2:18 a.m. Zürich time: my thesis defense at the Jung-Institut is at 9 am.
My phone's alarm is set for 6:20 – very early for me; and because I frequently get annoying side effects at night (headaches, itching, stomach aches) I did not take my HIV meds at dinner.
It's okay – statistically 95-98% compliance is just fine, which means skipping one or two doses a month isn't a problem. I rarely invoke that privilege – I could already see that strategy coming when we were looking for a room for the thesis defense and people started looking earlier than 10 am, which is when most things start at the Institut.
Of course... for defending a thesis about AIDS, it is a slightly... twisty strategy.
•••
Several problems have evaporated like fragments of mist in morning sunlight: people at unexpectedly high levels showed up to sign off on my internships, several years' concern on my part about the adequacy of the internships was quickly waved aside (the previous director of studies wanted me to spend more time with serious cases, which I was hardly able to do, just a few tens of hours); a sudden huge discrepancy in my own analysis hours resolved as we realized they'd lost a letter from my last analyst, and he promised to send another today...
I do like the I Ching reading that came up on my phone app while I was waiting for the train to Küsnacht this morning: “The topmost NINE, undivided, shows its subject disposing of (what may be called) its bloody wounds, and going and separating himself from its anxious fears. There will be no error.”
Bloody wounds.... or "(what may be called) bloody wounds," which suggests the ambiguity, contingency, of my position. I know, that sounds like inflation, and it will seem so to most people: but in another way I am carrying my bloody wounds, from several aspects of my life, into this thesis defense.
•••
I have stumbled through so many final phases of development in my life – often after several years of overconfidence, I do tend to stumble repeatedly near finish lines. The mess around my bachelors degree was merely a prelude to the thirteen-year PhD, finished the summer after the appearance of protease inhibitors, in the hot Hong Kong summer... strangely enough I don't even remember writing the PhD: to finally write so much about things I'd messed with for years, and to not be entirely conscious: in a hazy trance of bypassing my own resistance...
And the ugly/hilarious confrontation between the two professors I'd insisted on keeping for the dissertation defense – the ones who hated each other so much they had split the UCLA music department into three departments in the same building. I didn't drop either of them and ended up with them in the same room, confronting each other for the first time in years. Recipe for a charming afternoon....
And, more trivially, Susan M., my astoundingly supportive PhD supervisor, was openly peeved when I expected her to carry my thesis across the UCLA campus at the last moment, as I was in another country – now of course I am not quite so identified with the youngest, most demanding child, and I view the memory of asking her to do this with embarrassment.
This time, for what must, absolutely will be, the last time I complete any kind of degree for anything or anyone, I have stayed eerily conscious throughout: often a bit anxious, a bit tired, sad; sleepy, projecting disaster, but also turning a klieg light of clarity on my own disconnected lack of attention to administrative problems.
Did you know there is now an 'avoidant personality disorder' in the DSM?... seems a bit silly, yes? A symptom turned into a personality disorder. A diagnosis that feels a bit like the concretized exasperation of many therapists at their most annoying patients.
•••
So, though I know this will all resolve, and I'll graduate – and I have (mostly) known that for a long time – this time I remain constantly aware, watching myself, through my anxieties, deferrals, avoidances, sadness. Even a few nights of deep emotion as I look, again, at a life that still tends to feel littered with errors, with gaps in attention, with disintegrating dreams and neglected goals.
And, before you burst forth with a kindly need to reassure me that I'm a Nice and Good Person who shouldn't be so hard on himself: please, don't bother – I recognize the exaggerated distortions of all of that – I'd rather have it out in the open, though, as it's a fairly basic level of my personality.
When I manage to remain aware throughout this neurotic noise, with a sense of strongly, if a bit gruffly, steering a boat through intermittently rough seas, I always know that I can keep going....
Of course, perhaps a next stage of individuation for me would be: to get beyond defending myself from myself. Not really there yet... give me time.
•••
So, what is the hardest part about this defense?
That being, really, the main reason for writing this blog entry.
I wanted to map out the archetypal terrors of AIDS: fear, infection, sickness, rot, death. To look at them straight on (as Nachiketas would undoubtedly want to do). To go past decades of psychologists saying: jeez, this is really difficult stuff, my patients are terrified – and respond, not with the very common: how can we steer away from the dark stuff so we don't have to be upset?
But, to say instead: Let's look the dark stuff right in the eye. Stand in front of the dragon and get clear about exactly how many teeth it has, how the rings around its pupils are arranged. How hot its breath is, right before the flame comes at you.
Very me, of course.
•••
The main stumbling block: I am looking at deep death/sickness/paranoia aspects of the 'what is' about AIDS; but other people have looked at HIV/AIDS as symbolic of psychic processes.
Actually, a number of Jungians have done this: some of them rather heartlessly and carelessly – Edinger, Ancona, Sardello have all gone into 'what's wrong with gay men that this would happen' (thanks for that, guys) and 'if PWAs understood their illness symbolically they would be cured' (the biggest fool here is one Remo Roth who, interestingly enough, was not allowed to graduate from this same Jung-Institut in the 1990s, before he published a 1994 book that told us all how we could cure ourselves of AIDS by chakra meditation).
But this is what happens to Jungians when they go wrong – they aren't as cold and disconnected as Lacanians who go wrong, or as authoritarian as Freudians when they lose the plot: Jungians who screw up – especially the males – are enamored of their own imaginations, they identify with archetypes and the world of dreams, they want to be seen as powerful and magical and just, frankly, great sorcerers of the unconscious.
It's one of the grander forms of inflation in the business – it's one of the things professionals in other types of depth psychology distrust in us. And there is of course common sense in that.
•••
Other Jungians have looked at symbolic interpretations of AIDS with much more generosity and care: Monick of course, and Dupont and Ruffino (who is on my committee in... let's see, six hours – yes I'll finish this up, there's one more major bit I must include); and Zémor, a French Lacanian who wrote a lovely, sad, symbolic exploration of the world of one of her patients who died.
The problem is, at this point in my understanding, I can only really judge the difference between turning AIDS into a symbol in a useful way, and turning it into a symbol in a more heartless, more foolish way, in terms of apparent care, apparent caution, apparent humility: it is sort of a feeling assessment – are these writers looking for useful truths, or are they just showing off?
I will have to have a much clearer sense of the difference before this material can become a published book. It's hard, though: I know I have my own emotional resistance to treating AIDS as symbolic (how about: the ego exposed to the world, so no persona? or, if you feel like going further, the ego no longer protects, like a damaged sort of immune system – it's not a great metaphor, but stay with me – so perhaps that would be like borderline, or schizotypal, or at worst like full-blown schizophrenia, where one is flooded with infections from the unconscious?...).
•••
And this is the reference I really wanted to make, because this is the passage that keeps coming to my mind in the last few days.
I've mentioned Hope Mirrlees' wonderful 1926 fantasy, Lud-in-the-Mist, from time to time.
The prosperous merchant town of Lud-in-the-Mist is situated a range of hills away from Fairyland; this fairyland is the land of the dead, of dreams and poetry, of delirium, and is treated as horrifyingly dangerous, something revolting, not to be mentioned in polite company. But fruit comes over the border; and those who eat the fruit are struck with fantasy and poetry, become drugged, changed, a bit insane, and sometimes die...
One character is a doctor Leer, who has been smuggling fairy fruit into the town for decades, who maintains a mask of friendly sarcasm, and who once poisoned a man who got in the way of his fairy fruit trade. He will be finally found out, tried and hanged, near the end of the book.
His opposite is the mayor, Nathaniel, about to fall from power because of the machinations of the doctor, who will ultimately discover the truth of the doctor's poison, but who will be forced to follow his fruit-drunk son over the border into Fairyland... and for the first time in living memory, will come back. With his rescued son; and with fruit.
So, they are parallel but different: and in the last chapter the remaining characters talk about the doctor:
"... and then Master Ambrose said, 'Tell me what your theory is about Endymion Leer, Nat. He was a double-dyed villain, all right, I suppose?'
Master Nathaniel did not answer at once, and then he said thoughtfully, 'I suppose so. I read the report of his defense, however, and his words seemed to me to ring true. But I think there was some evil lurking in his soul, and everything he touched was contaminated by it, even fairy fruit – even Duke Aubrey.'
'And that spiritual sin he accused himself of… what do you suppose it was?'
'I think,' said Master Nathaniel slowly, 'he may have mishandled the sacred objects of the Mysteries.'
'What are these sacred objects, Nat?
Master Nathaniel moved uneasily in his chair, and said, with an embarrassed little laugh, 'Life and death, I suppose.' "
These words keep ringing in my mind the past week or so...
They aren't going to be useful in the defense, of course. If I were more religious, I could easily draw a line between doing this right and doing it wrong, show how one may be able to treat real sickness, real suffering, real dying, as symbolic – and that one may not be able to do so, depending.
As I'm not particularly religious, at this point – I will just have to trust my feeling....
•••
Returning to sleep. Perchance to dream.
Hey Paul. Beautiful, heartfelt post. Hope all goes / went well for your viva. By some curious coincidence D and I will be passing through Zurich on Saturday morning on the way to Interlaken. I wonder if our paths might cross? David C x
Posted by: David Clarke | June 20, 2019 at 11:52 PM