We agreed that today would be the final session of my own psychoanalysis…
Strangely enough, this is the smoothest, most successful ending to an analytic relationship I’ve ever had. With each of the other three Jungian analysts, things went somewhat wrong – circumstances, unplanned aspects; two of them were a bit self-centred or careless about finishing the relationship. And my other therapeutic relationships, generally associated with HIV care from the 1990s to the present, have tended to trail off without any clear boundaries.
I’ve drafted my last paper for the Jung-Institut (before the thesis, which... can I really complete it in the next eight or nine months?) about these problems – calling it 'the magus in error,' in arrogance or self-involvement or power complexes (think Guggenbühl-Craig in some ways, but a narrower focus than the vast Faust archetype) – because, let's face it: we can predict that my faults as an analyst will probably appear under one or another category of arrogance... But that's the dark side of a thing, this blog post is about its lighter, more conscious, successful side.
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And today, on what we are calling our last scheduled meeting, B. is cheerful, present – as am I: I am in a good mood – it feels like completion, like graduation.
We talk about a dream from two days ago that is an odd tangle of anxiety/performance situation, plus sexual encounter – but the overwhelming quality of the dream is that the feelings are not uncomfortable: even as I tell the director that I can’t sing and conduct the same piece, so he’ll have to conduct for me, and am aware that I haven't really learned the music, I’m not particularly worried… and the sexual turn that dream takes flows into its own context fairly easily. A dream that seems entangled with several clichés, but this without a great deal of – attachment, I suppose: as my analyst also likes Buddhist references we talk about Buddhist/Taoist interpretations of such a dream, of such a relationship to a dream.
There is an Olympian hilarity in the room: we joke, we laugh....
Even more rapidly than usual – and, in the past six months, we've had an increased rapidity with these things, in the conversation, in the room, in the mind – there is an instant generation of large-scale connections and interpretations: and we counter each other in spinning the focus or angle, expanding or shrinking the connections, to suddenly include another range of meanings. The leaps are easy, the larger frames hang in the air, things are familiar or somewhat surprising – outlining future areas of attention, referring back to work already completed – the rapid generation of castles in the air of the mind…
Connections to Barbara's dream of me last week and its overlap with my dream from this week, to sifting through my CDs and their various resonances across my life, to singing to Barbara in a café in Geneva – to my stroke and the change in my writing that it may have caused, to fate, to anima, to relationship – to illness, and especially to time and its extensibility, its multiple facets –
I tell him: in the past months, I keep thinking, in my room with analysands, and when changes appear in my own life, about the vast reality of the simple statement that individuation is different for each person; and about reaching a point where – it is not that everything is happy, but everything is in play – everything is available.
Which relates to my vision early this year of how I wanted my life to go, as opposed to how it has actually gone, and the realisation that that would not make any difference.
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At the end we hug (and goodness wouldn't the Kleinians be upset at that boundary crossing).
We are both smiling as he sits at the table, and I turn to pick up my bag, open the door, and walk out into –