My first blog post was dated 14 May 2006... good lord, eight years ago.
689 posts (including this one), therefore eighty-six or so per year - actually rather better than I thought.
I experience this as – partly – a long-term narrative of moving from sadness, and a lot of retelling stories of the past, to something a bit more complex, more wide-ranging: an experience, or a view, with much more space and growth in it –
partly as a result of the sheer luck of reentering psychoanalytic experience and theory: a feeling of having (being) a living self, growing, becoming more aware from year to year – rather than less.
Which – and I stay this with real, unprepared surprise, and pleasure – is really what I want most from Jungian individuation: that I, that we, keep on growing through time, even while moving through aging, moving towards death – rather than being either stuck in the past, or devolving into a deteriorating collection of repeated ideas, repeated reactions, predictable limitations, lowered expectations.
Which reflects the fact that, though my personal analysis with B. has been very intense and often passionately sad over the past month, it has also been deeply and electrically exciting – and I can feel that excitement: as though vast chunks of the past, of memory and feeling and experience, are becoming part of me once again: as though blood is flowing into dead limbs....
It is particularly wonderful in May, as the trees become greener and fresher, as we do also.
Remarkable, too, that one of my analysands has been going through something similar, and in a similarly intense way. B. and I laughed about this yesterday – synchronicity and possible mutual influence and transformation: I made a 'realistic' apology for any overly fantastic statements (which do often float around in Jungian work), but B. hooted at me, saying: really, where is the problem here.
If there is a problem... because perhaps there is not one.
(And then there's the other 'combined' psychological process between B. and I – the past few sessions we keep discovering how similarly we think, in terms of processing, etc. The difference between an analyst who is very different than you (thus helping you connect to something beyond your normal patterns) and someone who is very similar (who can create a remarkable self-reflective process)...)
So, despite intermittent physical miseries, an unpredictable world, a sense that there are passing dark spots crossing the world –
it does feel like spring....
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