is one of the most challenging tasks an individual may choose to undertake. But it is also, perhaps, the most rewarding. In taking such a risk one has the opportunity to experience a union from which may be born true pleasure–not ease, not comfort, not fearlessness–a real, unshakable, and deeply felt delight one can only find when one is fully committed and fully available and vulnerable to another, doing the work of one’s own life.

Independence: The Mortally Intolerable Truth

I’ll never be such a gosling to obey instinct, but stand As is a man were author of himself And knew no other kin.
–William Shakespeare (Coriolanus V, iii)

As we commemorate our national independence, I thought it might be a good time to look more closely at this notion of independence. After all, the concept of independence is a foundational idea not only for nations, but also for the individual and one’s psychology as well. Herman Melville, in chapter LXVII of Moby Dick, writes: “Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?” Why is independence a mortally intolerable truth? Independence is an intolerable truth because a deep seeing into the nature of independence shatters the comfortable delusion of one’s mortal, human essence. One finds that independence, the sine qua non denoting the highest achievement of enlightenment values, is not separation but is in fact a pervasive interdependence.

But first, one’s independence, or at least what one thinks is one’s independence, should be declared. Thomas Jefferson wrote that: “…a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” While it is proving to be less and less the case in this country, the country which has been erected upon Jefferson’s declarative document, it still remains the ideal that before one declares something, one has thoroughly thought about, at least thought through, the declarations one makes. I am of no doubt that if one engages any idea or experience (including feelings) thoughtfully, one will be confronted with Truth. I am equally doubtless that at the moment of such a confrontation with the eternal verities, most of us run the other way. So in this essay, I want to try to hold my ground and explore the truth of independence.

Popular psychology unhesitatingly tells us that independence is good, and that dependence is bad. The pop culture pedagogues say that dependence is pathological, it is abnormal, it is self-defeating behavior and it results in the cosseting of our addicted partners, the abandonment of our own needs, and condemns us to an unending search for validation from without. But the dependence-independence differential is rather more complex than the popular definition might suggest. Much of what passes for independence consists of striking a psychological pose; it is defensiveness masquerading as self-sufficiency. This faux independence impels one to push others away, it requires one to inflict negative judgments upon anyone or anything perceived to be different, inadequate, or wrong. Such a pretense of independence is a defense one proffers against the experience of one’s own unpleasing or inconvenient realities, especially a sense of one’s own fears, one’s subjective intellectual, physical, and emotional inadequacies, and a conspicuous existential dread.

In the consulting room, what I usually find lurking behind the word dependence is a deep and persistent dread of one’s own neediness and a profound fear of being confronted with one’s own brokenness. To be dependent means I need another too much, that I can’t take care of myself, that my inner world is so hostile that I need you to rescue me from it. From this perspective, the dependence-independence paradigm is synonymous with self-avoidance. The dynamic to which both words aspire is, at the bottom, anything that will numb the self to its own fear and pain; in other words, addiction. And believe me, the fact that words referring to dependence and co-dependence are so often the constituents of the language employed to frame addiction is not accidental. But from my point of view, the only addiction we have is our addiction to not wanting to know, our addiction to unconsciousness, and framing this issue in terms of dependence or independence feeds that addiction every bit as much as an individual’s abuse of sex, drugs, gambling, or alcohol; in this category of addiction feeding ignorance, I would also include the abuse of psychological, scientistic, or theological theory masquerading as enlightenment, which has at its core the goal of self deception and the effective escape from what one identifies as one’s condition.

The notion of independence is the seminal concept in American life. Everything we do as Americans and how we define ourselves as a nation is rooted in the notion of independence. But the praxis of independence–the way we as a nation and as its citizens talk about it and practice independence–bears little resemblance to the archetypal ideal of independence that so powerfully informed Jefferson’s thinking and the declaration that gave birth to a nation.

The prelapserian ideal of independence has been diluted and presently exists in the collective psyche as the mythology of rugged individualism, a mythology that emphasizes, and in fact it necessitates, a deep, abiding belief in the separateness of individuals. The collective psyche has memorialized the disconnected, disaffected, existentially isolated and psychically wounded hero, or perhaps more accurately, anti-hero. These are the iconic characters we see in films like High Noon, Shane, True Grit, The French Connection, The Godfather, and the more noirish films of the Batman cycle (to name only a few). Actors like Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Al Pacino seem to specialize in portrayals of marginalized men, nearly broken by life and unable to allow themselves to be loved, who seem to step forward at just the right moment and offer one last, fleeting hope of defense to a defenseless few facing the ultimate in subjugation or death.

The disconnected, separated, independent hero has, in the American mythic imagination, become the last, best hope for the protection of those who are powerless, impotent and facing off against the overwhelming forces that so often control the rhythms of life. But to the anti-hero–the one in isolation, the archetypal image I am describing–the very constituent elements of his personality create a being that isn’t connected to anyone, a being not even connected to its own inner world. Such a lack of connectedness to one’s inner world endows an individual with a capacity for ruthless violence against another, which is only equaled by a startling disregard for himself.
In Michael Moore’s film, Bowling for Columbine, there is a discomfiting interview with then President of the National Rifle Association, Charlton Heston, in which Moore asks him why America is so exponentially more prone to gun violence than other equally gun laden societies. Heston couldn’t give him an answer, but I can. Our society’s capacity for gun violence corresponds to the venerated myth of rugged individualism. From the vantage point that considers independence to be separation, one easily allows oneself to see another as a absolute unknown, an alien being so completely different, with foreign values, strange ideas, and holding within itself all the destructive potential of the of the unimaginable, so that annihilating such an other creates no more of a moral or ethical dilemma than does swatting a fly.

For you see, in the peculiarly American psyche, the mythology of rugged individualism walks hand in hand with the myth of the gun. It was the rugged individualists, with the aid of Samuel Colt and his revolvers, who tamed the Wild West. It is exactly such a conflation of mythologies that permits the settling of grievances to occur through the deployment of violence, it allows one to murder the other (if not actual physical murder, then at least one may murder the soul of the other as happens in the case of slavery, racism, or domestic violence, to name just a few) in order to remove the obstacle of the foreign other standing in the way of our obtaining what we desire or need, be it in the form of a material object or in the form of an ideology.

So, what then is true independence; what are we really declaring ourselves separate from? The first sentence Ralph Waldo Emerson writes in his essay entitled, Self Reliance, is the Latin phrase, “Ne te quaesiveris extra,” or, seek not outside yourself. Now wait a minute. Isn’t this exactly what I have been saying is wrong with popular notions of independence? That we cut ourselves off from outside concerns and then proceed to marginalize and alienate anything or anyone outside the circle of our immediate concerns?

Well, yes. But this is not what, I believe, Emerson refers to. To not seek outside oneself suggests that we should, in fact, seek within ourselves. It is when one seeks deeply within that one is confronted with the truth of our existence: our interdependence, the sacred awareness that all life is interconnected, what Buddhist philosophy terms Interdependent Co-Arising and Hinduism frames within the concept of Indra’s Net. One life makes all other life possible, and vice-versa. This is as beautiful a thought as it is terrifying because in addition to the beatific vision of Unity and Oneness, we see all too clearly that life feeds on other life, and this is the horrific fact of existence which gives birth to all religions. When one begins, as Emerson urged, to seek within oneself, the nature of our interdependence becomes clearer and one begins to accept more and greater responsibility for one’s actions and thoughts, understanding that even small or apparently insignificant personal thoughts or actions may literally set in motion forces that change the world. From this awareness one moves closer and closer to understanding the breathtaking nature of independence.

Emerson writes:

I appeal from your customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you [for me]. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me and the heart appoints. If you are noble, I will love you; if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical attentions. If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own. I do this not selfishly but humbly and truly…You will soon love what is dictated by your nature as well as mine, and if we follow truth it will bring us our safe at last.

Emerson places great faith in this, well, I don’t know what else to call it–his credo. A few lines later he adds, “…all persons have their moments of reason, when they look out into the region of absolute truth; then they will justify me and do the same thing.” The deep seeking within, and the subsequent discovery of the reality of oneself creates an independent, highly efficacious individual (individual literally means one who is unable to be divided), an individual who is aware of, and in harmony with, the interdependent nature of existence and is willing and able to assume, from the perspective of psyche, a kind of stewardship in which one is responsible for the well being of others and for the world.

I believe that just such an awareness is the goal of psychotherapy. An awareness of the Self–and C.G. Jung himself might have added to this Self awareness the “religious attitude” that accompanies such an elevation of consciousness–is, under ideal circumstances, exactly what emerges from analysis. Understanding the Self in this way creates connections, ameliorates isolation, makes the alien familiar, and inspires one to the delights of loving and being loved. One is able to see the One in the Many, and the Many in the One. But one does not, cannot, start analysis from such awareness. One begins in the unknowing and in the deep seeking within, an endeavor that is necessarily solitary in spite of the therapist’s presence. The work of seeking deeply within oneself is solitary work because it is necessarily individual work, which, in its deepest aspects, can only be experienced alone. In the willingness to experience our own inner world alone, without instruction from some outside source, we begin to discover the truth of independence.

In The Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna is quoted as saying, “He alone sees truly who sees the Lord the same in every creature…seeing the same Lord everywhere, he does not harm himself or others.” This realization of god everywhere, and in everyone, is the summum bonum, the ultimate treasure of independence and is itself the liberation one mines from the solitary digging, it is the result of the deep inward seeking. To be alive in the world, to be conscious to any degree, and avoid seeking the truth available to every one of us is the same as living in Antarctica and trying to avoid ice. Jefferson seemed to understand that a solitary, deep seeking within oneself unites us all, and since it is the anniversary of American independence, it is right to end with Jefferson’s unique and powerful expression of this notion: “Enlighten the people, generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like spirits at the dawn of day.”