in the hall of mirrors

Miseries

Yesterday I went to Leicester for psychoanalysis... unfortunately started to feel a bit off while getting to the train; suggesting IBS, or something very like it. By the time I arrived, three hours later...

My analyst is fortunately a psychiatrist, so can write prescriptions; he kindly wrote a prescription and drove me around until we found a pharmacy (more difficult than expected – I told him he was now operating under my curse – mostly jokingly), and then he found me a nearby hotel where I could stay the night, rather than taking the long train ride home.

We talked around and on the problem of mind and body – are we ill because we are under psychic stress, are we under psychic stress because we are ill?... fortunately B. is reasonable about this, and was actually hilarious about the extreme Kleinians in London who interpret any illness in an analysand as some kind of 'aggression' toward the analyst. (Such vanity!) But I finally reached a point where I couldn't even talk to him any more: just needed to get to that hotel, and lie down (in private, unbuttoning the damned waistband).

A train back, this morning... somewhat miserable, though not in acute pain. And the exasperation of changing trains three times, getting on the wrong one – such a mess of details, when we are least able to deal with them.

Misery... cramps, pain, difficulty sitting up, or lying down – it is the endless pain of it that is hard to stand. I realize it's not a significant/dangerous illness – although I would suggest it's as much linked to my deteriorating liver as it may be to stress; it seems we're reaching a point with the HCV where I will really need successful treatment in the next couple of years.

Good thing I don't drink, for the most part... well, none at all now, I guess. Fortunately not something I particularly value, or would miss.

•••

Something about the different parts of the body, and the ways that we respond to problems in each of them – I remember surprisingly painful swimmer's ear (a fungal ear infection) when I was in my teens, and still swimming – something about that focused pain fusing all the nerve centers of the skull –

As opposed to legs, or arms: which, even at their worst, seem somewhat detached – a sort of external pain.

Breathing problems are of course notoriously frightening: think of something like asthma, people who have those frightening experiences of choking, as though to death – frequently – and of course, as with so many of these problems, the tension of fear/panic actually makes the illness worse.

I've always found broad, complex digestive problems, especially the ones that cause all the multiple mechanisms to grind against each other (practically the definition of IBS) especially maddening – such an experience at one's physical core: impossible to distance yourself from it, impossible to detach from it at all.

Then there are those dense, sharp pains that attack people with serious problems in the more complex processing organs – spleen, kidneys, liver... the sadness of Susan's friend, the lively, talkative woman who took care of people dying of cancer, who ended up with very painful pancreatic cancer herself.

She's gone, of course....

•••

I am not, in any case, acutely ill – although it feels as though I am at times, and unpredictably; and of course the liver problems can gradually increase to be very serious. But illness, and pain, distract me, make me uncertain of nearby and distant plans – should I cancel Zürich, the Rome conference, the Cambridge conference? I couldn't stand to be that miserable on a train again, unable to get away, unable to go lie down, for minutes that don't pass but seem to stall, that stretch to hours.

For years, when we give our HIV presentations to medical students, I have often said that it seems really difficult for anyone to have any qualified attitude towards their own death. People are convinced they are not going to die, people are convinced they are going to die – one or the other, but not both.

And it remains true that I still can't think of myself in any 'statistical' manner – forty per cent chance, sixty per cent, whatever –

but, at the moment, I do seem to have simultaneous overlapping views of the future – living and active, ill and dying. Like shadows on each other, like several transparent versions of the future, overlaid, interpenetrating like veils, like smoke.

(Of course, the thing that is hardest to envision – and what would be the real curse: not dying quickly – but living for a time in constant, or frequent pain... something that, despite all my attempts to understanding death in the abstract, I doubt I could handle, at all.)

Anniversary

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....

Meta-memory

... or meta-awareness... or something like that.

There are a number of links in the chains of what is passing through my mind – reading Buddhist stories (especially Paul Reps' wonderful translations), working on a project nearly twenty years old, my own analysis sessions – and even the experiences  of working with my own analysands, which are both utterly unlike anything I have ever undergone, and at the same time additional reflections of everything I have ever undergone –

This is perhaps because I read so much.

As I am, in my recent analysis sessions, both aware of what I expect of myself, and also aware of what my new analyst Brian expects of me – which implies/has a basis in: what he expects of himself, what he expects of anyone –

Not just links, but many chains, linked at various points in what seem more than three-dimensional spaces. Which they are, of course.

Perhaps my awareness is also slightly amplified by several intermittent illnesses over the past couple of weeks.

After typing notes for an analysis session, revising the text for the edited book – and Dune, Lynch's film, is on television. I've actually been exasperated by this film in the past, but now it seems interesting and strange, and I am also drawn to those parts (there are many) that are about the way the mind reads things.

Of course, I was always drawn to those parts, even on first reading the book.

Herbert was writing in a way that reflected some of his own seventies experiences – learned disciplines, Eastern religions, ingested chemicals. Not only awareness, but various kinds of hyper-awareness, and awareness of hyper-awareness –

Am I making sense here?

I am slightly struck, tonight, by the Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother who tests Paul, and her metaphor: that those who do not have the control she is teaching are animals, as opposed to humans. I am of course inevitably an animal in this context, but it is notable that I – like everyone else who read it, apparently – would learn this image of self-control, of awareness....

In fact, there is certainly more than a shadow of the memories of reading science fiction in my studies now, in learning to be an analyst. Therefore what are my models? Not really the Zen or the Taoism learned by a generation slightly older than me, not quite a disciplined practice.

But, at least, the awareness that such awarenesses are possible: the sense that memory can be held, contained – not quite the current younger generation's image of themselves as having something parallel to computer memory, but the older sense that as we change and grow, or re-grow, we can re-experience the spaces of memory where we have lived.

Which is why, while doing the laundry after the cleaner has gone, and typing on the computer in a project that is finally getting completed after nearly twenty years, and a film is rolling by on a screen, I can feel oddly aware – super-aware – of my mind – because of its own links: why do I think of a room in Berlin, why is there a flash of my Los Angeles kitchen, why do I experience myself at different times out of the past fifty years?...

The acknowledgment that our minds to not hold memory or knowledge in organized structures:

and that when we fragment a bit we rediscover large parts of ourselves –

perhaps the parts that matter....

The experience of fragments

I seem to be functioning in a very, as it were, multi-leveled way lately.

Things that must be done – working as an analyst, teaching classes, observing classes, editing a volume, meetings, being in analysis, planning, conferences, Jung-Institut homework – even: vacuuming the apartment, buying groceries – are functioning in often brisk and sharpy outlined ways: slightly hyper-conscious, as it were. A bit of impatience and pushing of students and colleagues – I do feel these days as though I don't have time for anyone around me to dither... and some real successes: students lately seem so focused, so far ahead of where they were even two months ago.

But grief, more than depression, is also easily available – and recurrent, and not necessarily tied to particular memories or events. Some remarkably painful sessions with B., my new analyst down in Leicester: he is very good indeed – and, even more than with S., we communicate very well. In fact, in my entire history of analysts and therapists, B. is probably more on my wavelength than anyone, ever. Which is very interesting: it feels as though I don't even need to waste time being embarrassed about my usual mental games, or working through my standard patterns in order to show them to him – we both see them instantly, with clarity: as though they are on a PowerPoint slide in the analysis room.

Which means that we have moved rather quickly beyond the usual topics into something startling and, at first, alarming – a world of fragmentation, mildly schizoid, incoherent. The other day, in analysis, I was speaking in a torrent (DSM: "pressure of speech"?), trying to explain everything at once, leaping from topic to topic, memory to imagination to event – but, because of that multi-leveled status I seem to be operating in these days, was also able to stop after some minutes and say, it seems as though I am getting across a river by leaping from log to log, but of course the logs move with the water as I leave them behind, and it becomes impossible to go back, to retrace my steps: to remember the linear progression toward what I am saying....

From a theoretical perspective, I'm glad I heard Philip Kime talk about fragmentation and the shadow in February – a remarkable lecture that stirred up some irritable resistance and bewildered questions from the students. As I said in a previous post, Philip hasn't published yet, so I won't go into detail – but essentially he was reminding us, and proving, that the shadow isn't the big dark threatening aspect of our unconscious – it is more properly the incoherent, fragmented parts, the ones that aren't quite developed, that are tied to anxeity and confusion because they don't even have their own definable identities.

Because of that lecture, I was able to go with this weird, incoherent experience without feeling as though I had to draw back from it. B. is also a psychiatrist, and very, very well read (he and J., my new supervisor, both suggest one or two new books every session – I assume they don't have secret contracts with Amazon); and so he had not only an instinctive but also an educated appreciation of what was happening with me, and he was perfectly comfortable supporting it, letting it go wherever it needed to....

Which is especially good, as there is yet another part of this tangled experience. My health, in minor ways – though ones that mirror major concerns – is not good: this may not be a serious problem, but it has definitely spooked me over the past few weeks. An infection, erratic and painful periods of IBS – when my GP called me in for an appointment to tell me my liver function wasn't doing well, I easily explained that I am supposed to have yet another round of Hep C medications, probably this fall; medications that are supposedly fairly successful (a 60% success rate, or is it even better than that?).

But, both before and after that visit, increasing digestive problems, things that reflect minor toxic crises, allergic reactions shifting in different directions, a slightly 'off' skin tone – I am clearly not in great shape. No reason to expect disaster (except in the middle of the night, when I am once again having hospital/death fantasies and plans flashing through my head, almost too fast for me to follow them); but feeling toxic is not fun.

And it pushes me out towards more fragmentation, when I'm having those ol' illness-and-death anxieties confusing my plans, my hopes – I will admit to those background thought processes, which were once very familiar to me, where I think of how I have to plan a funeral, get rid of books and clothese so they aren't a burden to whoever has to clear up this apartment. Dump projects and expectations out the window, figure out what to do with whatever time is left.

Body and mind: an endless chicken-and-egg problem.

It's tricky because, of course, these are fantasies, projections: and ones that carry the whole burden of my anxieties since the age of three, my guilt and unhappiness over things not finished, my sense of isolation and failure. (Indeed, the biggest fantasy of all: that, if I fell ill and died, I wouldn't need to finish projects – including the book on S. that I am, again, finally, editing: because when this project was supposed to be done, years ago, I can assure you that fantasies of dying before the project was completed were very familiar. And so we're returning, in an unwelcome way, to the past.) And from one angle I can treat them as fantasies and projections: the world of ways that I have made life difficult for myself –

but they also have, if only slightly at this point, real and plausible aspects. It would not be impossible to fall ill, not at all; and then, though these things are not extremely probable any time soon, it would not be impossible to die, more plausibly of liver failure than HIV problems....

And so the body is of course fretful: difficult, uncomfortable, at times itching, in pain or misery, especially at three in the morning. Which makes all my experience feel slightly difficult, out of focus....

fragmented.

I am willing to accept that I am in the midst of a psychological process: but I can't help – how could I help? – but wonder if, while I am working through processes, my body is demanding some sort of attention, some solutions that I am not giving it – and so, at the moment, my multi-leveled approach feels as though it may be as much a problem as a strength: as though I might be working my way up to more awareness, but the real world of the body could collapse, while my attention is focused on the cloudy sky of the mind....