A Re-Visioning of Love: Dark Feminine Rising [1 ed.] 0367179172, 9780367179175

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A RE-VISIONING OF LOVE

In A Re-Visioning of Love: Dark Feminine Rising, Ana Mozol looks behind the illusory veils of persona and explores the reality of feminine experiences relating to love, trauma, and sexuality in contemporary Western society. Mozol takes us on a personal journey through the three levels of experience, delving into the underworld and the trauma of rape, the middle world and the illusions of romantic love, and the upper world and the masculine spiritual ideals that fracture the feminine soul. In this multidisciplinary and personal examination of the feminine, Mozol seeks to understand violence against women intrapsychically, interpersonally, and within the field of depth psychology. The book begins with Mozol's own experiences with violence and her exploration of the demon lover complex and the stages of breaking this complex after trauma. Combining personal testimony, theoretical reflections, historical analysis, and 20 years of clinical experience, Mozol uses a heuristic approach to explore personal stories, clinical material, dreams and depth analysis as they connect to the female individuation process. We follow Mozol's journey through the middle world and the illusions of romantic love, into the upper world and the complexity of Oscar Wilde's feminine character Salomé who represents the rising dark feminine energy that must be reckoned with for the possibility of love to exist. Accessible yet powerful, Mozol uses her personal story to place the oppression of women within the Jungian context of individuation. A Re-Visioning of Love: Dark Feminine Rising will be key reading for academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, psychotherapy, trauma studies, gender studies, women’s studies, and criminology. It will also be an indispensable resource for Jungian psychotherapists and analytical psychologists in practice and in training. A Re-Visioning of Love, however, is more than a psychological exploration; it is a memoir of the personal and archetypal feminine and as such will appeal to anyone interested in the story of many women today. Ana Mozol is professor of psychology at Adler University, Canada, and at Pacifica Graduate Institute, USA. She has a private practice in Vancouver, Canada, where she specializes in depth analysis, dreamwork theatre, and the intersection of depth psychology and the creative arts. Her website can be found at anamozol.com.

“In this well-written, intense examination of the dark feminine, Ana Mozol sheds light on the often-neglected deeper mysteries of the psyche of women. Chronicling her own experience of these mysteries and of the repressive masculine shadow, she also uncovers the archetypes related to the dark feminine. This work would be welcome at any time but is especially timely as women struggle today to free themselves of sexist abuse and [become] open to the secrets of their own nature.” —Jeff Raff, Jungian analyst and author of Jung and the Alchemical Imagination and The Wedding of Sophia “In A Re-Visioning of Love: Dark Feminine Rising, Ana Mozol has gifted us with her own memories, dreams, and reflections, showing how we repeat our suffering, our symptoms, our habitual unconscious ways of responding. Real remembering always calls for a sustained engagement, and an integral part of that is sharing it with others. Ana herself says that this is the book she wished had existed when she entered the field of depth psychology. We do indeed write for ourselves and discover ourselves through the writing. But we are also always writing for our readers, writing out of a conviction that what we have lived has transpersonal, not only, personal, significance, as any reader of this book will immediately discover.” —Christine Downing, author of The Goddess: Mythological Images of the Feminine “Brilliant and important.”

—Marion Woodman

“Persephone, Demeter, the demon lover, Ereshkigal, Inanna, Ariadne, Dionysus, and Salomé are all summoned by Ana Mozol’s essential book about the repressed, excluded, dangerous, and erotic energies of the dark feminine—she who is necessary for the sacred sexuality of body. A Re-Visioning of Love: Dark Feminine Rising is for everyone who has suffered for love, their friends, therapists, and lovers. It is impossible to write an archetypally nuanced and compassionate book about rape. This is such a book. It says what cannot be said and what society does not want to hear about anger around sex, about surviving, and ultimately about living through the initiations of Persephone and Salomé. It envisions individuation in ways that leave behind Jung’s limitations on his anima and animus theory. Containing a stunning study of Jung’s fascination with archetypal Salomé, the book also reveals the dark feminine as that which has been swallowed by patriarchy to be literalized into the rape culture of today. Mozol stares unflinchingly into the abyss and shows the way to recover the feminine mysteries sorely needed by both women and men.” —Susan Rowland, author of Jung: A Feminist Revision and Remembering Dionysus

A RE-VISIONING OF LOVE Dark Feminine Rising

Ana Mozol

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Ana Mozol The right of Ana Mozol to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him/her/them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mozol, Ana, author. Title: A re-visioning of love : dark feminine rising / Ana Mozol. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019004470 (print) | LCCN 2019006434 (ebook) | ISBN 9780429058455 (Master eBook) | ISBN 9780429608636 (Adobe Reader) | ISBN 9780429597596 (Mobipocket) | ISBN 9780429603112 (ePub) | ISBN 9780367179151 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367179175 (pbk.) Subjects: LCSH: Feminist psychology. | Feminist theory. | Sex. | Rape. | Psychic trauma. Classification: LCC BF201.4 (ebook) | LCC BF201.4 .M69 2019 (print) | DDC 155.3/33–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019004470 ISBN: 978-0-367-17915-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-17917-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-05845-5 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Taylor & Francis Books

For Xenophon

CONTENTS

Foreword Acknowledgments Credits

viii x xii

Introduction

1

1

A memoir of descent

8

2

The demon lover: Becoming the bride of Hades

25

3

Embracing the mystery

58

4

The false bridegroom

75

5

Jung and the demon lover

112

6

Salomé

133

Epilogue

170

Conclusion

172

References Index

174 179

FOREWORD

In A Re-Visioning of Love, Ana Mozol has gifted us with her own memories, dreams, and reflections about what it is like to be a woman who lives in a world that condones violence against women, in what she dares to call a rape culture. The powerful resonance of this theme right now is something I experienced directly last spring while leading a tour of Sicily. Each evening I lectured on the myths most pertinent to the particular classical site we had visited that day. As part of the lecture focused on Athena, I spoke briefly about her relation to Medusa. I was wholly unprepared for how much energy this mythic figure whose story begins with her being raped by Poseidon stirred up. It became clear: the figure of the raped woman is an awesomely powerful archetype. I believe that a genuine depth psychological approach—a genuinely deep engagement with any theme—will always include our very personal involvement with it. Our stories! I think of how in the prologue to his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung has little to say about his theories, how he focuses instead on the experiences that gave rise to them, particularly his dreams and visions—as though they would speak more powerfully to us than the concepts. That Ana, too, has done this is what I most value in her book: she explores rape not just as an almost inevitable metaphor, but also as a literal experience forced upon too many women, including herself. Her own experience has taught her that women respond to the violence directed against us in radically self-destructive ways, by identifying with the aggressor, by resorting to denial, seduction, and submission. Ana shares her stories and her dreams and interprets them in relation to depth psychological theory—to terms like hieros gamos, anima, animus—and shows how doing so both helps and hinders. She discovers for herself that such concepts are primarily apotropaic, ways of warding off the terrifying, unsettling aspects of the unconscious. She also sees how the theories didn’t necessarily help even their

Foreword ix

creators: how Jung, especially in his complicated relationship with Sabina Spielrein, fell victim to the very energies he was trying to help us learn to redirect. So she returns to her stories and her dreams and amplifies them by bringing in other stories, like the myths about Demeter and Persephone, Inanna and Ereshkigal, Ariadne and Theseus, Eros and Psyche. It seems important to me that she didn’t go looking for such stories; they appeared to her. She didn’t choose them; they insisted on being included. Her own experience was also deepened by her discovery of its connection to literary accounts, especially Oscar Wilde’s Salomé. Again this was not just a story she was looking at, but rather one she found herself performing—and thus being forced to experience the conflict between what it felt to live the role from inside as a woman and how her male director understood the role from the outside. A profound experience of the power of the male gaze. In her book she keeps returning to her stories and her dreams, keeps reflecting on them in relation to her primary theme of love. Sharing personal experience does not mean sharing raw experience. This book represents years of working through, of struggling for the meaning of what she has lived. This reminds me of how the German word for remembering is Erinnerung, inwarding, interiorizing, taking what we’ve lived into our souls. To use James Hillman’s language, it is about turning event into experience. Remembering is work, soul work, the soul work of digesting our experience. This is an ongoing, never-ending process. Ana calls her book a memoir of descent. I see it rather as a memoir of descents in the plural. She knows so well how we repeat our suffering, our symptoms, our habitual unconscious ways of responding. Real remembering always calls for a sustained engagement, a sinking deeper into, a steeping. It’s an ongoing process. And an integral part of that is sharing it with others. Ana herself says that her book is the book she wished had existed. This is something I well understand; it is exactly what led me to write my Goddess book. We do indeed write for ourselves and discover ourselves through the writing. But we are also always writing for our readers, writing out of a conviction that what we have lived has transpersonal, not only, personal, significance, as any reader of this book will immediately discover. — Christine Downing

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My appreciation and gratitude extend to so many individuals who contributed to this work in significant ways. There are two women who believed and supported this book from its inception—Chris Downing and Marion Woodman. Chris Downing has been my “goddess at the crossroads.” Every time that I was at a crucial threshold she would appear quite miraculously, ferociously, and lovingly to provide just the word or insight that I needed to navigate the territory and continue on. Thank you, Chris, for your strong encouragement to me as a writer and for once telling me, “You write from the soul and that is not something that can be taught.” Marion Woodman’s support was more like an initiation by fire that fed flames to the work from both the conscious and unconscious worlds. My deepest respect and gratitude to you both. To Hendrika DeVries for her shapeshifting capacities, containing presence and wise counsel. To Jeff Raff for being a powerful ally and a singular example in my life of a man who understands the feminine quest toward individuation. To my grandmother Isabel, who once embraced me as Demeter would Persephone upon her return from the underworld, and to my mother Maxine. I carry and acknowledge the sacrifices you both made in your own lives that allowed for the opportunities that I have in mine. I love you both. To my father who supports me even in places that he does not understand me. To my great-grandmother Jenny who “thought there was something to dreams” and whose diaries inspired me to write. To my sister Dawn, who I am able to turn to in both joy and sorrow. Thank you for reading my work even when I know how difficult it was. To Pacifica Graduate Institute for providing a soul-filled and stimulating community where I was able to teach at my edge with a true sense of academic freedom. I am grateful to the Adler University where I learned to expand my inferior

Acknowledgments xi

sensate function. With special thanks to Larry Axelrod and the Adler administration that believed in this project enough to grant me a six-month sabbatical to work on the book at a critical point in its development. To all my students over the years who have listened to aspects of this book in lecture and or exercise format. Thank you for your deep listening and engagement with these themes and for risking sharing your own stories with me through dreamwork theatre, storytelling, and writing. It is hard to find the words to thank all my clients over the years. It is such an intimate and unique relationship and one I don’t ever have the opportunity to talk of openly. Your courage in sharing the realness of your lives with me has changed me and strengthened my own resolve regarding the importance of speaking out and standing up for what I believe in. Our times together of laughing, crying, and dreaming have been many of the greatest and rarest moments of my life. My thanks to the Vancouver Jung Society for offering me the space to develop my thoughts through several public lectures. I appreciate the community support and friendship of many of my Jungian colleagues, including Carol Condruk, Gail Lyons, Marlene Schiwy, and Phyllis Jensen. A special thanks to John Allan who encouraged me and believed in this book from an early date. My appreciation to Susan Rowland for her close reading and careful review of the initial book manuscript and for catching something important that I had missed! I thank Gina Ogden for encouraging me to publish and for suggesting Routledge. My sincere thanks to Susannah Frearson at Routledge for being so responsive and incredible to work with. My appreciation to Dania Sheldon for her copy edit of the first draft of the book and for weathering the significant synchronicities that surrounded that reading. A big thank you to LeeAnn Pickrell for her amazing detective work and perseverance in securing all the final permissions. And to my many friends who have listened deeply and reflected seriously on the topics of this book: Elaine St. James for all the long conversations, to Phil Cousineau and Chris Franek for providing me with opportunities to sharpen my understanding of the complex lived dynamics between the masculine and feminine, to S. J. for dancing the medicine dance for me at the right time, to Cordy Fergus and Cynthia Novotny for allowing me to retreat and write in their beautiful homes over the years, to Marilyn Strong and Jerry Wennstrom for their soulful friendship, to Nina P., dancing diva and problem solver, for helping me sort through my thoughts on the title, to Margot Adler for her inspiring correspondence and deep affection, to David MacMurray Smith for his invaluable feedback, and to many others . . .

CREDITS

River Mary Malcom’s poem “The Two Goddesses.” By permission. Copyright 2007 by River Mary Malcolm, from “The Two Goddesses” in The Mother Poems: A Daughter Wrestling with a Difficult Love, iUniverse Press. Epigraph in Chapter Two is from Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman, copyright © 1992, 1993, 1997, 2008, 2015. Reprinted by permission of Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. Epigraph from James Hillman in Chapter Three: Copyright © 1975 by Margot McLean. Excerpted from Re-Visioning Psychology by James Hillman. Reprinted by permission of Melanie Jackson Agency, LLC. Epigraph from Joseph Campbell in Chapter Three: Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers. Courtesy of Alvin H. Perlmutter, Inc. and Public Affairs Television, Inc. “since feeling is first.” Copyright © 1926, 1954, 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1985 by George James Firmage, from Complete Poems: 1904–1962 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation. Epigraph from Chapter Five from The fear of the feminine and other essays on feminine psychology by NEUMANN, ERICH Copyright © 1994. Reproduced with permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS in the format Book via Copyright Clearance Center. Quote in Chapter Six By Federico Garcia Lorca, translated by Christopher Maurer, from IN SEARCH OF DUENDE, copyright © 1955, 1998 by New Directions Publishing Corporation. Copyright Herederos de Federico Garcia Lorca, Translation © Christopher Maurer and Herederos de Federico Garcia Lorca. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Excerpt of eight lines from “The Man Watching” from SELECTED POEMS OF RAINER MARIE RILKE, A TRANSLATION FROM THE GERMAN

Credits xiii

AND COMMENTARY by ROBERT BLY. Copyright © 1981 by Robert Bly. Reprinted with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. “Gypsy Soul” by Nadia Hava-Robbins, MA, Romani Poet. Reproduced with permission from The Roads of the Roma: A PEN Anthology of Gypsy Writers, eds. Hancock, Dowd & Djuric´, University of Hertfordshire Press, Hatfield, UK, 1996. Excerpt from “Käthe Kollwitz” in The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. Copyright © 2005 by Muriel Rukeyser Reprinted by permission of ICM Partners.

INTRODUCTION

When I began my graduate work in the field of depth psychology, I had the following dream: I am in a crowded auditorium; there is a priestess at the front of the room. She is teaching of the hieros gamos and sacred prostitution. She asks if there is anyone in the crowd who wishes to experience the ritual. It seems she will perform it immediately. I am shocked and find it hard to catch my breath. There is an enormous collective reaction from the crowd, but no one comes forward. I have a strong desire to step forward. I have never desired anything more. The internal voices abound, and I am paralyzed with fear. The priestess talks of how powerful the energy between the two will become. She says the experience will transform one’s entire being. I don’t volunteer, though every fiber in my body wants to. There is concern for what others will think of me if I do. I can feel the moment of opportunity slipping away and am taken in a wave of sadness and disappointment at my lack of courage. Will I ever be asked again? (Author’s dream journal, fall 1998) In this initial dream, I am an observer in a crowd among many others, relatively unconscious of what is taking place around me. I am surprised to hear that the topic is the hieros gamos, the sacred union, and it sends a shiver through me. There is a great longing and desire to move closer to this ceremony, yet something holds me back. The dream reveals that the restraining force is the watchful gaze of others. This was my psyche’s way of relaying that much work was needed before the masculine and feminine in me could be united through the symbol of the sacred marriage. In the myth of Inanna, Sumerian goddess of love, beauty, desire, sex, justice, and war, she was stripped, piece by piece, of all appearances and pretenses until she stood naked

2 Introduction

before her dark sister. Her jewelry had to be sacrificed, along with her clothing, her title, and her crown, and her relations had to be left behind, until nothing remained but the truth of her flesh, with no need to pretend she was headed anywhere but closer to the mystery of death. A main portion of my psychological work around the time of this dream can be condensed, in its core, to slowly peeling away the layers of paralyzing concern for how others see me. A Re-Visioning of Love is a weaving of personal story, dreams, and depth analysis as they connect to the individuation process in women—on the road to this highest initiation. I primarily have chosen to use my own personal experience rather than to focus on that of clients, even though I have several examples of this process being lived out by those I have worked with over the years. That choice became necessary for the integrity of the work. This book questions how the field of depth psychology changes when viewed through a feminine lens. It seeks to understand violence against women intrapsychically, interpersonally, and within the field of depth psychology. The fairy tale of Psyche and Eros marks the individual transformation in depth analysis from narcissistic love to the capacity for genuine love. The four tasks that Psyche must complete to be reunited with Eros represent the inner work necessary to be initiated into the deeper mysteries of love—for Psyche (Soul) and Eros (Love) to be joined. The tasks include pulling back projections and freeing oneself from identification with others’ projections; facing violence and finding the hidden gold in these shadow lands; developing a psychic container/body that is capable of holding the highest and lowest aspects of self without inflating or collapsing; and lastly, a confrontation with death and the underworld that allows one to see the soul’s beauty in the self and the other. In my personal confrontation with each of these tasks, Oscar Wilde’s character Salomé became a central image of the split-off feminine that was rising into consciousness. Wilde’s Salomé is a complex feminine character who holds within her echoes of past pagan worldviews, surges of authentic sexual energy, and anger at the kingdom she finds herself in: a kingdom that splits the feminine into lost or fallen, abandoned or desired. She is the feminine energy rising that must be reckoned with in order for the possibility of love to exist. In a patriarchal worldview and a rape culture, the feminine remains possessed by masculine illusions of what love is and what it means to be a woman. In her poem “Kathë Kollwitz,” poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open” (1974, p. 377). In any piece of writing, there is always a struggle to decide what will be included and what will be edited out. It is a natural human tendency to minimize one’s vulnerability. So how much truth do I share? How much of my soul do I reveal? Do I dare to just tell the truth . . . at least the truth that I am willing to tell myself? I once heard that elder warriors of the Navaho tribes used truth as protection in battle. They held elaborate ceremonies in which they painted on their battle shields, in symbols, the stories—the truths—of their lives. I was deeply moved by

Introduction 3

this concept that truth offers protection. Of course, it may not be protection in the classically conceived sense, for to tell one’s deep truth often invites strong negative projections. But is it possible that telling the truth is a release, a liberation in and of itself, that sets one outside of such banalities, dualities, and negativities even unto one’s death? I think of Cassandra, a woman who would rather stand in isolation with death and truth than belong in a world bound by illusions and lies. In speaking her truth, Cassandra, walking towards her death, remained untouched by the murderous wishes of those who persecuted her. This book is an exploration of women’s mysteries, the dark feminine, she who is found in modern dreams: the young, dark-skinned girl, murdered, drowned in the bottom of a hot tub; the beautiful Puerto Rican woman who bathes her child along the shores of the prison where she has been kept her entire life; the prostitute shaking from the cold night air, standing alone on the manicured front lawn, begging to be allowed entrance; the insane woman living in a dirty public bathroom within a dark corner of a city, freezing with eyes of ice everyone who crosses her path. According to the Funk and Wagnall’s Canadian College Dictionary (1989), mystery has multiple meanings. It is something that cannot be known or understood, an action that arouses curiosity or suspense because it is not fully revealed; it connects with darkness (especially that which contains a secret), an incident shrouded in secrecy, a truth that can only be brought to light through divine revelation; in ancient times, it referred to one of certain religious cults whose rites were kept secret from all but initiates. In writing of women’s mysteries, I will sometimes use the word feminine. To define what is meant by this word is extremely difficult. I will not do that here, not because I lack a desire or even motivation to do so, but simply because I don’t know how. I primarily continue to use the confusing, if not ambiguous, word feminine because it has a long history of development within the Jungian tradition and this book is loosely located within that tradition. I agree with Esther Harding (1971), who believed that in approaching the subject of essential femininity, one must “disabuse” oneself of all preconceived ideas of what a woman is like as well as all images of what is “considered” truly feminine. We have been immersed in a patriarchal society for so long that our ideas and images of the feminine must themselves be prejudiced. Jungian analyst Betty de Shong Meador (1992) expressed succinctly what she believed to be the source of this lack of understanding in relation to the feminine—mainly that we do not have strong religious or mythological symbols that celebrate the essential feminine. Having been banished for 3,000 years from the doorstep of their own religion, women are entering a new sanctuary of self-understanding that will grow out of repeated descents into the fertile dark of the imagination. Out of the dark, new cultural forms will take life. The burden of consciousness these women will bear will carry us into the new age. (p. 130)

4 Introduction

There is a long and complex history of violence against women and the feminine. In her book Laughter of Aphrodite, Carol Christ (1987) traces the political struggles that led to the loss of worship of the divine feminine and the demise of polytheism. In the fourth and fifth centuries CE, the temples of the goddesses were forcibly closed in Eleusis, Rome, Ephesus, and Athens. Gnostic traditions—the only exceptions where worship and exaltation of the feminine could still be found—were declared heretical. She concludes that suppression of female symbols of power and divinity was a result of the political struggle leading to the development of the Christian canon, and that this suppression followed a similar trail of violence and desecration found in the earlier development of the Hebrew canon. Christ reminds all women that we cannot come close to fully understanding the damage that has been done to us by living and developing within a society that defines the divine as other. There is perhaps no other time in which we so clearly see the extreme fear of the feminine and the dangers of projection as during the persecutions of witches between the years 1400 and 1700—a time Jung describes as “that indelible blot on the latter Middle Ages” (Jung, 1921/1982, p. 20). This collective femicide was really the continuation of this earlier religious war. “That witchcraft was a pagan survival has been supported by such scholars of religion as Mircea Eliade and Rosemary Radford Ruether” (Christ, 1987, p. 45). The witches were the healers, midwives, and wise women who carried with them the oral traditions of the earlier goddess traditions. In a riveting and disturbing video produced in 1990 by The National Film Board of Canada, entitled The Burning Times, several historians, feminists, authors, and theologians discuss the period in European history known as the “witch craze.” Feminist writer and broadcaster Thea Jensen points out that 85% of those killed for the crime of witchcraft were women. Between the 15th and 17th centuries, thousands of women were burned in town squares all over Europe. Jensen says that this was the women’s holocaust and estimates that millions of women were killed over a period of several centuries. With them burned the secrets, stories, and rituals of an oral tradition that had been passed down in families for thousands of years. Churches were built over the pagan shrines and goddesses were turned into saints. The immensity of the loss is staggering. What was really going on at this time? The most well-known text that judges and inquisitors were equipped with, the Malleus Maleficarum (“Hammer of Witches”), reads as a pure example of repression and projection. It is a highly sexualized book that exposes a deep fear of female sexuality, of the night, and of all that is mysterious. Ironically, this is the time historically referred to as the Renaissance and Reformation—the dawn of the scientific revolution. Thea Jensen reminds us of the words of Francis Bacon, one of the fathers of the scientific revolution, who proposed using the techniques of the Inquisition to torture or tease the secrets out of Mother Earth. The birth of the scientific process of dissecting, exacting, and proving coincided with the burning of thousands of women; perhaps such a onesided, linear approach as the scientific method could not have been born without this mass oppression of the feminine.

Introduction 5

Depth psychology cannot be separated from the oppressive history of violence against women and the feminine. The field of psychology emerged out of the examination and treatment of female patients by male physicians. All the early theories were built on masculine mythologems or archetypes. Freud, often considered the father of depth psychology, based much of his theory on the mythological figure of Oedipus. A large portion of Jung’s psychological theory was birthed from the archetypes of the hero and the alchemist. What is true of both these original founders of depth psychology is they believed in the power of myth to contain and hold secrets of human life. We have learned a great deal from Jung and Freud in relation to the processes and manifestations of the unconscious. However, what is largely absent from the early literature of Jungian and psychoanalytic thinking are theories of psyche that are based on central feminine archetypes and women’s lived experience. As Jung reminds us: You can only be really conscious of things which you have experienced, so individuation must be understood as life. Only life integrates, only life and what we do in life brings out the individual . . . Real consciousness has to be based upon life experienced. (Jung, cited in Woodman, 1993, p. 109) Jung considered individuation as a series of initiations that must be survived, but many contemporary Jungians (Woodman, Meador, Douglas) point out that Jung’s original theory does not adequately account for a woman’s journey toward wholeness. In his article “Peaks and Vales,” Hillman (1991) exposed the split in Western, Judeo-Christian culture between spirit and soul. He used the metaphoric landscapes of peaks (spiritual) and vales (soulful) to outline the distinction. Hillman pointed out that the term peak was used by Abraham Maslow in the phrase “peak experiences”—moments of spiritual triumph that are “self-validating, self-justifying and [carry their] own intrinsic value” (p. 114). Peaks are associated with the spiritual heights of Mount Sinai, Mount Olympus, Mount Patmos, and the Mount of Olives. Vale comes from the Romantics: Keats uses the term in a letter, and I have taken this passage from Keats as a psychological motto: “Call the world, if you please, the vale of soul-making. Then you will find out the use of the world.” Vale in the usual religious language of our culture is a depressed emotional place—the vale of tears; Jesus walked this lonesome valley, the valley of the shadow of death . . . There is also a feminine association with vales (unlike peaks). We find this in the Tao Te Ching, 6; in Freudian morphological metaphors, where the wooded river valley teeming with life is an equivalent for the vagina; and also we find a feminine connotation of the valley in mythology. For valleys are the places of nymphs. (p. 115)

6 Introduction

In Re-Visioning Psychology (1976), Hillman further distinguished the characteristics of soul versus spirit. He stated that in moments of intellectual pursuits and transcendental aspirations, the soul enters with its needs, natural urges, and symptoms. Whereas spirit attempts to extract meaning and then concretize the meaning further into rules: [S]oul sticks to the realm of experience. It moves indirectly in circular reasonings, where retreats are as important as advances, preferring labyrinths and corners, giving a metaphorical sense to life through such words as close, near, slow, and deep . . . Soul is vulnerable and suffers; it is passive and remembers. It is water to the spirit’s fire, like a mermaid who beckons the heroic spirit into the depths of passions to extinguish its certainty. Soul is imagination, a cavernous treasury—to use an image from St. Augustine—a confusion and richness both. (pp. 67–68) Hillman’s discussion of soul seems connected to the circular mysteries of the feminine as opposed to the spiritual aspirations and focused goals of the masculine. The movement in Hillman’s archetypal psychology is down into plurality and nebulous confusion, not up into clarity and precision. The aim is not to heal or cure the psyche but to expand the internal landscapes and dimensions. To relativize the ego’s heroic spiritual pursuits, one must turn one’s ear to the underworld, the symptoms of the body, and listen to strange voices of foreign images and beings. “We still catch our soul’s most essential nature in death experiences, in dreams of the night, and in the images of lunacy” (p. 67). Hillman helps us to imagine what a feminine stance in psychology might look like in his discussion of soul versus spirit: as something that stays close to lived experience, darkness, vulnerability, and symptom. There are many ways of researching hermeneutically in the field of psychology, as a way of making meaning. The one that lives closest to the feminine is heuristic. In the words of Moustakas (1990), the founder of heuristic research, “the heuristic process is autobiographic, yet with virtually every question that matters personally there is also a social—and perhaps universal—significance” (p. 15). In heuristic research, the researcher is an integral part of the research process, and a great deal of time is spent reflecting on the topic and its personal ramifications. The word itself comes from the Greek word heuriskein, which means to discover or find. Moustakas (1990) defines heuristics as a process of internal search through which one discovers the nature and meaning of experience and develops methods and procedures for further investigation and analysis. The self of the researcher is present throughout the process and while understanding the phenomenon with increasing depth; the researcher also experiences a growing self-awareness and self-knowledge. Heuristic processes incorporate creative self-processes and self-discoveries (p. 9). Heuristic research places an enormous responsibility on the researcher, as the investigator must have had a direct, personal encounter with the phenomenon being investigated. Unlike phenomenological studies, in which the researcher need not have had the experience, the heuristic researcher has undergone the experience in a vital, intense,

Introduction 7

and full way (p. 14). While heuristics requires a great deal from the researcher, it also makes unique and specific demands on the reader. Through personal stories, it attempts to offer a glimpse, a bridge into an experiential world that may be difficult, and in this case (especially the first third of the book), one from which most people instinctively turn away because it is dark, traumatic, and hard to contemplate. The strong logos of intellectual and theoretical structures can create a barrier that renders much research in psychology inaccessible to most readers. Intellectual, overly clinical writing may be a defense against the vulnerability induced by sharing personal stories. I see a disturbing trend in academia in the preference for detached, intellectual, authoritative voices. During my years of teaching depth psychology, I have witnessed growing disregard for women’s research and writing that risks this personal style, including revelation and storytelling, in favor of the more detached, intellectual style of many writers in the field. There seems a clear privileging of logos and word over heart and experience. Philosopher Sam Keen (1994) has gone so far as to say: I am convinced that we suffer immeasurable harm from the usual academic, objective, anonymous ways of writing, talking, and thinking about our values and visions, our fears and hopes, our sexuality and spirituality. All too many books about the psyche and spirit appear to have been written by abstract authorities and professionals who give advice and offer conclusions from Olympus. I have come to distrust books in which the author lacks the courage to be vulnerable and share the story of his or her journey. (p. 6) There is nothing wrong with intellect used to come to a deeper understanding of the personal, but often it seems used for the exact opposite: to completely distance from the personal. It is this connection to the personal that moves writing out of the world of dull, safe, and dry research and transforms it into a text full of soul and pathos: full of heart. For all these reasons, I have felt compelled to share my story.

1 A MEMOIR OF DESCENT

While I was walking through the deserted aisles of a Vons supermarket in Santa Barbara late one evening, protecting my eyes from the fluorescent lights, I encountered two heavy-set bikers in worn black leather riddled with flags and symbols indecipherable to those outside their circle. Averting my eyes so as not to encourage contact, I caught the briefest piece of their conversation. As they brushed past me, one complained to the other, “Where the hell does someone find the milk around this place?” The words, spoken in angry, frustrated bewilderment, stayed with me, penetrating like an oracle. The contrast between the sound bite and the harshness of their appearance sent me into a burst of uncontrollable laughter, which I held inside until they were safely out of distance and the full impact of their words had sunk in. God, I thought, as insight resonated throughout me, isn’t that the truth—where the hell does a person find the milk around this place? I had been in search of it for the greater portion of my life: the smooth, soothing hills of the eternal breasts flowing in abundance, open to all in need of replenishing, nourishing at the deepest layers of being. Many years later, just prior to my conscious descent into the underworld of my dreams and symptoms, The Dark Mother came to me in a vision. Shortly after I go to sleep, I am awakened by a vision. There is a female figure wearing dark, hooded robes at the foot of my bed. She moves closer. My heart races and I am paralyzed with fear. She starts to lean over me. She has a bundle of something in her hands. She is offering me to take it. I see it is golden sheaves of wheat. She carries them like a beloved child. I seem to understand what she is doing and for a moment think her to be my mother. (Author’s dream journal, August, 1997) At the time of this vision, I was not acquainted with the myth of Demeter and Persephone. Over the next many years, it would be this myth that held me.

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Through the myth I found the containment for the intolerable emotions and experiences that I had never been able to integrate or make sense of. I think myth can do this. The archetypal images are capable of holding suffering and emotions too large for any human to bear alone. The myths offer a contained space to reflect within. They can contain these raw emotional elements until enough safety has been established to reintegrate them into the individual. It was this initial vision that brought me to the myth. A fascination soon developed. I identified with Persephone. For my master’s thesis, I wanted to write on the Demeter-Persephone myth and the mother-daughter relationship. There was a blue moon (a rare occurrence where the moon reaches its fullness twice in the same month) that happened to be in my sign, Libra—my sun and moon are both at home in the sign of Libra. When I heard of the unusual astrological event, it brought back an image from my dreams a few nights earlier. There had been two moons in the same sky. In the dream, I pondered the two silver spheres in absolute awe. I decided this would be an auspicious time to begin writing. I wanted to begin typing out my initial thoughts at the moment the blue moon became full. The full moon was to enter Libra at 2:39 p.m. Early that afternoon, I sat at the computer, working on other material, waiting. As I waited, I began to feel very sleepy. At about 2:00, a wave of exhaustion swept over me, so strong that my eyes were slamming shut. I fought off the feeling, tried to deny it, but it became stronger. I was determined to make it to 2:39. Then I started to think this was ridiculous. Why not just write a few lines, call it a day, and go lie down? What are a few minutes, anyway, in the course of a lifetime? Still, my ego was very attached to the idea of starting at the perfect moment—but by 2:15, I realized that I was not going to make it. It was as if a force much larger than myself refused me entrance. I wondered whether I was meant to be dreaming at the moment the moon entered its fullest point, and I was fighting the wiser part of my psyche. Holding that thought, I went to lie down and drifted off immediately, my dreams taking me to the depths of my psyche—a place devoid of light. I am in a dark dungeon. I am disoriented as though spinning out of control and then I stop dead. Nothing moves. Then sounds: primordial screams of terror from the mouths of ancient women. The screams are familiar somehow. They tear through my skin, breaking the boundary of self-protection, penetrating my skin. I fight to adjust my eyes to the dark. My vision comes to me slowly. There is movement all around me, like shadows. Cobwebs encase me and cloud my vision. My arms are immobilized. I struggle with all my will to move, to push the cobwebs from my face. Then everything becomes too clear too fast. There are women all around me being raped and murdered. I see the blood as it spurts from its sacred vessel. The screams grow unbearable, but the silence that follows is worse. The sweet, sticky smiles of nefarious men as they take their pleasure with no concern for the lives of their victims scorch themselves in my being. Things begin to swirl again. Boys become

10 A memoir of descent

women; women become men. Nothing is sure but the carnage and the blood—so much blood. (Author’s dream journal, March, 1999) Waking, I had the strong sense that I was being asked to change the topic I was writing on. This dream, along with a previous one, led me to consider that I was being summoned to a darker journey. Incredibly, I did not see the great depth of the Demeter-Persephone myth as a dark journey. I was that split between the dark and light, the good and the bad. I had been planning to write on the motherdaughter reunion, a theme that exposed my devotion to maintaining my mother’s distorted version of reality. I wrote my thesis on sadomasochism from a depth, archetypal perspective, not thinking it was connected to the myth in any way. I was wrong. Years later, when I had a better understanding of my own trauma, I was able to see that I had been working on this myth all along. I was in Hades. This was my myth, the archetypal pattern living through me, in me, with me, and it colored all my life decisions. I was catapulted out of my reverie in relation to the myth when I identified the missing piece, simply by asking why. Why was the Demeter-Persephone myth so important to me? Why was its ancient archetypal pattern embedded in the cells of my body? The deeper part of me knew why, but I hadn’t considered that I might be asked to disclose it in the process of writing. I did not feel strong enough. I was raped. The night that I began to contemplate seriously whether I would include this disclosure in my doctoral dissertation, I had the following dream: I went to bed around one in the morning and did some visualization exercises, breathing into my heart the image from a previous dream—a large, open meadow of the most magnificent green, endless in its expanse. I drifted off to sleep . . . I am on a plane. It becomes clear that we are in danger and may crash. I take my seat as we move through an atmosphere racked with turbulence. Steve,1 my friend, is beside me. I go to put on my seat belt and realize that I don’t have one! I kiss Steve. My attention is gripped by a glimpse of the full moon through the small plane window. What is strangely familiar is that the full moon is at rest beside a body of water right next to the earth in the corner of a garden under a beautiful tree. It is a magnificent sight. I am filled with joy and say to Steve, “Whether we die in the crash or land safely, whether in flesh or spirit, let’s meet under the full moon at the side of the garden.” Fear is replaced with a wave of intense curiosity and the grace of a final destination beyond life or death. It is a rough landing, but we are safe. I am awakened by the acute emotion evoked. I have the intuition to try something new—to breath the fresh image of the full moon into my body. Vibrations take me over almost immediately and I am rendered powerless with awe. I think, “Well maybe I will try this experiment another night

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since I need to wake up early tomorrow.” I try to move, but my body is paralyzed. I decide to stay with it and breath the image deeper into my ovaries. The vibrations increase and I am transported into the familiar, but always frightening, psychoidal realm of psychic experience The same night, closer to morning, I continued dreaming: I go downstairs into an unfamiliar room. My aunt, my sister, and a few men are watching a movie. It is only after I sit down to join them that I realize that one of the men is George Olsen—the man who raped me when I was young. He is discussing something about penis length with the other men. I am horrified. I feel sick that he is here. I leave the room. Dawn (my sister) comes after me and informs me that George is being inappropriate. I want to go back in and keep an eye on him, but at the same time I don’t want to be anywhere near him! The silence of lucidity washes over me, and I can’t believe that he is HERE on this night when I began my exploration into Persephone and considered for the first time disclosing the rape in my research. I think of the absurd perfection that I must face him NOW. I am considerably calm. I want him out but I fear my family knowing. I worry about the repercussions of a confrontation with him. I walk up the stairs and wander the halls of the house in silent anguish. I find my grandfather in one of the rooms. He sees my torment and asks me why I don’t just march down there and kick him out. I tell him my fears. “What if he gets violent? What if he says horrible lies about me? What if…?” My grandfather cuts me off with his strong voice: “That doesn’t sound like the Ana I know. She would not let anything, especially a few insults, stop her.” Emboldened by my grandfather’s words, I go back downstairs. I push Olsen towards the door, demanding that he leave. I directly announce why: “You must leave because you raped me.” To my surprise, he calls the others and prepares to go without insult, denial, or violence. He takes the time to return my sister’s key so that all ties between us will be severed. As he leaves, he hands me a large green mug, saying, “This is for you in recognition of what has happened. Please accept it as partial reparation for what I have done.” In the mug there is a thick, black liquid and it is bubbling. He leaves. I am glad he is gone. I am left standing alone with the mug of seething darkness steaming between my hands. (Author’s dream journal, July, 2003) I knew upon waking that my psyche was inviting me to come forward with my story, my truth. In my first dream, the full moon is at rest beside a body of water right next to the earth in the corner of a garden under a beautiful tree. The image of the moon and the tree, once entered, catapulted me deeper into the underworld of my own unconscious, offering guidance and protection over this work. Whether I lived or died, I was to enter back into the Mother of Mysteries and meet my love under the moon tree.

12 A memoir of descent

Persephone speaks I remember sitting in a large auditorium during an introductory class in psychology at the local university. The female professor started by having us all write on a piece of paper what action we would commit if we thought we could get away with it. I don’t remember the purpose of the exercise. With all the papers placed in a not-so-neat pile at the front of the room, she began to read a few of them aloud. She got to one, opened it, and . . . all it said was RAPE in large, capital letters. A tangible wave of energy ran through the room, and no one spoke for some time. It was clear that the professor was visibly shaken, as was I. The incident remained lodged in my mind for a long time. Who had written it—which of the 30 or so men in the auditorium? Likely it was someone no one would expect. I knew it was real. I felt it was real. Timothy Beneke in his 1982 book Men on Rape stated that most of the men he interviewed blamed women for having been raped. He also found most of these same men admitted to being tempted to commit rape themselves. Before I finish writing this sentence, a woman somewhere in Canada or the United States will be sexually assaulted; before I finish writing this paragraph, a woman somewhere in Canada or the United States will be raped. If this doesn’t disturb you, it should. Statistics show that one in four Canadian women will be sexually assaulted during her lifetime. Half of these assaults will be against women under the age of 16 (Brickman & Briere, 1984). The 1993 Statistics Canada Violence Against Women Survey found that “one half of all Canadian women have experienced at least one incident of sexual or physical violence. Almost 60% of these women were targets of more than one of these incidents” (Statistics Canada, 1993). In Janice Gary’s bold article “Sleeping Beauty Wakes Up: Breaking the Spell of Women’s Silence” (2014), published by Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture in an issue dedicated to “Women’s Voices,” Gary summarized the findings of a 2013 United Nations study on violence against women, one of the largest studies of its kind: Out of 10,000 men surveyed, one half reported the use of physical and/or sexual violence against a woman and one quarter of those surveyed admitted to rape. The most common motivation that men cited for committing rape was sexual entitlement—a belief that men have a right to have sex with women regardless of consent. (p. 135) In her illuminating book Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes, Helen Benedict (1992) outlined what are commonly referred to as “rape myths.” The word myth in this case refers to the collective fallacies and misguided assumptions that surround the crime of rape. Benedict outlined ten of the main “myths” and then presented evidence directly contradicting the commonly held assumptions. In regards to the first myth, rape is sex, Benedict wrote:

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This most powerful myth about rape lies at the root of all the others. It ignores the fact that rape is a physical attack, and leads to the mistaken belief that rape does not hurt the victim any more than does sex. The idea that rape is a sexual rather than an aggressive act encourages people not to take it seriously as a crime—an attitude frequently revealed in comments by defense attorneys and newspaper columnists. (“If it’s inevitable, just relax and enjoy it,” said Clayton Williams in 1990, when he was candidate for governor of Texas.) Rape crisis counselors and researchers define rape as an act of violence in which sex is used as a weapon, and point out that a woman would no more “like” rape than she would like being mugged or murdered. (As a teenage victim of rape once said to me, rape is to sex like a punch in the mouth is to a kiss.) I prefer to characterize rape simply as a form of torture. Like a torturer, the rapist is motivated by an urge to dominate, humiliate, or destroy his victim. Like a torturer, he does so by using the most intimate acts available to humans— sexual ones. Psychologists and researchers in the field have found that rape is one of the most traumatic events that can happen to a person. (p. 14) From this first false premise, rape is sex, the next myth is easily generated that the assailant is motivated by lust. Research has shown that far from fitting the picture of a sexually frustrated male with no other outlet, “most rapists have normal sex lives at home, and many of them are married” (p. 14). Men convicted of rape also do not fit into the profile cast by the third myth: the rapist is perverted or crazy; “the majority of rapists are known . . . they are relatives, boyfriends, husbands, teachers, doctors, neighborhood friends, colleagues, therapists, policemen, bosses—not seedy loners lurking in alleyways” (p. 15). I will not list all ten of the myths that Benedict discussed; however, I will point out four further ones that are commonly used to blame victims for their attacks: women provoke rape, women deserve rape, only loose women are victimized, and rape is a punishment for past deeds. In response to these myths, Benedict provided the facts: Most commonly, rape is a crime of opportunity: the victim is chosen not because of her looks or behavior, but because she is there . . . Every time a woman has knowingly or carelessly taken a risk before she was attacked, such as going home with a man, going to a party alone, or taking a walk at night, this myth [women deserve rape] is brought in to blame her. The facts that everyone takes such risks at times and that acting foolishly does not mean one “deserves” an attack are often forgotten, as in the fact that a behavior that may have seemed normal, such as jogging alone, can appear dangerously risky in retrospect if it was followed by an attack . . . The loose-woman idea is also part of a larger, widely held belief that bad things do not happen to good people—a thought that comforts non-victims, but forces victims to blame themselves. (p. 16)

14 A memoir of descent

The effects of these myths are profound and enduring; they live in the culture, they live in the individual. They live in me. As I started to write this chapter, I attracted chaos into my life. I was revisiting the unspoken, the unconscious, voluntarily submitting myself to entering the underworld, and in many ways I did not understand why I was doing it. Was I being overly dramatic? Was I dredging up things that were better left buried? Was I crazy? But then I had to question where these voices originated. They were not my own. They were the voices of those who haunt me. The voice of my mother (“I don’t understand why you can’t just learn to forgive and forget”). The voice of my aunt (“Why would you put yourself through all that? I hate to see you so upset. I just want you to be happy”). And then there are the more powerful voices. The voices that don’t speak yet will silence with a look of disdain: the looks of my grandfather, my father—my gods. I don’t expect everyone to understand why I have felt compelled to speak. The paradox is expressed in this contradiction: it is dangerous to tell the truth but more dangerous to let it die. I want things to be different for my daughter. I want her to know her own voice and not fear using it. I want her to know her own worth. I don’t have a daughter, and I may never have one, but it is her image represented in future generations that gives me courage when I falter. And at a collective level, we are all daughters. As I write, I am the daughter as much as I am the mother, learning to hold the daughter as she learns to speak out. The word itself, rape, conceals more than it reveals. Every instance of rape has a unique and revealing story behind it. They say the Devil is in the details; what is easy to minimize or misunderstand in a word is much harder to gloss over or misconstrue in a story. Years ago, I was asked by a psychoanalytic colleague to review my research on trauma, which included my personal story. I did so, reluctantly, but was rewarded by his frank confession that in nearly two decades of working with countless women who had been sexually assaulted, this was the first time he had been brought to tears. There is a power to the written or performed word that is rarely touched in personal communication, even in the intimacy of the analytic container. For these reasons and more, I share my personal memoir of rape. ≏ I throw my lunch dishes into the sink, thinking I’ll get to them after classes. I look around for my book bag; it’s not where I left it. A burst of rage rips through me, and I scream at my sister, “Dawn where is my—” “I never touched it,” she screams back, cutting me off mid-sentence without even knowing what it is. I am fighting the urge to grab the closest thing to me and hurl it at her when I catch a glimpse of my bag sitting by the door. “See!” she accuses in her nerve-wracking, sing-song, I-told-you-so voice, always the Pollyanna. Something erupts in me, maybe because I’m already late, maybe because yesterday I found my favorite new black sweater with the pink flowers crumpled up in a ball at the back of her drawers (the one she swore she never touched), or

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maybe because I can’t contain the feeling of hate I have for her in that moment. I grab her. My hands dig into her shoulders. For a second, I lose the fight with the part of me that would love to strangle her. I am shaking. I am in touch with a dangerous desire. I release my hands, horrified at my uncontrolled outburst. I want to hug her and cry. The hate in her eyes stops me. An immediate rush of guilt hits my throat—and something like tears. Dawn stumbles for the door but not before getting in a quick, “I hate you. I’m going to tell Mom.” She can’t even hide the surreptitious smile that escapes her lips, letting me know she now occupies that slippery, ever-elusive place of power. She is off with a slam of the door. I clench my teeth, my body a magnet for sharp, metallic emotions. My bones feel scraped with the kind of sharp hatred reserved only for a sister. I have to struggle through this virtual electric field of emotion to reach the door. What is wrong with me? I shake my head, seeking clarity. The sun shines brightly in spite of me. The day is beautiful—another day, like so many others. I breathe in the dandelion puffs floating in the air, like the tiny gray feathers of a bird too small to live. My eyes focus on the sole weeping willow that my mother planted last spring, smack dab in the center of the lawn, towards the cement curb. I am amazed it survived the unforgiving Alberta winter. The sound of the phone jolts me out of my reverie; a strong volt of electricity runs through me in the already charged air. I stand alone on the front step, doorknob in hand, fearing the punishing hand of God awaits me on the other end of the line. My first instinct is to let it ring and run off to classes. Curiosity wins out. “Hello,” I gasp, out of breath. “Is Ana there please?” a deep male voice inquires. “This is Ana,” I manage, heart pulsing in my ears. “Hey, how’s it going?” Still unsure who it is, I wonder whether it is the perverted prank caller who called once before—the one I kept talking to because I thought it was my uncle. I know this is not my uncle. I don’t recognize the voice, yet there is a familiarity. My mind is aflutter with possibilities. I don’t think to ask; that would be rude. I stay on the line, hoping recognition will dawn. Instead, waves of anxiety rush over me, extending to the very tips of my little island of awareness. I almost drop the phone, my body verging on a full state of panic. What is wrong with me? “It’s George… George Olsen…I’m here with Derek. Thought we’d see what you’re up to.” Silence fills the airwaves. Why are they calling me? I have no idea. Neither has ever called before. I can’t even imagine how they found my number. I thought they hardly knew who I was. George carried a position of rank in the neighborhood. He had a large number of subordinates constantly circling him, and he hung around with the angels—Hell’s Angels, that is. He was feared by all who knew him. Olsen already had a beer belly at the age of 19. I heard that his dad hired a bunch of George’s buddies in his shipping business, paying what seemed to the boys astronomical amounts—to him, cheap labor; he also didn’t have to pay any disability insurance for accidents, slipped disks, and so on. So it paid to be around Olsen; he had the best drugs and the most connections, and he was protected. I knew less of Derek except that he had a girlfriend, one of the older girls at my high school. Everyone

16 A memoir of descent

called him Cardinal, for reasons unknown to me. He was the trickster, the fool— always providing comic relief for the big boy, Olsen. I saw them sometimes in the parking lot at lunch, or after school at the local 7-Eleven, making deals. There was an invisible line you didn’t cross around them. The only other place I ever ran into them was at the abandoned fields on the outskirts of town where all the local teens went to drink on the weekends. But they didn’t speak to me then; they were usually arriving when I had to be home. They used to play smash-up derby with their cars in these same abandoned fields. They actually smashed up cars—rammed old beaters into each other for hoots. I am quite stunned by the call—a bit confused, a little flattered. “Ana, you there?” “Yah.” “What are you doin’?” “Just heading back to class.” “Are your parents home?” “No, my Mom’s at work.” “Thought we’d come by with a few beers, hang out for a while.” “Ummm…I have to get…” “Ah, you don’t really want to do that.” He laughs. “Skip class.” “Well…I don’t know, I…” “We won’t stay long. You’re on Raddcliff, right?” “Yah, but…” “We’re on our way.” I hear the click. The phone dangles in the air between my ear and the receiver as my body pauses, unable to make sense of the odd call. Although the alarm running through me suggests concern, I’m not anxious, not really, at least not in connection to them coming over. My mind has already skipped ahead a page to being concerned about missing school and my mother catching me drinking. I don’t even consider heading off to class and ignoring the call; that would be rude. I also don’t care about missing class—my chronic problems with punctuality speak volumes about my attitude to school, especially Riverdale High, with its foreboding solid cement walls that make it resemble an infirmary more than a place of learning. No, missing school is an attractive proposal; it is my mother I fear. I feel on the edge of what my mother would call delinquent. I feel a bit out of control just making the decision. Did I actually make the decision? Oh well, it’s too late now. I hang up the phone, yet the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach lingers. I feel slightly outside of myself, as if I have entered an alternate reality, one derailed from the routine fabric of my daily life. The radical break constellates a presence in the space around me. I feel it everywhere. There will be no school for me this afternoon. The thought strikes me as fascinating. Who would have thought I’d be diverted? I look out the window as the sun passes momentarily behind a thick puff of white clouds, casting a wave of transient darkness over the house. They park in the drive, arriving with a 24-pack of extra old stock beer, also known as “high test,” and the biggest bag of pot I have ever seen. They enter in a

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flurry of activity, completely taking over. Before his butt even finds a seat, George is cracking open a beer and taking a swig. “Fuck, this isn’t cold enough.” He leans over as if physically assaulted, spraying beer from his mouth onto the carpet. “Derek, take some of these beers out and get them into the fridge!” George flicks open his zip lighter, striking it against his jeans as he flips a cigarette into the air; it finds his open mouth like a gymnast planting the perfect dismount. He leans in towards the exaggerated flame, then inhales deeply, setting his eyes on me. I immediately start running around, opening all the windows. I don’t dream of asking them not to smoke. I hear myself blurt out, “You guys know my mom will be home by 6:00; you can’t stay long.” “What’s the matter with you? Why so tense? Geez, where’s the hospitality?” At the crushed look on my face, they both chime in with a not-so-convincing chorus: “Don’t worry, we’ll be long gone by then.” George is off to the kitchen, rifling through the cupboards in search of an ashtray. I jump up to accommodate. Once we are all seated back in the living room, an awkward moment strikes. We kind of just look at each other; all of a sudden, there seems nothing to say. George breaks the silence. “Got any cards?” I jump up, happy to provide; do I have cards! My grandparents recently came back from Vegas with many decks of used casino cards. I grab a stack out of the cabinet and take a seat on the large, Victorian-style sofa, while they sit on high-backed chairs on the other side of an antique coffee table with hand-carved legs like elegant dancers. I find it truly surreal to see them sitting across from me in my home. Slowly and confidently, I shuffle the shiny new red and white cards with the Caesar’s Palace logo branded on the front and a hole punched clean through to alert the dealers they have been used once. “What shall we play?” I ask. “Bullshit,” George shouts at me. I giggle nervously, thinking he has made some kind of clever joke beyond my deductive skills. Thunderous laughter rips through the air, so loud the earth might have quaked beneath my feet and I would not have noticed. Some secret is passing between them that I am not in on. I become more self-conscious by the minute. “Come on, what is it? Tell me!” Apparently, “Bullshit” is actually a card game, a drinking game the two of them are familiar with; they find my naiveté the cause of great entertainment. I answer by shuffling the cards like a professional, unruffled on the outside. George whistles. “Hey, little girl, where’d you learn that trick?” I respond with a glowing smile, which is soon wiped clean as Derek takes the cards, handling them as if spinning gold, revealing my talent is not so special. The basics of “Bullshit” are explained to me; it’s a simple game, based on poker, that amounts to one person declaring their hand, such as “three aces,” and the next person either accepting the hand or calling, “Bullshit.” If you call bullshit on someone who actually carries the hand, you drink; if you call their bluff, they drink—not rocket science. I am usually quite good at cards. When I play canasta and five hundred with my grandparents, I always seem to win, to my sister’s dismay. But this is different. My mind is distracted, and I have a hard time focusing on the rules. I am more tuned in to the gestures, the invisible underlying dialogue

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taking place. Something feels off. I am trying to find my way into their world; I want to get the words right, the laugh right, the timing right. I am happiest when we meet on common ground and laugh together. The first joint passes between them like the baton in a relay race. It is clear they take their smoking seriously. Derek takes a series of quick, precise, intense sips of air; the end of the joint lights up like a stick of dynamite and then covers over with gray ash as he holds his breath. He resembles a child under water, trying to make his best time. I find myself holding my breath as well. I watch his eyes bug out, his face turning red, and just when I wonder whether he will survive the whole ordeal, out flows a Milky Way of smoke that he directs right into my face, the sticky-sweet smell burning my nostrils. All he manages to gasp is, “Woooow.” George nods his head in approval, possibly admiration. I am able to avoid the passing of the stick the first couple of rounds. “What are you afraid of? Mommy’s disapproval?” George taunts. As if a comedian had just landed the keynote joke of his skit, the two burst into gutsplitting rips of laughter. They giggle like young girls. All of a sudden, I feel tired. I don’t even try to join in. When George catches his breath, he says, more seriously, almost apologetically, “Come on, it’s good stuff, you really are missing out.” Derek adds his expert opinion: “Nothing like it.” I am happy to take the tiny cigarette between my thumb and forefinger, lessening the gap between us. I pull the air down into my lungs. The air comes out faster than it went in, a burning cough betraying the loud protest of my lungs. I am deeply embarrassed that my body has such a strong opinion. They laugh as if their pants are on fire. I grow more accomplished in my smoking skills as the hour rolls on, taking only a little bit at a time. I look into the mirrored top of the coffee table, catching a glimpse of my reflection, one I don’t recognize—joint in one hand, cards in the other. I start losing early in the card game. Even during the trial run, when they were teaching me the game, I lost significantly. According to the rules, I am not supposed to drink until we start to play “for real.” However, after I lose a trial hand, George fills the medium-sized glass and pushes it towards me challengingly. I take it with only minimal complaints about the unfairness of it all. The first couple of glasses go down easily, and I am quite proud of my ability to finish it in one long swig. As the games progress, I catch Derek showing his hand to George in the mirrored tabletop; there is nothing subtle about it. I call them on it, but that doesn’t change anything. It becomes part of the game. I am aware of the unjustness in the exchange and my obvious disadvantage, yet I am feeling quite invincible. I believe I will win against the odds. A strange power surges through the room. I start having so much fun I forget my concerns about the smoke, the spilt beer, and my mother’s inevitable return. It’s wonderful to feel their eyes on me, see their half smiles, and feel their genuine kidding. I even believe that their teasing is symbolic of inclusion. Derek is puffing away, like a professional Hoover, when the whole joint gets sucked down his throat. George doubles over laughing so hard no

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sound comes out, all red-faced, fat jiggling. I too am taken with convulsive ripples of laughter, and soon, all three of us are reeling. I look over into the eyes of my new-found friends. We try to get back to the game, but none of us are able to be serious, and just as we get started, one of us rolls over again, thinking of the look on Derek’s face as the joint disappeared, burning somewhere deep in his throat or perhaps already lodged in his lung. My stomach aches from laughing; I may never have laughed so hard. When I come up for air, I am spinning. The spinning doesn’t stop; the room takes on a cloudy aura. I realize I am drunk. “I can’t drink any more,” I announce like a breaking news flash interrupting the regular television program. I expect they will leave. They don’t. I get up to go to the bathroom, but I stand up too quickly; the room is moving sideways as if I am on some ride at an amusement park. I stumble. In the bathroom, I am sick. I have a great feeling of relief after purging the toxins from my system. Before leaving the bathroom, I brush my teeth, stare at my face in the mirror, and say to myself, “OK, now I’ve got it together.” The afternoon is over as far as I’m concerned. When I return to the table, they ask whether I’m OK. “Yes,” I lie. “I have to start cleaning up.” I try convincing them with a stronger voice this time. “Don’t worry, we’ll help you clean up. Just come finish this last game and then we’ll head out.” We argue briefly back and forth before I agree to finish the game; it seems the only way to get them to leave. I am beginning to feel uneasy, hurt even, as it dawns on me that they don’t seem to care one bit about my predicament. Visions of my mother pulling up, all the evidence still intact, travel across my distorted mind. I continue to lose. Things start to become fuzzy. It is at this point that my memory begins to fail me. Bits and pieces remain. I am kneeling on the bathroom floor, getting sick. Derek is there, knocking at the door. “You OK?” He is so gentle in his inquiry, one would imagine he was coming to hold back my hair as I curl over the toilet. “Fine, I’ll be out in a minute,” I yell toward the door. He doesn’t leave. “Really I’m fine.” Now he is pushing open the door. I scream, embarrassed, “I said I’m fine!” “You don’t look fine.” He comes to where I am on the floor. “Go away!” In a flash I am struggling. I can’t grab hold of what is happening. Why won’t he leave me alone? Panic bursts ripe shards of awareness throughout me. Both George and Derek are there now. They are forcing me into my mother’s room. “Maybe you just need to lay down.” They are pulling me. My sock-covered feet push hard at the air and slide against linoleum as I am dragged. They thrust me across the threshold into my mother’s room with the lavender curtains. I am still sick. I throw up on the carpet. There are tears. They shove me violently on the bed. There is a yellow brush with black bristles lying on the bed. I focus all my attention on this absurd detail: the yellow brush; it seems the strangest thing in the world, almost luminous. Then there is nothing. The world goes black.

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There is no more memory, no more struggle. It seems to stay dark for many years. I am broken wide open, a container for all the darkness poured into me. I start to wonder: Where is my god? Am I still in the room? This isn’t happening! Am I naked? The next memory is of laughter, not mine. The shame I feel is unbearable. I can’t protect myself from their words, their blatant stares. They are laughing at me. “Just go,” the words like a whisper on my lips. “Oh, what was that? You don’t want us to stay here and take care of you again?” Laughter. In a red tide of rage, I grab the closest thing to me: a glass sitting on my mother’s night table. I throw it with all my might toward George, who stands by the entrance to the bedroom. It explodes into a million tiny pieces like the splintering of my innocence. For one moment, things are crystal clear and I have my voice. I scream, hoping the sound will shatter reality. The cry, piercing the tail of a passing comet—a falling star in the eye of a crocodile—comes from somewhere I have not known. The power of it forces them from the room. The yellow front door, the one I helped my mother paint, slams shut. I can still hear them in the driveway through the open window. George casually asks Derek if he’s hungry. They decide on Mexican. I swim, the mud a divine orchestra of quicksilver covering over liquid gold. I can see the gold in the reflection of the crystals in the dark cave where I now dwell. I curl up into a ball, wishing I could escape the harshness of the air on my raw skin. Everything hurts. I know I need to clean things up before my mother comes home. I am stiff in my attempt to avoid the pain of motion; I hold my body tense and tight, as if I would spill out if I let go. I find the strength to crawl from my mother’s room to my own. I pull myself into my bed, dragging the sheet across my face. I can’t bear the light through the window, nor can I rise to draw the blinds. The bed dissolves in waves and I lose time; it could have been seconds, minutes, hours, or a lifetime. I awake with a violent fright. I make it to the bathroom. I fear I may be sick again, but nothing comes out, just retching, dry heaves. I start to pee, and torn flesh is soaked in urine; I inhale sharply as if I could suck up the pain. I become aware of a strange smell, something I have never smelled before—semen inside me. I am afraid of the smell; it sends a wave of fresh anxiety through me. I feel horribly wrong. I look at myself in the mirror. There are marks on my body: hickies, fresh bruises, burn marks. I deny the reality of my flesh. I deny the rape. I am back in bed when my sister arrives home from school. She is humming a tune as she bounces up the drive, possibly still enjoying her earlier triumph. I expect to be greeted with animosity. I brace myself for the onslaught. I don’t think I can take it. Instead, I see shock on her face, concern in her eyes as she asks me, tentatively, as if scared of my answer, whether I’m OK. I say nothing. She runs to the side of my bed, instinctively wrapping her arms around me. She must smell the smoke still smoldering, feel the dark electricity still pulsing through the air. No words pass between us then, yet more is said in that silence than at any other time in our relationship. In the reflection of my sister’s misty eyes, I consider, for

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the first time, that something truly horrific has happened to me. In that moment, I love my sister with the fierceness of love reserved only for a sister. She asks whether she can do anything. Choking back the tears released by her kindness, I ask her to clean things up before Mom gets home. “I don’t feel well enough.” “Ana, my God, what happened to you?” she asks again. I repeat I am just sick; I had too much to drink. I don’t meet her eyes. She leaves to get to work. I am indebted to her. I roll over and cry. Dawn continues to check in on me while she cleans; she tries to get me to eat and brings me a glass of orange juice. After she pokes her head in to report everything is clean, I drift off into a disorganized and fitful sleep. I awake with a start as I hear my mother’s car pull up. My heart pounds ferociously. I hear the door; she is talking to Dawn; I hear Dawn say I am in bed, not feeling well. There is silence. I start to think everything will be OK. I got away with it! I let my guard down, my body’s need for rest takes over, and I begin to slide back into the dark corner I found earlier. My mother’s scream catapults me out of my catatonic state. My sister had not thought to include my mother’s room amongst her cleaning duties. I can’t imagine the sight that confronted her as she opened the sliding door to her bedroom, perhaps hoping for a moment of peace after a long day. All I hear now are her frantic steps down the hall, and so I shoot up in my bed. Suddenly, the door flies open; my mother is standing under the doorframe, unveiled in her full fury. She does not step inside but yells from where she stands. She does not cross the invisible barrier between us, the veil my sister had so easily passed through. She is saying something, but my brain can’t absorb it. I see her lips move, the red of her face. I hear a soft buzzing, like the diaphanous lace of a thousand bees between us. Did she call me a whore? The bees protect my ears. Maybe she feared she was going to hell for having such a daughter; maybe she feared I was going to hell. What she could not see was that I was in a vast underworld already; she could not see the streaks of violence across my soiled body. Her unshed tears are deafening—her smile, a dark rainbow in my belly, birthing the unknown. At this crossroads between us, magic could have been spun, proprieties, fears, years of silence and projections could have given way to the tidal wave of love a mother feels for her daughter when she is in pain. With every breath in me, I longed for her touch, for a soothing word that would assure me that I would live. She does not think to ask me if I am OK. She does not think to check my body for scars. She does not think to pick me up and hold me in her arms as I cry. Instead, I get the years of her repressed rage and the deep hatred that she has of her own body, her own sex. I drown in her fear as she firmly consolidates her alliance with God over her bond to her daughter—her body, her blood. A moment can have the power to define a life. In this moment, my mother casts the first stone at my heart. I think it is still lodged there. Just as my mother was unable to embrace my burned and broken body, so I began to reject my own wounded, vulnerable body. I buried her. She hides behind

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many faces: the actress, the academic, the lover, the seductress, the gymnast, the athlete, and the professional. But she is not dead—not for my lack of trying, to be sure. She keeps pushing her way into my life through dreams, through sickness, through failed relationships, until finally I turn to her and scream in frustration, “What do you want from me?” She replies, “I want you to tell my story. I want you to tell my story! Not because I wish to suffer, not because I wish you to suffer, not because I wish others to suffer. I want you to tell my story because it is the only way to heal.” She understands things that I do not. She is a warrior. Even today, I feel strangely detached as I write this, as if all these things happened to someone else; but I notice I stopped breathing some time ago, and my head is beginning to ache. When my mother slammed the door between us, I climbed out of bed, packed a couple things in a small knapsack, and jumped out my bedroom window. I had no idea where I was going. I ran. I ran. I ran. I did not look back. I heard later of the horrors that George and his gang inflicted on other unsuspecting girls. Debra, whom the neighborhood parents referred to as the slow girl from down the block (she suffered from a learning disability); they took turns on her, sometimes renting a hotel room for the event. I heard they inserted a milk bottle into her vagina once. Lori, who had too much to drink one night at the abandoned fields; they propped her up against the back of a truck, spread her legs, and flipped caps of beer bottles at her, trying to see who could come closest to hitting the target. Apparently they made a real game out of rape, degradation, and violation of the most vulnerable young girls in the area. So I guess that all in all, I was lucky? My body remembers what my mind does not. To this day, I have recovered no memories of the actual rape, of any penetration or pain. Yet I often awake from a recurring nightmare where I feel intense pressure on my stomach. I try to breathe, but with each breath I take, on the exhale, the pressure grows stronger. My stomach is being crushed—I am dying. Perhaps my body remembers a large man lying on top of me, as he breathed in, pushing against my stomach; my prana, the breath of my being, in Hinduism the kiss of life—was literally sucked out of me. The horrible truth began to dawn on me that I was not going to receive any help or protection from my mother. My response was to start dating one of the older, tougher guys in the neighborhood. I must have known that no one would touch me again as long as we were together. No one came near me for fear of death. He was abusive to me and possibly did the same kinds of unspeakable things to other young, unsuspecting girls when I was not around. I chose not to see this, however. I needed him. We stayed together for three years. When I finally left him for good, I was living on my own. I had to get a restraining order against him, which he did not honor. He brutally raped me while trying to strangle me before finally disappearing from my life. This time, I remembered everything. Like most women, I never pressed charges. According to Statistics Canada (1993), only 6% of all sexual assaults are reported to police.

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It took me forever to realize that my psyche was living in the underworld, stuck in these eternal moments of trauma. Even though I had upperworld experiences, they never held. Once you have entered into the deepest parts of the underworld, you can never remain as you were before. There are parts of me that split off when I descended. They remain imprisoned in darkness. Hades has me. I feel his teeth as they rip into the tender flesh of my fallopian tubes. My ovaries shed blood and tears. I relive the rape theme again and again in my dreams and fantasies. I have to fight for every hard-won piece of consciousness. I descend into darkness in attempts to recover my lost sexuality. As it returns to me, the grief and rage are profound. Ereshkigal, like Persephone, was raped by the gods and exiled to the underworld. She [Ereshkigal] is the part of the feminine that has gone underground. She embodies rage, greed and fear of loss. She is raw primal sexual energy; she is feminine power split off from consciousness . . . She is the place where potential life lies motionless. (Murdock, 1990, p. 104) All daughters who have been violated long for a mother like Demeter, the sheer power of her grief and rage enough to retrieve her daughter from the arms of death. And perhaps even more than that, the daughter longs for a mother who understands that she has been changed and embraces her as such, not attempting to restore the daughter to the status quo of her previous self. This longing is depicted beautifully in the last stanzas of River Malcolm’s poem titled “Demeter” (2007): Daughter, do not imagine I deceive myself Or dream I can call you back as you were. Nor do I dream of freeing you, when you think of my absence, my failure, from the hatred that hardens your eyes. How can a goddess who makes the very grain grow allow her own child to be raped? Do not be afraid: I know of your hate. Even the goddesses, especially the goddesses must dance with destiny, daughter. Do not think I require you back as you were, I know you are changed. And I too, daughter, I also am changed, oh flesh of my flesh, these seeds of death within you, they are seeds in my flesh. I embrace all of you, daughter, the change and the hate, the longing to partake of your violator’s power,

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and I call you, I call you forth as you are knowing you may not be able to love me now in the face of my failed power, power that seemed so great to your child eyes. You will never know Persephone except as you rest your brow on my bosom and remember a little the girl you once were and how you were whole you will never know the joy I feel in your being no matter where you go no matter what seeds of death sprout in you no matter how pregnant with winter oh my sweet flower of spring you will never know how my love for you makes the grains grow.

Note 1 Where necessary to preserve anonymity, the names of people and locations have been changed in this passage and throughout the remainder of the book.

2 THE DEMON LOVER Becoming the bride of Hades

Adults as well as children often feel impelled to re-create the moment of terror, either in literal or disguised form. People reenact the traumatic moment with a fantasy of changing the outcome of the dangerous encounter. In their attempts to undo the traumatic moment, survivors may even put themselves at risk of further harm. —Judith Herman

The sequelae of symptoms experienced after severe trauma have been characterized by a variety of different terms over time: PTSD, psychosis, dissociative identity disorder, hysteria. But these are just names. In reality, and sticking closer to the inner experience and the images, one could just as easily categorize the experience as possession by the demon lover complex. In the end, theory is just theory, and terms are just attempts to categorize complex and confusing dynamics into something manageable—to make something unspeakable speakable. There is always an image/archetype behind the category. The demon lover is most often the image behind the traumatized feminine. Traumatic bonds are inherently difficult to break, and the bond to the demon lover is deadly in its force. The individuation movement of the demon lover complex is presented here in stages, but I would like to bring in the caveat that as in life, there is always a problem with a purely linear formation of stages. The process will be different for everyone, and even when a later stage has been reached, there remains a danger of finding oneself back, caught in an earlier stage of the process due to life stressors, additional trauma, or simply a regressive move of the psyche as it seeks deeper integration. The process in actuality more circular than linear. Yet once later stages have been reached, if the complex is constellated again at an earlier stage, it is easier to break free than the first time around. There may also be real possibilities for clinicians and therapists to utilize the reoccurrence of an earlier stage as an opportunity to help the individual integrate the whole of the original trauma more fully.

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Despite the inherent problem of stages, I have still chosen to use them, as they are the best representation of the direction in which the individuating psyche is always moving.

The early stages Stage one: possession When the demon lover is constellated in the psyche of a woman, she is in the gravest of danger. As Jung (2001) describes, “When an archetype is unconsciously constellated and not consciously understood, one is possessed by it and forced to its fatal goal” (Letters, Vol. 2, p. 594). The demon lover archetype is alive and well in the collective psyche. The fact that The Phantom of the Opera has been one of the most successful musicals in contemporary theatre suggests this archetype is rampant, so much so that it is disguised in euphemistic codes such as codependency or compulsive relationships (Woodman, 1993). The term demon lover evokes images of the demonic, of evil. Just what constitutes evil is a matter of debate, as it means different things to different people and has carried considerably varying meanings throughout history. In contemplating my own understanding of evil or the demonic, I found a quote by clinical psychologist Stephen Diamond (1996) in his book Anger, Madness and the Daimonic that I feel adequately describes the essence of what I mean by the term demon lover. On a still subtler level, evil can be considered that tendency which—whether in oneself or others—would inhibit personal growth and expansion, destroy or limit innate potentialities, curtail freedom, fragment or disintegrate the personality, and diminish the quality of interpersonal relationships. (p. 56, emphasis in original) The demon lover is a complex that accomplishes all of these ends. I envision the demon lover as an archetypal image that keeps many women bound to a state of initial confusion and depression; in alchemical terminology, the demon lover might be considered the nigredo, prima materia, or massa confusa, a state of conscious confusion and the place where all alchemical work begins. Many traumatized women will stay bound to this initial state of confusion, depression, and possession completely unconscious of the demon’s presence. I define the demon lover complex as a split-off autonomous aspect of the psyche that has taken possession of the ego and holds dominion over the individual; it is a destructive force—its fatal goal, death. The extremely egodystonic characteristics, often present in the autonomous complex, fuel its notable absence from awareness. In more psychoanalytic language, this stage is referred to as identification with the aggressor. The demon lover can manifest in reaction to explicit trauma or implicit social conditioning, or through shadow material inherited from previous generations. In the case of trauma—rape, for instance—the demon may begin its reign at the

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moment of violation. In Wertz’s (1985) phenomenological study of criminal victimization, he discusses one of the essential components involved in the experience: loss of agency. The victim is immobilized and this new sense unfolds in a position of passivity. This is necessarily so, since the world [she] usually acts in has been pulled out from under [her] feet; immobility is lived bodily as spell blindness and intellectually as confusion. . . . the victim is stripped of, or better yet alienated from [her] own agency in a situation whose purposes, values and ends are defined by an other to whom [she] is utterly vulnerable. (p. 197) The will of the “other” penetrates the armor of the self, and as a result, a psychic introject is born. What does the body of a woman do with the seeds of the other that have been forced inside her? There are the physical seeds left behind during rape, but we must also consider the psychic seeds implanted at this moment; they remain long after the semen has washed away, long after the outer scars have healed. As Persephone remains forever bound to Hades through the ingested pomegranate seeds that live on in her, so does a woman who is violated sexually remain psychically bound to her perpetrator. The classic Hindu text on relationships, sexuality and eroticism, the Kama Sutra identifies rape as one of the four forms of marriage, or eternal bonding—the lowest form, to be sure, but still a form. It is a death marriage, or in Jungian terms a death coniunctio. In her powerful memoir Lucky, Alice Sebold (1999) describes this death bond well. While a freshmen in college she was brutally beaten and raped in a park near campus. She was 17 years old at the time. In her words: It was an early nuance of a realization that would take years to face. I share my life not with the girls and boys I grew up with, or the students I went to Syracuse with, or even the friends and people I’ve known since. I share my life with my rapist. He is the husband to my fate. (Sebold, 1999, p. 51) In the aftermath of trauma, a woman may unconsciously sacrifice many things to the internal demon. She may give her voice in the hope of being kept safe from now on; she may give her sensuality, which she may unconsciously blame for the incident (“if I am not a sexual being, this can’t happen again,” or worse, “this is a punishment for being a sexual being”); she may give her creativity, not daring to open lest the sexual waters begin to ripple through her again, ripping open the cordoned off wound; or she may give her vulnerability so as to never again acknowledge the possibility of being violated. In denying her vulnerability, the woman denies reality and identifies with her aggressor, feeling the soar of his omnipotent surges, his negatively inflated rush of power.

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Some men have reported extreme rushes of god-like power at the time of committing violent sex crimes, as if they were inflated with the negative side of God; they feel all-powerful and invincible. It is not uncommon that at the time of committing such a crime, the perpetrator will experience the type of trembling and shaking mystics talk of when in the presence of the divine. In their book exploring the minds of violent sex offenders, Dark Dreams, FBI profiler Roy Hazelwood and author Stephen Michaud (2001) analyze the crimes of Billy Lee Chadd, “a native San Diegan, husband and father [who] described himself as a ‘normal, easy-going guy’” (p. 75). Chadd’s first crime, a confessed rape, was committed against a woman he found by knocking on the door of her home, claiming his car had broken down and that he needed to borrow her phone. The woman said she could not let him in because her husband was at work and she never opened the door when she was alone. Chadd left, returning moments later to break in through the front door with a brick. He put a knife to the victim’s throat and forced her into the bedroom. In Chadd’s later confessed description: When we got to the bedroom, I just shoved her down on the bed and threw up her housecoat. I tried to cut her panties off but my knife wasn’t sharp enough . . . I pulled her panties off and pulled down my Levi’s and got on her . . . [and] she just laid there. So I told her to start moving or I’d hurt her. Up till that night, I had balled quite a bit but I had never experienced such sexual pleasure. I was completely overcome with passion. I dropped my knife . . . I even lost my vision for a few seconds. I collapsed on her and I was so spent I couldn’t even move. Had she only known my condition, she could have picked up the knife and stabbed me and I couldn’t have done anything to stop her. (p. 78) In relation to a later murder, Chadd said to investigators, “My high was beginning to take over again . . . I started breathing hard and my palms got all sweaty . . . I felt the now familiar exuberance sweep over me again. I was going to kill” (Hazelwood & Michaud, 2001, p. 83). Often, criminals like Chadd, who go on to be serial sexual killers, escalate the violence of their crimes over time, attempting again and again to push the limits of negative inflation and perverse ecstasy. A victimized woman may wish to live in the shadow of her perpetrator’s archetypal god-like rush, an infinitely more attractive proposal than feeling the reality of being taken, the terror of being ripped open, the truth that she did not want it, the pain that she could not stop it. On the outside, at a conscious level, the woman may know very well that she has been victimized; however, the internal psychic position often taken up is an unconscious identification with the perpetrator. This is a compensatory stance, offering an illusion of control that covers the unbearable psychic pain and originally seems to serve the protective function of keeping the victim from further fragmentation.

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This is an aspect little explored in the psychological literature—that at the time of a violent crime, both individuals are in the presence of the archetypal realm. The symptoms and complexes, the woundings of the soul, are the cracks and crevices that offer passage between ordinary consciousness and the archetypal world. The archetypal psychologist James Hillman is very clear that we are as much in harmony with the archetypes “when afflicted as when in beatific states of transcendence” (1989, p. 151). Sexual violence is an intense, darkly numinous experience that places one at the edge of an opaque abyss, the edge of death. Both victim and perpetrator swim within a black hole, the sadomasochistic core around which all religions are built. Persephone’s innocence was raped and ravaged before she was anointed queen of the underworld. In the classical world, the villa of mysteries in Pompeii is believed to have housed the sacred rites for initiates in search of a deeper meaning of human existence. In a series of frescos found in one of the villa’s rooms, the progression of a woman’s passage into higher consciousness is marked by her flagellation at the hands of an angel. Christ suffered flagellation and crucifixion before resurrection, the Buddha sensory deprivation and starvation before enlightenment. These spiritual icons speak to a deep connection between conscious suffering and archetypal experience within the psyche. After someone has touched death in this way, an existential question arises: Why live? If one is not able to find a sufficient reason for living, if there is little in one’s life that is authentic, the question becomes all encompassing. The internal unconscious dialogue sounds something like this: Why not stay married to death? Why not fuse with the presence that has the power to bring one to the brink of death? It is certain that life is never the same, that one does not return to one’s previous state of being. A woman who has touched this abyss through violation knows in the cells of her being the futility of most living; she can’t engage in the pleasantries of being proper and alive—although she may try. The demon takes up primary residence in her dreams, night-terrors, sexual fantasies, bodily symptoms (panic attacks, vaginismus, infections, indiscriminate pain, migraines) and psychotic attachments (repetitive abusive relationships). It does not let go, not without hard and painful work. I would venture to say many women suffering from such a complex remain unaware that their lives are controlled by an inner demon unless, by grace, they are offered the opportunity to feel safe enough to unravel, reveal, and explore the intolerable image. In fact, in analysis it may take years for the dreams and fantasies confirming this state of possession to surface or for a woman to risk sharing them. As initially there is often an enormous degree of shame surrounding them. Like Persephone, a woman who has undergone such a violent abduction into the arms of Hades is forced out of the state of innocence. No longer does the world feel safe; no longer is her body her home. The violence of the “other” has entered her. This is also true in a type of reverse projective identification: the perpetrator steals her innocence and integrates it into his psyche. In 2017, I attended a Ferenzi psychoanalytic conference during which this idea was proposed. Although I don’t have a detailed grasp of Ferenzi’s theories, this idea makes good sense to me: may be how many men can walk away from such crimes and feel

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OK, as if they have done nothing wrong. This reminds me of the comments of men who commit the crime of incest on their children and go on to say that it was an act of love and preparation for being sexual in the world, and really believe it— they have introjected the innocence they took from their victims’ lives. In shamanic terminology, this would be called soul theft. In Western societal structure, where there are no ceremonies or rituals commonly practiced to honor the transition from adolescence into adulthood, a rape or unwanted sexual contact will often mark a young girl’s transition. When sexuality is repressed to the frightening degree seen in the Western world, there is a danger it will fall into enantiodromia, with the darker side of the archetypal continuum bursting forth. It is also interesting to consider that the act of rape may for men be an attempt at initiation in a world that does not have deeper initiation ceremonies (beyond getting a driver’s license, reaching legal drinking age, and graduating from high school as one of the classic components of initiation is a confrontation with death). During the writing of my original doctoral research, in 2003, the city of Vancouver, where I live, was engaged in the largest serial murder investigation in Canadian history. Most of the women murdered were prostitutes from the city’s Downtown East Side neighborhood. The number of women missing since 1978 is astounding and alarming: at least 65. Robert Pickton was convicted of first-degree murder in six of these cases, with the growing number of victims linked by DNA to his Port Coquitlam pig farm reaching at least 31. Just across the border, in the state of Washington, Gary Ridgeway, also known as the Green River Killer, was believed to be responsible for the death of over 60 women, most of whom were engaged in prostitution at the time of their murder. Ridgeway was married throughout the period when he violently killed these young women, most of whom were in their teens. A disturbing and unusual aspect of this case is that in some of the murders, after raping and murdering the women, Ridgeway inserted stones into their vaginas. Ridgeway did not seem to spend much time reflecting on his motives, and he claimed to have had no conscious understanding of or intention behind the action. When asked, for example, why he inserted rocks into two women’s vaginas after killing them, he replied that the rocks “were there.” On another occasion, Ridgeway seemed to suggest that he inserted the rocks to “plug” up his victims. According to Ridgeway’s second wife, he had threatened to “sew up” her vagina to prevent her from having an affair (Maleng, 2004, p. 26). The insertion of the stones stood out for me. In fact, it got inside me. When I think of stones, what comes to mind is the stoning of women during biblical times, an atrocity still committed in some Arab countries and parts of South Asia, such as Afghanistan. Biblical scholars generally consider the relevant laws to have been written between 1000 and 600 BCE. These laws portrayed stoning as the extreme form of punishment elicited when loss of “control” or “ownership” over a woman occurs. The laws were based on the premise that women were owned first by their fathers and later by their husbands. Women who threatened these laws were often stoned to death. Control over women’s sexuality was paramount to a patriarchal system whose continuance depended on being able to identify the paternity of future generations.

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In Levite law, the rape of a virgin was honoured as a declaration of ownership and brought about a forced marriage. As the victim of rape, a woman automatically lost the right to continue her life as a single woman or to become the wife in a more carefully arranged and probably more desirable marriage. The law reads, “If a man find a damsel that is a virgin which is not betrothed and lay hold on her and they be found, then the man that lay with her shall give unto the damsel’s father fifty shekels of silver and she shall be his wife” (Deut. 22:28,29). Perhaps just as astonishing is the law that if the victim of rape was married or betrothed, she was to be killed. The law stated that if a betrothed or married woman was sexually violated, she and the man were both to be stoned to death (Deut. 22:23–25); the rape was regarded as an affront to the male who owned her. (Stone, 1976, p. 191) This desire to own women and have ultimate control over them is also seen in the Ridgeway murders: Ridgeway’s sense of ownership and his need to retain possession of these bodies drove him to pin his third “river” victim beneath the surface of the Green River. It was an ordeal to hold the body at the bottom of the river and cover it with large rocks, but Ridgeway did so because . . . “You had already found two of ’em by then. And she . . . I wasn’t going to let this other one get away.” Ridgeway told a defense psychiatrist about a recurring dream in which he was unable to recall the location of one of “his” bodies and thereby lost control of her: “I had control of her when I killed her and I had control of her if she hasn’t already been found, I’d have control of her where she was still in my possession.” (p. 29) Is this modern-day version of “stoning” an inverse cry for the return of the Dark Goddess, the sacred feminine forced underground, a consequence of the years of her active repression, a loss that reverberates endlessly in these violent acts? Most people equate violence with mental illness and leave it at that without further reflection. Yet what is considered pathological itself holds remnants of the collective shadow. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) can be seen as a book that exposes the collective shadow—human traits the general population refuse to allow into consciousness. Is there a way these acts are forcing something from the underworld into the light of consciousness? Renowned psychiatrist James Gilligan in his 1996 book Violence argues for the importance of understanding action as symbolic language in relation to violent crimes, and if we look at the actions of Pickton and Ridgeway from this perspective, certain things become disturbingly clear. Are their actions the concretized form of the symbolic reality of the unconscious that exists within the “normal” psyche, albeit to a lesser degree? Do they offer us the opportunity to

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“see” these disturbing inner psychic structures magnified to living nightmares? I believe so. It is implied throughout Freud’s writings on psychopathology that one of the values of studying extreme manifestations of pathology is that they reflect back in a more concentrated form what is true for most “normal” people. Ronald Lehrer in Nietzsche and Depth Psychology (Lehrer, Golomb, & Sataniello, 1999) makes the argument that Freud may have adopted this way of thinking through familiarity with Nietzsche’s philosophies and writings. And we see this concept well-articulated in the words of Nietzsche (1967): It is the value of all morbid states that they show us under a magnifying glass certain states that are normal—but not easily visible when normal.— Health and sickness are not essentially different . . . there are only differences in degree between these two kinds of existence: the exaggeration, the disproportion, the nonharmony of the normal phenomena constitute the pathological state. (p. 47) It was found that after the women had been murdered on the Pickton farm, their bodies were dismembered and fed to the pigs. This is hard to even contemplate in consciousness. Following Gilligan's theory of action as symbol the atrocities the bodies of these women endured evokes thoughts of the sacred rites to Demeter, the Dark Mother. In the rites to Black Demeter, piglets were fed to snakes that inhabited the underground chasms, as an offering to the goddess. In Jungian language, what happened on the Pickton farm is an extreme enantiodromia, a reversal: the pigs were fed the flesh of the goddess in the form of the women’s bodies, rather than the pigs being sacrificed to her. Are these gruesome crimes pressing society to “see” the mass imbalance between men and women, the denied and repressed rage and frustration of trying to fit into stereotypical roles that no longer serve either sex, the frustration of continual unmet needs and aborted attempts at wholeness through possessive love? Do these extreme acts of violence symbolize the collective state of narcissistic, immature love, and the concretized rage bound in the refusal to relinquish illusions and deathly projections—to see the other as more than a mere reflection of one’s own unlived potential and shadow desires? At the most profane level, is this representative of what we have done to the “feminine” as a whole? I believe so. I believe we will we continue to see such atrocities until we can honor sexuality as divine, women’s bodies and flesh as sacred, and until we heal the split between sexuality and spirituality. Were the stones left as an offering to the great Dark Mother, an unconscious gesture honoring the immense power she evokes, a power so allencompassing that a man like Ridgeway believed he must actually kill in order to feel? The closest association to the dark feminine in the Judeo-Christian tradition is the Black Madonna. Historically, the Black Madonna was worshiped as a black stone; “in Chaldea the Great Goddess, Magna Dea, who was goddess of the moon, was worshiped in the form of a sacred black stone which is believed to be the very

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stone still venerated at Mecca” (Harding, 1971, p. 41). Is the Dark Goddess the symbol necessary to hold what we as humans, and lighter archetypes such as Christ or the Virgin Mary, have not been able to transform or contain? In the words of poet Robert Graves, in Mammon and the Black Goddess: The Black Goddess is so far hardly more than a word of hope whispered among those who have served their apprenticeship to the White Goddess. She promises a new pacific bond between men and women, corresponding to a final reality of love, in which the patriarchal marriage bond will fade away . . . The Black Goddess has experienced good and evil, love and hate, truth and falsehood in the person of her sister; but chooses what is good: rejecting the serpent-love . . . She will lead man back to that sure instinct of love which he long ago forfeited by intellectual pride. (1965, p. 164) Although I agree with most of Graves’ sentiments, I would replace the second use of good with true—“but chooses what is true”—and I would challenge women to say yes to serpent love. Some may believe that honoring the Dark Mother Goddess as a way of bringing about a reduction in the extreme rates of violence against women is an idealistic notion. Many have argued that violence is part of life and the real challenge lies in coming to terms with such atrocities. I don’t think the Dark Mother is an idealistic notion. I believe she asks more of individuals than any other archetype. Her path is not an easy one to either follow or imagine. The Dark Mother came to me before I began this journey. I shared this vision in the Chapter 1, but I think it is important to come back to Her now. That night, I was awake! I was not asleep when she appeared. I had awoken, sensing something in the room. I opened my eyes to see Her standing at the foot of my bed, enshrouded in black. I was frozen, as if a sheet of invisible ice encased me, preventing the tremors beneath my skin from erupting. I imagine this is how it would feel to awaken to an intruder standing at the foot of the bed. Even cloaked by her dark hood, the charge of the archetypal mother before me was nearly too much, the terror so complete I don’t know whether I would wish for another visitation. She leaned towards me with wheat in her hands, an offering, the gold sheaves in such contrast to her robes, blacker than the breast of a crow. I was awake the rest of the night, shivering. The Black Mother, the Black Madonna, the Dark Goddess, Demeter had come to me, somehow traversing the barrier between the world of the archetypes and the earthly sphere where I slept. She came to jolt me out of my slumber: a gift of grace, one I could neither recreate nor explain. She shook me, reached in and rearranged my DNA. I will always have that. I saw Her once. She exists. She bears gifts for her daughters. She gripped me. She is the epitome of mystery itself, darkly devouring in her love, fierce in her resolve. When someone has been traumatized, it is not images of light that heal but images of dark. As hard as images of trauma are to hold, they feed the individual

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soul because they are a direct reflection of a most difficult reality. Images of light while one remains trapped in repetitive trauma leave one feeling even more alienated from the world. As Edward Edinger (1992) writes so clearly and powerfully in The Mysterium Lectures: I don’t think it can be emphasized too much how important symbolic images of darkness are for dealing practically with the darkness of the unconscious. We need to know these images in all their variety because dark moods are healed by images of darkness, not by images of light. You need only consider how you feel in a depressed state when you encounter images of lightness and good cheer; that’s not what you’re interested in when you are in that condition. (p. 207) In Steve Aizenstat’s (2007) dream-tending work, he discusses the importance of turning towards the intolerable image in dreams because it is these most difficult images that contain strong medicine for the psyche. In applying this same principle to collective lived experience, having the courage to turn towards, to lean into the traumatic and violent stories holds vital medicine for the community. It is healing to the community for more citizens to turn towards contemplation of these intolerable images and stories, as they help the burden of trauma move out of the individual psyche and back to the collective society where it belongs. As Micha Lindemans points out, one translation for the Roman name of Persephone (Proserpina) is “She who destroys the light” (Lindemans, 1997). It is in this light-destroying capacity that I feel Persephone’s voice is desperately needed at this time in history. From the witch burnings, to the Nazi concentration camps, to the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, “spiritual purity” has sanctioned more atrocities and crimes than any other concept throughout time. The desperate desire for spiritual supremacy demands continual projection of the darker aspects of the self, which creates a compulsion to annihilate the object of the projection, “the other.” The results of perfectionism cannot be better characterized than in the words of Nietzsche: “ . . . the more fundamentally we desire the one the more completely we shall achieve the other.” We seek for the ideal, but what we find is the sick animal. (Frey-Rohn, 1967, p. 161) The darkly sharp consciousness of Persephone is required to discriminate between what is representative of true evolution of soul and what is mere compensation for dissociative splitting and possession by an inner demon. We seem a world danced by this inner demon to our collective death while we remain blinded by the light. Like children afraid of the dark, I believe all patriarchal societies surround themselves with light so they can continue to sleep, aloft in ivory towers when true evolution lies in the mud beneath our feet.

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It seems impossible not to connect the extreme cases of violence targeting prostitutes in North America today with the loss of the ancient temple priestesses and their rites. The Madonna-Whore archetypal continuum represents the most obvious split between the light and dark sides of the feminine in society. Collectively prostitutes may carry for many women the projection of their own dark side, “the whore she has been rejecting in the name of the father” (Woodman, 1982, p. 169). In general, we have not found a way to relate to the immense energy of the Dark Goddess worthy of our attention; it is as if She were a large and powerful black hole that either sucked one under or left one desperately striking out against her in the dark, terrified and alone. The lives of prostitutes and women who live on the streets may feel too far removed for many to identify with their plight. However, it must be remembered that these women are often the children who have been failed by their families and societies, women abused and silenced. I have found in my practice that women who judge prostitutes harshly are often the same women whose husbands are engaged in sexual relations with prostitutes. In men, prostitutes perpetuate the fantasy that some women can be bought, owned—completely possessed—for a period of time. Narcissistic rage in the form of blind violence may explode in men when they are forced to admit that in truth, paying for sex does not equate to ownership. The frustrated desire to “own” a prostitute or the “body of a woman” is depicted well in the most intense scene from the movie Monster (Jenkins, 2003), which is based on the true story of Aileen Wuornos. In this scene, Wuornos gets into a man’s car, and they proceed to an isolated location. He complains to her of his simultaneous love and hate of prostitutes. He then punches her with all his strength, knocking her out. When Aileen awakens, she finds that he has tied her to the vehicle in the hopes that she will not escape his control and he can take full possession of her body for his sadistic fantasies. This is the first man she kills. The violence of which prostitutes are far too often victims is representative of the strong misogynistic undercurrent continuing to run through Western culture. Prostitutes suffer the brunt of this misogyny because they are easy targets, often chained to addictions that can lead them to go with men they otherwise would completely avoid. Ridgeway claimed that he only killed street prostitutes. His principal reason was the relative ease with which these women could be murdered: “Uh, prostitutes were the, the easiest. I went from uh, havin’ sex with ’em to just plain killing ’em” (Maleng, 2004, p. 16). “Sometimes, to finish the women off, he would roll them on their backs and stand on their throats” (Maleng, 2004, p. 23). It would be a tragic mistake not to consider the brutal treatment of these women as a critical issue of concern for all women. Prostitutes are also less likely to be heard if they risk speaking out or seeking help. There are no protective structures in place for these women, and they clearly do not feel safe to reach out to the local authorities. This silence in the face of extreme violence was demonstrated in another investigation in the Vancouver Lower Mainland area concerning the sex crimes Donald Bakker committed against “51 local sex-trade workers as well as nine underage children from a foreign

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country” (Lee, 2004). After apprehending Bakker in the act of committing sexual assault in a local park, police searched his home and found videotapes containing over 60 images of women and children. The tapes are categorized as “extremely violent.” In the words of one investigator, “I can tell you in the 25 years I have been policing, these are by far the most disturbing images I have ever viewed.” One thing officers were wrestling with was why none of the 51 local sex-trade workers had come forward to the police with complaints against Bakker, and why he was not found on any of the “bad date” lists that circulate among the police (Lee, 2004). Clearly these women did not feel protection was available to them through the police. Just as it is true that the women victimized are not as psychically distant as many would prefer to believe, neither are the men who commit these acts of violence. In their 1980s study of sexual sadists, Park Dietz, Roy Hazelwood, and Janet Warren found compelling results on the typical profile of these violent criminals: If you were to look at the photos of the thirty sexual sadists in our study, you would be struck by two things: The first is the sheer ordinariness of these men’s appearances. You couldn’t by looking at them imagine the horrors they inflicted on their victims. Equally striking is their skin color. The vast majority of sexual sadists in our study—twenty-nine out of thirty—were whites of European descent. (Hazelwood, 2001, pp. 94–95) Hazelwood goes on to admit that since this study, he has recognized higher socioeconomic status—and thus culture, not race—seems to be the largest common denominator among these extremely violent offenders. They also found “thirteen of the group were married and fifteen were fathers” (p. 101). Another important discovery was that of the 30 sexual sadists studied, 17 had no arrest records prior to the crimes for which they were now imprisoned. Hazelwood notes: “[the fact that] some of the most heinous offenders operating in North America had no arrest history is a strong testament to their planning and intelligence” (p. 99). Nine of the 30 men were found to be what is referred to in forensic terms as “police buffs.” “They collected police paraphernalia, drove vehicles that resembled police cruisers, maintained scanners, and might even have taken courses in police work or applied to become officers” (p. 100). While these examples represent the most extreme forms of possession, all women violated go through a period of possession by the trauma and the internalization of the perpetrator. How quickly a woman is able to shake free of this possession depends on the support and safety she is able to re-establish in the world after. Not all women are afforded the opportunity for this in their lifetime. One of the most powerful dreams I ever heard that symbolizes this stage of possession was from a woman I will call Nora. Nora was raped as a teenager by a friend of her father and then again in early adulthood, not long before coming to see me. The rape happened near the end of an after-party at the nightclub where

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she worked in Hong Kong. She came to me to get control of panic attacks. In her dream: Nora is dancing. She looks down at her chest and panics: there are two penises dangling where her breasts should be. In her dream Nora’s body is not her own; where her breasts should be, symbolic of feminine essence, are penises.

Stage two: omnipotent control over the demon lover Due to the loss of agency at the time of rape, the victim attempts to re-establish agency by eroticizing the dark and violent incident beyond complete identification with the perpetrator to a position of omnipotent control over him—as if it had been what she wanted all along. This is an initial attempt of the psyche to triumph over the trauma; it is a compensatory stance, offering an illusion of control that whitewashes the unbearable pain and authentic affect. I had the following dream during this stage: I am walking down the sidewalk. I see two men talking in an alleyway a short distance away. I approach them and ask them to rape me. I instruct them on how to best secure my bonds so that I will not escape. The collective consciousness of women seems stuck mostly in these first two phases of possession and inflation. Many women desire this type of possession, as seen in the current fascination with vampire lore and the recent Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon, the latter a trilogy about a woman’s enactment of the sadomasochistic fantasies of a wealthy man. One reason these books have such a strong pull for women is that the man, Christian Grey, is portrayed as concerned not only with possession of a woman but also with her genuine sexual pleasure. Once when I was lecturing on the characteristics of the demon lover complex in relationships, I remember a female student commenting, “But that is what I want!” A collective confusion that blurs the lines between love and violation has become highly eroticized. It is during this second stage that authentic sexual feelings may begin to stir again, but they are still bound to the dark erotic. This is demonstrated in the following dream I had during this stage. I am sleeping in my dream and in my “dream within a dream,” I allow myself to be captured by a dark man. He is controlling me and pulling me up a steep incline on something that looks like a sled. He realizes that he isn’t strong enough to do it on his own and calls two other men to assist him. Immediately I am manipulated into a sexual position. There is an Asian man who keeps placing his lips against my neck, causing little electric ripples throughout my body. One man has spread my

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legs open and is touching me. I am on my stomach when one of the men enters me forcefully from behind. Another man whispers in my ear telling me how much I love this. I arch my back up into a cobra pose and he begins to play with my nipples. I continue to surrender. I am making sounds of deep release from my throat when I am suddenly overwhelmed with shame. I shouldn’t be enjoying such a domineering encounter. I wake wet between my legs. My sister is there and I try to explain to her what has happened. I tell her that for the first time I reached orgasm in my sleep. My sister leaves but now my grandmother stands at the foot of the bed refusing to leave. She expresses her strong concern about me. She says, “I have watched you sleeping and contorting into all sorts of strange positions. You looked as if you were hurting yourself, as if you were bound to something.” She demonstrates, to my horror! She tells me she believes me to be possessed by a demon. I am reluctant, ashamed to get out of bed. I ask her to leave and assure her I will clean all the bedding. (Author’s dream journal, winter, 2000) When I began to be conscious of the violent and sadistic images in my dreams, a movement towards individuation began deep within my psyche. At first, I tried to ignore the demon lover of my dreams. Yet the more I turned my back on him, the harsher and more violent the dreams became, until I was forced to face him. In this dream, an important shift begins to take place. The men are no longer purely aggressive; rather than rape and abuse, they attempt to awaken the sexuality of the dream ego. So figures that previously evoked feelings of terror, shame, and confusion begin guiding me toward reclamation of my primitive, raw, somewhat animalistic sexuality. The archetype of the demon lover represents a way of being in the world that is difficult to release. To integrate this figure back into one’s self-image would be to take ownership of one’s darker longings, those that have little to do with being good or right. For a woman whose sexual drive has been split off from her feelings through unconscious incest [or conscious abuse] . . . living out her sexuality will often bring the sexual issue to a kind of crisis out of which consciousness emerges . . . She must confront and integrate the dark side of her creativity. She must confront the whore, the sexuality of the virgin, the whore she has been rejecting in the name of the father. (Woodman, 1982, p. 169) I was being asked to see the violence and darkness that existed in me, not just in the outside world. I needed to move beyond projecting my dark impulses onto masculine figures. As long as I did not integrate the trauma of my past, I would continue to project the image of my demon lover onto the men in my life, sabotaging relationships in the name of preserving a pure and good self-image to compensate for my own shadow.

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For women, the desire to repress and project shadow aspects is in part influenced by the culturally imposed images of the ideal feminine: pure and virginal, in the patriarchal sense of the words. This drive toward repression is represented well by the grandmother in my dream, the ancestral line of women who attempt to keep me bound to the antithesis of wholeness in service of goodness.

Stage three: breaking the bonds Dream one: I am hitchhiking, trying to get home, when I am picked up by two distinguished gentlemen that kidnap me. They take me to a compound where I am to be held. I am to be the maid cleaning the enormous home. I start my duties and come to a secret door. Behind the door I witness a sadomasochistic ritual taking place. Significantly, in the dream the ritual is horrifically violent and being perpetrated against my grandmother. In a flash of horror I realize that this is to be my fate. I know there is nothing I can do to save her. I have to save myself. The sun is starting to set, and I understand that this is my only chance to escape. I take nothing with me and begin to run. I find little things along the path that support me in getting away—a sweater, a PowerBar, and some water. Dream two: I am being kept in a dungeon. I flirt with the man who is my captor, hoping he will set me free. He looks at me and says, “You have always held the keys to your own cell.” (Author’s dream journal, 2001)

The dream offers me a glimpse of the intolerable image at the core of my own psyche that is endlessly playing out. A movement begins in my psyche towards freedom and taking the necessary action to break free of the complex. In this action, I am supported, as in fairy tales—along the path, things show up that support my escape. As the complex began to lose its grip, the demon lover of my dreams would continually mess up the sadistic role—the bonds would come undone, or something in the dream would distract the men so they were not able to complete the rape. There was also resistance to this evolution; I would experience frustration and anger at the incompetence of my pathetic assailants. In the previous stages, the dream ego had been more identified with the sadistic position rather than the experience of victimization, thus avoiding the deep grief, terror, and rage. In this third stage, I was coming closer to the reality of the violation. As I did so, my psyche tried to hold onto what it knew to avoid the descent to the victim’s position. It was a paradoxical, compensatory development: while I moved into a more helpless state in dreams, I was in actuality reclaiming power in my life. There was no longer a reaching out for an external locus of power and control, often projected onto men or Institutions. In my work with other women, it is common for them to have dreams of exorcism at the stage. In dreams that characterize this stage, women begin to

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reclaim their own power and destiny as real possibilities. In my second dream the bonds of illusion were breaking with the realization, “You have always held the keys to your own cell.”

Stage four: re-experiencing the trauma The actual memory of the rape may return in dreams at this stage, as has been true for me and many others with whom I have worked. These memories break the psychic boundaries that once kept the emotions dissociated. Like a tidal wave, these emotions rush to the surface and change the landscape. This return means enough safety has been created in the analytical container, and internally enough ego strength is present that the individual is able to face the reality of what happened rather than transforming the experience into bearable (if illusory) terms. I am with a man whom I love. We are underground in the basement of a large structure. We are involved in very deep and dark lovemaking. I enter into a trance-like space. I am no longer sure of who I am with. I feel my legs taken and tied to my hands and then both taken and tied to a large headboard above my head. I am fully exposed, trying not to scream. There are two men. One touches me as I squirm and try to move. He laughs, amused with my futile attempts to escape. He holds me firmly in place and smears some kind of lubricant onto me that affords him even greater access to my sex. I push down hard on my PC muscle to resist him penetrating me. He finds this funny, hits me, and forces himself deep into me. I feel his rough hands on my breasts . . . some memory has opened up that I cannot control. It has become alive, and I am horrified. The hands are rough and relentless . . . I fight to breathe. The next man prepares to take his turn. I can’t move. I feel humiliated. I am aware of the man I love watching me. He sees me writhing, breathing deeply, struggling on the verge of screaming but fighting to hold it in and be quiet. He can’t see the men, for this is happening in another realm in another time, but happening. He watches the demons as they take hold of my being. In my deep trance I am barely aware of his eyes on me. As I come out of the fog I ask the man I love to fasten my legs as these men had done and to force himself into me. I am overtaken with this want, this deep and primal need. We are now walking up the stairs together and I find myself at a chalkboard, writing something in an ancient language. Pamela is there and the only one able to decipher my writings. She understands that I need to reenact the original rape in a ritual setting, so that my voice and soul may finally be released. I feel cracked open, wet between my legs, and penetrated to my core. (Author’s dream journal, June 2001) Much of this dream reveals the typical pattern of PTSD, reliving the trauma of the earlier rape over and over in my dreams. Yet this was different from all

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previous dreams—it felt real, not like a dream. My hands and legs are tied; no matter how I try to escape my perpetrators’ hands (first through movement and later through squeezing my PC muscle), I am forced to feel their rough touch. The rapists gain pleasure from my inability to assert my will. I believe the dream is connected to the dissociated memory of the actual rape. I am left with this sense upon waking: “Some memory has opened up that I cannot control. It has become alive, and I am horrified.” The desire to repeat the trauma is strong, as I know from my past compulsive drive to recreate abusive interactions with lovers. In the dream, after the rape, I ask the man I love to fasten my hands and feet and to force himself into me as the previous men had. I interpret this to be a state of confusion similar to the nigredo in alchemy, where I have transferred the repressed trauma from my past into my present relationships; again, the initial trauma is alive in the present moment. Also, if I can place the man I love into the role of sadist, I can maintain an illusion of purity and cast my own shadow over his vulnerabilities. In a whirlwind of projective identification, he gets my dark side and I hold his vulnerabilities. I become the sadistic one posing as the masochist or pure victim, forcing him to hold the dark that he may not want or understand; but it can take hold of him nonetheless. The relationship dynamics of traumatized women can quickly turn sadomasochistic and become focused around an unconscious struggle for power. I remember in my younger years having the omnipotent sense that I could bring out the sadist in any man. Masochistic tendencies can be seen as a screen for a deeply destructive and aggressive drive, which traumatized women learn is not safe to expose. In many cases, fighting back during the rape would have placed their lives in greater danger, so this righteous rage (the masochist’s aggression) is held outside of consciousness. The masochist needs the sadist to hold this aggressive projection in order to maintain her perception of reality. I believe that unconsciously, the masochist longs to be accepted and loved in her aggressive stance and therefore tolerates and acknowledges in her sadistic partners the very aspects in herself that she wishes to be accepted. I am reminded of the saying that we love others in the way that we most desire to be loved, as is seen in marriages where each partner buys for the other the gifts they most want for themselves. This represents a primitive narcissistic level of love: because each is not able to see the other clearly but only the projection of themselves in the other, they fall in love with their own projection, accepting in the other what they have rejected in themselves. Lacking the physical power to dominate over the male, the female masochist engages in psychological warfare. The field on which the masochist plays lies in the invisible mystical realm, as seen in this excerpt from the classic erotic novel of a female submissive, The Story of O: Daily and, so to speak, ceremoniously soiled with saliva and sperm, she felt herself literally to be the repository of impurity, the sink mentioned in the Scriptures. And yet those parts of her body most constantly offended, having become less sensitive, at the same time seemed to her to have become more

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beautiful and, as it were, ennobled: her mouth closed upon anonymous members, the tips of her breasts constantly fondled by hands, and between her quartered thighs the twin, contiguous paths wantonly ploughed. That she should have been ennobled and gained dignity through being prostituted was a source of surprise, and yet dignity was indeed the right term. She was illuminated by it, as though from within, and her bearing bespoke calm, while on her face could be detected the serenity and imperceptible smile that one surmises rather than actually sees in the eyes of hermits. (Reage, 1965, p. 44) Here we see the split between O and her transgressors. The sadists are described as impure; they attempt to infuse O with these impurities. O, through accepting them, is transformed and elevated to a mystical realm where her spirit is untouchable and she, by virtue of her purity, is able to “contain all.” An alternate interpretation regarding the masochistic tendencies of trauma victims is that they are seeking to regain their lost parts. Kalsched (1996) points out that if an aspect of self is split off into the archetypal realm during trauma, one must reenter that original state to reclaim it. From a purely clinical standpoint, this can be associated with the concept of mood-dependent memory: one must enter into a similar state of mind as when the trauma occurred, to gain access to the memory of that event, to pull it back. This is the drive behind the powerful urge of repetition compulsion; the danger is that this very drive toward wholeness often places a woman once more in harm’s way. That is why a conscious ritual can be so powerful in relationship to trauma. I do not feel that this has to be a literal reenactment (although that is possible), but rather a symbolic or metaphorical reenactment. One is then able to enter into that state of mind in contained safety with the intention of reclaiming and thus break the endless, dangerous need to repeat it unconsciously. This can be done carefully by working with traumatic dreams, as I have done successfully with many female clients. If this work is not completed, a woman is at risk of reentering abusive relationships.

A word on the demon lover, constellated and projected With a long history of attraction to men who are part objects, married, extreme puers (eternal boys), or just plain cruel, I know the allure of the seductive demon lover and the heights of eroticism they can evoke. Once she projects her demon lover onto a human man, not only will she forfeit her happiness, she will suffer greatly. She may find herself passionately drawn into a relationship that ends in a compulsive stuckness. Or she may choose a man who is married or in some way unavailable, or someone who is cruel to her. In some cases she may even choose a man who will kill her. In almost all cases, she will choose a man who will reject her true feminine nature just as she has. (Sattler, 1994, p. 23)

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I have an understanding of why many women choose to stay bound to this complex. There is a safety, a security in the prescribed boundaries of the demonlover relationship. In this land, a woman knows her place. She feels loved. She feels rapture. It is a form of death marriage or death coniunctio. This dynamic of a death marriage is beautifully depicted in the opening of the infamous novel The Story of O: Keep me rather in this cage, and feed me sparingly, if you dare. Anything that brings me closer to illness and the edge of death makes me more faithful. It is only when you make me suffer that I feel safe and secure. You should never have agreed to be a god for me if you were afraid to assume the duties of a god, and we all know they are not as tender as all that. You have already seen me cry. Now you must learn to relish my tears. (Reage, 1965) Even when a woman knows that a behavior or pattern is detrimental to her being, this knowledge does not necessitate change. When her demon draws near, a woman will involuntarily tilt her head back, exposing her most tender flesh in ecstatic surrender, desperate for penetration. What black irony—a woman believes she is running toward Light, and is unconsciously running straight into the arms of the demon lover! Mythologically it is a death marriage, a mystical union with the dark side of God. The relationship is sado-masochistic, it fascinates because it has within it the elements of violent eroticism . . . The over-spiritualized, over-intellectualized masculine turns in rage against the feminine and drinks its blood. The life force that was not able to find its proper channel into actual loving relationships is given over to feed the rage which, in turn, stabs at its feminine victim. (Woodman, 1990, p. 142) When a man appears who fits the image of her internal demon—a good hook for the projection, so to speak—the woman will swoon. She will fight with irrationality, be blinded, ignore reality, and endure great humiliation or cruelty to have her demon walk beside her. It takes a kind of unheard of courage to see the situation for what it is, to pull back the projections and bow one’s head in defeat. A woman’s search for containment, for a savior, leaves her vulnerable to attracting into her life her own internal wounded masculine in the form of a puer or a demon lover. She looks to him for containment, longing to be held, mirrored, and honored in her feminine essence. If she has reached a certain level of conscious femininity, an average man will not be capable of mirroring her; instead, his destructive tendencies may be awakened by unconscious envy of what she has found, what he fears he is exiled from. We live in a collective generation of men who have not been initiated into the feminine mysteries, motherless men, split men. Men who devour while believing they are loving, destroy while believing

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they are building, kill while believing they are protecting, and betray while believing they are loving. A demon lover will not come flashing a warning sign. In actuality, he often appears as the answer to a woman’s prayers—as the man she has been waiting for. Satan is too clever to clothe himself in that disguise. Handsome, intelligent, in love with beauty and truth, he comes in radiant light. He charms with music, poetry, gracious manners and sparkling wit. He charms but has no feeling. Once he has conquered, lured a victim into stony perfection or death, he carelessly moves on. (Woodman, 1990, p. 101) Not until after he has seduced his victim into a swoon of desperation, longing, and chaos will a man possessed by the demon archetype start to pull back—start withholding the precious life-affirming gestures, words, and gifts on which the woman has grown dependent. At this point, the dark side of his nature may come out in full force, and the woman may be in danger of physical abuse, extreme emotional abuse, or sexual cruelty. Of course, not all men are demons, but many are demon lovers. Their sheer unconsciousness makes them so hungry, so full of grief, so fearful of their vulnerabilities, so intolerant of their dependencies that they suck the marrow out of the feminine soul. Hungry for the mother, matter, for the breast, they remain simultaneously resentful of these basic needs. A woman in the grips of a demon lover complex and living out the dynamic projected onto an external man is a woman possessed with an addictive fervor. Leonard (1987) suggests that the only way to exorcise oneself of the demonic possession is to drive a stake through the heart of the complex. Julia McAfee (1992) points out the tendency in Jungian circles to accentuate the positive aspects of the shadow, such as reclaiming repressed sexuality and instinctual drives. However, she warns that at the heart of the shadow—the archetypal core—lies evil, and real evil can never be realized or integrated. I have found it most valuable to keep the dialogue open between myself and the internal image of the demon lover. I fear that the solution of driving a stake through the heart of the demon is equivalent to splitting and is based on a paranoid fear, but I may be naïve. In one early active imagination, I tried to stab him through the heart and could not do so. He shared with me that his purpose has been to protect me, and that I have mistaken that protection for danger. The real danger, he suggested, has been in some of my external relationships. He said that throughout time, many women have devoted their lives to a religious order or a life of conscious celibacy, and he suggested I was such a woman. As he was saying these words, something opened inside me, and I experienced a river of visceral waves washing through me. I had never considered conscious celibacy as a life choice. I had been celibate for a few years after a failed relationship, but that was not a conscious choice; I simply had not met anyone who interested me, and I was deeply involved in my personal analysis and studies. This active imagination reminded me of the crucial importance of inner work in transforming this complex.

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When I opened myself up again to the possibility of a romantic relationship, both men I dated turned out to be charismatic, wounded demon lovers. I recognized much of what was going on; I saw and still could not break free once I engaged. I immersed myself in the experience and the research simultaneously until I could no longer maintain an outer connection with such destructive relational patterns. After ending these encounters, I entered a period of conscious celibacy. Few go deeper than genuine celibates . . . [T]hey too must reckon with their inner voices, their inner daimons. The issue here presents itself in the form of the risks of living toward Self without a mate to help mediate the ventures. The danger looms of locking oneself up in rule and regulation and staying there only because no better alternative offers itself. Then the religious vow lives only in superego interdictions and not as the calling of the soul in love with [the divine]. (Ulanov & Ulanov, 1994, p. 98) I think of all the time and energy I have put into relationships, often at the cost of my inner world. Celibacy may be the ultimate act of self-protection and devotion to the inner world. I considered performing a ritual ceremony and taking vows—first, one year at a time—but I resisted, mostly because I had not yet defined for myself what I meant by celibacy. I considered that it meant I would never again be sexual in the way I had been up to this point in my life. In personal communication to me, Woodman (2004) points out that no woman can authentically join with a man until she has experienced sexual union with another woman in the physical or symbolic realm of dreams. Perhaps a period of conscious celibacy is also a prerequisite; one may need to say “no” to many things, many times, before being fully able to say “yes.” As I consciously contemplated celibacy as a life choice, potential relationships miraculously surfaced. It seemed my resolve was being tested immediately and with extremely enticing offers—to all appearances, the type of relationships and men I had been waiting for. But the powerful seeds of celibacy were already planted, combined with a distrust of past relationship choices, so I moved very slowly and with great caution. Ultimately, I chose not to engage in sex or relationships with these individuals. I have deep gratitude for this decision, as in retrospect, after the seductive energy lifted and I could see straight, it became clear to me what I had previously been blind to. I find the possibility of a celibate life incredibly empowering. Like many women, I have often defined myself and my worth in connection with intimate relationships, and it is a tremendous feeling of power to think that I need not continue to do so. It is a way of reclaiming my sexuality, my body, for myself first and foremost. I have been disturbed by those subtle actions and words of men that betray an assumption that if they desire a woman and the attraction is mutual, she should open herself to that sexual experience; if she does not, the man is very quick to assume she has a problem.

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I believe this kind of thinking (that because sexual energy is present, it is one’s duty to serve it) is built around the unconscious fantasy that the body of woman belongs to man. It is possible that to break the extreme grips of patriarchal attachments, many generations of women will choose a life—or a certain period within their lives—of celibacy to consciously break these patterns. I know that I would never give up a sexual life; however, my truth up to that point was that my most beautiful and intense sexual experiences had more often been alone or with another woman. Another paradox I found was that I had never felt more sensual than during this period of celibacy. It was as if my body felt free to trust me with releasing a more powerful sexuality. Ulanov and Ulanov (1994) point out that celibacy opens up a space for the divine spirit to come through as the beloved. The other who partners them, the one to whom they reach for immediate contact, is the ineffable spirit. The celibate gives up only the concrete fleshand-blood form in which the spirit is glimpsed by others, leaving open and empty the space the beloved occupies for the lover. The space is open and empty for the spirit to come right in. Celibates consciously, willingly suffer the loneliness that afflicts all of us at some time . . . Theirs must be a steady alertness, like the wise virgins ready with their oil for the bridegroom’s arrival. Celibates seek then to be attuned to every hint of the Self’s desire. (p. 99) Towards the end of the dream in which I was bound to the bed, the ancient wisdom in the writings on the chalkboard revealed that it remained my task to give voice to the original trauma. The silence needed to be broken. I woke from this dream with an undeniable feeling of calling, the sense that I was called upon to write a memoir of rape and the subsequent journey of reclamation of my sexuality. When this thought came to me, my entire body vibrated violently with shivers and the fear of embarking on such a journey. I had to calm myself and remember that if this were to be, I would be ready when the time came. I acknowledged that I was not ready then: “struggling on the verge of screaming but fighting to hold it in and be quiet.” As I came out of the fog at the end of the dream, it was suggested that the boon I would eventually bring into the upper world from my time below would be connected to writing. After I ascended the stairs with my lover, I was able to write on the chalkboard what I had learned about my psyche through the experience of rape, to make conscious what once lay still and motionless in the unconscious. This writing may be what is necessary to release the primal scream, the scream repressed in the dream. Pamela, the one who is able to decipher my writing, is an instructor of sacred sexuality (tantra), a sex educator, acupuncturist, and lesbian. I had been having individual sessions with her and sitting in women’s sacred sexuality circles with her for many years at the time of the dream. My work with Pamela, who in the dream deciphered my writing, was really the first contained space where I felt free to explore the center of my sexual wounds

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and awaken to the natural rhythms of my body, just as I was—no show, no posing, the real, raw, rageful, and tearful places. I began to recognize a certain comfort with the pain of my sexuality; it was much harder to allow the pleasure, joy, and ecstasy in, possibly because it forced me to face what I had lost, to face just how perverse the pervasive patriarchal version of sex really is—how what is seen in movies, psychology texts, and literature does not come close to expressing the real sensual rhythms of the female body. At times, I reached levels of ecstasy where the pain and rage would turn abruptly into rushes of true sexuality, or I would find myself in the middle of a session releasing from my throat, and the next moment I would be laughing hysterically, feeling a little crazy. Insanity has long been associated with the deep feminine. Yet what looks like insanity from the outside (and may feel like it on the inside at first) in actuality is a reclaiming of women’s mysteries. It feels crazy mostly because it is foreign to the ruling order. Patriarchy fears this dark wisdom and refuses to let the voices at the edge speak without labeling them insane, hysterical, or unstable. But if one stays at the edge of the abyss long enough, the confusion and chaos will transform into a brilliant star (Woodman, personal communication, October 2004). Today, I would better characterize those moments as some of the most “real” I have ever experienced. The rest has been madness.

The later stages Stage five: reclaiming the victim—the movement from fantasy to reality The following dream was brought to me by a woman I worked with in my private practice whom I will call Collette. She entered analysis with a high degree of awareness. She was in an abusive relationship and not able to leave. Collette’s first sexual experience, like mine, was a rape. I use her dream here because it is such a strong example of this stage of reclaiming the victim as she resurfaces from the underworld: Collette is sleeping in the bed of her current lover (in the abusive relationship she has been trying to get out of for many years). The bed is mud rather than a mattress. All of a sudden, she feels something stir beneath her. There is a woman encased in the muddy earth below her. In horror, Collette scrapes the mud off of her. The woman is dead. Just as Collette is struggling to get out of the bed, the figure takes in a breath of the wet earth. Collette is in awe that this creature is alive, and she has the thought that it would be better for her to die than to live at this point . . . the pain would be too unbearable for her to live now. One of the best books I have come across on the subject of trauma is Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery (1992). Herman is a professor of clinical psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School and the Director of Training at the Victims of

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Violence Program, at the Cambridge Health Alliance. She starts off her exploration with the powerful statement that the field of trauma, just like those traumatized, periodically disappears into the vast chasm of oblivion, becoming something of an anathema that must be resurrected from its slumber and the gross misunderstandings surrounding it. Herman argues that in relation to trauma, it is impossible for the bystander (researcher, citizen, psychologist) not to take a side; further, whether one is conscious of it or not, the silence that surrounds the field of trauma and the paucity of literature (compared to the immensity of the issues) shows that Western culture has made the decision to stand on the side of the perpetrator rather than of the victim. In Herman’s words: It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement and remembering . . . In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator’s first lines of defense. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure that no one listens. (p. 8) This passage raises the important question of societal and personal responsibility for adequately embracing the archetypal pattern of the victim. There is such a universal fear of victims and their plight that the negative connotations surrounding the word have become commonplace catchphrases such as: don’t fall into “victim mode,” or so and so is always “playing the victim” or is possessed with a “victim mentality.” These derogatory phases and the implied condemnation are thrown around with little thought or reflection. Most people do not look deeper or ask why. Why would one act in such a way? Is it not possible someone is acting like a victim because they have been victimized? What I have observed is that victims will continue to tell their story—if not in the verbal realm then concretized in physical or psychological symptoms—until they are heard. Individuals suffering from PTSD will feel as if they are continually being traumatized and will transfer the original traumatic situation out onto the world around them, leaving them feeling perpetually victimized. Also, due to the complex psychic drive to repeat the trauma, they very often are still being victimized. Victims require us to look at the intolerable image, to hear the unspeakable tale. They also require that we remain open to our own vulnerability and the existential truth that it is entirely possible to find oneself in the position of victim. It is perhaps less frightening to continue to perpetuate the myth that bad things only happen to bad people, or a certain class of people, or members of a certain gender. Herman takes the reader through what she calls the forgotten history of trauma research and the political climate from which it arose. For two decades in the late

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19th century, there was a great deal of study into the condition of hysteria—a medical syndrome that the doctors of the time felt was caused by the womb wandering to various other places in the body. Women diagnosed as hysteric were often associated with their earlier ancestors, who had been killed during the inquisition as witches. As Herman points out, more than one scientist of the time is reported as saying that among the patients locked away were many who would have burned in earlier times. This fact may be considered evidence for the intergenerational transmission of trauma—what one generation is not able to work through or contain is passed down to the next. The Austrian physician Joseph Breuer pioneered studies on hysteria. The story of Breuer’s patient Bertha Pappenheim (Anna O), perhaps better than any other, alludes to what really lay hidden under the symptoms of hysteria. After being treated and abandoned by Breuer (he left her after two years of intensive treatment; she was in a cold sweat, completely disorganized and had to be hospitalized), she remained ill for several years. When she recovered, she: found her voice, and her sanity, in the women’s liberation movement . . . [She] became a prominent feminist social worker, intellectual, and organizer. In the course of a long and fruitful career she directed orphanages for girls, founded a feminist organization for Jewish women, and traveled throughout Europe and the Middle East to campaign against the sexual exploitation of women and children. (Herman, 1992, p. 19) At her death, the philosopher Martin Buber commemorated her: “I not only admired her but loved her, and will love her until the day I die. There are people of spirit and there are people of passion, both less common than one might think. Rarer still are the people of spirit and passion. But rarest of all is a passionate spirit. Bertha Pappenheim was a woman with just such a spirit. Pass on her memory. Be witness that it still exists.” In her will she expressed the wish that those who visited her grave would leave a small stone, “as a quiet promise . . . to serve the mission of women’s duties and women’s joy . . . unflinchingly and courageously.” (pp. 19–20) In regard to the present epidemic of rape, Herman explores how this extreme violence can be seen as a political tool to instill fear in and maintain power over women: Feminists also redefined rape as a method of political control, enforcing the subordination of women through terror. The author Susan Brownmiller, whose landmark treatise on rape established the subject as a matter for public debate, called attention to rape as a means of maintaining male power: “Man’s

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discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe. From prehistoric times to present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.” (Herman, 1992, p. 30) In showing how the symptoms of rape victims match the cluster of symptoms often experienced by veterans of war experience, Herman writes: Only after 1980, when efforts of combat veterans had legitimated the concept of post-traumatic-stress disorder, did it become clear that the psychological syndrome seen in survivors of rape, domestic battery, and incest was essentially the same as the syndrome seen in survivors of war. The implications of this insight are as horrifying in the present as they were a century ago: the subordinate condition of women is maintained and enforced by the hidden violence of men. There is war between the sexes. Rape victims, battered women, and sexually abused children are its casualties. Hysteria is the combat neurosis of the sex war. (p. 32) Some depth psychologists feel the combat neurosis of this age is anorexia and other eating disorders. Living in a rape culture remains at the center of these clinical disorders. This is how the story goes. First there is violence against women, then there is a natural reaction to the violence through symptoms, and then those symptoms are judged and categorized as a disorder—hysteria in these early cases. As long as women remain identified with the symptom rather than the victim, they continue to carry the disavowed and projected violence and vulnerabilities of men; the disorder itself becomes the blaming of the victim for the crimes of others. Women internalize this system; they believe the lie, believe they are ill. This internalized position of submission makes it hard to pull the traumatized (victim) aspects of the psyche back, as the rejection and judgment have also been internalized. As the dissociated emotions start to surface in these stages of reclamation, they are also used as powerful tools of reversal and victim blaming. Rage is a natural response to abuse but a very delayed one, as we know from trauma literature that the earlier responses are to go numb and to dissociate. When this powerful, unprocessed emotion begins to rise from the once frozen psychic landscape, it can be explosive. Rage is hard to hold and bring into consciousness so that it can turn into the more directed and motivating anger. For many women, it is rare to hear their own voice, “because their fear and blocked rage keep the voice in the throat, unrelated to the real energy of their imagination” (Woodman, 1985, p. 64). When

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someone has been raped or violated, should there not always be a place left in the heart of their soul that feels hatred and rage for the innocence lost, for the years lost, for the heartbreak? In my opinion, it is this rage that protects one from further violation; it is necessary and appropriate. It also allows one to see these violating energies playing out in the foreground of the still very patriarchal world we inhabit, making voice and action against that world possible. This is why one of the most oppressive things that can be said to someone who has been the victim of violence is, “Don’t be angry.” Anger is what is most needed to move out of identification with the victim stance into holding of the victim in a place of personal and protective power. I dream that I kill the assailant that attempts to rape me. I stick a large knife into his body . . . the knife bends, and I fear that it may not kill him and he will continue his attack. I will it deep into his chest. He looks at me in shock. (Author’s dream journal, 2002) It often takes many years of analytical work to uncover the anger. I understand that anger is hard and creates complex reactions. However, I hope that as a society, we come to a place where judgment is placed on the criminal behavior and the oppressive tactics of reversal rather than on the natural anger at being violated. Red flames of rage can emanate from the first and second chakras when victims realize what has been done to them. The release of this rage is necessary, for only then can its repressed power be transformed into creativity. Patriarchy fears this potential for power and tries to suppress it. “Nice people don’t get angry!” (Woodman & Dickson, 1996, p. 74) Anger is not revenge. Anger is not a violent act. It is a feeling and a powerful motivating life force! The anger is a strong container for becoming and is not meant in anyway as a destructive arrow but as carrier of new life, the possibility of a new level of Eros. I found in my own life the truth that as anger was repossessed, joy was allowed back in more fully. A woman may need to find a larger container or archetypal figure capable of holding the rage. Dark-feminine archetypes such as Demeter, Lilith, or Kali can be incredibly supportive in active imagination for this type of containment and acceptance. It is Demeter’s refusal to give up her rage and grief that brings Persephone back from the underworld. The dark goddess Kali embodies rageful wisdom—Kali dances ecstatically on the skulls that she has crushed. Kali is not a punishing and demanding god but a goddess in touch with the prima lava of the soul, creating and destroying simultaneously. “Those who can accept her cycle—life and death—are no longer vulnerable. They are fearless” (Woodman & Dickson, 1996, p. 16). Before this fearlessness is born, a woman must grieve and rage for what has been lost. Reclaiming one’s own perception and no longer seeing the violence through

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the filter of the perpetrator or society marks the widest crossroads. Later in analysis, Collette had the following dream, which marked the reclamation of her body, her life. Collette dreams of being in bed involved in dark lovemaking. Sadomasochistic activity takes place all around her. She gets out of the bed and takes some seeds with her. She enters a different landscape where there is nothing but a plot of beige earth. The land has been tilled. She plans to plant the seeds in this land. Taking responsibility for her life and honoring what she has been through, Collette is now transferring the seeds that she ingested in the underworld and bringing them to the ground, matter, body of her being. The intrapsychic movement is from the bed of the death marriage, where nothing grows, nothing stirs, to the earth of her body—the grief-stricken plane of Demeter. The earth has been tilled by her analytical work and watered with her conscious grieving. Here she plants the seeds for the rest of her life and waits to see what grows.

Stage six: honoring the demon lover In honor of the inner work with the demon lover, I painted an image of him. A spontaneous ritual began as I finished the painting. I placed the image on my mantle. I created an altar around him, set candles and incense for him, made offerings of roses and rice to him, and I entered a deep active imagination with him. I could neither anticipate nor explain the degree of emotion that coursed through me as I moved my body and spoke to him. Never before had I literally been brought to my knees in longing and truth. My voice cracked at many points: when I shared my sense of existing solely for him, of being utterly possessed by him; when I said, “I don’t know how to live without you. I don’t know if I want to.” These last words were uttered in the absolute silence of full bodily expression. I held myself. I wept inconsolably. I ran my hands over my body with a love I had never known. Slowly I became aroused, then taken, by a wave of frenzied desire and brought myself to a fierce orgasm. It was the first time I had ever done so in such an intimate manner, with my own hands, my own fingers, my own love. It was the first time I ejaculated. I experienced what in tantra is considered the release of the most revered healing fluid of all—the amrita—which flew out of me, soaking the floor beneath me, the altar in front of me, the flesh between my legs. It is estimated that 33% of women are nonorgasmic, and of the ones who do know the joys of orgasmic release, few know the wonders of full body orgasm and ejaculation. Many women spend years seeking out “professional” advice and clinical treatment to increase libido and/or reach orgasm. In her book Mother– Daughter Wisdom (2005), Christiane Northrup summarizes anthropologist Margaret Mead’s observations about female sexuality in Pacific Islander ethnic groups, particularly what is collectively necessary for a woman to have the potential for sexual fulfillment. Mead concluded that for women to view their sexuality

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positively, they must live in a culture that recognizes and honors female desire, allows for the understanding of her sexual anatomy, and teaches the necessary skills that give women orgasms. This contained and intentional ritual held me in such a way that I could enter into areas of my body and sexuality previously untouched. During this ritual, things became clear to me: even though the demon lover is a terribly destructive complex, there are positive aspects hidden within it. The complex protects an individual from being flooded too soon with the pain of the trauma. After the ritual, the dream image of the demon lover began to shift significantly. I had a number of dreams in which I was secretly in love with my captor.

Stage seven: seeing through to the wounded masculine The following dream starts out with the same premise of earlier stages, offering myself to be violated, but then shifts to reveal the wounded young masculine that hides behind the violent persona of the demon lover. I walk up to a group of men floating in an open container in a deep lake. There are approximately eight men lying down inside the container. I remove my clothes and enter into the vessel at the center. I expect the men to use me for their own sexual gratification. Instead, there is a space—a silence—a time of no movement. I both fear and take comfort in the pause. No abuse takes place, and I begin to wonder at my purpose at the center of these men. Then a young, chubby boy approaches me. I am now wearing my favorite blue denim dress. He places his head against my breasts. I feel a strong emotional connection to the young boy. The sheer strength of his vulnerable need brings out a maternal instinct in me. We are connected, but the union is sensual rather than sexual, and extremely intimate. He then presses hard into my stomach as if he is trying to crawl inside me. He is filled with grief and longing. He wants his mommy. She may have died or never been available to him. I hold him tight. I take his face in my hands. His tears roll down my fingers. I tell him he is loved. When he leaves, an older man begins to touch me. His touch is playful, light, expert. I groan deeply with my own desire. (Author’s dream journal, July 2003) The dream displays what Hillman would call “seeing through” the complex into the eyes of the young, vulnerable, unmirrored masculine: seeing past the violent persona to the innocence buried beneath. Freud’s biographer Jones (1981) reminds us that Freud defined soul as that which is most valuable in a person, what he describes as “the fragile, insubstantial essence of the self which needs to be approached gently and with love” (p. 42). The dream suggests that this seeing through to the soul’s innocence offers an opportunity to move into a more mature sexual attunement with men. The dream ego is now able to feel the expert, gentle, and honoring touch of the more authentic masculine.

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While completing my doctoral research, I read in a local paper of a violent rape and murder; a wife and mother had been tortured, raped, and then set on fire by a 15-year-old boy. During the court proceedings, the judge referred to the boy as “unspeakably evil” (Bermingham, 2004). While I am sympathetic to the truly horrific last moments of this woman’s life as well as the unbearable loss that her husband and children were left with, I have a hard time believing a 15-year-old child is pure evil. Certainly the acts may be evil—but the child? It may be harder to afford this same seeing through to repeat adult offenders of horrific crimes, but they were all once children. In the news article, as a side note, there is mention that this same “unspeakably evil” boy’s mother had died from chronic alcoholism when he was ten years old. The boy had been seized by children’s authorities on three separate occasions. The first of these situations had occurred when he was just over six months old; his mother left him alone in the car while she attended a house party all night long. Clearly, the “milk” (symbolizing the nurturing essence that a child receives in an adequately contained parental relationship) this boy received was tainted, poisoned in fact, with the mother slowly dragging her dependent child into the underworld as she sank deeper into her own hell. The murderous rage of the abandoned child, mixed with the intense love and dependency that all children have towards their mothers, proved a deadly combination. How long did this boy fantasize darkly? How long was this boy forced to swallow back his own intolerable emotions? Was there anywhere in his world where he was contained? James Gilligan (1996) argues that one of the main reasons the criminal justice system sees so much recidivism is that the prison itself acts as milk, the large, containing breast for those who are unable to contain themselves. Let me explore this idea a little. Basically, Gilligan means that many criminals would rather commit a violent crime and end up back in prison than admit they are unable to succeed in life outside the thick prison walls: in the workplace, in relationships, and in the simple tasks of self-care, obtaining food and shelter. Under a harsh, violent exterior, they are ill-equipped boys suffering from a lack of milk. The persona of the tough criminal is infinitely preferable to that of the dependent young boy in search of a nipple. The prison’s familiar scent offers the assurance of a meal, a bed, and a toilet. Even the continual threat of violence may become a constant reassuring presence when compared to the great unknown beyond the prison walls—which are strong enough to contain prisoners’ extreme destructiveness and aggression, something I imagine they have not found elsewhere. Containment is a key element in life, as the prominent psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion was masterful at showing through his psychological theory stating that containment by the mother/analyst allows intolerable affect to be processed and internalized by the child/analysand. Unfortunately, very few have experienced adequate containment during their developmental years. Too few mothers/analysts are strong enough to sustain a destructive attack of hatred from their child and still contain the infant with appreciation and love. One who can is a mother who recognizes the human need to express both aggression and contentment, good and

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bad, a mother who understands the child needs something to hate as much as something to love, a mother who knows that love does not come without its opposite, a mother who can hold her child when it is screaming in an uncontrollable eruption of emotion—wailing, eyes swollen, dripping with tears, voice piercing her eardrums—a mother who can pick the screaming child up and hold her lips to its cheek, kiss its tender, red flesh with a tear in her eye, who says, “Yeah. I know sweetheart . . . I know . . . You get that out of you. I’ve got you.” A mother who can hold the smile on her lips and say, “Oh yes, is this not the center of it? Not your first and certainly not your last scream at the injustices of this world . . . And most importantly, I love you here too . . . I love you here too . . .” In this way, the child can eventually internalize an inner imago capable of containing extreme emotions rather than being overwhelmed by them and continuing to lash out angrily at the world while secretly seeking understanding and containment. Only a mother in touch with her own shadow is capable of such a strong gesture. Only a woman initiated into the mysteries of her own darkness can contain a child in such a way—without fearing that the outburst is a reflection of poor mothering, without believing the baby is trying to destroy her with a vicious, manipulative attack, without fearing that the child is abandoning her, without gathering evidence through projection that the baby does not like her, or worse, that the child is evil. In 2004, I attended a psychoanalytic conference on the topic of infant observation and infantile states of mind as they relate to the adult patient. I was deeply touched by Judy Eekhoff’s presentation of clinical material on infant observation. Eekhoff (2004) began her infant observation at the birth of the infant and stayed with the mother-infant couple for one hour a week for the first two years of the baby’s life. Once, while she was observing the mother breastfeeding, the baby became very aggressive, biting the nipple, grabbing at the sides of the breast, smashing its face and forehead into the tender, swollen flesh with an absolute display of ownership. The mother sat looking into the eyes of her baby from time to time, grimacing from the pain, before returning to the uncontrollable smile playing on her lips, the smile that understood this too was her infant’s natural instinct of trying to get her needs met. Of course, there would be a time for the child to learn appropriate boundaries and the containment of such aggression, but that time was not then. When the baby finished her attack of aggression and frustration, she fell into a deep contentment and started playing with and speaking to the breast, cooing and making sounds Eekhoff had not heard up till that time. Afterwards, the mother let the baby down to play on a blanket and said, “I love it when she serenades the breast.” Here was a mother capable of undergoing an attack from her baby without entering into a negative projection, falling into the paranoid fantasy, or acting out. She took the love and pain in stride and held her child from above with absolute appreciation. Now I don’t mean to idealize this mother-daughter couple completely. I am sure there were more challenging days—days when her own stress was too great to hold the child in such a way. Such is life. However, the holding by the mother that the infant experiences during moments of frustration and hatred becomes part

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of its growing reality. The child internalizes the understanding it is possible to be loved/held in my destructive human tendencies without them continually needing to expand and extend in attempts to be heard. Infants with a fragmented mother will often internalize the blame for her condition, believing their own aggression to be the source of her disintegration. In this way, they live forever in unconscious guilt for the death of the mother. A patriarchal world-frame breeds narcissistic mothering. I have seen many mothers attempt to regain lost power through devouring their children. It can bring up unbearable envy for mothers to see mirrored in their children the freedom, joy, and play they were denied in their own childhoods, communities, and relationships; their children receive their swallowed back rage at being disempowered in the larger world.

Stage eight: transformation of the demon lover to the beloved I am with a man, and we are very loving together. He is a teacher of mine and has offered a bonus to students who submit their work in good time. I have gone with him to meet his family on a large farm. He is financing a large revamping of the property in a community and gaming spirit so that everyone feels that they have earned and contributed to the new changes. We go for a walk. When we first begin the walk, there is another, younger boy with us who becomes upset and runs off crying when he realizes there is love between the older man and myself. The younger boy is in love with me. Neither of us follows the boy when he leaves. We end up lying together in the grass. I massage his body and release a great deal of tension. I wonder why this man wants to be with me and what I can offer him. After I finish the massage, I lie down on my stomach. I can feel his breath on my neck. He almost kisses my neck many times but then says, “I will not kiss you until you are my bride.” In a flash, I realize I have much to offer this man. As we walk back, the young boy joins us again. (Author’s dream journal, spring 2002)

This dream is a far cry from the sexual aggression and harsh qualities of the masculine in earlier dreams. The inner animus is becoming loving and gentle, attentive and intuitive. The animus figure desires the dream ego for his bride but is willing to wait for her to feel comfortable. He respects her. His respect elicits deep feelings of love and self-worth—for the first time, she feels she has something to offer him. The young, immature masculine, the boy, is replaced by a more mature masculine energy, a man who is generous and loving rather than impatient and demanding. The younger animus figure grieves over his loss of precedence in the psyche as the older, stronger male energy is activated. In the lyses of the dream, all are united. Together, we continue along the path towards wholeness. Around the same time, I dreamed I was preparing for my wedding.

Stage nine: initiation/the happy arrival When someone reaches these depths of the analytical work, you see authentic sensual and creative expression returning as well as images of initiation: vast, far-reaching

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dreams that touch the archetypal, numinous level of psychic experience. Mircea Eliade (1994) defines initiation as “the beginning of the revelation of one’s true self” (p. 225). Some initiatory dreams I have had personally and others I’ve seen in clients include cobras, powerful sexual awakening, sacred rituals, animal sacrifice, a child bathed in blood, ecstatic states evoked by the dreamscape, and being handed a sacred object to carry into one’s future. One of my most significant dreams from this stage was of giving birth and keeping the baby—caring for it; I equate this dream with the final stage in the ritual of the Eleusinian Mysteries Rites from 480 BCE to 364 CE: the Happy Arrival. At the culmination of the mysteries at Eleusis, a divine child was born; at the end of the ritual evening of the greater mysteries, a baby was brought forth in a basket. And in truth, when enough inner work has been done, something akin to a psychological birth does take place. Woodman (2000) refers to this moment as the birth of the soul child. The appearance of the soul child marked the arrival of Dionysus. Throughout this writing process I had numerous dreams of being pregnant, none brought to a desirable conclusion. I had a series of dreams of aborting the fetus, then dreams of miscarriages that left me physically aching, heaving with grief. Some dreams were of gross neglect or abandonment of the newborn (giving birth alone on a steel table and then walking away, leaving the baby to die, or remembering my child just in time to see her fall down a flight of stairs), dreams of losing the child, giving the child away, having the child in secret but leaving her for others to care for. Then I dreamed of giving birth and keeping the child, taking full responsibility for her. It all seems so deceivingly simple. It is not. It is hard to remove all the veils that cover the soul, and even once this is accomplished, it is harder still to take full responsibility for it. In conclusion, although these stages are focused on the individuation of a woman after a sexual assault, they have further ramifications and relate to the stages of individuation of the feminine consciousness in general. Many men in my classes have related the stages of breaking the demon lover complex to the individuation of their inner anima. This theory can also provide important insights for marginalized individuals and groups of all kinds, including those connected to culture, race, sexual orientation, gender identity, and religious affiliations. The stages offer a marker of where an individual, group or movement is in the evolution of coming to an understanding of and freedom from the oppressive shadow complex of the “other.” There are also environmental considerations, as this destructive shadow projection can be seen in consumerism and the “use” of the earth for corporate agendas and narcissistic strivings.

3 EMBRACING THE MYSTERY

If only the living can die, only the dying are really alive. —James Hillman It’s whether you say yes or no to the serpent, to the adventure of being alive. —Joseph Campbell

A swirling sensation hits unexpectedly in the middle of my dream. Gray turns ruby red, and in a flash I am left breathless, fighting for some unknown, forgotten, yet familiar scent. I pray for something to hold on to; the swirling is relentless; everything is dissolving. God, what is happening! Someone or something is pulling at me from underneath! I can hold my ground no longer; I fall to the floor. My eyes lock shut against the violent streaks of sound as the dreamscape dissolves. How long have I fought this swirling call from below? The dream recurs again and again. I wake gasping. Sometimes my hands are clenched above my head, waves of heat rushing over me, my heart ripped wide open with the violent pounding of internal eruptions. The intense vibration that my body becomes slowly turns red hot, flash after flash. I have no idea what to make of all this, besides considering seriously that I may be losing my grip on reality. I am sweating, shaking, and disoriented. Someone please help me. Someone please hear me. Someone please tell me what is going on! Sometimes there is a drumbeat, sometimes voices; sometimes the bed dissolves into waves, and sometimes a vortex opens along my chest and I dissolve into it. Whenever the sensations come, one thing is constant—I fight against them like a fierce lioness defending the life of her cub. Struggling to maintain my visual hold on the current dream and not be sucked under, I awake, as a warrior would on a battlefield after losing moments of precious consciousness due to pure exhaustion. My eyes snap to full attention, not knowing whether my life will end due to the momentary lapse. It feels blasphemous to even attempt to describe the terror of these moments.

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I am in the midst of a dream. The swirling sensation crashes me to my knees. I, so tired of fighting, spinning, being sucked under, am falling down, down . . . down. I must lie down. I can barely sustain consciousness. I crawl to a nearby bed and fall like a young, drugged teenager whose LSD has kicked in. There is no turning back, and a deep fear wells up from the center of my being. There is a moment of clarity, a conscious decision to give up the fight. I surrender to the dark abyss. Simultaneous with the thought of letting go there is a crashing sound that shakes me; I come to. Instantly, all my senses are exquisitely aware; I have entered another reality. I’m in an unfamiliar room. There is a presence with me. I feel it in the cells of my body. The room is electric. I am not alone; an old bag lady, a homeless woman clearly in rage, is sitting close to where I fell on the bed. She has a burnt, dark complexion with deep grooves cut into her face. Her eyes are piercing, painful to feel. As I look closer, I realize she is really very young—an adolescent girl! She wants a tape, some kind of cassette, something I am supposed to understand. I can’t remember the name of the band. I ask her if she is to be my guide. It is really the only thing I can think of, considering the extraordinary circumstances; this frightening woman/child must be my psychopomp. She replies that she is not. I then notice there is a man standing in the corner of the room, wearing the brown robes of a monk. He watches the exchange between us. I ask this man whether he is my guide. He smiles coyly and shyly tilts his head to the side in quite an adorable and unexpected gesture, then says, “Yes.” I feel something break open inside me. I go to him in tears. “I have been waiting for you. You have a message for me!” He tells me his name is Xenophon. I ask again what I need to do. I am weak with emotion. He tells me that I already know what I am to do. I tell him that I really do not. He takes my face between his two gentle hands, stares deeply into my eyes, and in the most loving voice says, “Just rest.” I try to get more information, but he repeats, “Just rest.” I try to say something; he cuts me off and repeats one last time, “Just rest.” A trembling begins from my solar plexus; I begin to weep in deep sobs. He tells me the eclipse will be at 0500 hours. I did not know there was to be one. The woman then starts chanting in a strong and foreboding voice, prophesizing at me. “You have two days left. You have been given this vision as a gift. You are given this time to get your things in order. In two days, you will die. You have two days left. This vision is a gift. You have very little time to get your things in order.” I don’t trust her words—I don’t dare. I feel on the edge of hysteria. I want her to shut up. I find myself explaining to her the work that I have yet to do before I travel on. As I speak, a calmness descends over me. I look at her, my eyes filled with wonder and compassion for this sad creature, and I ask her what she wants from me. “Is there anything I can do to help you?” “The tape,” she replies, her eyes searing into my forehead. I have the thought of sharing this experience with Andrew; the thought sends me spiraling back into this world. (Author’s dream journal, March 2001)

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I come back to my bed a bundle of vibrations, wide awake and clear. There are tears in my eyes. I had lain down in the middle of the afternoon with a debilitating stomachache. Later that evening, I go back to sleep and dream. I am in a circle. I recognize the power of group and community. We are on top of a high skyscraper, lying in individual encasements handcrafted to fit tight to the proportions of each individual’s body. The encasements expand out over the edge of the building, forming a circle. My head is reaching out into endless space as I look up into the heavens, hanging off the edge of the world. At the same time, I feel safe and contained. A sense of awe, purpose, and belonging surrounds me. Our feet are all pointed inward and we are holding hands, running energy. I feel a powerful voltage rush through the cells of my body, dissolving me into more than I am. I feel a pang of longing for community, and there is a sense that I may find this back in Vancouver. As a closing, the high priestess is preparing an oracle; we are all to place something of meaning on the center altar and then approach slowly and draw out what is to be our message from an ancient collection of ornately contoured cards. The ritual is being done to decide who will die. There is one among us who must die, must be sacrificed for the whole. I get a shiver along my spine and no longer wish to participate as my turn arrives to take from the center. I am questioned directly. I reply, “I already know that I have been chosen to die, and I refuse the call.” The priestess then locks her eyes with mine; I am stung by her power. After a pregnant silence, she says, “Do you have anything to wear to your funeral?” (Author’s dream journal, March 2001) I wake up shaking. I descend the staircase in my home to the comfort of my worn, overstuffed chair, which is yellow with the faintest outlines of burgundy flowers. I curl up. I begin to feel my body, which is good even if all I feel is the sickness that lies in the pit of my stomach. The fear is palpable; I can taste it in my mouth, smell it in the charged air. I inhale deeply. I feel out of time and space. I do not go back to sleep that evening. I was given the day that I would die: two days from the dream—Thursday. I consider canceling my entire schedule that day and not leaving the safety of my home. I wonder whether this is wise, recognizing that many deaths occur in the home. I strain my mind to feel where I will be safest. There is something ominous about the dream; my body knows there is truth to it. There is no rational way to explain the certainty of being so close to death. A shaman friend once told me there are four portals to the other side for each life. This seemed to be one. Nothing soothed me. For one of the first times in my life, I truly did not care whether I was being rational. I was at a threshold and did not know whether I had the power to change the course of this predestined oracle. I began to consider all the ways it was possible to die in two days—a car accident, a house fire, an earthquake, possibly an attack.

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I booked a session with my therapist at the first rays of light. In the daylight and familiar warmth of her office, I began to release the incredible tension held in my body and psyche. I was grateful that she took me seriously and did not attempt to interpret my concerns away. We had been working together too long; she knew my tendency for precognitive dreams. Something shifted for me in the alchemical chamber of her office. I did not die on that Thursday. I did not understand the dream until many years had passed. The vision of Xenophon never left me. In moments of confusion, sadness, or fear, I would hear the words “Just rest” and feel comforted. Originally, I was puzzled and disappointed by his words, thinking that I should have received a more profound, even life-altering message, one that would effectively change the course of my existence and give me direction, or at least assure me that I was on the right path. Reading Robert Romanyshyn’s 2002 essay on the uselessness of psychology, in his book Ways of the Heart, I came across his discussion of John Keats’ concept of negative capability, and I began to wonder: In the attitude of negative capability, Keats senses and feels the song of the bird so deeply that it impregnates him with a sense of his mortality. He listens to the beauty of its song, obeys its call and hears the whisper of death. At its deepest level, the sense of the aesthetic is about listening, and to listen is related to the word to obey. At the abyss, the poet’s aesthetic sensibility is a way of listening to the call of the world and obeying and responding to it even in the face of death. At the abyss, a word whose own etymology relates it to grief and suffering, the poet’s aesthetic sensibility makes him or her a witness who listens to the world’s depths, to those depths where what has been forgotten, marginalized or otherwise neglected, makes its appeal for his or her voice. With a voice fragile, weak, and haunted by the knowledge of death, transitory and for the moment, the poet speaks what he or she has heard. (p. 128) I had spent most of my life running from one experience to the next, rarely finding the time for a reflective pause in the forward motion, a moment of respite that might reveal the deeper levels of what is being asked of me in the moment, in this life. The message of rest was asking me to slow down, to feel the moments of my life more fully, to receive the gifts that surrounded me. Raising consciousness has as much to do with being and receiving as acting and learning. I recognized that for the remainder of my life, I might have to engage in being just to balance all the action to date. This would not be about plowing forward to the next goal but slowing down enough so that I could receive what had already passed and assimilate it—with the hope of one day being able to receive fully in the moment. I was being invited into a deeper communion with nature. I had to trust, as in the vision, that I could surrender to the black abyss; I had to die in relation to my current perspective and find a truer place in the complex matrix of things. The nature of my being and the nature of the world around me were calling out for my

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attention, but I had to learn to rest in the reverie of negative capability to receive the voices and to find the strength to bring them forward. No-thing was being asked of me! All I had to do was question whose voice kept me moving so fast that I hardly had time to know myself. Such forward momentum is presently at a crisis peak in society. It is harder and harder to unplug from emails, texts, and social media and hear the call beneath the surface. I slowly learned to wait in reverie for that which I did not yet know; tracking my dreams over the last three decades has led me to understand that often the fuller gestalt of dreams will only be possible to see years after the original dreams. They require a backward glance. About a year after the original dream, in an active imagination with Xenophon, I did not hear his voice directly, nor did I once again travel between the veil of the worlds. My intention for the active imagination was to strengthen the connection, the bridge that exists between me and Xenophon in whispers at the edge of my consciousness, I received the clear message that the time of silence between us would soon come to an end, but not until I fully integrated the message of rest, which I was still fighting. I was also told that I must begin to trust more deeply that I am worthy of my life. My work was to become a priority. I needed to stop my endless pursuit of others’ love by running around performing “good deeds.” In the words of the Bhagavad Gita, “Goodness is the final obstacle to God.” These messages encouraged me to be clearer about setting the boundaries I needed in my life, to leave more time available to enter into states of reflection and writing, feeling less burdened by obligations to others built on fears and insecurities. My prime obligation was to develop a deeper devotion to the inner world. Without firmly establishing this relationship to my soul and destiny, I would only continue to make poor choices. When I was not acting in accord with the messages I received through the ritual of active imagination, I fell into a melancholic or lost state. Indeed, this is the last step of active imagination: acting in accordance with the messages received. In Marie Louis Von Franz’s article on active imagination (1980), she discusses the case of a man who fell into a deep neurotic state before realizing that it was caused by his broken promise to an anima figure during active imagination. In this same article, Von Franz mentions that Jung referred to the process of active imagination as a “voluntary psychosis.” To enter into the imaginal, one must loosen the threads of middle-world consensus reality. Years later, I found myself in the midst of a tribal circle, entering into a weeklong death ceremony. At my first opportunity to speak, I found myself expressing from my heart rather than going through a prepared speech or an old narrative. As I spoke, the connections became clear. I had a memory of the first shamanic circle in which I had ever sat, being consumed by unexpected emotion after speaking my truth that I wanted to be kissed by a man before I died. Of course men had kissed me, but my grief lay in the fact that I had never really allowed myself to receive the kiss. I had never fully been kissed; I was always somewhere else when it happened. The words of the poet e. e. cummings (1954; 2013) came to my mind; I actually heard the words spoken as my eyes watered with the welling of emotion and a lifetime of longing.

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since feeling is first who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you (Cummings, 1954, p. 35) I realized in that moment that my longing extended far beyond an actual kiss from any man; my desire was to open and be kissed by life, to be cracked wide open and flooded. I wanted to be fully kissed by all that life had to offer, its sufferings, its sunsets, its sublime beauty, its murderous rage, its violent passions, its solitary nights, its dim shadows and bright gardens. I wanted to open my heart to fuller presence. Someone once said that all mysteries are really a movement from fear to joy, from a lifetime of saying no to finally saying yes. I knew fear, and now I longed for joy, abandonment, and rapture. Instantaneous synchronicities continued to take place in my imagination as I spoke. I felt as if the words were flying directly out of my unconscious. It was exhilarating and disorienting. I heard the call of ancient voices. I remembered the oracle in the dream telling me that it was my turn to die. “Do you have anything to wear to your funeral?” The mythologem of death/rebirth is nearly impossible to grasp intellectually or rationally. One must experience it. It is the quintessential direct religious experience. The experience erupts from within, and then one must decide whether one will surrender or resist. Nearly everyone resists. The all-night ceremony took place on a Thursday evening, the day I was apparently predestined to die. As it turned out, I was ready. In fact, I had spent the last few years of my life preparing for this moment, when I would move once again beyond the veil of this world. I was ready to surrender. We live in order to die. Life and death are contained within each other, complete each other, and are understandable only in terms of each other. Life takes on new value through death, and the pursuit of death is the kind of life philosophers have often recommended. If only the living can die, only the dying are really alive. (Hillman, 1964, p. 59) Ancient cultural rituals of initiation often revolved around the central theme of death. Shamans, at some point in life, were confronted with an actual disease or spiritual crisis that threatened their lives. If the prospective shaman survived the crisis—was able to heal himself or herself—he or she became a medicine man or medicine woman within the community. The death experience and the blessings forthcoming to those initiated are clearly seen in some of the beatitudes dedicated to initiates of the Eleusinian Mysteries. According to Kerenyi’s (1967) research: Sophokles puts the beatitude into the mouth of one of his characters probably in the tragedy Triptolemos: “Thrice blessed are those among men who, after

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beholding these rites, go down to Hades. Only for them is there life; all the rest will suffer an evil lot.” Pindar is the only poet who tells us something of the content besides the beautiful beatitudes: “Blessed is he who, after beholding this, enters upon the way beneath the earth: he knows the end of life and its beginning given by Zeus!” Participation in the Mysteries offered a guarantee of life without fear of death, of confidence in the face of death. That is why the poets looked upon the initiates as so superior to other mortals. (Kerenyi, 1967, pp. 14–15) Cicero, in his treatise On the Laws, attaches the greatest importance to the radiance Eleusis cast on all life. “We have been given a reason,” he writes, “not only to live in joy but also to die with better hope” (Kerenyi, 1967, p. 15). From the time of the preparatory dreams up to the time of the ceremony itself, it was clear that something within me was shifting radically. Mythically, I was dying, although I did not at the time know what I was dying to. With the benefit of hindsight, it is easier to see that I was dying to the myth I had been living all my life—devotion to the father, to patriarchy. My unconscious psychic alliance to the Judeo-Christian myth was ending. Although I was not actually moving from one religious system to another, there was a feeling of conversion. I was shifting from an internal, dogmatic, patriarchal, and religious order into the ever-expansive world of the archetypal. The Demeter-Persephone myth I was engaged with—the mother-daughter mysteries—was the antidote to the fatherson mysteries. I had been unconscious of my devotion to the Judeo-Christian myth. I inherited it from the collective, from my family. I was a father’s daughter in every sense of the term, even though my father had been absent from the beginning. My father left us when I was three years old. When my mother was eight months pregnant with my younger sister, she went out to a matinee with her sister, seeking distraction. My father was supposed to be out of town on a business trip but when she sat herself down in the movie theatre, she spotted him only a few rows ahead with another woman. Without confrontation, she stumbled from the theatre and somehow made her way home. When my father returned a few days later it was to find his possessions strewn across the front drive. Although I had little contact with my father throughout my childhood, I idealized him fiercely and wanted to live in a world just like his. Of course, this dynamic was not exclusive to my relationship with my father but transferred in some ways to all men, especially those in positions of authority. I would find the most basic and mundane in men deeply attractive, mysterious, and brilliant and give away all my gold. I had not found my more authentic voice, and this, compounded with the presence of a male authority figure, rendered me virtually speechless. Ironically, people found me very outspoken, rebellious, and strong. What they remained unaware of was that I was good at quickly discerning the

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situation and confidently voicing a degree of confrontation that would be tolerated, even appreciated. I always remained cute and apologetic, never actually pushing anything beyond the invisible boundary of comfort, never threatening the ultimate authority of the father. I had dreams of chanting in an ecstatic state; then my father would arrive, and I could not hold the chant in his presence. In another dream, I was in a sacred sexual ritual when my father entered the space, and all the energy that had been building was dispersed. In this last dream, I looked up and saw that the moon had tears in her eyes. Over time, I began to question male authority figures. I did not formally practice religion but came from a fairly religious family. I started to question some of the main premises of the Christian religion, such as forgiveness, blasphemy, and the repression of rage—all essential components for upholding the “good girl” persona. For example, why did the burden of forgiveness fall to the one who had been wronged? It seemed a convenient system for maintaining the status quo—keeping women and other victims silent and forgiving. I also thought forgiveness needed to be differentiated from understanding, empathy, and compassion. I have already discussed the dangers in repressing the natural reaction of rage when one has been violated. It was this very rage, burning through my system like hellfire, that forced me from docility. Facing my rage was and continues to be one of the most challenging aspects of my healing process, and visits from my father could spike it, as could birthday packages containing things like the book Dancing with Anger. I would dream of my dark sister in the other room, who sat drumming. I tried to sneak past her, and she screamed, “Why do you continue to allow him into our home?” I was like the fairy tale character The Handless Maiden, who kept reaching out to her father, only to come away more injured than before. At the same time, I was aware that my father was a good man. Over the years, he was able to express remorse over his lack of protection when I had reached out to him as a young girl, as well as grief at our lost years. He made genuine attempts to get to know who I was. That he was able to do this helped me hold strong to my own experience and boundaries. Over time, we both changed and evolved, individually and in our relationship. Nonetheless, it was his world that I had been leaving for some time and his shadow that continued to have a destructive impact on me. In Uncursing the Dark: Treasures from the Underworld, author and Jungian Analyst Betty De Shong Meador succinctly summarizes this complex process: This transition from the acceptable adaptation she has made in a masculinedefined culture to the recognition of the fullness of herself in relation to the archetypal feminine is a transition of enormous proportions. She is switching religions. She is betraying the fathers. She is aligning herself with the outcasts. She is returning to an affirmation of the dark. No easy task, this transition may take years or a lifetime. There is no doubt, however, that many women are confronted by the powerful unconscious images pulling them in this direction. (1992, p. 128)

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I wrote the following poem to honor my transition: Ode to a King You can’t know what you ask of me Ah there’s the pain You can’t know what you took from me While I was sleeping Ah there’s the name Your righteousness anchors me to your shadow The one full of blood That deals the death-blow in still air A pained throat sliced with broken mirrors The ones you might have seen me with If you could have stepped out of your own kingdom The sacrifice of the unborn I lay at your feet No more My illusive devotion lost at the dancing well And that crown I stumbled to place on your head The one that broke my foot and took all my words Still I began a fierce dance The dry well caught my tears The real ones Now out of your reach I breathe beyond your touch And dare to live a life of my own As I moved further away from my father’s world, I began to uncover my own voice and more authentic sexuality. Images from my dreams continued to propel me forward into new territory. Awakening the serpent I have some friends over at my home. A woman screams as she spots a large, black cobra in my living room. There is a contradiction of activity as many try to rush the front door while others remain frozen to the spot. I had been on my way upstairs when the cobra was found. There was something important that I needed to do; however, now I must pass the path of the cobra if I am to reach the stairs. For a moment, I think I will join in the rush for the front door, but I calm myself down and, keeping my eyes on the cobra, I move towards the stairs, taking a seat on the three legged stool that rests against the wall at the foot of the stairs. As soon as I sit down and relax my back against the wall, the snake senses me and begins to slither across the floor towards me. I remain stiff, barely breathing. The snake grows in size as it moves. It is huge! It reaches my feet and begins to slide up me. I can feel the wet of its

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dark skin on mine, its muscles contracting as it gathers itself to move further up my body. It is all the way up my legs, starting to pass over my pelvis towards my chest. I am in an altered state, a mix of fear and fascination that this is happening, so it takes me a moment to realize what I am seeing as I glance down to my chest. My body has become the body of the snake! Where the snake has passed over me, I have been devoured, completely encompassed. Where my legs once were is only the smooth, soft, deadly body of the cobra. I watch my waist become a solid column of black, glistening scales. The cobra continues over my chest. I can see into its eyes. Its tongue is whispering in and out with deadly precision, making sssssszzzzzz sssssszzzzzzz ssssssszzzzzzzzz sounds. The tongue is nearly brushing my own lips. I can feel the vibration of its movement. I have the thought that if the tongue touches me, I will be poisoned. I will die. In my panic, I gather all my strength. I attempt to grab the neck of the snake and rip it from me. It is my only chance. I grab the neck in one swift move with my free hand. I awaken, striking out into the dark, empty space in front of me . . . my heart about to explode. (Author’s dream journal, winter 1999) In applying the Jungian dream technique of amplification to the mythic or collective level, I found some interesting information. When Western European people think of snakes, their associations are often tainted with the politicized biblical view: sexuality and sin. In Merlin Stone’s groundbreaking book, When God Was a Woman, Stone argues that the story of Adam and Eve was designed with the intent to transform the snake—the most central and sacred symbol in the worship of goddesses and a tradition of worship that had been going on for thousands of years—into a demonized symbol of evil to be feared. It seems that in some lands all existence began with a serpent. Despite the insistent, perhaps hopeful, assumption that the serpent must have been regarded as a phallic symbol, it appears to have been primarily revered as a female in the Near and Middle East and generally linked to wisdom and prophetic counsel rather than fertility and growth as is so often suggested. (1976, p.199) Stone suggests the Serpent Goddess worshiped in Crete and at Delphi (before the oracle was usurped by Apollo) gained its origins in the sacred worship of the Cobra Goddess of Egypt. On the island of Crete the snake appears in the worship of the female deity more repeatedly than anywhere else in the Mediterranean area. All over the island, artifacts have been unearthed that portray the Goddess or Her priestesses holding snakes in their hands or with them coiled about their bodies, revealing that they were an integral part of the religious rituals . . . The abundant evidence of the sacred nature of the serpent, along with the Goddess, has in fact appeared to such an extent on Crete that many archaeologists refer to the female deity there as the Serpent Goddess. Evans, offering supportive evidence, asserted that the Lady of the

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Serpents on Crete was originally derived from the worship of the Cobra Goddess of the predynastic people of Egypt. The use of the cobra in the religion of the Goddess in Egypt was so ancient that the sign preceding the name of any Goddess was the cobra (i.e., a picture of a cobra was the hieroglyphic sign for the word Goddess). In predynastic Egypt the female deity of Lower Egypt (north) was the Cobra Goddess known as Ua Zit. Not a great deal is known about this most ancient Cobra Goddess, but we later see Her as the uraeus cobra worn upon the foreheads of other deities and Egyptian royalty. The cobra was known as the Eye, uzait, a symbol of mystic insight and wisdom. (p. 201) The connection between Demeter and the snake is clearly shown in a ritual that was performed in her honor, the Thesmophoria. According to Burkert (1985), the Thesmophoria was the most widespread Greek festival as well as the most important ritual dedicated to Demeter. The ritual was exclusive to women, and one of its most distinctive features was the sacrifice of baby pigs. The piglets were fed to snakes that inhabited underground chambers, as an offering to the goddess. Burkert writes: The women thus entered into contact with the subterranean, with death and decay, while at the same time phalloi, snakes and fir-cones, sexuality and fertility are present. The myth explains the pig sacrifice by the rape of Kore. When Demeter’s daughter sank into the earth, the pigs of the swineherd Eubouleus were swallowed up as well. So Demeter on her search for her daughter instituted the Thesmophoria; the death marriage is recapitulated in the sacrifice. (p. 243) He goes on to explain that the women who traveled deep into the earth after three days to collect the remains of the pigs not devoured by the snakes were called Bailers and had to remain in a state of purity for three days before descending into the forbidden rooms. Demeter’s priestesses were to remain unmarried, as Stone explains, “and yet the abstinence in turn is an antithetic preparation which seeks fulfillment in procreation and birth, just as fasting seeks fulfillment in the sacrificial banquet” (p. 244). Obscenity and blood are two further features of the Thesmophoria, although Burkert admits it is unclear to him where they exactly fit into the ritual. Clearly the dark side of the goddess was being worshiped here. In reality the women at the Thesmophoria eat pomegranate pips whose deep red juice is always associated with blood; if a pip falls on the ground it belongs to the dead. Thus the women are occupied with blood and death; Demeter, too, is associated not only with passive grief, but with active rage which demands sacrifices. (Burkert, 1985, p. 244)

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Esther Harding, like Stone, connects the symbol of the snake with sacred sexuality and prophesy, but she also points out its association with the underworld and the moon: The serpent, however, is associated with the moon . . . Snakes live in dark holes and go down through cracks in the earth and rocks. They live in a subterranean region which to the ancients was the underworld. Their movement is secret and mysterious, they are cold-blooded and inaccessible to human feeling. For these reasons they have always been considered to be related to the underworld and to the shades of the dead. In its dark phase the moon, also, has to do with the underworld and the chthonic powers, and in this aspect the divinities of the moon can appear, as can all underworld deities, in the form of snakes. For instance, the dark moon goddess, was herself partly snake in form, or was shown with snakes in her hair, and Ishtar was said to be covered with scales like a snake . . . In nearly every place where she was worshiped the Moon Goddess was attended by women priestesses and usually her guardians were virgins, often hierodules, or sacred prostitutes. (1971, p. 54) Harding goes so far as to suggest that the central ritual of the Eleusinian Mysteries involved a snake. “The great earth mother, Demeter, was attended in her temple at Eleusis, by a snake, called Kychreus, and a mystical union with a snake probably formed the central ritual of the Eleusinian Mysteries of the Great Mother” (p. 54). The connection between the serpent and prophetic visioning is well established. The shrine that perhaps offers the deepest insight into the connections of the female deity of Greece to the Serpent Goddess of Crete is Delphi. Under the classical temple and buildings of Delphi, Mycenaean artifacts and ruins of earlier shrines have been unearthed. In the earliest times, the Goddess at Delphi was held sacred as the one who supplied the divine revelations spoken by the priestesses who served Her. The woman who brought forth the oracles of divine wisdom was called the Pythia. Coiled about the tripod stool upon which she sat was a snake known as Python . . . In later times the priests of the male Apollo took over this shrine, and Greek legend tells us of the murder of Python by Apollo. (p. 210) Stone suggests that evidence of the gradual takeover of the Goddess temples, served by the Pythia and intimately connected to the snake, by the sun god Apollo is evidenced in certain myths and legends of the time. One such example is the legend of Cassandra. The legend related that Cassandra was left overnight at the shrine of Delphi as a very young child. When her mother, the Trojan Queen Hecuba, arrived

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there in the morning, she is said to have found the child surrounded by the sacred snakes that were kept in the shrine. They were licking Cassandra’s ears. This experience was offered as the explanation of how Cassandra gained the gift of prophecy. (Stone, 1976, p. 212) Besides the obvious embracing of sexual power (which I will touch on at the end of this chapter), allowing or refusing the serpent to kiss my lips is also a metaphor for saying yes or no to “seeing.” The cobra offers the gift of prophecy, evidenced by the stool that appears strikingly similar to the tripods that the ancient priestesses sat on with the snake coiled beneath when they embodied the function of the oracle. Even more than this, I believe the cobra’s kiss is an invitation into deeper connection to mystery and magic: The sacred serpents, apparently kept and fed at the oracular shrines of the Goddess, were perhaps not merely the symbols but actually the instruments through which the experience of divine revelation was reached. This may explain the title of the Egyptian Cobra Goddess, who was at times known as the Lady of Spells. (Stone, 1976, p. 214) The serpent, representing the power of the Dark Goddess, can be terrifying, even to those who wish to embrace her, as seen through my instinctive attempt to reject the snake. The collective associations connecting the snake with sin, evil, and poison were an obstacle to my assimilating this primal energy and left me striking out, fearful for my life. Most likely the widespread fears and phobias of snakes connect to this deeper fear of dreaming, prophecy, authentic sexuality, and magic. As I delved further into dreamwork, I not only gained insights into my own life and psychology but was offered prophetic glimpses into the lives of those closest to me, including my clients. With prophetic dreaming, one can never be entirely sure until after the fact that it was indeed a prophetic dream, although over time, the quality of such dreams themselves and the feeling sense evoked become strong and frightening predictors of such foreknowledge. For example, I once woke very early from a dream of my sister attaching something to the back of a trailer that blew up. I ran to her, and she was badly burned, horribly disfigured. I moved her across the street and into my car, trying to let her know she would be all right. As we drove to the hospital, I could feel the waves of anxiety and realization of how badly she had been burned start to come to her. It was a terrifyingly real dream. I had it while in the midst of a silent retreat. I broke the silence to call my sister, who had bought just bought a Boler trailer (something I did not know she had done). She had taken the Boler camping for the weekend only to find out the electrical and gas wiring was off. After I shared the dream, she didn’t take any chances with trying to sort it out herself but took it directly to the dealership to be fixed and found there was a real risk. Not long after, I

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further discovered a great aunt and uncle had actually died in such an electrical fire in a camping trailer. Another example is a dream of my father calling out to me in a strong, desperate voice that woke me in the middle of the night. I phoned and found out he had been in a nearly fatal car accident. It is extremely difficult with some prophetic-like dreams to know how much to share with others and how much to keep to myself. Quite naturally, some of the things that come through in the visions in dreams would be disturbing for individuals to know. When they happen, I feel somewhat like Cassandra, as what I often see is the unconscious “reality” of the individual— the very things they do not want to see. Prophecy may seem mysterious and magical from the outside, but to the deep feminine, it is natural. It can also be seen through quite a practical lens. The unconscious sees with different eyes, from a different perspective, than the conscious. The better an understanding one has of oneself through studying dreams, the more consciousness one gains, and the more clearly one sees others as well. There are laws to the universe: archetypal patterns. An archetype that is constellated in an individual will pull certain experiences towards it and repel others. In that way, the future of the individual is present in their dreams as well as in the actions and words they express in the present. There are many levels of communication; most people have become quite adept at tending only to the surface level. In the Dream Seminars, Jung spoke of the importance of both the objective and the subjective levels of dreaming. He also was known to use prophecy in his work. After hearing a man’s dream of falling off a mountain, he told the man not to go hiking; the man did not heed Jung’s warning and fell to his death. After hearing Robert Johnson’s exceptional dream of the serpent and the circle, Jung told Johnson that he would live a life of solitude and celibacy, that groups and communities would never contain him, and that this solitude would be his path. In his memoir, Balancing Heaven and Earth, Johnson (1998) admits that this turned out to be true for him. As much as he tried to join or create communities in his life, it was never a good experience, and he always ended up returning to his solitary path. Of course, not all dreams are prophetic, and again, difficulty arises when one attempts to discriminate which dreams are speaking directly and which symbolically. Over time, with comfort and experience working with dreams, such discrimination becomes more natural. As well as prophecy, the symbol of the serpent also has strong associations with sexuality. I have found the individuation journey in women intimately connected to sexuality. Time and time again, I have been astounded at the connection between sexuality and dreaming. I am in a ceremony and my friend Carmen is lying beside me, her legs spread open. A high priestess enters the room with a huge cobra. I realize with a sick, horrified knowing that the snake will be placed between her legs as a blessing. Then

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it will be placed between mine. The snake unwinds itself in my direction. I try to open to the experience. (Author’s dream journal, July 27, 2003) Women opening to their authentic sexuality are throwing off years of conditioning and projective identification with masculine 'ideals' of sexuality. When playwright and activist Eve Ensler was asked in an interview for women.com (Bourland, 2000) about female sexuality being both glorified and objectified in Hollywood, she responded: “I don’t think Hollywood has yet to deal with female sexuality. It’s a male-driven, male-filtered, male-based system.” Although sexuality is explored with more depth and intensity in European cultures, especially in French cinema, in my opinion these explorations still lack this deeper, authentic feminine essence that is trying to rise from the unconscious. There are many obstacles to face in relation to unveiling more authentic sexual expression in women, but one less often considered is the idea of pleasure anxiety. We often associate anxiety with extremely unpleasant situations, but it is just as often present with extremely pleasant experiences. For many women, it is exceedingly difficult to allow deep sexual pleasure and states of ecstasy. In Robert Johnson’s 1989 book Ecstasy, he notes that ecstatic feelings are difficult for everyone. “When we do honour our physical self it is generally with guilt and anxiety. We feel that we must cover the ecstasy of physical pleasure with alcohol or embarrassment or guilt” (p. 41). I am with a number of women who have been buried in the earth who are all feeling the effects of this burial. There is a woman who is instructing us. She asks me where I feel it. I answer in my chest. The priestess moves to me and mirrors the pressure and emotions that are held tight in my chest. As she does this, I have a flash of insight, and shivers traverse my entire body . . . I try to stop it. She says to me very directly, “Stay with it, feel it, let yourself gently open to it. It is common when the ecstasy comes to try to stop it. We fear the newness of it and the loss of control. But if you open to it and let it flow through, you open to the world of the collective flow.” (Author’s dream journal, 2003) I continued to wonder and dream of a time when women had greater access to the deep mysteries of the body and sexuality. The Eleusinian Mysteries remained a symbol for me of the essence of these lost threads. In the summer of 2005, I traveled to Greece to celebrate the successful defense of my doctoral research. I wanted to honor the intensity of the journey by visiting the sacred sites of Greece: the Akropolis, the Delphic Oracle and the Omphalos, Epidaurus and the Asklepian dream temples, the Aegean Sea, Mycenae, but most significant of all, Eleusis, the site of the ancient Eleusinian Mysteries. I took day tours from Athens to most of the destinations, but for Eleusis I knew I had to be alone. I didn’t even want a private driver waiting for me. I needed none of the pressure or expectations that too often come with another’s presence, so I took public transit. The morning of the trip to Eleusis, I woke dreaming of Marion Woodman. I stepped out onto the tiny balcony of my small hotel room at the base of the

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Akropolis and saw the faint sliver of the moon in the predawn light. I remembered my first dream involving Marion Woodman. She had grabbed both my hands across a long oak table, locked my gaze, and said, in a voice so powerful it shook straight through my core, “Why are you denying your destiny?” I thought of our strange yet important journey together. Alongside my brilliant chair, Dr. Christine Downing, she had been a member of my dissertation committee. That dream was before all my research into the Demeter and Persephone myth and the demon lover complex. It seemed appropriate that I dreamed of her again that night before my pilgrimage. I was not alone. I carried with me the women who had made the most significant imprints on my life—the women I had admired and studied under, the women who had helped open me to other ways of seeing and believing, the women who had provided a safe enough space for me to unfold and speak out. Although I did not think of it at the time, I would soon hold this same space for other women, which was a crossroads of sorts. I fasted, meditated, and drank tea and dropped more fully into the altered space that had been building ever since I had arrived in Greece five days earlier. I had heard of other visitors’ experiences at Eleusis. Mostly, I heard how sad the industrial wasteland looked that had grown up around the ruins and how there was not really much to see. I wanted to walk the last bit, so I got off the bus when I felt we must be close enough. I was not at all sure that I was in the right place. I checked in with a couple of store owners, who pointed me onward. Then I let go; I just walked. I walked a long time. I tried to trust, but my mind started to spiral with fears of being lost: “What the hell am I doing this for? All this preparation! This is ridiculous! I am too hot. How will I get back? I’m not even sure I can trace my steps back to where I got off the bus now. I don’t even know if there is anything there for me.” Suddenly, I rounded a corner and had my first glimpse of Eleusis. Nothing could have prepared me for the flood of zoe, the ancient Greek word for the “life force,” which now seized me and forced a sob from my lips. This was a depth of emotion that was saturated with duende, guttural, primal, and razor sharp. As I walked to the site, I continued to cry—my tears, like red diamonds, held my offering to the goddess. As I later wrote in a line from a poem of this moment: “grief—this is enough—one tear—one thought—travels towards the horizon of Eleusis.” I controlled my crying just long enough to pay the site entrance fee and then instinctively walked to the right and let the tears flow freely again. There was no one else on the site. It was as if the Fates had aligned to give me this precious moment in solitude, undisturbed by the oppressive eyes of the world. I found old stones placed in a square around a deep hole in the earth. I was not sure whether this was Demeter’s well, but there I offered the core of my emotional release: all that my body had held onto for so long. Within the sanctum, I was finally able to acknowledge the trauma, the rape, the betrayal. When I was ready to continue, I looked up to find small, black writing engraved on a simple stone amidst the high grass: “The Altar.” I was so entranced by the ruins that I stayed all day. I wandered all alone except for one young security guard who occasionally walked the site. But even he

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seemed to feel my need for privacy and showed up only when I had a question. I sat on the rock, journaled at Hades cave, spoke words from my heart. I weaved my way through the labyrinth of the large site until I stood at the center: the Telestorian. There, I instinctively raised my hands towards the sky, took in all the spirit I could bear through my breath, and recited my secret mantra. The next thing I knew, I was on the ground, the world swirling, the ground pulsing, my body nothing but pure waves of sensation, as if I were the oracle itself, resounding with vibrations from the deep earth into my unknown future—calling back the dead, changing my destiny.

4 THE FALSE BRIDEGROOM

And all should cry, Beware! Beware! — His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise. —Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Thirty-six years after my birth, two advanced psychology degrees attained, two formal Jungian analyses complete, and five years of celibacy under my belt, I decided all I really wanted was to be free of the part-object, split-feminine legacy passed down to me through the generations from my parents through my name. In psychoanalysis, a part object is not a whole object and is in danger of splitting off aspects of the self to fit into others’ fantasies. The greatest collective fantasy of the feminine is the mother-madonna, wife-lover split. According to family mythology, I was almost born in the back seat of a taxi. My father was “on a business trip.” My mother, alone, had waited until the last moment to call the cab—I picture her curled up in her own fetal position, cursing, imagining that someone would appear to take charge of the situation before any action was required on her part. My father did not show for two days, and when he did finally arrive, to see the wrinkly little red body with blue eyes that was me, the battle over my name began. Both my parents liked the film Dr. Zhivago, the prototypical movie of the split feminine. My mother decided I should be named after the mistress (interestingly enough), Lara, and my father believed I should be named after the wife, Tonya. The debate blazed on for so long that I was not officially named until I was three months old. I was eventually named Tonya Susanne. It was an interesting collective climate to be born into. It was 1970: the

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year the first female jockey was allowed in the Kentucky Derby, the first World Trade Center building in New York City was completed, the first no-fault divorce was granted in California, the first Earth Day was celebrated in San Francisco, and the Beatles single “Let It Be” was released, one month after their official breakup. In 2006, I traveled to Thailand to engage in a name-changing ceremony. I chose a name that represented what I wanted: to be whole and to carry all the aspects of the feminine within me. I wanted my relationships to be based on whole-object experience—all of me and all of them. I chose the name of a grandmother many generations past with the intention of bridging back to a feminine energy that had not been completely colonized by patriarchy. I wanted to break the intergenerational cycle of disempowered women in my ancestral line. She was someone I could at least imagine as still linked to the feminine mysteries. Her name was Ana and she was Romanian. Her grandfather had been a famous storyteller. I wanted a name that balanced the feminine and masculine, so I chose Ana as the first name and Mozol (a male name) as the last. Ana means grace and Mozol has connections to the underworld. According to the translation of more than one Romanian, it means something akin to being kissed by a dark river or by the muddy, dark earth. Mozol also carries the connotation of sexual misuse or misconduct in some European cultures. So the two names together carried the truth of the past, the hope of the future, and the union of the masculine and feminine. On the ferry from Koh Samui to Koh Phangan, after 28 hours of travel, as I set off into the otherworldly, bubble gum pink, satin sky of the setting sun, I wondered: Can I really do this? At that exact moment, something caught my eye from the deck below. It took me a moment to register what it was: the name tag from my luggage, which had torn free and flown off into the waters that reflected the endless sky. Yes, I can do this. In Koh Phangan, the world continued to speak to me. I arrived at the sanctuary, where my cabin was set far back in the dense jungle. It was more open to the elements than closed—the only thing between me and the torrential rains when they came like flash floods was the thin linen that surrounded the bed. In the modest library in the common area, I randomly opened a book by a man of unparalleled demon-lover qualities: Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, aka Osho. It opened to the story of when Jesus met Mary Magdalene, how she was possessed by seven demons, and that when he touched her, the demons rushed toward the sun and drowned themselves. Osho goes on to say that the word “demon” comes from a root that means division—that Mary was divided into seven parts but with Jesus’ touch became unpossessed. I have searched for this reference in numerous books of his and never found it Again. I stayed a week preparing but as the full moon approached I knew intuitively it was not the right place for my ceremony and traveled on. The night before my ritual, I dreamt of seeing through many veils to something my Romanian grandmother had written for me. It was our name—Ana. The morning after the ceremony, perched in my humble hut, I woke in the wilds of Koh Tao from what I could only call a religious sexual experience. The untamed and eternal stirrings of the Gulf of Thailand spread before me like

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sparkling blue cotton candy. My dream, a divining rod, struck all the rivulets of water running through me and vibrated out. I knew my period of celibacy was over. Certainty rang through my whole being. I would have sex again! In my dream: I am in a highly orgasmic space and prepare to open to a great ritual. I find a young man and ask if he would like to enter me. At first he seems confused but then agrees. I say, “Tie me up before I change my mind.” The young boy prepares many beautiful fruits which he displays before me that will be part of our ritual. He carefully inserts them one by one inside of me. Lastly he places a lotus blossom deep within me. (Author’s dream journal, Rainbow Moon, June 12, 2006) I did not know then where the seeds of this dream would take me, what it would cost me, or how it would bring me face to face with what I have termed the false bridegroom. We had met before, a brief moment, a dance at the Hot Jazz Club in Vancouver during one of their regular Saturday night salsa events. His name was Nicolas. That same evening, still dancing, I looked up to see his eyes following me as I danced with another. He was tall, manly, with dark hair, chestnut eyes, and confident hands. He was an elegant dancer. Other nights, on various Vancouver dance floors, he would always ask for my number. “I’m not dating right now,” I would say. He was persistent, and we entered the ancient patriarchal dance where disregard for boundaries is confused with romance. One night, feeling free and flirtatious, I let my boundary break and said my number fast, finishing with a kind of dare: “If you can remember it, call me.” He called. He was different. He had a million questions: “Where is your family? Do you have any brothers or sisters? What is she like? What is your favorite color? What does your office look like? Do you have a spiritual practice? What made you choose psychology as a profession?” He was sincere in a pleasant, disarmingly charming way. I agreed to meet for a walk on the beach the next day. In the front of my mind, I thought, “The light of day will end this momentary infatuation.” Yet the back recesses of my mind continued to polish the memory of our dance— his hands on my hips as we melded into one another on the shiny wooden dance floor, joined by the sensual lure of bachata, a dance originating in the rural areas of the Dominican Republic and outlawed in mainstream society for being overly sexual and associated with debauchery. That fateful night of the flying phone number, caught and remembered whole as if he possessed the audio equivalent of photographic memory, I dropped. Concealed in the dim violet lights, absorbed by the gentle swing of our bodies in synch, I let go. I released, felt myself drop, let myself drop. Who knew I had such a longing to relinquish all responsibility and possession of myself? I could not have felt more outside of myself in that moment than if an old sorcerer had locked eyes with me from across the dusty floor of an

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ancient ritual mound and captured my soul in a talisman with haunting incantations. I traveled so far in an instant that later in my memories, I wondered whether it was my imagination or that I had actually felt his lips brush my neck ever so delicately, the touch of a dragonfly’s wings, as he breathed me in whole. In depth psychological theory, this is the moment the projective arrows of the anima-animus soar: their characteristic numinosity and power electrify the field. Such an arrow can anchor in a word, a touch, a glance that slants perception and starts the world spinning. Without the inner psychological tools to understand and exorcise the foreign object, there is little hope of release from its lethal, intoxicating effects. And most carriers (at least at first) do not wish to be free of the arrow’s ecstatic edge. It feels divine. Once securely embedded, the arrow works its strange enchantment, producing symptoms akin to psychosis: intense longing, obsessive thoughts, compulsive actions, sexual arousal, appetite and sleep disturbances. The projective arrow firing is only the first step in the process. The second is when the targeted individual identifies with the arrow through a process known as projective identification. A key characteristic of projective identification is that identifying with the projection alters the individual in significant, sometimes fundamental ways. This can happen completely outside of conscious awareness, and to complicate the things further, it is not only the personal images of “the ideal love object” that are projected but also cultural romantic ideals and expectations. In any type of strong projection, it can feel as if one has been co-opted to play a role in another’s inner theatre; however, a true anima-animus projection carries death at its core—a wish to see the other not as they are but as one desires them to be. And indeed, after two decades of being in private practice, working with these matters of the heart, I can honestly say that the largest percentage of love and romance in contemporary Western society (as in previous eras and other societies) appears more like a blood sport than a ride on a carousel at an amusement park. As destructive as identification with anima-animus projections can be, they also contain keys to the individuation process and transformation, but it is dangerous territory to navigate. Although the concept of anima-animus continues to evolve and be reimagined by many post-Jungians in important ways, the terms were originally defined as the contrasexual other in the psyche: an intrapsychic image of the opposite gender to what the ego self identifies with. Jung realized that the inner images of the anima-animus carry such importance that estrangement from them produces a feeling of loss of soul; anima is the Latin word for soul and animus for spirit. This is why we are on such precarious ground once we have projected this internal image onto another human being. When we project the anima-animus out, we give the other an extraordinary amount of power, and the carrier of the projection starts to hold a certain fascination that rarely has a basis in reality. There is a numinous field of meaning and synchronicity that surrounds these relationships because of the projections. Ironically, it is this same misunderstood numinosity that will often be used to justify the rightness of the relationship. In its proper place inside the psyche, the anima-animus is the central archetypal figure that sits at the border between the

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collective and objective psyche; its function is one of psychopomp or guide into the deepest realms of the unconscious. Marie Louis von Franz acknowledges that in its intrapsychic function, the animus in women acts as the “innermost instinctive awareness of the inner truth, a basic truthfulness which guides the spiritual woman in her individuation, toward becoming her own self” (1988, p. 176). Projected outward, it becomes apparent that the animus can lead a woman away from herself. The majority of women, and men, rarely connect to the anima-animus intrapsychically but project it out onto another and then are held captive by their own projection, needing to be with the other in order to feel alive, which paradoxically drains their very life force and disorients their inner compass. It is this very possession that marks the culturally idealized version of romantic love. One might go so far as to say there is a collective narcissistic obsession with romantic love. Indeed, one of the diagnostic criteria for narcissistic personality disorder in the DSM-5 is a preoccupation with images of ideal love. In The Way of the Dream, von Franz elaborates on Jung’s assertion of the importance of taking “objects” away from the animaanimus in the outer world (both positive and negative) so that the archetypes remain where they belong, in the inner sanctum of the psyche. Otherwise you are possessed by your desires. When anima/animus are in the bottle you are free of possession . . .Then you will discover that there is a stone growing inside the bottle . . . Insofar as self-control, or non-indulgence, has become a habit, it is a stone . . . When that attitude becomes a fait accompli, the stone will be a diamond. (1988, p. 23) One might imagine individuals would strive for freedom, for this elusive diamond, but more often they do the opposite—individuals long for fusion, long to be possessed. Existentialist psychologist Irvin Yalom sums up the dynamic nicely: One of the great paradoxes of life is that self-awareness breeds anxiety. Fusion eradicates anxiety in a radical fashion—by eliminating self-awareness. The person who has fallen in love, and entered a blissful state of merger, is not self-reflective because the questioning lonely I (and the attendant anxiety of isolation) dissolves into the we. Thus one sheds anxiety but loses oneself. (1989, p. 12) This longing for fusion is perfectly reflected in the current mania among adolescents for vampire lore. In her Kindle single “Out for Blood,” Margot Adler (2013) reflects on why the archetype of the vampire continues to have such traction in society. She explores the themes of power, mortality, sex, and the struggle to be moral that are essential themes in vampire narratives. Adler tracks the history of vampire narratives and notes that the new vampires are “struggling-to-be moraldespite-being-predators” and that this “new vampire” reflects our “current moral struggle” as a society.

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Any discussion of anima-animus theory should also include some consideration of how these archetypes relate to and are experienced in LGBTQ2 populations. I am, obviously, limited in what I am able to extrapolate from my research to these communities, because I primarily identify as a heterosexual woman—one who has had sexual encounters with women (mostly in a tantric teaching context) but who has historically had all my primary relationships with male partners, although I remain open to other possibilities. Personally, I tend to agree with Freud that we are all bisexual and are socialized to identify with specific orientations for varied and complex reasons. This is my personal felt sense, and I don’t pretend to be an authority on this subject. I am quite certain that many would disagree. However, I have worked with individuals across the spectrum of sexual orientations as well as individuals with diverse and fluid gender identifications. What I can say from this experience is that I have not come across anyone who, regardless of orientation or gender identity, did not relate to the idea that aspects of their own psyche were either masculine or feminine. This is also true in dreams—the masculine shows up in the male gender and feminine in the female gender. For simplicity’s sake I would suggest that if the primary gender identification is male, the inner anima be considered female, and if the primary identification is female, the inner animus be considered masculine—at least as a starting point. I don’t think it is this simple, however, and our society’s ideas of gender and sexual orientation are always evolving. Another possibility is to consider anima-animus as one archetype and not split it into separate gender identifications, as Hillman has suggested. The advantage here is that some individuals experience a more androgynous identity and don’t relate strongly to either a male or a female gender. I have not worked personally with any individuals who identify with the pronouns “they/them,” but I have supervised other therapists’ clinical work with such individuals. I think their experience is important to consider, as today’s limited gender categories come under closer scrutiny and deeper reflection, individually and collectively. In this way, the animaanimus might be thought of more specifically as the inner archetype of the beloved or the psychopomp. For clinicians and individuals wanting to do this depth of dreamwork, I would suggest sticking as close to the inner images as possible and listening to them carefully in active imagination, which can help to expand and challenge fixed assumptions relating to sexual orientation and gender identity. Most of this classical theory on anima-animus knew from my studies in depth psychology, but knowing it was not enough to protect me from falling into it. I needed to understand it through lived experience. The intellect alone is never enough! It is true that our initial meeting had all the markings of an inciting incident in a teenage vampire novel. Years later, he told me he would lie in bed and by sheer will pull back my scent, which would then conjure my presence, thus bringing back the felt sense of that first moment, whole. It was one of the things I loved most about him, initially, this uncanny ability to pour all of himself so completely into a given moment. Only much later would I see the destructive side of such fervor.

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In James Hillman’s collection of essays entitled Puer Papers (1979), he explains such an outpouring as the quintessential mark of the puer archetype—or the syndrome of the eternal boy: The magic touch of the puer-man is not spurious; it is his life-blood that he puts into his projects and his friends. He pours out his heart despite himself. His bleeding seems mere display, but it is an enactment of those God-figures whose bleeding is the emanation of their essence, the exteriorization of creative vitality. (p. 111) In the same collection of essays, the psychologist Tomas Moore notes that the: pathology of the puer originates in his tendency toward a peculiar monotheism, a single mindedness so virtuous and appealing on the surface that its potential destructiveness easily remains hidden and overlooked. (p. 196) I had never before been with a man who could so completely lose himself in physical sensations, die into them. True to Hillman’s theorizing, he used this exteriorization to escape his own vulnerabilities and creative capacities. I too began to pour myself into those moments with him as a way to escape taking fuller responsibility for containing my own creative energy. ≏ At that first date, I found myself liking him. Nicolas was from the province of La Rioja in Argentina, where his family owned vineyards. He had a degree in engineering, but his degree did not transfer to Canada, so he was working as a contractor, building homes. We sat at Jericho Beach, watching the sunset and talking about our past relationships. He told me of his first love, the woman he left behind in South America. “She was perfect, but I felt a strong call to a different life; she represented all I was trying to break free of.” I resonated with his desire for freedom from ancestral patterns of relationship and cultural expectation. “Have you been in a relationship since coming to Canada?” In the millisecond before he answered, I felt the truth of the words that came through me with spontaneous knowing: “You’re in one right now.” It wasn’t a question. To his credit, he made no move to deny it. I continued, “You live with her!” A rage stirred from down low; I began to pack things up. “What is it with men who are so incapable of ending one relationship before starting another?” Alarmingly, he leaned over and aggressively tried to kiss me. I instinctively recoiled. He gripped my shoulders tighter, as if to force me back through time to

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the moment before, when things were ripe with romantic possibility. I dismissed the taut band of fear that circled my chest in response to his boldness and judged the burst of concern for my safety as silly. My voice steadied. “It has been lovely to get to know you a little, but honestly, I have an extremely full day tomorrow.” The effort to maintain my “casual position” for the five-minute walk to my vehicle felt epic. Once we were there, he lingered at the open door, feet on the pavement. “I’ll call you.” “Sure. Have a good night.” The tension in my body didn’t begin to release until the door slammed shut and I was driving home. The few times I saw his number on my call display, I didn’t pick up. He disappeared like a dandelion blown away by the wind. Two years passed. The first night upon my return from Thailand, I went out dancing and there he was! He looked good with his deep brown eyes, his jeans and white shirt. He was dancing with another woman. We acknowledged each other with a nod that sent a tiny electric shock through my chest. The friend I was with wanted to leave because the place was dead—just a smattering of sequins, leopard-print skirts, blue jeans, and T-shirts with various screen-printed images, whirling through space. We dashed across Granville Street to the Red Ginger Lounge, where another salsa event was happening. The place was packed, but I wasn’t into it. My energy kept being pulled back across the street, with images of silver sparks and brown eyes. I told myself I was leaving for home, yet as I approached the threshold, I turned toward where I knew he still danced. I nearly slammed into him as my glittering dance shoes hit the cold pavement. “Can I walk you to your car?” “No, thank you.” He did anyway. We walked in silence. I tried to quiet the hum of energy running through my body by reminding myself he was in a relationship. When we reached my car, we both lingered. I noticed his confident hand on the car door. “Can I call you?” My right hand shook slightly as I reached for the steering wheel. I gripped it tight, forced my eyes to meet his directly, a cool, casual edge to my voice. “I don’t think that would be a good idea.” He called anyway. I picked up. He was separating from his wife (yes, they were married!). He now lived alone. Although I was excited, I maintained an unimpressed tone, not crazy about the idea of jumping into a relationship with a man who hadn’t even had time to pick up salt and pepper for his new bachelor suite. But we started dating casually, dancing more, talking late into the nights. As the world started to spin, I had the distinct feeling of being found. Summer deepened, and in the boundless days we found solace in one another— long walks, wine at sunset, talks of philosophy, diversity, the effects of culture and family in shaping life, destiny and dreams. We moved to the erotic slowly, as I wanted to feel in alignment emotionally, spiritually, and physically before being sexual again. It created a slow burn between us and an intensely passionate edge to our dancing. I felt it like a powerful secret. I felt that if everyone could know this

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secret, the world would be a joyous place. I imagined us singularly unique, and I suppose at one level that was true—no one had ever experienced “exactly” what we were experiencing then. I caught a glimpse of us in a mirror as we danced one night and fell in love with the image of us moving together as one. Others noticed this magical synergy that enveloped us. I became used to strangers approaching after our dances. “Beautiful.” “I was inspired watching you two.” “Where did you learn to dance like that?” “Are you a couple?” “So sensual,” and so on. It was not that we were the best dancers on the planet, but people felt into the potential field that had been constellated; it was alive like a dream not yet interpreted, sex not yet fumbled through. Later, in the more difficult moments that all relationships ultimately face, the dance could always bring us back to each other, strong. One such difficult night, just after spinning me several times and then pulling me in from behind on the dance floor, he whispered in my ear, “When we dance together, I know that we will always be.” The first time he kissed my stomach, I collapsed into spontaneous convulsions throughout my body. My sexuality was coming alive in frightening ways. And contrary to that forced first attempt at a kiss years before, he was content with waiting. Unpressured, I opened to uncharted depths of physical sensation. As the “right time” approached, an agreed upon minimum six-month period, we set off to the clinic to be tested. Even though I had not been sexual in five years, I had never tested since my last relationship and thought of it as a rite of passage for us. And I wanted to be safe. I knew my body would not relax fully otherwise. We sat outside the clinic doors on the tiny, green-painted metal bench, surrounded by little shrubs and patches of grass. “Thank you. It means a great deal to me that we’re doing this consciously,” I said with damp eyes. “It’s good for me too,” he replied and reached for my hand, leaning over and kissing me fully. Inside the clinic, the waiting room was completely empty. I checked in with the front desk nurse. There was a large porcelain bowl reminiscent of a Halloween night candy bowl. Instead of candy it held hundreds of individually wrapped, brightly colored, shiny condoms. When she disappeared to the back to see whether the doctor was ready to see us, I started loading condoms into my purse. Nicolas burst out laughing. As we waited, I talked to him about a challenging interpersonal moment with a colleague at the university that week. “In the past, I would have reacted through a complex rather than responding from the more balanced place I found. It left me feeling strong,” I said. He looked at me with complete sincerity and said, “This is strong.” I looked at him, confused. “This.” He swept his hand around the room. “Being here . . . this is strong.” And then he affectionately squeezed my hand. It was true that I had always wanted

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to enter a relationship more consciously and safely, less impulsively than I had managed before. There isn’t a lot of encouragement for a more conscious passage into relationship in Western culture, which continually promotes romance and sex with little concern for safety and protection. You don’t see many couples at the clinic in romantic dramas. I had waited a long time for this beginning. The sturdy, full-bodied, widely smiling nurse who took our samples was approving, admitting to both of us in a whisper, “I wish more people would do this before . . . It would save a lot of heartache later.” The night we first made love, things started beautifully but turned somehow in the middle. I imagine it was a disappointment for both of us that our desire and preparation was not enough to break free of the collective intergenerational entanglements and complexes present between the genders when it comes to sex. It was delightful, playful, and connected but then quickly crossed the line to feeling pushed and pressured. I think most men (and women) have been conditioned to believe an extremely limited version of sex—that sex equals an erect penis, that an erect penis requires immediate penetration, and that sex is over when the man ejaculates. This kind of conditioning creates a constant vigilance towards maintaining an erection rather than yielding to deeper intimacies. We had lost our deeper communication all of a sudden, and I needed it to stop. I had not waited five years to repeat this awkward dance. I had reached a place in my sexual development where I would no longer pretend something was enjoyable that was not. It was a hard moment for us both. Like most women, I find the space between action, the places of no action, the key to sexual satisfaction—the pockets where longing builds and the waves of ecstasy rise. In sex as in life, both men and women often fear empty spaces because they are like black holes in the psyche where access to the unconscious fears, terrors, traumas, and real emotions rise, so there is a push to keep moving, doing. They are dark, feminine places. Surrender to these quiet spaces can abruptly turn to potent explosions of unwilled passion and intimacy that reach far beyond the limitations of ego or fantasy. Devotion to stillness, the obeying of the waxing and waning of both male and female pleasure, is very tantric—a sexual practice that comes closer to honoring the feminine, in contrast to the repetitive, action-based sexual impulses born of patriarchy. Tantra is kind of like the depth psychology of sex: still completely inadequate for addressing the feminine reality, but the best we have. The word tantra comes from the Sanskrit roots tan, “to weave,” and tra, “to liberate.” I like this definition of tantra, as it envisions a form of sexual relating that has the power to weave freedom. I had always wanted a tantric partner. The idea was not something I took lightly. I had a sense of what it really means to enter into such a consideration and the responsibility it demands. I had already completed two teacher trainings in yoga and had been studying tantra on my own for over a decade. Eventually, we talked about the possibility and moved into some initial exploration of tantric practices. He genuinely wanted to explore this type of partnership; however, as with depth psychology, tantra is a discipline where mere curiosity and desire are often not

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enough. Both traditions involve what could be termed mystical communication with other realms, and there are sentries at the gates between these worlds. In the words of Don Juan Matus to Florinda Donner when she is under consideration for initiation into the sorcerers’ world, one must “be pointed out by spirit” before being able to knock at the door of the other realm (Donner, 1991, p. 108). Similarly, Edward Edinger states that when evaluating candidates for advancement in the field of depth psychology, one of the main factors he considers is whether the individual shows “clear evidence of a genuine calling” to the work (1997, p. 21). I believe Nicolas did have such a call, an invitation at least. We had many deep and satisfying sexual encounters after this first evening, in a very real way that perfectly balanced action and non-action. In fact, he was a gifted lover. The way he could just smell me or breath on me, seemingly endlessly, would take me to unimaginable edges, at times to the point that it was hard for me to allow these moments fully. I too could rush things when the intensity grew too much. As we began to practice, he had a numinous dream of a Tibetan lama finding him at the tree of life and inviting him to follow. Nicolas was left with a strong feeling of not being worthy to follow the old monk and with profound grief took another path. Although he never did become my partner in this ancient, sacred way, a time of deep sexual awakening began to occur naturally through our connection. The first night he slept over at my home, I woke to a brilliant blue dragonfly dead in the center of my living room hardwood floor—the same place where, years later, I would dream I lay splayed out like a female Christ figure, dying from deep wounds cut up my arms, the blood pooling from my open wounds. I dream I am in a ritual space. I have cut deep lines throughout my body—long, deep cuts down my arms, chest, and legs. I have lain down to die. I feel the blood slip from me as I descend into the sweet darkness. At one point, something ignites within me and I have a thought that resonates like an electric shock through my whole body. “I want to live!” I fear it may be too late . . . too much damage done . . . too much blood lost. I try to call Nicolas. He picks up but has a hard time speaking. My body is weak . . . my voice a whisper through veils of consciousness. (Author’s dream journal, September 2008) I looked up the symbolism of dragonflies and found that they connect to dreamtime and to discriminating between illusions and reality. From early on, a voice deep within me was trying to warn me to get out of the relationship. There were signs. Like my mother before me, however, I ignored my body’s felt sense, intuitions, and symptoms. I planted my faith firmly in rational words, mostly his. He became possessive quickly. He requested that we both never dance bachata with anyone else. Although I teased him about this, I felt the same; I wasn’t crazy about the idea of watching him dance this intimate, sensual dance with another woman, so I agreed. It was our first pledge to one another.

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Four days later, at Sunday afternoon salsa at Robson Square, he broke it. I arrived at the dance late, as I was finishing some work at home. The first thing I saw as I descended the stairs to the underground skating-rink-turned-dance-floor was him dancing bachata with a beautiful young Asian woman. The energy drained from my legs, and an inner shaking started in my chest. I left. He came to me that evening. His words settled me. Everything has changed so quickly. I have never felt like this before. You have to believe me the whole thing of us has hit me hard. I absolutely don’t want to dance with anyone else. I declined when she asked me, but she just grabbed my hand and said, “You can’t do this to me. We’ve danced together for years.” I didn’t know what to say. I was kind of stunned, and that’s when you saw me. I could relate somewhat, as I was going through my own uncomfortable moments of turning down dances with partners I had danced with over many years, but I always seemed to manage to say something, “I’m in a relationship now” or “I’m not dancing bachata . . . let’s wait to dance a salsa.” The next warning came in the middle of the night. Nicolas had departed for South America the evening before. He had left many of his things at my home— clothes, baskets of tennis balls, his cell phone, and other things that were precious to him (a friend had stored larger items in his garage). He was in transition and would be renting a new place when he returned to Vancouver. I woke from a dead sleep at 4:40 a.m. to a strange and persistent sound that kept calling me out of my dreams, something like the siren that goes off in a casino when someone hits the jackpot on the slots. It took me forever to figure out it was something in the kitchen drawer—his cell phone. The alarm was set for a Monday morning work call. Half-awake and irritated, I fumbled with buttons, trying unsuccessfully to turn it off. I scrolled down one of the menus, trying to find the alarm, and saw his contact list. Women—many women. I felt like I had been punched in the gut. I feared he may be one of “those men” that women dread and I am particularly repulsed by—a player. My intuition was to leave, to end it and not give him the chance to explain. I would not be my mother. My body knew something was off, and I would trust it. I remembered all my sleepless nights, listening to my mother’s endless fears, agonizing over the decision to leave her violent husband, my stepfather. My body breaking for her, my mind spinning, trying to find the magical words that would give her the courage, my spirit flying with the thought of her freedom, our freedom. Then everything would be undone in the morning by the familiar scene at the kitchen table: the two of them together, talking as if nothing had ever happened. Like the inverse of Penelope weaving all day and unraveling her work by evening, my mother and I would weave plans and find courage at night, only for it to come undone in the light of day, in the presence of her husband. I would not be that woman.

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His words made rational sense. “Before I met you, I would contact women from the dance community and go out dancing as friends.” It made sense logically, but the visceral intensity of that moment was hard to ignore, a bit like all the sirens going off in the town square of Venice, warning of the coming acqua alta—yet I looked around at the dry land, heard his words, and said, This can’t be happening. My dreams continued to bring visions of his betrayal, him being with other women, and radio reports of domestic violence. Whenever I confronted him with my fears, his words would momentarily alleviate my anxiety. “Sweetheart, we are so close on so many levels that if something like that was going on, you would absolutely know it; your intuition and your dreams are too strong. This is just your fear, ghosts from the past. I would do anything for you, drive to Alaska to buy you ice cream if you wanted. I love you so.” It turned out that I did not need ice cream from Alaska or professions of love. The things I needed were simple: to feel safe, to feel sane, to feel loved. The discrepancy between my unconscious and conscious perspectives pushed me to my own aggressive edge when I sat him down one night and said, “Listen, I don’t want to control or possess you. You are free to do what you want. I only ask that you be honest with me so I can make my own choices. If you meet another woman that you want to be with sexually, please tell me.” I took a deep breath and continued, “I can handle anything as long as there is truth between us, but if you lie to me, if you deceive me—I will destroy you.” He laughed uncomfortably. We both knew this was not something I was capable of. Still, it was as if I had conjured the words directly from the underworld. They came out with a fierce determination, as if saying them could ward off what I already feared would be our demise. I shocked even myself with the intensity of my delivery. For the summer solstice that year, 2009, I had set up a ritual and was taking a few days off in silence to work with my dreams, to journal and prepare. I was seeking clarity. Nicolas wanted a commitment from me, yet I remained always on the verge of leaving. I feared he could not be trusted. I was a virtual pendulum, swinging between forever and freedom. He was constantly throwing out the words, “Marry me,” often at the most unexpected, inappropriate moments: when I lost my cool on the tennis court, as I did an imitation of one of his signature moves on the dance floor, in a moment of frustration when I said, “Don’t talk to me right now, I hate you,” and in an underground parkade as we parked. There were moments I let myself be completely vulnerable in my love as well, like when I was cutting the vegetables for a stir fry and turned to him in a wave of unexpected emotion and said, “Don’t ever leave me.” I resented that he never seemed to doubt the relationship. This did not seem realistic to me. My mind kept ruminating over certain points. Why am I the only one in such deep reflection? Is it not natural for most individuals to doubt when contemplating such a serious commitment? My desire for solitude naturally brought forward his fear that this time, I would decide to leave. I could hardly blame him. Even if I was not 100% forthcoming

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about the depth of my conflicted emotions, he knew that I was unsettled, undecided. At heart, we both wanted to feel secure in our relationship. Still, I took the time I needed. In ritual space on the evening of the solstice, I did an active imagination with the Dark Mother Goddess from that first initial vision and asked, “On this day when the sun and light is at its fullest, may I be granted the gift of sight to fully understand what is needed to reconcile the unbearable tension of the opposites within me and gain clarity with regards to my relationship.” Images flooded through me of Nicolas, flashes of us dancing, the deep, ecstatic stirrings and the joy of our union. Words of love came back whole. I have been a fool, I thought. Why have I held myself back from this uncommon love? I became all fizz and bubbles, like a shaken bottle of champagne on New Year’s. Seized by a longing to feel his body against mine, I imagined rushing into his arms and telling him how much I loved him. I was consumed by the compulsion to tell him I was ready, I was sorry to have doubted us, and I knew what a rare gift he was, we were. I checked the time, thinking it was likely too late to meet him, and was surprised to see it was barely 10:00 p.m. It was Saturday night, and I knew he would be at the Howard Johnson Hotel, dancing. I started to prepare myself by wearing his favorite black and white polka dot dress, putting on my silver dance shoes, pinning up my hair, and glazing my lips a pale pink. Hungry to see him, I was out the door in record time. I anticipated his smile when he felt my presence. He always loved it when I came to him. There were no parking spaces available at the hotel, so I circled the block, looking for street parking. I found a tight spot two blocks away but was determined to fit. I bumped the front fender of the car behind me but, undeterred, straightened the wheel, pulled forward slightly, and was in! Taking in a conscious breath, I walked briskly. I could not stop the smile from framing my lips even while passing two strange men in hoods rising from the cellars of the Biltmore to street level. They smiled back. I could hear the heavy metal music wafting up, loud through the closed doors down the flight of stair to the venue well-known for alternative live music. At my destination, the automatic doors parted like the entrance to a haunted house, and I walked onto the worn, cheap, red velvety carpet of the lobby, heading directly for the dance hall in the back. The Howard Johnson was not the classiest place, but it had won over the fastidious Vancouver salseros community for a brief moment in time with its underworld charm. I rounded the corner and paid the ten-dollar cover, my body already alight with the deep salsa rhythms. I spotted him instantly when I walked in. It was not as busy as I had expected. He was dancing at the front of the room with a blonde woman wearing a paisley print dress. I slipped into a seat along the left side of the dance floor and waited for the song to end. When it did, I started to stand but then realized it was a fast salsa. Nicolas hated fast salsas, so I resumed my position across the dance floor from him in the dark and waited. I was pretty much directly across from where he stood. I watched him adoringly as he shook hands, in that very assertive, masculine way,

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and then chatted with a male acquaintance. I was surprised he had not noticed me yet. Even in the dimly lit room, it was unusual. He would never have suspected that I would break my period of silence, I reminded myself. The song changed to a meringue. I watched him start to move purposefully around the room towards the front entrance, thinking he was on his way to the washroom or for some air—a strategy we both adopted to avoid the discomfort of saying no to others’ dance requests with “our dances.” The two that, over three years ago now, we had committed to only dance together—bachata and meringue. I stood, planning to intercept him on his way out. As I started to walk toward him, he grabbed the same blonde woman he had just been dancing salsa with and pulled her in close, wrapping his hand around her hips possessively as she started moving them extremely sensually. They crushed their bodies into each other, and I lost all the air in the room. I felt like some alternate universe had slammed across the center of my stomach—like I was in free-fall on an amusement park ride with the electric bar across my waist malfunctioning, pressing hard, fast, and dangerously into my internal organs. I continued to walk out the door, everything shaking. I should never have driven, but a homing device had kicked in. I needed to be out of the world’s sight. A spontaneous mantra leapt into my head, repeating again and again: “Just get home . . . just get home . . . just get home.” I made it to the car, fumbling to get the key in the ignition. Thankfully, the car in front had left and it was relatively easy to pull out. Who knows what damage I might have done otherwise. I made a U-turn on the street and came to the stop sign at the first main intersection. Instead of making a right turn, traveling to the next street, and then going left, I tried to make it all the way across Kingsway Avenue. I just missed getting hit. Even as I said to myself, I should not be driving, I could not stop. Just get home . . . just get home . . . just get home continued in an endless loop. I had nothing to compare this feeling to—ever. The closest, perhaps, would be a few years later while driving home from Whistler, with the terrifying realization dawning on me that I was seriously coming down with something and it was hitting hard. At least an hour away from home, alone in the dark of night, I drove as fast as possible, making it through the door in time to say to myself, “OK, now anything can happen.” And it did; I went under with the worst case of food poisoning I’d ever had, not to rise again for four days except to cancel appointments and crawl to the bathroom. That night after making it home from the Howard Johnson was worse. I opened the window wide, sat in my window box, and started smoking, the need for cigarettes being the only compulsion strong enough to trump my home-obsessed thoughts; I hadn’t smoked in years but had picked some up at the local gas station. My new mantra was holy shit. I couldn’t stop thinking it, saying it out loud every once in a while. I felt like I could just smoke forever. I couldn’t get enough smoke into my lungs. I felt like Psyche after Eros abandoned her—longing for a cliff to throw herself from, with none in sight. I simply could not stop.

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Never have I ever experienced anything quite like it before or since. The closest was when I heard that the family doctor I had been seeing for years had been sexually assaulted, her skull nearly crushed by a tenant to whom she had rented the basement suite of her house. She had managed to fight back and crawl to a neighbor’s home, which was the only thing that saved her life. That time, the mantra that came into my head and refused to leave for many days was Jesus f$% &*. I couldn’t stop thinking it, repeating it out load in moments alone, although it was nothing I had ever said before. I have no idea where it came from, but they were the only words that fit. I smoked my way through a feminist video a student had mailed me earlier that month, attempting to glean some strength. Close to 3:00 a.m., I became aware of the beautiful bouquet of two dozen violet roses that he had bought me the week earlier. They were starting to wilt. The sight and memory ignited a rush of fire through me. Impulsively, I grabbed a handful of the soft, pale petals from the crystal vase, jumped back into my vehicle, drove the two blocks to his home, and threw the dying petals by the door of his truck and again at the entrance to his apartment. I’m not sure why I had to do this. I just needed to do something, anything to acknowledge what had happened, anything to send back something of what had been forced into me when I saw his hands on her hips. To a passing stranger, I must have looked quite mad, like the woman from the sad country song who slashes the tires of her cheating man’s truck. Except that I was, thankfully, armed simply with rose petals. As I threw them, a momentary relief entered my being. “Take that!” It did not last long. I died in bed all night long. No chance of sleep, I just closed my eyes, trying to will the pain away. I prayed to Xenophon to bring some peace. It was close to seven the next morning when I finally fitfully drifted off and into a vivid psychoidal dreamscape. In my dream: I woke to a different reality. I was in a different home, although it was mine. I walked out of the bedroom to find the man I loved on the couch. He stood and embraced me with such a force of love I felt my whole chest spontaneously open to him. I have never known such an embrace. I knew this man. We were together, in love. I woke again, now curious to see who would be around the corner as I walked the halls of this other house, also my own. A tall, elegant East Indian man with his two young boys sat around a desk in his office. He was showing them something on the computer. The four of us were a family. I woke a third time to walk into a room where a party was being held in celebration of a book release. My husband, a third man, round and joyous, was present with me. We were surrounded by a large, loving community. (Author’s dream journal, June 2009) It was as if Xenophon had immediately answered my prayer with these dream fragments, these three men, these potential future lives. All three said, resoundingly, I would love and be loved again. This pain would not be eternal.

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I only slept an hour or two at most. Even with the dreams, I felt as empty as an eggshell with its insides blown out through the tiny hole in the bottom. I forced myself out of the house for a walk around the seawall, hoping I could rediscover the cloud of dragonflies I had spontaneously come upon a few days ago, to gain some solace. I hoped not to run into anyone, especially not clients or students, in this distressed, undone state. But there were no dragonflies and there was no relief. I realized with a sudden start that it was possible he remained completely oblivious to everything—imagined I would be out of silence the next day and that we would see each other soon. The thought was unbearable. My next obsession began: how to end it. I don’t want to see him, I thought. Perhaps an email, short and sweet, let him figure it out—a simple notification that our relationship ended at 11:30 p.m. the previous evening. I understood in this moment for the first time why people end relationships by email or text. Instead, I called, omitting details, and said, “We need to talk.” We set a time to meet at our park the next afternoon. It was clear from my tone and the felt sense between us that something big was up. I did not try to reassure him. He agreed to be there. I was the first to arrive and was perched on the edge of a park bench when he drove up. I was resolved. I had never been more sure of anything in my life. I knew what I needed to do. I wanted him out of my life. I had asked for sight on the longest day of the year, and not an hour later searing, brilliant, and painful light had pierced through me. Less than a month later, we were married.

The commitment ceremony: lost on Naxos The day of the summer solstice, he had had a bad accident at work and ended up at the emergency room. He felt he couldn’t call me because he did not want to interrupt my solitude. This incident had thrown him into deep contemplation of our relationship. Apparently, he had sent an email expressing his concerns—an email I never received. With the now almost predictable combination of his words, the missing email, and my desire to believe him, the pendulum of our relationship swung once more from agony to ecstasy. I proposed to Nicolas that it would be best if we married gradually. There were three lunar eclipses in an 18-month period, so we decided to marry in three phases, each marked by an eclipse: the first our individual commitment ceremony, followed by a second community ceremony five months later, and the final legal ceremony one year after that, at the winter solstice full-moon eclipse. I had been aware of eclipses ever since my dream with Xenophon, and over the last couple of years had continued to have numinous dreams of eclipses. I researched the symbolism of an eclipse in mythology and religion and came up with little that satisfied me. In Jung’s collected works, the symbol of the eclipse is pretty much absent. To me, the eclipse seemed a perfect symbol of the sacred marriage—the coniunctio of masculine and feminine energies.

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That July, we had our personal commitment ceremony—a beautiful one where we wove ribbons and ropes around our wrists, spoke our personal vows to each other, and then lay down, on a sandy, isolated stretch of beach to do a visualization journey together at the edge of Boundary Bay Regional Park. At the moment of the eclipse, we felt the earth sway beneath us. After, we celebrated with a barbecue of fresh halibut, potatoes with cherry tomatoes, a fresh wild greens salad, and a bottle of Laurent-Perrier Rosé champagne. Nicolas started a large bonfire as the darkness fell. It was mystical. We were seriously struggling again by October. We had not spoken for days. On my way downtown to a Jungian lecture by psychologist and Syracuse professor David Miller, I spontaneously pulled over and called to invite him to join me. I knew we would both enjoy the evening. We could work things out later. I needed to remember my vows and do my part to keep us together. He was happy to hear from me but declined the invitation. He was starting a new course at the University of British Columbia in the morning, so he wanted to rest and get a good night’s sleep. I felt myself deflate slightly, my hopes of us dancing later that evening quashed. He knew I was spending the rest of the weekend in silence to work on an art project and some dreams. I sighed. “So I guess this means no dancing tonight.” “Yes, I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he replied. I was disappointed but understood and respected this rare display of self-care and focus on his part. I almost changed course and considered cooking a nice dinner for myself at home, but I persevered. It was important to keep my connection to the things I loved, even when we could not be together. Over the years, it seemed he was more and more comfortable dancing without me and I less and less so without him—something I had been incredibly comfortable doing before we started dating. So I pushed myself a little and put on my yellow chiffon top with embroidered black beads and lace around the neck, over my old jeans. With the yellow billowing out all around me, I must have looked like a bumblebee on a stick. When I arrived, I went right for the table at the back where I usually sat, and changed my shoes. A good song was playing, so I hurried to get them on and hit the dance floor. When I looked up, there he was! He stood under the archway at the top of the stairs between the upper and lower dance halls, looking down on the dance floor. He wore jeans and the bamboo T-shirt with the tractor screen print that I had bought him the week before. He looked casual and at ease. I kept staring, not quite trusting my eyes. I believe I might have talked myself out of it being him if he had not been wearing that shirt, such is the extraordinary power of denial. When I looked at him, I did not see my partner. I did not see Nicolas. I saw someone I did not know. I felt a now familiar drop in my stomach and hid behind a large, round trash bin between the table and the bar area. I looked down instinctively, not wanting him to see me. Then he was gone, like an apparition. I danced freely, ecstatically, likely a form of reaction formation—doing the exact opposite of what I felt. I danced how I used to dance when I was single. I didn’t

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break any of “our rules,” but I allowed myself to enjoy the men I danced with, to smile, laugh, and be a little wilder than usual. I took my weekend as planned, worked on a painting, did some active imagination with dreams, and wrote. By Sunday, what had felt so devastating Friday seemed trivial and complex driven. He likely couldn’t sleep as he’d planned and at the last minute, frustrated, thought to go out for a while, I reasoned. I called him late Sunday afternoon and invited him over. In my open state, increased by solitude and soul-work, I said, “I want you to come over and make love to me.” He was there in 30 minutes. A few minutes later, he was naked beneath me on the makeshift bed of pillows and blankets in front of the fire. “Give me your waters,” he said. I responded, slowly bringing myself to orgasm and releasing my ejaculate waters over his naked body. In tantra, a woman’s ejaculate waters are called amrita and are considered to contain healing energies. My waters had become something he experienced as healing both physically and spiritually; he always entered into a deeply restorative, restful place after—his eyes closed softly, floating far away in the bardos. I would rarely disturb him from these states, where he indeed seemed to be sky dancing with the dakinis away from the struggles of this world for a time. It opened an eternal space for us. When he returned from his reverie, he stirred, pulled me to him, and then turned us both so he lay over me. With his right knee, he nudged my legs further apart. As he entered me, he looked into my eyes and said, “I want to be with you when I die.” We made love, close, slow, connected, excruciatingly intimate. I released again. I was so open. And then he asked for my waters again. In tantra, they talk of the waves of ecstasy that one rides, progressing to higher ecstatic states, each energetic wave watched over by a different deity—a very different philosophy of orgasm than the very masculine-driven Masters and Johnson’s stages of sexual arousal. I hesitated, already feeling at the edge of the world. I feared the inevitable depth such an orgasm would evoke. He asked again. I dove down, let myself get lost in sensation, found the edge of my orgasmic wave. It did not want to rise, demanded more time. I forced it some and the forcing was painful, but allowing would have been too dangerous—something might spill from me I could never retrieve. The pushing kept me safe. I moved back and forth between coaxing, pushing, and allowing. My orgasm was a painful ascent, like walking the Inca trail known as the “hike of death” to the best view of Machu Picchu, agonizing, fearful, and a little crazed, before opening to the view of a lifetime. When I let go, rainbows of color flooded through me. I fell on him, and the words burst out of me as if they came directly from my waters, from my body: “May there be no more lies between us.” I convulsed with my need and desire for this to be so, for us not to be torn apart by lies, for things to be clear, for there to be integrity.

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I could feel his emotions stirred. More words erupted from me. “Did you go out dancing Friday night?” As I spoke, I heard myself saying in my mind, I meant to say, “You went dancing Friday night!” He replied before I could correct myself, “No, mm-mm.” His body twitched beneath mine twice in quick succession, spreading heat that entered me. I remember thinking that this must be the energy that lie detectors record. The heat permeated beyond our bodies, into the room. “You didn’t?” I challenged him. “No. Why?” he asked. “I saw you…I was there.” His anger erupted, sharp. “Then why would you ask me?” He fired words at me I hardly heard. His attempt to reverse the tides and make this about me did not work this time . . . I actually felt us end, felt all the threads that intertwined our souls unravel. I knew we were exiled from the garden, never to return. I did not want this. I did not expect this. My new mantra rang through my head: “It ends as it began—with a lie.” In fact, I felt nothing for him then. He had lied. I had never known for sure that he had ever lied to me; a lie of omission is different from one of words. Perhaps if this had come about in any other way—over dinner, a glass of wine, a walk on the beach, at our bench in the park—it would have been different. But the fact that we were so deep in our tantric embrace, a place closer than I had ever been to another living being, a place so vast and undefended that the lie had nowhere to be deflected, it pierced through the center of all my vital organs at once, killing me—killing us. No matter how hard I wanted to after this, I could never find my way back to the home we had created. He had lied to me while in another realm, in another time. I was the water carrier, a priestess, accessing a depth of waters I had never released to any man. He started to dismember, to come undone in slow motion before my eyes, spiraling into a psychotic-like space. “I hate feeling this! I can’t feel this. I don’t want to feel this,” he pleaded. The two worlds he had kept separate for so long had collided, like the Titanic into the iceberg. I felt a genuine compassion for him in that moment. “I don’t want you to feel this either.” I meant it. “I can’t talk more of this now. I need you to leave.” I could not bear him in my home. He did not belong there anymore. He needed to work this out alone—it was his fight, not mine. I could not save him. It was not a logical or rational process, it was just what happened. It was not as if I was without feeling, but the feeling was devoid of attachment, as if the lie had ejected the parts he had projected into me that controlled me from inside (as per Melanie Klein’s theory of projective identification). I was released. He no longer held any sway over me, nor did his words. I was in the cold, icy realm of ultimate truths. Many times since, I have wondered at the extraordinary clarity I felt in this moment. Hillman’s discussion of the icy realm in hell in his book A Blue Fire (1989) offers some insights. He reminds us that the inner circle of hell or Hades is not marked by infernal fires but by utter ice. The ninth circle of the inferno,

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according to Dante, is entirely ice. Hillman makes the distinction between the night sea journey of the hero and the descent into the underworld, stating that the hero returns from his journey better off: [W]hereas the nekyia takes the soul into a depth for its own sake so that there is no ‘return.’ The night sea journey is further marked by a building of internal heat (tapas), whereas nekyia goes below that pressured containment, that tempering in the fires of passion, to a zone of utter coldness. (p. 262) —a place of glacial coldness, psychosis, madness, and the cruelest intentions. The icy chasm of Christianism’s shadow is a realm of radical importance that cannot be reached with Christianism’s bleeding heart. An archetypal approach to this zone follows the homeopathic maxim: like cures like. The nekyia into hell’s ice requires coldness. If any connection is to be made, we must be able to work with the cruel extremities of ice itself. We can meet Cain, Judas, and Lucifer by being aware of our own desires to be false and betray, to kill our brother and to kill ourselves, that our kiss has death in it and that there is a piece of soul that would live forever cast out from both human and heavenly company . . . The heart has a coldness, a place of reserve like the refrigerator that preserves, holds, protects, isolates, suspends animation and circulation, an alchemical congelation of substance. The cruelty and mean despising are the surroundings of a private sense of ultimate deepening . . . Here is a soul figure who is neither flighty, nor sensuously rippling, nor brooding moods and emotions. Instead the glitter of ice reflects perfection; nothing but crystallized insights and sharp-edged truths are good enough. Desire for absolutism, absolution and perfection . . . The curative urge conceals the fear of the Ninth Circle, of going all the way down to those depths that are so quickly and surely called psychotic. (pp. 263–264) Nicolas seemed to momentarily descend into a hell realm, while a feeling of ultimate, absolute truth crystallized in my being, which was not entirely unpleasant. The betrayal cast us out of the archetypal field of the puer and puella, and we entered the territory of initiation. While researching for a class I was teaching on the connections between depth psychology and tantra, I found a passage in the book Passionate Enlightenment, by Miranda Shaw (1994), that states a man who disrespects a woman in the realm of tantra enters hell: Unconditional respect for women was so integral to the Tantric ethos that men who failed to take seriously this aspect of Tantra were severely criticized and rebuked . . . Male practitioners were warned to dispense with any denigrating attitudes they might have about women and admonished that these were incompatible with the Tantric path. The special commitments of a

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Tantric initiate include, as the culminating vow, a pledge never to disparage or belittle women. In the chapter entitled “Praise of Women,” the Candamahårosana-tantra argues in the strongest possible terms against the denigration or ascetical avoidance of women: Even if you fear bondage and death thereby, Withstand all that. On this path women must not be abandoned! ........................ Never abandon women! Heed the Buddha’s words! If you do otherwise, That transgression will land you in hell! (pp. 47–48) It is possible to leave a relationship and not abandon or disrespect the other, but it requires a depth of integrity beyond the consciousness of the puer. The disrespect that I felt from Nicolas brought me to this sharp, cold territory where I felt utterly free of illusion and desire. We did not meet again for several months. When we did, we sat on our park bench once more. Before our meeting, a vision had come to me of us on that very bench, a rainbow arched above and around our heads and a circle of ash and skulls arched below our feet into the earth. Together they formed a perfect symbol of our relationship, at once both spiritual and beautiful, destructive and death-bringing, a true union of the opposites. And when I sat on that bench beside him for real, I perhaps at no other point in my life had felt so connected to both heaven and hell, love and death. The power of the upper world and the lower world were palpable as we spoke truth, talked of our love, raged at our loss, and remembered how well we laughed together. I had pulled up and parked behind his truck at the west side of the park. He jumped out and walked toward my car as I turned off the ignition. I sucked in a weighted breath and slowly opened the door. It was dusk and the sky was turning. “Do you know one of your headlights is out?” “No. Which one?” I wondered how long I had been driving around with one headlight. I felt the familiar warmth spread over me at the sound of his voice and the knowledge there was someone in the world who cared whether I had one or two headlights working. “I can fix it if you like,” he offered. “No, but thank you. I’ll drive to Max’s garage in the morning and have the bulb replaced.”

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We walked in silence to our bench. We both waited for the other to start. He inhaled and the words rushed out: “So what now? Have you made plans to have me shipped off to Zurich for full analysis?” “No, I think you need more extensive inpatient treatment at this point.” We both laughed. “I had a dream,” he started carefully. “We were entering an ancient ritual that was to take place in a cave. I was supposed to give you something to complete the ceremony, but I held it back because I realized that you did not want me. You wanted the ritual but you didn’t want me.” His voice shook, and my eyes dampened. “Do you really think I don’t love you, that I won’t miss you?” I stared at the leaves of the tree bending to almost touch the setting sun, then turned to him. “I was reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead and came across a line that said when you pass out of one of the stages in the bardos, the body will excrete a golden drop of liquid through the sexual organs. It gave me a shiver because earlier that very morning, I’d had such a drop of amberlike liquid slip from my vagina. It made me wonder whether all this was just an illusion . . . that somewhere in some time, I was already dead, my soul now traveling through the bardos, each choice I made crucial to finding rebirth or liberation.” “What does that make me—just some shade in your dream, your death?” “I don’t know. Maybe you’re also traveling through the bardos, and for this brief moment we met.” “I always love being with you.” I looked up. He was staring down. “Was any of it real?” I questioned out loud. “Of course. It still is.” He placed his hand over mine. I slowly turned my palm up to his, and he twined our fingers together and grasped tight. “You said the night you danced bachata with Tina was the first time it ever happened. Is that true?” “Yes. I thought that we were over. It was impulsive.” He looked down at the grass at his feet. I felt into the pause after his words, my head energetically stretched up as if it was searching for an answer in the empty sky, the truth. My stomach turned. “When you say that, I feel my stomach start to go off.” I pulled my hand back to my side. “No, it was not the first time,” he confessed. “Thank you,” I said as a strange relief flooded me. I had been struggling with stomach problems that had started while in the relationship, but I had never before caught the exact moment when they erupted. I opened up more. “You know when I was on Whidbey last month, just before we started the women’s sweat lodge, I was walking towards the enormous bonfire deep in the forest. It was tended by the men holding ceremonial space for the women they loved. When I saw the fire and how beautiful it was, a deep wave of grief hit me that you would never tend a fire like that for me, that you would not be that man in my life.”

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Rare tears flashed in his eyes as he said, “I am sorry, truly. I was never taught to respect relationships, marriage, women. In my culture, I was taught to take women and relationships for granted.” I appreciated his honesty. I felt the truth of his words. I did not want to leave that bench—felt I could stay forever in this space, navigating death and life, never surrendering to either. In these precious last moments, the “real” came through— real love, real eros, real pain, real communication. I was hungry for the real, no matter how painful. My body rooted itself to this time between our life together and our lives apart. That night, I felt like I was on a vision quest. The dreamworld flooded me and felt more real than this one. I am in a tantric circle. I am paired up with a young boy about nine years old (although he looks much older). At first this seems fine to me. I imagine it will be gentle, innocent, sweet. For the first round of connection, I am to dance, and I dance to his music. I stop and truly move into a deep, soulful, and sensuous connection. He is moved and begins to dance with me. Many watch the dance. There is one man who judges or criticizes me, saying that my shoulders are too high when I turn, and it closes me down. The young boy seems excited by the dance and our connection. We separate to prepare for the next round. I am with a priestess who expertly stimulates me anally in preparation for the next level. I drop deeply into my felt sense. When I come out, I have the realization that I can’t do the next ceremony with this boy. It would be illegal/abusive because of our age difference. I could lose my license to practice. (Again, I had been thinking it could be easy and innocent—he could place his finger inside me and I could run the energy—a gentle initiation.) Then I see the abuse underneath. There is a higher group in the marriage bed, and I know this has been my test and I will be joining them. In fact, now another one will come to partner me in the finalizing of this ritual. I wake with the song running through my head: “You can never go home again. You can never go home again. You can never dance the way you did back then. You’re far from home but you’re not alone—you can never . . .” (Author’s dream journal, toward the end of May 2010) The dream shows where I was divided, the place my sensuality took precedence over seeing clearly. If I was going to move more into my own virginal self and further out of the puella complex, I had to see not only his destructive behavior but my own. I wanted the relationship. I did not want to see that he was not ready for what I desired—that kind of commitment. What I thought would be sweet and innocent was incredibly damaging. The divide between puella and virgin left me vulnerable to his destructive shadow. I did not want to see that he was not mature enough, whole enough, responsible enough to be the partner that I desired. He was evolving, and there were flashes of the man he might become, but if I was honest, he was not that man now and very possibly never would be. The dream

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also suggested there was something abusive on my side for not acknowledging this. I had to pull back what I longed for from him and provide that for myself—protection, a home, a feeling of safety and responsibility for my life. I also needed to reclaim the core of my sexual experience. Like many women in a relationship, I had given him too much power erotically. It was my preparation, my protection, my communication, my commitment, my inner work, and my surrender to the ecstatic depths that had allowed me access to my deeper sensual nature. Although there were moments that bridged into a more mature and authentic love for us, the majority of our relationship was characterized by narcissistic love, which is more cathected to the self than to really seeing the other as other. We both saw what we wanted the other to be through the projected anima-animus conflated with the mother and father imagoes, and not the reality, not the true face of the other. His euphemistic self-description of being “a little immature at times” mirrored my own immaturity of wanting him to care more about me, to be more emotionally mature, so that he could be my safety, my home. Was his dream true in that I wanted the ritual and not the man? In my dream, after our separation, the priestess stimulated me anally, which suggested the healing I needed was around the first chakra: the center of security, safety, home, and foundation. I projected my feeling of home onto him. We often talked of the home we would create together in South America. Letting go of this dream left a core grief, the grief that awakened in me as I woke with the song lyrics repeating, “You can never go home again.” I had to be my own home. That same night, I dreamt of letting go. I was lucid in that dream and consciously let go. I was quite high and began to fall—with some fear, but I kept letting go. I expected to hit the earth hard, but it received me. In losing him, I lost a sense of solid ground, and this sent me spiraling through space, falling through time, falling through the earth towards my own center. I tried to bring things to completion alone. The next day, I woke and started out to Boundary Bay Regional Park Beach, where we had done the commitment ceremony almost a year before. I walked to the isolated area where we had shared our vows. As I approached, I noticed smoke drifting upwards and was confused. There was no one in sight. Curious, I walked on to find a huge, abandoned driftwood fire still flaming. Someone had clearly tried to extinguish it with sand, but it had revived itself and stood alive before me. There was no one around for miles in all directions. I was overcome with emotion: the fire was still burning. I sat on a large piece of driftwood by the fire, and my vows came back to me . . . I commit to making you and us a priority in my life. I commit to protecting and honoring the sacred temenos between us and to protecting our connection from energy that would deplete or dishonor the full power of us—our potential to travel together into the realms of ecstasy and communion. I commit to speaking my truth to you, even when it is difficult. I commit to opening more completely—risking love.

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I commit to holding a vision of our best selves—our highest potential as individuals and as partners. I commit to supporting your dreams and fiercely protecting your freedom. And above all to inflict no harm and to respect your soul. Had I done enough? I made offerings of dried sage, lavender, and rose petals to the spirits and tossed them onto the flames. I prayed for an end to the violence between the genders, at all levels, including the subtle levels not easily seen. It was a big prayer. We tried one last time. We shared dinner at our favorite restaurant and then went back to my place. That night, I opened sexually as I never had before; I decided to just let go. It was only after my complete surrender and the unlocking of this last stronghold of my deep sexual nature, a moment where I gave all of myself, that it was over. He instinctively knew the place I held back and in an epic reversal blamed this protective stance for his infidelity. I blamed his straying nature for the holding back. This standoff seemed to be the killing field of power and blame we could not escape; neither would allow defeat. I believe my descent to pure ecstasy broke the spell. I died there. I let it take me all the way down till I had nothing left. I asked him to stay the night, his other main complaint having been that I liked to sleep alone. As I drifted off, I felt open to us as never before. He woke an hour later and departed silently in the night without saying goodbye—leaving behind all he’d said he ever wanted. I heard him leave. I felt every miniscule movement of departure in his body. When I heard the door softly close, I rolled over and sobbed. I did not know it then, but I was pregnant.

Gypsy In December of 2011, I traveled to Romania with a four-day stopover in Paris. In the words of the renowned Mazatec shaman Maria Sabina: There is a world beyond ours, a world that is far away and nearby and invisible. And there is where God lives, where the dead live, the spirits and the saints, a world where everything has already happened and everything is known. That world talks. (Schultes & Hofmann, 1979, p. 144) On this trip to Romania that world talked to me through my dreams. The trip was broken down into four sections of four days at various locations, four representing, according to Marie Louise von Franz, wholeness and the completing function of the feminine principle. My intention was to connect with my ancestral Romanian roots, grieve the loss of my relationship, break any final bonds to the demon lover complex, and embrace a deeper and more complex understanding of the feminine. In other words, to return to my own home. In her book Outercourse (1992), feminist philosopher Mary Daly writes of a “fourth spiral galaxy” comprising moments of momentous “re-membering.” For her, places in time and space exist as doors to this fourth reality. Daly associates these “doors to four” with “Lucky-Discoverings” and “Happy Homecomings.”

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I arrived in Paris exhausted and had a long, dreamless sleep. The next morning, I rode the Métro to the Denfert-Rochereau station then trekked through torrential rains to the Catacombs of Paris to pay my respects to the underworld. In this way, I began my pilgrimage that would spiral me from the mythological landscape of the underworld through Transylvania, the Carpathian Mountains, and the hauntingly frayed beauty of the Romanian countryside, all the way to the contemplative monasteries of Bukovina for Christmas Day. To enter the Catacombs, I left the bustle of Paris streets behind and descended nearly 20 meters down a narrow spiral of stairs. I was led eventually to the threshold of the ossuary, its archway inscribed with a warning: Stop! Here lies the Empire of Death. I walked alone, vacillating between feeling strangely comforted by such a direct, visible connection with death and feeling overwhelmed by the brutal reality of being in the presence of some six million people’s remains. I tried to take in what this meant for my short life. I was cold and damp afterwards, as if the chill wind from the bones had passed through me. That night, I reflected in my journal on the death of my relationship. A faded image of him dancing with another woman, holding one hand to his heart as he used to do with me. Her red dress, matching red shoes, radiant smile. He’d gone to her after dropping me off at home from our date—dinner and a Van Morrison concert. I had wanted to go dancing after, but he was concerned it was too early after everything we had been through. A week later, I followed a strange intuition to check the pictures of that salsa event online and there they were, so happy, sending my pregnant self spiraling through time. I was sitting in the airport, on my way back from teaching in California, when I saw the images. I felt a wave of utter humiliation hit. An unexpected kindness from a security guard and a concerned look from a male traveler sent me into soft tears most of the journey home. I believe it was the intense stress of this visceral revelation that led me to miscarry so early into the pregnancy. There was no way of denying at this point in our discourse that he knew fully what these actions would do to me and chose to do them anyway. The word humiliation comes from the Latin humus, meaning earth. Near this time, I had a dream that suggested I needed to let the humiliation change me: There is a man with a knife. He is dangerous. I am around him but I don’t think he is after me. Something breaks with the knife and it is pushed hard against my solar plexus. I try to hold it back but it pierces through me. There is someone, a man I trust and love, who is stitching me back together. I have no anesthetic. At first I don’t cry out in pain—later I do—when I see it has gone straight through me, through my heart, and he starts stitching up my back. I am in bed and realize now it will be about sweating, resting, and letting the healing take place. It could

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have been a death blow. The man is talking of death alchemy and allowing for humiliation to transform me. (Author’s dream journal, 2010) I wrote in my journal: I thought that we were beginning again but in reality we were ending. It was a moment in time when life and death were side by side—a perfect coniunctio—like my dream of dying in ecstasy as the earth made love to me. Yet death and life together is always more—it was our child conceived at the moment of our ending, forever lost. The physical life lost, her imaginal presence still alive in me. He did not stay with me that night—this life . . . (Author’s journal, 2011) Grief continued to surge through my being as I finally let go into sleep. The false bridegroom is a man who destabilizes a woman. Underneath the feeling of connection and romance, he is like an irritant that gets under her skin and agitates the fabric of her being so she no longer feels at home in her body. He confuses her understanding of things and undermines her intuitive knowing. As with the demon lover, the complex state that he produces is a reflection of his own disembodied state, the exile he feels from the feminine side of his soul—the ground of his being, which is constantly overridden with his disavowed longing and need. His weapons are charm, romance, words, and sexual stimulation. He stimulates but rarely satisfies. He does not follow through but dramatically undoes things in the end. He promises partnership but destroys the very foundation it could be built on. He loves but does not have the capacity to follow through on that love; he can’t hold onto it. He speaks the language of fidelity, commitment, and devotion but actively manipulates, betrays, lies. He is present only in his absence. It is possible to be married to one—alone, lost on Naxos. I had felt more alone in the relationship than when I was single, yet I kept reaching towards the elusive romantic dream. The false bridegroom is not the demon lover; his violence does not reach the same degrees. Yet the healing stages from being in such a relationship are remarkably like the stages of healing from the demon lover complex. In this way, an encounter with the false bridegroom offers a woman initiation into a deeper level of healing from the collective complex of the demon lover. That night, Xenophon visited in my dreams again, and I spontaneously entered an ecstatic state. Xenophon played an essential role in my healing process from both the rape and my relationship. In fact, the original dream suggests that in the imaginal world, he kept the dissociated aspect of my soul safe—the part of me that split off during the trauma, the homeless, enraged adolescent. He protected and contained her until I was strong enough to take her back. At heart, my relationship to Xenophon remains deeply mysterious, with more unknown than known. I have had a hard time maintaining my own belief in him and our relationship at times. Yet any time I have ever reached towards him, I have been

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powerfully met with insights, integration, psychic clearing, ecstatic travel, hope, and direction. I had been working with Xenophon as an ally figure in my active imaginations for many years. After reading Jeff Raff’s 1997 article and subsequent book (2006) on “the ally,” I had a strong belief, based on my own felt sense of the first meeting with Xenophon, that he was my ally. It was in the psychoidal realm of dreaming that I first encountered him (as described in Chapter 3). Raff describes the ally as at once friend, teacher, guide, lover, healer, and husband or wife. “The ally enters the life of the modern individual with the promise of ecstasy, love, knowledge and with the gift of the power of the imagination” (1997, p. 121). Raff goes on to describe his own encounter with the ally at the age of 20: One night I was showering and found myself confronted with an experience unlike anything I had ever had before. I felt that the shower cubicle was filling up with the presence of a being whom I could not see but felt very distinctly. This being was outside my range of experience and seemed very alien to me. Instead of being frightened, however, I was filled with ecstasy and love and felt as if I began to cry with joy. In a very incoherent and uncontrolled way I spoke to this being and it spoke to me though in a fashion I could not understand. Instead of speaking with words we felt each other’s thoughts and moods. In a flash I knew my life would never be the same, and I was glad. (p. 111) At the time, Raff had no way to conceptualize the experience. He was relieved eventually to come across the concept of the ally in shamanic literature. “Mircea Eliade, in his fascinating book Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1974) characterizes shamanism as the art of the ecstatic” (p. 112). The ally helps the individual navigate the imaginal realms and protects him or her from harm. Raff demonstrates there are consistent themes present in encounters with the ally: First is the theme of love and marriage: The ally comes not simply as a guide but as a lover. Second the ally comes to impart wisdom and teaching. Third the young man or woman chosen by the ally usually resists until threatened with death. (p. 113) He goes on to note that not all contacts with the ally include all three elements, but they will always include one. Raff connects the ancient shamanic concept of the ally to the heart of Jungian psychology when he suggests that Philemon, the imaginal figure and guide of Jung, who first appeared in a dream, was Jung’s ally. Philemon eventually became such a “real” and continuous presence in Jung’s life that in his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he describes Philemon as a guru. When I started to work with the imaginal figure of Xenophon, it soon became clear he was my ally, a powerful force that continued to impact me from beyond

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this world. It was in this exceptionally real world of the psychoidal that he first appeared—the in-between realm filled with terror, love, and ecstasy. I had spontaneously slipped into this realm on more than one occasion, so I understood the need for protection and guidance from the ally—not that such safeguards aren’t also needed in this middle world! While the alchemists considered the psychoidal an intermediary world between matter and spirit, I have to say that any time I have entered this realm, it has always left me with a sense of being more real than anything I have ever experienced here on earth or in regular dreaming. Raff also argues for the profound reality of this place: My “imaginary” experience was more profoundly real than any other experience I had ever had, in any world. Imagination of this kind is quite simply another reality, where the most marvelous and transformative events can occur. (p. 120) If forced to attempt a definition of the psychoidal, I would agree: it is another reality. In the midst of a dream, my cells would start to vibrate, then another world would open, a world that is beside this one. In his book Ecstasy (1989), Robert Johnson talks of allies as spirit husbands and wives. He also discusses that it is rare for an individual to have both a physical husband-wife and a spiritual one, giving different examples of how these attempts most often end in failure or even danger. One world interferes with the other, and there is deadly envy on one side or both. Nicolas was always threatened by my deep connection and devotion to my dreamworld; perhaps if he could have understood it more and seen how one could enhance the other, we would have had a better chance. My reflections might have been coming together in the metaphysical realm, but in this one I was not well. The next morning, I emptied a package of Emergen-C into my water and washed down a handful of vitamins, then headed off to the Louvre. I started to feel worse on the subway. By the time I reached the large, mall-like labyrinth that promised in some enigmatic way to eventually lead to the Louvre, I admitted I should really be in bed. It was, however, my last day in Paris, so I decided to tour around just a little and then start back for the hotel and rest. When I returned to my hotel, I made tea in my room, crawled into bed, and dreamt: I am watching a video when someone asks me who I am. Before I can answer, a voiceover-like commentary begins: “She is the embodiment of home. She represents home. And is the embodiment of it—the homeland—but the fact that she lived some time as a gypsy allowed her this, allowed for this.” In the dream, it all makes perfect sense, and long-buried emotions rise. I sit alone under a tree, my back resting against its ancient, rough strength. Many people start to come to me, sisters and women with children. Then grandmother comes. She says, “It is fine if you don’t.” I know instinctively what she means—it will be fine if I don’t have children. I am not sure if I believe her. I don’t

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dare! Although it is clear to me she is most sincere. She says, “It is enough for your sisters to have children.” She communicates to me directly that she likes the diversity. She smiles, empathetic, knowing the pain her words evoke. “I already have enough granddaughters with children.” Other family members come toward me. They surround me. It feels good, as if I am the embodiment of home. I feel very connected to the earth. (Author’s dream journal, 2011) The next day, I had a late afternoon flight to Romania. I spent the morning reflecting on the dream and packing things up, then took a mid-afternoon shuttle bus to Charles de Gaulle Airport. By the time I had checked in and was waiting for my flight, I felt like I was dying. I started to run a fever and had to blow my nose seemingly every couple of seconds. I became that dreaded traveler no one wants to sit beside. Naturally, only on this leg of the journey, I had not been able to prebook my seat. I was stuck in the middle of the plane, over the wing, between two passengers who gracefully seemed quite compassionate rather than irritated with my compromised health. Upon landing, I was assailed with aggressive masculine energy, trying to win a fare to the city center. I was tricked into a ride with a man whose car wore the persona of an official cab company: a yellow and black taxi sign attached to a number of electric cords that plugged into the lighter to illuminate it. He removed the sign from the roof as soon as I entered the vehicle. As he started to drive, I realized the fare machine did not work. I asked him to let me out to find another taxi, only to be met with loud attempts to reassure me. Too sick to really deal with the situation, I quickly acquiesced to his insistent reasoning. We agreed on a flat rate—matching the suggested rate in my guidebook—for him to take me to the Epoch Hotel. I felt a little better when I arrived at the five-star hotel I had treated myself to for the four nights in Bucharest, gratefully entering my suite with its kingsize bed and pristine white sheets. I crawled in, and my body gave way to the fever. I soaked straight through all the sheets that night, barely conscious, and scarcely left the bed for the next three days and nights. My body was in so much pain that at times I would turn the movie channel on low; although I could not concentrate on anything, the sense of another presence in the room comforted me. That first night on Romanian soil, as I was descending, twisting into the infernal night, I dreamt: I am walking the back alleys of an unfamiliar city. An old gypsy woman calls to me, beckons with an electric, powerful presence. She is disheveled and wearing a knee-length coat wrapped loosely around her hunched body. I feel a deep power from her and don’t question her silent gestures, which bring me ever closer, closer to her and further from public view. In silent communication, I know she holds something secret she wants to show me. I vacillate between reverence and the type condescending, curious disposition I

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might offer a clown in a circus who was gesturing, with silent white gloves, at a hidden treasure. We smile at one another with our mouths. Her eyes pierce me. I am mesmerized by the mischievous hazel sparkle of her left eye reflecting the wet rain on the cobblestoned street below. She holds me prisoner to another dimension. It all happens so quickly that I have no time to think. I follow this ancient being, a cross between a homeless wanderer and a sorcerer, a witch. She fascinates and frightens me. Her smile stretches longer across her face as she teases about revealing what is hidden beneath her coat that she wants only me to see. Perhaps she has my crystal ball, some jewelry to sell, or some dark magic book of spells. She pulls the coat aside. I see dried blood, wild hair, and the staring eyes of the dead. Her right arm wraps gently around the severed head of a man, gently pushing it to her abdomen like a beloved talisman. Death like a dark arrow shoots straight through my unguarded heart. I wake with fresh icy shivers exploding from of my fevered, drenched body. There is nothing that can shake the image from my mind and being . . . no matter how I wish to be free of it. It penetrates me. I can’t help but wonder if it foretells the future of my own death. I wonder if I will survive this journey in my ancestral country of the walking gypsies. (Author’s dream journal, December 18, 2011). Almost exactly 11 months earlier, I’d had the following dream, which played a large role in me planning this trip to Romania. I am singled out for a psychodrama. I fear they will make me redo one of the earlier scenes I have already completed and judge it as inadequate. I am chosen by the director to play the scene. The only direction I am given is to be making a decision. A man enters with some props. I go offstage, place a bright scarf in my hair, and take a glass bowl to act as my crystal ball. I set the bowl down beside some tarot cards. Somehow, I know the missing crystal ball is to come from Romania. When the director originally chose me for this part he said, “Thanks for being yourself, for not acting.” I start to fall into an ecstatic state and travel deep into alternate time and space. I come forward, move the candles. I am about to choose a card and then further reflect on the card through gazing into the crystal ball. (Author’s dream journal, January 2011) In active imagination with this dream, I felt a strong pull to bridge the dream with the crystal ball. Bridging is a shamanic practice that in its simplest form equates to finding the dream object in waking life. The object is then considered blessed and can act as both a representation of and a medium between the realms of dreamtime and everyday consciousness. I felt I was meant to find it in Romania. I did not do any “rational” thinking around this or any research into how likely I was to find crystal in Romania; I simply trusted, perhaps based on a superficial, collective stereotype of a Roma fortune-teller.

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I spent my second to last day in Bucharest in the hotel spa, having a mud treatment and massage followed by hours in and out of the eucalyptus steam room, trying to draw the last of the sickness from my body. I asked the strong European woman who was massaging me if she knew of anywhere I might find a crystal ball in the city. It felt a little like cheating to ask rather than to be completely trusting and follow my intuition. When she directed me to the main shopping plaza I was sure she had not understood me properly. I asked again and she wrote the name of the plaza down for me. On my last day before traveling to Transylvania, I checked out the plaza—just in case. Arriving in the insanely crowded city center, then passing through the huge, rotating doors that opened into a sea of human mid-mall purgatory, I was even more convinced this plastic, cheap mall space would not house my dream-inspired object. I don’t know what I had imagined, but I was certainly not able to see through to any soul-life alive in the pre-Christmas shopping rush and the sticky sweet, manic energy that surrounding the blocks of glitzy stores punctuated by rundown hallways. I made it around two corners and asked at two separate information desks that kept guiding me on with broken English, an encouraging or condescending smile, and a vague pointing gesture that suggested, “Yes, just a little further, around such and such a corner you are sure to find what you seek.” Although I fully recognized I was the irritating tourist who could only speak a few Romanian words, I still found the energetic output to understand the others’ comparatively much better English enormous. My frayed nerves buzzed from too much everything. I gave up the quest quickly, rationalizing I was still not feeling well and “this” was not “the” place. I remained at the borderland of health and illness for the entire trip—well enough to continue on, ill enough that my energy was extremely low. The hard winter, the smoke in public restaurants, and the stress of travel all colluded to keep me from fully recovering. I dreamt one night in Brasov that it would be over a month before I started to improve. This seemed impossible for me to imagine at the time, but I took such a steep downturn when I returned home that even had I wanted to, I could not ignore the dream of the gypsy woman and the severed head. I was diagnosed with walking pneumonia, and despite all the bedrest, medication, and treatment, I continued to worsen frighteningly. At one point, with so little energy and a cough so bad that I no longer felt any embarrassment when it hit—I was too focused on surviving the onslaught and breathing once more—I forced myself back to my doctor’s office, half a block from home. His concern was palpable, and he sent me for X-rays. It was there, while waiting my turn in the little changing cubicle with the shoddy, dusty, peach cloth hung over a rail like a shower curtain that it hit me: this could be it—this could really be it . . . This not-too-distant future remained unknown to me in Romania, and I continued with my rigorous travel schedule. I spent some days in the medieval town of Sighis¸oara in the heart of Transylvania. The small, fortified town is the legendary birthplace of Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia, member of the house of Dra˘ cules¸ti, also known by his patronymic name Dracula—otherwise known as Vlad Tepes, the

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historical figure on which Bram Stoker’s Dracula was built. I practiced active imagination in my spacious, rustic suite with the window that opened to the thick fog and the faint light that shone through it from the main gateway. The streets were deserted, as almost no one visited the town in the dead of winter. I frequented the family restaurant across the lane, which had the most extraordinary polenta, cream, and cabbage rolls I have ever tasted. Every evening, I had the whole of the central dining cavern to myself. One night, I headed out into the fog and made my way to a trail that followed the perimeter of the 15th-century Gothic church and its cemetery; there was no one on the trail, and a fresh blanket of snow began to accumulate. As I passed the church boundaries, heading back to my pension, I was arrested by the otherworldly beauty of a tree just outside the church grounds; it became a living presence, covered with virginal snow, glowing as if lit from within and beyond. A great calm blew through me. A few days later, my driver returned to pick me up, and we continued on through the northern slopes of the eastern Carpathian Mountains to Bukovina. In preparation for the trip, I had researched the different options available for travel through Transylvania. The combination of my nonexistent grasp on the Romanian language and the mid-winter time of year led me, in the end, to hire a driver rather than rent a car. A Romanian colleague I knew and trusted in Vancouver recommended a driver, as her extended family had traveled through Romania with him a few years earlier. Things had started out smoothly; Dorin picked me up on time and at the right location in Bucharest. He was helpful and knew the history of the different sites in great detail. I had been on my own for the four days in Sighis¸oara when he picked me up again for the drive to Bukovina. He initially said it would be about six hours in total. At the seven-hour mark, when I grew tired of imagining our destination was just around the next corner, I pointed out we were over time. “How much further will it be?” Dorin confessed mischievously, “Another three hours at least.” My voice faltered, and all I managed was an astounded, “What!” He responded with, “See? I knew if I told you it would be this long, you would never have agreed to make the full trip in one day.” He clearly felt not only entitled to have withheld this bit of information but also quite justified, given my “strong reaction.” As enraged as I felt, I also was exquisitely aware of my compromised position. The roads were icy and isolated, with steep drops to the right, and it was starting to get dark amidst the vast Carpathians. I was stuck with this guy and this ride no matter how long it took. I forced myself to find something to be grateful for in that moment: that I was not driving alone and that he was at least familiar with the route. When I arrived at the pension in Bukovina, the only accommodation I had let my driver arrange, it was clear that the family tensions in the home ran thick. The husband and son had agreed to drive me around to the monasteries over Christmas Eve and Day. The son was free on the 24th and the father on the 25th. The son spoke impeccable English and thus started following me around the monasteries, chatting away. I think he imagined it his job to play tour guide; I had to specify I preferred to be alone at the sites. Driving between sites was fair game, however, and at one point,

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he launched into a diatribe about how much he hated the gypsies. I said something about believing in respect for all people and the importance of diversity. When that didn’t work, in an attempt to lighten things up, I shared that I’d once seen a T-shirt claiming, “I don’t discriminate. I hate everyone,” to which he replied, “Oh, I don’t discriminate. I just want them dead.” I fell silent. The rest of the drive progressed mostly in muddy, weighted silence. At the grounds of Verona monastery, feeling more than a world away from home and at the edge of tears, I thought Is this really what I traveled all this way for? I felt so alone and so sorry for myself in that moment. I decided to cut out the rest of the sightseeing I had planned for the day and relinquished my plan to search for my crystal ball later that afternoon. I headed back to the pension, anxious to be out of the car. The father drove me to the last monasteries Christmas Day, and because he spoke almost no English, the drive was a time of quiet contemplation. I enjoyed his silent company and felt him to be a gentle soul. As we approached Dragomirna, the final monastery, the sun was already low in the sky and its unearthly beauty struck me. In my state of reverie, a thought arose unbidden: “This is the place you are to say goodbye to your unborn daughter.” The thought shivered through and brought tears to my eyes. This was the heart of my pilgrimage, although amazingly I had not seen it before now. I had come to my ancestral home to say goodbye to my daughter. I knew her. Had seen her face in a dream. In all the previous monasteries, there were always two altars with votive candles to light—those for the dead and those for the living. I had lit many candles over the few days for people who had touched my life, living and dead. I don’t remember my words as I lit the candle for her—they came from somewhere too far down for memory, words meant only for her. Letting the tears fall down my face, I felt a sense of grace descend as I sat watching the candle burn, holding so many visions of an unlived life. I stayed some time. When I was ready, I walked over to the altar for the living and lit a candle for myself. I was grateful for the monastery’s silent halls, empty save for the nun who had taken my money and handed me a ticket as I passed the front gate. When I was ready, I turned and found my way back along the cobblestone path to see my driver walking around the outskirts of the grounds. We did not talk. I let the silence envelop me as we drove into the coming night. That night, I dreamed of writing, typing at a typewriter, actually. I was in a state of complete joy and impassioned creative flow. The dream felt like an enormous gift, something to hold onto. I had always known that I was called to write, and my dreams continually confirmed this, but writing had been very hard—so excruciating at times that I naturally turned away from it. Yet the pressure in my psyche to write never left, and the tension between the pull and the resistance often distressed me. Prior to this dream, I’d never had a felt sense of writing with pure joy. Tension grew with Dorin when I did not follow all his “helpful” travel suggestions, and the drop-off in Brasov was very different form the original pickup, when he had parked and then rolled my suitcase the couple of miles into the city courtyard, excitedly sharing the history of all the different shops and sites. Now he

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just whipped the car around and stopped illegally, almost getting us hit. He left the hazard lights on while I ran in to confirm my room. A tiny, delicate receptionist was kind enough to run back out with me and helped me bring my luggage in. Her name, Amelia, suited her, as it means industrious in Romanian. She would not let me help while she maneuvered the seriously substantial suitcase, likely weighing more than she did, as if it were merely a scarf trailing easily behind her in the wind. I went upstairs to my lovely room overlooking the main Old Town Square, the same square that claims to be the site of the last witch burning in Europe. That night, a festive winter scene greeted me, centered around a large, luminous Christmas tree that glittered through the gossamer drapes. I unpacked a little and settled in for a deep soak in the claw-foot tub, with the soothing voice of Markéta Irglová gently playing from my iPhone. While I reclaimed myself, Amelia was at the front desk computer, tirelessly searching for my crystal ball. By the time dinner was over, she had already acquired the name of a local occultist famous for his crystal ball readings. She had tried to set a meeting, but he was going into retreat tomorrow, the day of St. Anthony the hermit. Nevertheless, she gave me his contact information. I called and explained that tomorrow was my last day in Brasov. I shared a little of the origin of my interest in finding a crystal ball. Although he was not officially working, so he could not do a reading, we agreed to meet the next evening at the Tarot Café and lounge that he ran with his partner. The shabby chic café, hidden down a dark alley, was an unexpected jewel: the rich brocade fabrics on the couches, the crystal chandeliers, the ornate candelabras burning real candles all gave the space an old world, mystic feel. He was tall, thin, with an angular, young face and stunning black eyes. He wore a bright headband, ripped jeans, and a blue button-up shirt. He was cool with a jagged, almost gangster edge. I would not have wanted to piss him off; he looked like he could set an enemy afire with his Luciferian stare. We settled into a table for two in the back corner, and he gifted me with a beautiful, rare, oblong crystal that he said called to him to bring to me as he was leaving home. It was for dreaming! We talked for four hours straight, like old friends meeting up after too long a separation. We drank red wine and shared remarkably similar experiences from psychoidal dream realms, although we interpreted them quite differently. As the evening progressed, he could not help sharing some of his “seeing” into my future through the crystal. He enchanted me. He was surprised I wanted a crystal ball. “You don’t need one. Your gift of seeing comes through dreams.” Charmed as I was, I knew the crystal ball was connected to my dreaming and to other things that remained a mystery at that time. I continued my search. My last full day in Romania, I traveled back to Bucharest. First thing that morning, before pulling out of Brasov, I picked up the only real crystal ball I had seen on the entire trip, from a crystal shop. It was a miniature version of the one from my dreams, but at least I would not go home empty-handed. It was already dark when we arrived in Bucharest and the driver took me to the place he felt certain I could find a crystal ball. My hopes were dashed when I realized we were parked outside the same mega-shopping plaza where I had begun my search. I

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entered through the same enormous rotating doors and walked around the labyrinth-like structure once more. I turned a different corner, and there it was—a little stall set up in the middle of a large open area, selling crystal balls! I found two that I loved, one that called to me with its central flaw that sent rainbows cascading through its inner world and another that was quite beautiful in its near perfection. I took them both. So, on my final night, I arrived at a hotel near the airport with four crystals, all acquired in the last 48 hours. I did not sleep much, feeling their numinous presence working on me from the dresser at the foot of my bed, a message spilling into me: “We were here right from the start, but you needed to do some work before you could see.”

5 JUNG AND THE DEMON LOVER

She leads her life as the man’s anima . . . and consequently can forfeit her individual life. —Erich Neumann

Despite how useful I’ve found much of Jungian theory in helping me understand my own experience, I think it’s also important to recognize that Jung himself fell prey to the role of the demon lover. When I felt broken and hollow after the dissolution of my relationship, I tried to talk with a couple of close friends, my sister, and a trusted colleague. Although I came away feeling closer to these individuals, I felt further away from making sense of all that had happened. I ended up finding more solace and insight through researching the significant women in Jung’s life who had held his anima projections. Somewhere in the tangled webs of projections and fragments of these women’s stories, I found reflections of my own experience. In fact, as I researched these women, I could not help but feel their presence with me, like spiritual ancestors who wanted their own stories to contribute to all women’s increasing awareness of these powerful underworld forces. I arrived home from Romania with my crystal balls, feeling a little like Raven who stole the sun buried in the ancestral home. Then I became deathly ill. I had just recovered enough by month’s end to honor a commitment to sit on a panel for the Vancouver Jung Society and speak to the complex relational triangle between Freud, Jung, and Spielrein. David Cronenberg’s (2011) feature film, A Dangerous Method, had recently been released, and the society wanted to offer the public a viewing of the more in-depth and poetically poignant documentary of Spielrein’s life, My Name was Sabina Spielrein, by Elisabeth Márton (2003). I was quite confident in my research and analysis of the different transferences and projections present in the relationships. I felt I was fair and balanced in holding both the positive and the shadow side of the projective fields, and thus was caught off

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guard when, at a preliminary meeting of panel members, my analytic discourse of some of the more shadowy projective elements was met with fierce reactions. I had expressed my belief that the relationship between Jung and Spielrein had an incredibly destructive and long-lasting effect on Spielrein’s developing psyche and that the sadomasochistic sex scene between the two in Cronenberg’s film was not too far of a stretch to imagine, given the historical details available. On the evening of the panel, I stayed close to my theoretical interpretation of the events while remaining open to the other members’ ways of analyzing the relational dynamics. Some interpretations I took to heart, while others seemed hatched from a psychic space fixated on maintaining an idealized image of Jung rather than seeing him as a man with his own shadow and history; these I strongly disagreed with. As Marion Woodman is fond of saying, we can only handle so much reality (personal communication, 2004). Jung came to handle a great deal of reality and obtained a high degree of consciousness in his life; however, an initial review of the historical facts reveals the women closest to him were often sacrificed to his genius. Looking at Jung’s character exclusively through the harsher lens of clinical psychology, one could say he rates high on the spectrum for narcissistic personality disorder as defined by the following diagnostic criteria: a grandiose sense of selfimportance, a preoccupation with fantasies of ideal love, a belief that he is special and can only be understood by other special or unique individuals, the need for excessive admiration, a sense of entitlement, being interpersonally exploitative (taking advantage of others to achieve his own ends), lacking empathy (unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others). An individual who rates high on the narcissistic spectrum is often challenging to spot due to their incredible charm and brilliance, and the fact he or she is often admired by others through projective identification, producing the perception of being “beyond” ordinary human affairs and social rules of engagement. One of the ways to “see” individuals with strong narcissistic tendencies, then, is to notice that nearly everyone closest to the individual suffers greatly. This was certainly the fate of the women closest to Jung, including his wife Emma Jung, Sabina Spielrein, Christina Morgan, and Toni Wolff. It may be tempting to simply demonize Jung by applying a pathological lens to history, but this alone does not do justice to the complexity of his soul and life. True to his own theory, I believe it is more important to move into understanding how the soul speaks through psychological symptoms than to diagnose—and yet the diagnostic criteria do let us know what landscape we are in and hint at the foundational archetypal patterns that are being played out. From contemporary theories of psychology we know that narcissistic character organization forms around an individual as a form of protection from deep, unbearable wounds in childhood. This protective psychic layer is sometimes referred to as the narcissistic bubble or envelope. When anyone comes close to touching the core vulnerability behind the narcissistic bubble, they are met with what is clinically referred to as narcissistic rage, sometimes in the form of violent outbursts or at other times abandonment—so, fight or flight. There were two such profound and enduring wounds in Jung’s childhood: his mother’s psychiatric hospitalization

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before he was three years old, and a sexual assault perpetrated upon him by a family friend when he was 11. Regarding the first deep wounding of the inner mother imago, Peter Mudd (1998) suggests “that Jung’s polygamous dimension, which characterized his adult relations with women, was an attempt to heal a deep and troubling split in the mother imago which began in his turbulent relationship with his mother” (p. 5). In Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963), Jung discloses that his mother’s absence when she was admitted to the psychiatric hospital left him “deeply troubled” and that “from then on [he was] always mistrustful when the word ‘Love’ was spoken” (p. 8). When his mother was hospitalized, Jung was taken to live with his mother’s sister in Basel. His mother’s frequent bouts of depression (possibly connected to the trauma of the death of her first son, who lived only a few days, and/or the disturbance in her marriage that Jung hints at in Memories) had an enormous impact on Jung’s psyche. Jung connects his early illness, which his mother later told him was general eczema, with “dim intimations of trouble in my parent’s marriage” and his later anxiety dreams, accompanied by feelings of suffocation, with an atmosphere in the house that “was beginning to be unbreathable” (p. 19). All sorts of things were happening at night, things incomprehensible and alarming. My parents were sleeping apart. I slept in my father’s room. From the door to my mother’s room came frightening influences. At night my mother was strange and mysterious. One night I saw coming from her door a faintly luminous, indefinite figure whose head detached itself from the neck and floated along in front of it, in the air, like a little moon. Immediately another head was produced and again detached itself. This process was repeated six or seven times. (p. 18) His mother’s frequent absences left Jung with a belief about women’s “innate unreliability,” and something he describes as the “handicap that [he] started out with” (p. 8). During his mother’s subsequent absences, Jung was often taken care of by the maid, a woman he remembers picking him up and comforting him. When describing her, Jung states, “It was as though she belonged not to my family but only to me” (p. 8). She had “black hair and an olive complexion.” Jung further comments that it was this type of girl who “later became a component of [his] anima” (p. 8). The split present between his daytime mother and the more unpredictable, nocturnal mother marks the separation between his mother’s persona and shadow: the woman who tried and expressed love (at least in words, if not with her whole body) and the mysterious and frightening woman of the night. In Memories, he reveals on several occasions that his mother told him stories of times when he had been sick or injured: My mother told me, too, of the time when I was crossing the bridge over the Rhine Falls to Neuhausen. The maid caught me just in time—I already had one leg through the railing and was about to slip through. (p. 9)

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Jung interpreted this incident as an “unconscious suicidal urge” or a “fatal resistance to life in this world” (p. 9). I wonder, however, whether the memory could also be connected to the strong death wish present in his mother at the core of her depressive illness, which young Carl must at times have experienced as a devastating abandonment that left him concerned about not only her reliability but his own worthiness of her love. By all accounts it seems Emilie was extremely unhappy in her marriage. The combination of experiencing the split in his own mother and the presence of the maid, who was “his alone” and had the power to “save him,” became the inner imagoes of the feminine that were indelibly etched into his psyche: a feminine representing a security that he would have a hard time trusting, and the mysterious, loving presence that belonged and existed only for him and would be his salvation. There were obvious discrepancies in power between Jung and Spielrein when they first met, as evidenced on multiple levels, including their age difference (Jung was 29 at the time of her arrival at Burghölzli and Spielrein was 19), gender (considering the historical climate in Swiss culture at the beginning of the 20th century), as well as the enormous imbalance of power that exists between doctor and patient. It is important to remember two essential facts as we move into this territory: (1) that Sabina Spielrein was the first patient Jung ever treated with Freud’s new talking cure and (2) that many of Jung’s most far-thinking and brilliant theories were birthed out of his lived experience of treating Spielrein and what later evolved in their ensuing relationship. I realize it is somewhat problematic that a large part of my theorizing will involve the application of later Jungian thought to this early analysis; even the concepts of transference and countertransference, so commonly addressed in psychology today, were not yet in place. In fact, these seminal concepts of transference and countertransference came into being through Jung’s therapeutic exchange with Spielrein and his consultations with Freud during and after the treatment. It is also true that the ethical standards in the field of psychology in the early 20th century were not as clearly delineated as they are today, and that at this time in history, it was not uncommon to believe that a woman individuated (became whole) through a man. Carotenuto (1986) and Mudd (1998) both agree that Jung’s treatment of Spielrein was a profound initiation into what he would later theorize as the anima concept. Barbara Hannah (1962) in her writing on the animus suggests that many of the intense polarizations of positive or negative animus may be due to a fusion of animus with shadow content. I suggest that as well as being connected to the split mother imago, what transpired in this fateful analysis was an anima projection contaminated with an aspect of Jung’s own shadow in the form of dissociated elements from his early sexual abuse. Jung disclosed the abuse in a letter to Freud in 1907, when he confessed that his tardy replies in their communication were due to a “religious crush” with “erotic undertones”; “[t]his abominable feeling comes from the fact [that] as a boy I was the victim of a sexual assault by a man I once worshiped” (McGuire, 1974, p. 95). Jung had the insight that his history of sexual trauma affected his relationships when there was strong transference; he confided to

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Freud in 1907 that this “abominable feeling” connected his past victimization with his current transference onto Freud: “This feeling, which I still have not quite got rid of, hampers me considerably. Another manifestation of it is that I find psychological insight makes relations with colleagues who have a strong transference to me downright disgusting” (McGuire 1974, p. 95). Later in the correspondence, Jung goes on to say that he feared disclosing the sexual abuse and ensuing transference onto Freud because he thought it may cause similar feelings of disgust in Freud towards him. Clearly Jung took a great risk with his disclosure. He was brave. Unfortunately, it was not well received by Freud. The next correspondence is again a letter from Jung to Freud a few days later, disclosing his inner distress and need for reassurance. In his vulnerable state, we see Jung trying to repair any imagined rupture in the relationship with Freud through his new interpretation of an old dream (the realization that Freud poses no threat): I am suffering all the agonies of a patient in analysis, riddling myself with every conceivable fear about the possible consequences of my confession. There is one consequence I must tell you right now, as it might interest you. You will remember my telling you a short dream I had while in Vienna. At the time I was unable to solve it. You sought the solution in a rivalry complex. (I dreamt that I saw you walking beside me as a very, very frail old man.) Ever since then the dream has been preying on my mind but to no purpose. The solution came (as usual) only after I had confessed my worries to you. The dream sets my mind at rest about your + + + dangerousness! This idea couldn’t have occurred to me at the time, obviously not! I hope to goodness the subterranean gods will now desist from their chicaneries and leave me in peace. (McGuire, 1974, p. 96) The most important letter, containing Freud’s direct reaction to Jung’s “confession,” is mysteriously missing! (McGuire, 1974). However, one may piece together a good enough sense of it from Jung’s next letter, written on November 8, 1907: Heartiest thanks for your letter, which worked wonders for me. You are absolutely right to extol humour as the only decent reaction to the inevitable. This was also my principle until the repressed material got the better of me, luckily only at odd moments. My old religiosity had secretly found in you a compensating factor which I had to come to terms with eventually, and I was able to do so only by telling you about it. In this way I hoped to prevent it from interfering with my behavior in general. In any case I am confident that my humour will not desert me in difficult situations. The goal of our common endeavours provides a salutary and considerably heavier counterweight. (p. 97) Granted Freud wasn’t Jung’s analyst, but it still must have been quite a callous reaction on Freud’s part that, in essence, rejected Jung’s vulnerable, traumatized

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self—saying something Jung clearly interpreted as, “Yes, this is unpleasant, but don’t let it weigh too heavily nor get in the way of seeing the humor in how the unconscious tries to take over our present connection through the inevitability of transference of earlier experiences to later relationships. Now, back to business.” It strikes me that finding humor in the situation was inappropriate and a defense against facing the difficult reality of Jung’s trauma, as well as its potential impact not only on their relationship but also on other relationships and Jung’s work and way of being in the world. Jung’s response to Freud’s missing letter was clearly relief that the relationship was not damaged; he demonstrated an excited attempt to “join” or “collude” in any interpretive stance Freud proposed, even if that interpretation was characterized by minimization through extolling humor as the best way to cope. In this way, the transference was alive in that moment, and Jung abandoned himself to maintain the idealized transference onto Freud—who reacted much as the world responds to men’s deep wounds, by encouraging the professional man and silencing the wounded child. This dismissive collective and personal response to men’s traumas helps to create and consolidate a narcissistic, heroic persona, which then needs “others” to contain the unacknowledged, unacceptable wounds and vulnerabilities. It was these very themes of the hero/savior, saving and being saved, that concretely hooked the projective fields between Jung and Spielrein out of analysis into repetition compulsion and romantic fantasy. Again, it is very unfortunate we don’t have Freud’s direct response to Jung’s intimate disclosure, only Jung’s reaction to the missing document. Notably, the next letter we do have from Freud hints that his initial reaction might have been more severe than mere minimization and that Jung might have covered up his hurt by focusing on the importance of humor in such situations. In it, Freud admits regret at how he originally handled Jung’s disclosure: What you say of your inner developments sounds reassuring; a transference on a religious basis would strike me as most disastrous; it could end only in apostasy, thanks to the universal human tendency to keep making new prints of the clichés we bear within us. I shall do my best to show you that I am unfit to be an object of worship. You probably think that I have already begun. In my last letter I was irritable and sleepy; soon afterward I pulled myself together and said to myself very much what you point out in your letter, to wit, that we have every reason for satisfaction. (McGuire, 1974, p. 98) Freud suggests here that they should focus on the intellectual, the logos of the situation, and not get caught in the emotional felt sense. Again, this is a common defense mechanism that feeds narcissism—extreme intellectual or spiritual development. The next series of letters, like the remainder of this one, quickly turn to business and bringing what Jung refers to as “our cause” to a wider audience. One can certainly sympathize with not wanting to drown in past traumas, yet there is no

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surer way to grant them extraordinary power over one’s life than to discount them and not give them due reflection. This very minimization binds an individual to repeating the trauma in further relationships. It was healthy for Jung to reach out; it was his natural urge towards integration and understanding, and it demonstrated his degree of trust in and respect for Freud. It was tragic that Jung—like most others who speak out about trauma—was not met with the type of response that would have supported assimilation. The world is certainly a poorer place for not having a more explicit theory of trauma worked out by Jung. Perhaps if Freud had taken him more seriously in this moment, that reaction could have opened the door for further reflection and research into this important area. The fact that Freud effectively closed down this exploration is especially interesting given that his theory on trauma is quite eloquent and extensive. For Jung, I imagine, the interaction encouraged active repression of the material—but as we know from trauma theory, repression leads to disavowal and projection. The trauma never remains neatly tucked away; instead, it finds its way to speak through symptoms and relational dynamics, through lived life. I argue that the women in Jung’s life carried his dissociated pain and trauma. Women such as Emma Jung, Sabina Spielrein, Christina Morgan, and Toni Wolff became the water bearers of Jung’s dissociated emotions. In Spielrein’s case, a complex combination of conscious and unconscious elements from both Jung and Spielrein combined to make a potent alchemical container, ideal for a powerful transference and countertransference reaction to occur. These elements include but are not limited to: Spielrein’s abuse by her father, which was saturated with strong sexual overtones; Jung’s own sexual abuse; the psychotic episode Spielrein was experiencing when admitted to Burghölzli (the further a patient is along the psychotic spectrum, the greater the transference and potential countertransference will be); Jung’s mother’s illness; and the intimacy of the new treatment strategy incorporated in Spielrein’s and Jung’s work together. Spielrein was suffering from what might be referred to today as a brief psychotic episode due to a marked stressor—historically considered hysteria. In Jung’s handwriting from the Burghölzli hospital records, published in the Journal of Analytical Psychology: Tonight at 10:30 patient is admitted accompanied by medical police and an uncle. Medical report from Dr. B and Lubinsk. Pat. laughs and cries in a strangely mixed, compulsive manner. Masses of tics, rotating head, sticks out her tongue, legs twitching. Complains of a terrible headache, saying that she was not mad, only upset, at the hotel she could not stand people or noise. (Minder, 2001, p. 16) The physical abuse and humiliation by her father in the form of what was referred to in the hospital records as “beatings” proved to be directly connected to Spielrein’s hysterical symptoms. Pat. Loves her father “painfully”. She cannot turn to her father, he does not really understand her, he says hurtful things to her . . . He has hit pat. and she

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has had to kiss his hand in return . . . It gradually emerges that he has hit her several times on her bare buttocks, most recently in her 11th year, from time to time in front of her siblings. It takes a powerful battle to entice pat. to make this confession. (p. 17) Later in her treatment, it becomes apparent that the atmosphere in which the beatings were administered had a distinctly sexual quality. Finally she recalls, with great affect, scenes when her father beat her: when she was 13 years old, her father once threatened her with a beating: he took her into a special room and ordered her to lie down. She implored him not to beat her (he was trying to lift her skirt from behind). Finally he gave in, but he forced her to kneel down and kiss the picture of her grandfather and to swear always to be a good child . . . Finally [after] a 3 hour analysis it transpired that since her fourth year she has experienced sexual arousal after the beatings, she cannot hold her water, has to press her legs together, later even has an orgasmic discharge. In the end it was enough to see or hear her brother being beaten to make her want to masturbate, or someone had only to threaten her to make her immediately lie on her bed and masturbate. In recent years it went so far that the slightest hint could trigger off this impulse. She says that she only has to be laughed at, which to her symbolizes humiliation, to cause her to have an orgasm. (pp. 26–27) A later note on treatment recommendations reads: Pat. is extremely sensitive, especially to any stimulation. Strict bed-rest therefore. No books, no conversation, no visitors. A doctor visits only once a day. The nurse goes into the room only once an hour for 5 minutes. (p. 19) It is noteworthy that the intimate details of Spielrein’s trauma were revealed after a three-hour analysis—a period of time that I am sure anyone who has been in analysis would recognize as unbearably long to be focused on the traumatic details of one’s life. The way the case note was written leaves a felt sense of the patient being pushed towards revealing the sexual arousal connected to the beatings. The enforcement of “strict bed-rest, no books, no conversations, no visitors,” with a doctor visiting only once daily, was fertile ground for an extreme transference reaction towards her doctors, who along with the nurse effectively became her only lifelines to the outer world. The following notation in Spielrein’s clinical records refers to a drawing she made that clearly demonstrates the strong urge towards repetition compulsion due to the earlier beatings, as well as the transference of her inner father imago onto the treating doctors:

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[I]t shows Dr. Heller giving pat. electrical treatment. The position is a remarkably sexual one. Pat. reveals many other masochistic features: for example, the relationship with her father to whom she feels a remarkable disgust . . . She constantly demands that the writer inflict pain on her, do something to hurt her, treat her badly in some way; we are never merely to ask something of her but to command it. (p. 22) In Sabina Spielrein: Forgotten Pioneer of Psychoanalysis, Coline Covington and Barbara Wharton include Spielrein’s Burghölzli hospital records. In them, we hear this strong desire to repeat the trauma in the fused masochistic longing for Jung to do to her something that mirrors the original abuse inflicted by her father. “I just want to feel pain . . . I want you to do something really bad to me, to force me to do something that I am opposed to with all my being” (Wharton, 2015, Sec. [1904] X, 18). Elisabeth Márton’s previously mentioned historically accurate and wellresearched documentary based on Spielrein’s life also demonstrates the particular masochism of an anima-identified woman. Spielrein wanted to live as a muse to Jung’s ambitions, to be a protective force watching over him—which sounds, at least in part, like a projective identification with the projected inner image of the maid who watched over him. She began to make choices in her life that could be interpreted as sacrificing herself to him. Spielrein went on to become Jung’s research assistant, eventually attending medical school and attaining her own medical degree; as Cronenberg’s film suggests, many believe they were lovers for a period of time. What is certain is that they crossed over into the cavernous, deeply personal erotic territory that Spielrein referred to as “poetry” in her diaries. She was molded by his powerful anima projection (to become the woman he most desired): a projection conflated with the projection of his own earlier sexual trauma and his unconscious desire to heal this through her. In this way, “Jung, like Pygmalion, created a woman and then fell in love with her” (Mudd, p. 258). Spielrein’s masochistic urges and unconscious desire to heal her own projected father imago through Jung left her vulnerable to becoming his ideal woman, thus losing herself. Passages from Spielrein’s diary along with important letters, compiled and originally published by the psychoanalyst Aldo Carotenuto (1982) in his revealing book A Secret Symmetry, clearly depict Spielrein’s inner struggle to free herself from what sounds very much like possession by a demon lover: I fell into a rage and swore a sacred oath that in this case I would voluntarily renounce this wretched existence, that I would go to my friend, [Jung] to whom I owe my Siegfried ideal, and would poison myself in his presence with Ken. So . . . I took this oath and soon was overwhelmed with terror. I became obsessed with the thought that perhaps I should poison myself now in order to forestall possible, even probable disappointment. The thought became more and more insistent, and I began to be terrified of myself. I felt as if I was

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struggling with evil spirits that my friend dispatched in my direction, as if I were struggling with him. That would be a difficult, probably impossible struggle. I can take that step only with his assent. He must give me his blessing. (p. 32) Almost 3 in the morning. I cannot sleep. The two of us love each other as much as it is possible to love. If only he were free! But he is not, and given the circumstances, let me record my firm decision: I want to be free of him! I still want to live and be happy. Now I must make a cold compress for my head, since my wild yearnings make me feverish. Dear Lord, I should like to have some peace, at least at night, so that I might gather my forces to begin my new study, “On the Death Instinct”! So “come at last, Reason!” Let me be free at least for a few months, ye dark gods! Oh, Guardian Spirit, let me not come to harm in these storms of emotion. I am absolutely determined now that I want to be free. (p. 33) Spielrein was fighting for her life amidst the powerful projections that threatened to take her over. In the night, in the dark, she was left alone to face not only her own emotional turmoil but also the psychotic pockets of Jung’s disavowed and projected trauma that she experienced as “evil spirits.” It is little wonder she turned her intellectual attention to the death instinct; she was able to sublimate and make meaning of her struggle in this study—a brilliant paper first published in 1912 entitled “Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being.” Carotenuto (1982) draws attention to the fact that Freud’s theory of the death instinct found its inception in this seminal yet mostly forgotten paper. She intuitively understood that these projections were violent, and she wanted Jung to understand and see this—thus, the impulse to poison herself in his presence. She wanted to be free of the projection, but she wanted Jung to be the one to free her, save her. In this way, she reached out and continued to give her power and agency over to the one whose psychic material had taken hold of her. She tried to release herself from the shadow elements in his anima projection while at the same time leaving him in the position of authority; she wanted freedom from his projection but not to reclaim her own onto him! It is not too difficult to see why a reclaiming of her personal authority would be a nearly impossible task, given he was once her treating doctor, carried her own complex animus projection, and in this way was idealized as more than human. The original transference does not die easily—a truth that anyone who has been through a depth analysis knows well. Spielrein labored to allow her authentic self to be birthed into being through this experience, but it was hard for her to hold this “becoming” in the presence of Jung. Even when she decided to make the monumental move into the psychoanalytic circle, after it was clear that Freud and Jung had come to an impasse in their relationship, it was still with Jung’s consent. It seems that in everything Spielrein did, she waited for Jung’s blessing. In the depths of her psyche, he lurked

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like a dark god with all the privileges thereof. As the projections began to loosen, Spielrein would catch glimpses of the reality behind the projective field. When she started to speak out beyond the veil of Jung’s anima woman, she expressed rage at Jung. She felt betrayed and also that his considerable influence had set her on a course that diverged from her soul’s calling to compose music. Why, for instance, did I not begin methodically to sublimate my libido in music more than ten years ago, as I am doing now? In fact my diary is peppered with remarks about “superfluous feelings that were abreacted” in music. It would be obvious to anyone that this was no pose but an expression of a most urgent need. The suppressed need found expression in occasional outbursts and with such vehemence that you once told me I might lose my mind if I allowed myself to make music. Thus much time had to pass before I sent you the dream in which I appeared as a painter and wanted to rely on my “unconscious.” Without hesitation I then answered my own question as to what I most wanted to do: compose. And I composed, and my teacher was deeply stirred by the freshness and intensity of my songs; I am still working at it and making progress. Why did this not occur earlier?—Because I was afraid of life, afraid of thrusting myself forward, afraid of the “demonstration” of my most intimate feelings, which I allowed myself to show only to you, and then in a very awkward manner, sometimes stiff, sometimes excessive. (p. 72) Here, Spielrein begins to pull back projections onto Jung and reclaim her own authority and autonomous perspective. Spielrein and Jung worked hard to understand what the “love” that had constellated between them meant. Both had knowledge of the parental imagoes behind their individual transferences; both suffered in their own ways. In an article commenting on the Burghölzli hospital records, Covington (2001) quotes from an unpublished letter Spielrein wrote to her mother in 1908: Just recently Jung finished his paper that created such a stir, (“The significance of the father in the destiny of the individual”), in which he shows that the choice of the future (love) object is determined in the first relations of the child with his parents. That I love him is as firmly determined as that he loves me. He is for me a father and I am a mother for him, or more precisely, the woman who has acted as the first substitute for the mother (his mother came down with hysteria when he was two years old); and he became so attached to the (substitute) woman that when she was absent he saw her in hallucinations . . . And now he has fallen in love with me, a hysteric; and I fell in love with a psychopath, and is it necessary to explain why? . . . If you could only hide in the next room and hear how concerned he is for me and my fate . . . Then he starts reproaching himself endlessly for his feelings, for example that I am something sacred for him, that he is ready to beg for forgiveness, etc. . . .

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Remember how dear daddy was apologizing to you in exactly the same manner! . . . He suffered through many nights thinking about me . . . He felt responsible for my fate. (p. 113) It is interesting to note Spielrein’s near glee at disclosing Jung’s suffering and sense of responsibility for her fate. Her reaction to his suffering is reminiscent of the cycle of violence—the violation and then the apology. The victim often becomes addicted to the apology and the sense of power that she feels in seeing the perpetrator beg for forgiveness; his suffering is read as a sign of devotion rather than pathos. Covington (2001) theorizes that Jung transferred his hysterical mother onto Spielrein and then felt responsible for her healing. I believe this to be true and (as already mentioned) that the countertransference was further complicated by Jung transferring his own split-off trauma as well as projectively identifying with her abusive father. In this way, Spielrein became a sacred, almost religious container that held his deepest wound, and thus she was the doorway to his destiny. Jung’s compulsion to simultaneously save and unite with her is also an unconscious impulse to save his own traumatized child buried in her and reclaim his “lost object” that held with it the possibility of wholeness. Jung’s destiny, which he rightly felt was connected to Spielrein (so long as she held this soul piece), was symbolized in the idea of Siegfried. Jung and Spielrein shared a common fantasy that between them, they had conceived and were in the process of bringing into the world the symbolic equivalent of an ideal child: Siegfried. According to Mudd (1986): If we consider this kind of love, as Jung did in his marriage essay—an essay surely informed by this experience—we can see how easily the abuse of power in service of an intrapsychic need becomes inevitable . . . Jung’s attempt to instruct Spielrein in how to love him, blatantly selfish as it was, indicates a dim awareness on his part of what he needed. Tragically for him and for her, the awareness succumbed to Jung’s inability to see it symbolically. When he failed to control Spielrein, to compel her to play the intrapsychic part that he needed, the spell broke. Spielrein and Jung were propelled into a more fully interpersonal realm and an ever widening gulf opened between them. (pp. 258–259) As the projections faded, Spielrein became less the loving nurse and muse and Jung less the hero and savior. Instead, the shades appeared; Jung became the psychopathic, narcissistic father, and Spielrein became the ghostly mother—frightening, unstable, and unattainable in the way he needed. As Spielrein spoke and acted beyond the veil of Jung’s anima woman, Jung felt betrayed and pressed upon. In a letter to her, he confessed, “I am looking for a person who understands how to love, without punishing the other person, imprisoning him or sucking him dry” (p. 177). When Spielrein no longer acted as the

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woman he created, Jung pulled his affections back. Spielrein plummeted into the depths of depression and rage as Jung began to withdraw further from her. At the end of the relationship, she felt used by Jung: For over three months I have analyzed everything, I withdrew into nature to try to save myself and my idea; finally I spoke with a colleague of mine, or, rather showed her all the letters, with the result that I felt much lonelier than before, for my beloved could not be saved, and the thought that he might be a complete no-good, that he was using me for his first experiment, etc., etc., drove me absolutely wild. (Carotenuto, 1982, p. 92) The healthiness of this expression of anger may have saved her from having another breakdown or internalizing the anger and becoming actively suicidal. She was fighting for her autonomy, for the right to her future life without their shared “destiny”: But where, in the course of analysis, does one find support for the assumption that Siegfried is supposed to be not a real but an ideal child? I struggled with this question for years until I succeeded in no longer regarding the symbols of the subconscious from the prospective point of view and attributing only to them the meaning of infantile desires. The struggle was very difficult for me, and the guilt resulting from my missing my life goal so great that Siegfried almost took my baby daughter’s life. What contradiction exists between Siegfried and my little Renate that the two components found themselves locked in such a bitter struggle within me when little Renate was to be born? As you know, I have already written to you that during my pregnancy I almost lost my daughter, simultaneously with or as a result of the appearance of a powerful Siegfried dream. Finally my child proved victorious in reality, and I called her Renate, as another dream instructed me. Siegfried was vanquished. But is he dead? (p. 87) Spielrein was conscious of the fact that somehow, the existence of the imaginal child with Jung threatened the life of her own daughter—her conscious life. There is evidence in her diaries that Spielrein longed for a child with Jung: for Siegfried to be made real. I take this to be her desire to move the relationship out of idealism marked by anima-animus projections towards a real relationship. She was able to see that this ideal “shared destiny” had a destructive power and could cost her the essence of her life force, represented in her own “real” daughter. Spielrein recovered enough of the projection she had placed on Jung as her hero, healer, and protector to see through to some of his shadow elements and discover a protective instinct for herself and her future. Scattered throughout her diary entries and correspondence with Jung is evidence Spielrein felt that some essence was stolen from her through her connection with

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Jung. At times, this extended to being not only the “object” of his experiments but also a victim of his plagiarism. She felt he had outright stolen some of her best ideas and claimed them as his own in his writing and research, an accusation to which Jung responded in the following way: You are upsetting yourself unnecessarily again. When I said there were “uncanny” similarities, you again took that much too literally. I was intending it much more as a compliment to you. Your study is extraordinarily intelligent and contains splendid ideas whose priority I am happy to acknowledge as yours. The death tendency or death wish was clear to you before it was to me, understandably! . . . Perhaps I borrowed from you too; certainly I have unwittingly absorbed a part of your soul, as you doubtless have of mine. What matters is what each of us has made of it. (pp. 184–185) Jung’s response was condescending and authoritarian in that he presumed to know she was overreacting and upsetting herself “unnecessarily.” Rather than validating her feelings or taking responsibility, he used the age-old oppressive tools of patriarchy that Mary Daly (1992) refers to as erasure and reversal: “Your concerns are not real; it is not that I have borrowed from you but that we have borrowed from each other.” Jeanne Moll in her introduction to the unedited extracts from Spielrein’s diary notes a similar suspicion after her careful review of all the documents. In reference to Spielrein’s writing, she states: “Here a young woman asserts herself with an authority of thought which is surprising, taking into account her older discussant; one wonders consequently if it is not she who has more than once engendered his thoughts” (2001, p. 156). As Spielrein reclaimed her projections (strength, authority, intelligence), Jung was forced to pull back some of his (vulnerability, weakness, instability) onto her. The inner psychic aspects that represent the highest and lowest are the hardest to hold in consciousness; these demons and daimons are most often projected. The projective exchange that manifested between Spielrein and Jung is a mirror for what commonly occurs within a patriarchal culture: men more often project their demons (most dark and vulnerable places) onto women, and women project their daimons (destinies, gifts, genius) onto men. The fact that after the relationship was severed, Jung had his own descent into the unconscious I think is further evidence of this line of thinking. At that time, Jung wrote to Spielrein, “Give me back something of the love and patience and unselfishness which I was able to give you at the time of your illness. Now I am ill” (p. 177). Jung’s sexual trauma manifested in the more traditionally masculine form of narcissism, and Spielrein’s manifested in the more traditionally female form of borderline symptoms, formerly called hysteria. If we step back and take a more expanded view of the circumstance in the analysis itself, as well as the historical documents left available to us, it is truly fascinating that all of Spielrein’s life is laid out, dismembered on the altar in the name of science—her trauma, her sexual

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“perversions,” her emotions, possessions, and rages—while Jung’s remain mostly hidden behind his professional persona. It is little wonder as an addendum to her Burghölzli file, Spielrein wrote the following last will and testament: After my death I permit only my head to be dissected, if it is not too dreadful to look at. No young person is to be present at the dissection. Only the very keenest students may observe. I bequeath my skull to our school. It is to be placed in a glass container and decorated with everlasting flowers. The following is to be inscribed on the container (in Russian): “And let young life play at the entrance of the tomb and let indifferent nature shine with eternal splendor.” My brain I give to you. Just place it in a beautiful vessel and write the same words on it. My body is to be cremated. But no one is to be present for this. Divide the ashes into three parts. Place one part in an urn and send it home. Scatter the second part on the ground over our biggest field. Plant an oak-tree there and write: “I too was once a human being. My name was Sabina Spielrein.” My brother will tell you what is to be done with the third part. (p. 29) The collective climate between men and women at this time was essentially sadomasochistic, with male doctors examining and exploring female patients, projecting elements of their own souls onto their patients, to be dissected and dismembered in the name of science. These same men were shored up by the projections of power and authority women gave over to them. Spielrein along with countless other women were exposed and vulnerable, exciting intellectual and erotic impulses alike, while the men’s vulnerability remained hidden beneath a heroic, professional veneer (the narcissistic bubble protected by intellectual and spiritual power). It is truly astonishing to me that in the two decades during which I have engaged in comprehensive study in the field of depth psychology, not once, in any lecture, reading, or training, not even as a passing reference, was Jung’s experience of sexual abuse ever mentioned. Only in the initial meeting for the Jung Society panel did Jungian analyst John Allan make reference to the sexual abuse in Jung’s past. The details of Jung’s abuse remain a mystery, whereas we know and can even visualize the intensely intimate and painful details of Spielrein’s abuse. Brilliant as Spielrein was, she saw through to this painful reality and mirrored it back in her request for the dismemberment of her body after death. By giving her head and brain to the institute, she at once exposed the lack of true empathy in the scientific, patriarchal procedures she experienced and acknowledged the sacrifice that had already been made of her “life” in the name of progress. I would like to mention two more women who also had fateful analyses with Jung: Toni Wolff and Christiana Morgan. I will not go into the same degree of detail as I have with Spielrein. For those interested in a deeper exploration into Jung's relational dynamics with Wolff and Morgan I refer you to other authors who have rigorously covered this important material already: Claire Douglas’ 1993 book, Translate This Darkness, on the life of Christiana Morgan, and Nan Savage Healy’s 2017 book, Toni Wolff and C.G. Jung: A Collaboration.

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In Bair’s biography of Jung, she notes the similarity in appearance between Toni Wolff and Christiana Morgan: Both women were of patrician background, both had developed their own personal sense of style, both showed flair in dress and deportment. Each woman had a luminous pale olive complexion and piercing dark eyes, usually enshrouded in a cloud of cigarette smoke. Each was also the “other woman” in a man’s life, not the nurturing wife and mother but the hetaira (to use Toni Wolff’s word) or “soror mystica” (Jung’s). Before he ever saw Christiana Morgan, Jung had already told Harry Murray that it was possible and at times necessary for a man to divide the women in his life into categories formulated for his own masculine comfort and support. Murray added that Jung warned him that although such relationships were psychologically advantageous for certain men, they posed difficulties as well. Jung considered Harry one of these men and encouraged him to be honest and forthright with Josephine and Christiana about the role he expected each to play within his life, for such a personal arrangement was sure to enhance his professional creativity. Jung did not consider what such a relationship would inflict upon each woman, and from the documents Murray left behind, it appears that he did not consider it either. (p. 389) Wolff arguably held Jung’s anima projection longer than any other woman, and their relationship spanned 40 years. Jung’s relationship with Toni Wolff eerily followed a nearly identical pattern as the earlier one with Sabina Spielrein. Like Spielrein, Wolff was in a deeply distraught, vulnerable space when they first met. She entered analysis with him, went on to become his trusted research assistant and lover, and eventually became an analyst in her own right—one, according to Joseph Wheelwright, who not only rivaled but surpassed Jung. “Toni was simply the best analyst I ever had; better than Jung in my estimation” (quoted in Anthony, 1999, p. 34). Wolff analyzed Jung and reportedly helped him through the most difficult period of his own descent and his confrontation with the unconscious, interpreting his dreams and visions then translating them from the Black Books to the Red Book. There is not as much written material available pertaining to their relationship as there is with Spielrein. The records from her analysis are not available, nor are most documents of their personal correspondence over the years. This makes “reconstructing the affair” between the two difficult (McLynn, 1996). After her death, Jung burned all their correspondence, so “it is unlikely a cache of documents to rival the Spielrein papers will ever surface” (McLynn, 1996, p. 166). This relationship, like the earlier one with Spielrein, was marked by a sense of a shared destiny, eros, eclipsed boundaries, and pain. The transference from Wolff to Jung was natural: she tried to work through the grief of losing her beloved father by projecting that imago onto Jung and idealizing him. She further went on to

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transfer her animus onto Jung, and he became larger than life—a man and his work to whom it was worth sacrificing her own life force. It is also natural to transfer the extraordinary experiences of encountering the deep psyche onto the analyst—a projection of the Self (which I believe she did). It is the analyst’s job to work the transference through and not cross over into other relationships, which would derail the process and curtail the analysand’s potential for wholeness. Psychotherapist Florence Irvine notes the importance of sealing the alchemical vessel, the therapeutic container, for the patient’s best interest: The temenos develops from a decision made by the analyst at the outset of the work. The Latin roots for the word decide are the verb “to cut” and the preposition “away from.” When we decide to take someone into an analytic relationship, we consciously cut ourselves away from other forms of relationship with that person. We do this out of respect for the analysand’s potential wholeness. (1995, p. 21) There is evidence of Wolff having a premonition that becoming Jung’s collaborator and “second wife” would cost her more than merely not living her own authentic life. According to Nan Savage Healy’s research: Wolff did receive a premonition, a warning from her unconscious, of the difficulties to come. The sign came to her in the form of a dream. In a rare moment of candor, she shared her dream with the audience during her lecture to the Analytical Psychology Club of London on April 11, 1934. She told the group that twenty years earlier, in 1915, she had dreamt that she watched as a group of men dug a hole through the floor of her study. As they dug deeper and deeper, she realized that they were not simply laborers at work: They were grave diggers, and they were digging her grave. (2017, p. 112) In Jung’s Circle of Women, Maggy Anthony states: Whatever the agonies that Jung suffered, the complications must have been worse for Toni. For while in England and a few other European countries there has always been a niche for the unmarried woman, albeit a rather narrow one, no such niche existed in the Swiss culture . . . Then there was the added difficulty of loving a married man and a prominent one at that. One begins to see what were the stressors for her. A friend who knew Toni well said of Jung, “One can see that he was a big spoon—he drank her soul.” (1999, p. 31) There is evidence of some growing consciousness in Jung about the effect of his projected anima and shadow elements onto these women. Jung is reported saying,

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while Wolff was working with him and again after her death, that he wished she had pursued her own literary endeavors (Bair, 2003, pp. 559–560). Perhaps Jung took to heart Spielrein’s anger at not composing her own music earlier and instead giving herself over to his visions of her. Jung also kept his relationship with Wolff more in the open than with Spielrein. One wonders about the women’s responsibility to recognize what was destructive and extricate themselves. Yet I can’t help but come back to Jung’s responsibility as the analyst not to abandon the patient and not to act out the transference. Of course it would have been tempting to transfer his own wounds onto these women and leave them to carry the pain he avoided, enabling him to continue his research and experiments less burdened. There is always a danger of the power shadow in analysis, and in fairness to Jung, what is projected is unconscious until made conscious. It can be especially hard to bring greater consciousness to relationships where one benefits so significantly. And yet given his own clear brilliance and his deep connection to the unconscious, I can’t help thinking that for Jung, like the women who held his anima projections, there must have been moments when the destructive elements of the relationship were clear. Although Christiana Morgan lived out her life as inspiration, anima woman, and collaborator primarily with Harry Murray, it is true that for a period of time, she also held Jung’s anima projection. Jung was enamored with her visions in analysis, as Claire Douglas notes: Jung was thrilled with her vision book but, alas, responded as a man rather than an analyst. Despite his having encouraged her union with Harry, Jung now started to sound jealous, as if the force unleashed in the visions belonged to him. Jung reacted to Christiana Morgan’s potent sexuality with signs of passionate countertransference. (1993, p. 163) Jung did, in his own way, take possession of her visions through teaching the Vision Seminars and analyzing her series of visions for the larger community. In this way, as well as in the analysis itself, he abandoned her deep, chthonic, rising feminine sexual power and tried to move her back into the intellectual sphere, where he was more comfortable. Men faced with this feminine power tend to flee, or to combat it by seizing it for themselves, trying to surmount it through lovemaking or rape . . . Jung . . . started to attack the very power that attracted him. He began to restrain the flow of Morgan’s images and reemphasized the mind. (p. 164) For all his charm and seductive prowess, when faced with authentic feminine expressions of power and sexuality, Jung would retreat or attempt to usurp the power for his own spiritual and professional gain. According to Mudd:

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Jung was never at ease in relations in which sex appeared on the scene. It is easy to suspect that his theoretical nod to Freud’s pansexualism was a retreat before a burning issue. We can deduce with reasonable certainty that the female figure was perceived by Jung as a disturbing element, attracting him and frightening him at the same time. (1998, p. 247) All three of these brilliant, beautiful, and mostly veiled women made enormous contributions to the field of depth psychology. All carried aspects of Jung’s anima, shadow, and traumas to varying degrees for a period in time. All came to tragic ends. Near the end of her life, Sabina Spielrein took to wearing dark clothes and long skirts and was prone to depressed moods. Her second marriage seemed ghostly compared to the religious intensity that had been constellated with Jung. Indeed, for all the writing about Jung in her diary, she only once mentioned her husband. When the German soldiers came to reoccupy Ros-on-Dov in 1942, Spielrein and her two daughters were shot to death by an SS squad. Even though there was ample time and warning of their approach, Spielrein refused to leave, believing that such a cultured people were not capable of such acts of evil and therefore could not pose a real danger to her and her daughters. This lack of protective instinct may bear the mark of a woman who had given up, a woman worn down by life. I suspect her last correspondence with Jung broke the final psychic threads that bound him to her heart. Perhaps she felt destroyed by Jung’s last letter. She had begged him to tell her what she had meant to him; she wanted the human man to acknowledge the genuine connection—that the love had been real, meant something beyond the experiment and the work. The words he sent back in September 1919 were: The love of S. for J. made the latter aware of something he had previously only vaguely suspected, namely of a power in the unconscious which shapes one’s destiny, a power which later led him to things of the greatest importance. The relationship had to be “sublimated”, because otherwise it would have led to delusion and madness (a concretization of the unconscious). Sometimes we must be unworthy to live at all. (p. 194) Near the end of her life, it is reported that Wolff took to excessive smoking and drinking to soothe her pain at not being able to move the relationship with Jung into an actual rather than symbolic marriage. It must have taken nearly everything she had to continue to carry herself with dignity and elegance, calling on him for Wednesday teas “even though he treated her with disdain, ignoring her at tea, and reading a detective novel rather than talking with her” (Healy, 2017, p. 287). This was the same woman who had been soror mystica, hetaira, priestess, and midwife to his opus. Wolff died alone on March 21, 1953. Maggy Anthony notes that it is “somehow apt that Toni’s death was attributed to . . . undisclosed problems of the

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heart” (1999, p. 35). The International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis announced that Wolff died of a heart attack (de Mijolla, 2005, p. 1872). Of everything I have read and heard about Wolff, I remain most moved by the account shared with me by Jungian analyst John Allan, relaying a personal conversation with Jung’s son Franz in which Franz reportedly stated: My mother and sisters hated her because of the pain she caused our mother, but I liked her . . . They would be working in the (home) library and they would let me draw on the floor. Toni more or less saved my father’s life and sanity. She was his lover and “therapist”—he took his dreams (i.e., the ones he had written into his “black books”) to her, she did active imaginations with them and he then polished them and wrote and drew them into the Red Book. They were like co-therapists for each other. This was the period 1913–1919. She was his constant companion—not only for the Wed lunches and evenings at her apartment but also at Bollingen and travels to Ravenna in 1914, immediately after the birth of Helene and again in 1933 and other places. She asked my father to leave my mother several times and the last time (March 1953) she smoked herself to death, lighting one cigarette after another. He didn’t go to the funeral because he felt ashamed and guilty that he had caused her to commit suicide this way. After his wife died, Harry Murray finally agreed to marry Christiana Morgan under “the condition that she give up drinking; but as soon as Morgan stopped, he backed away from his promise” (p. 312) and turned his attention to a woman 20 years younger than she was. One beautiful clear morning, after this final humiliation, Christiana walked into the sea and never returned. The circumstances of her death, while vacationing with Murray at a friend’s cottage in Saint John, were purposefully confused by Murray either by grief or guilt or both. He recounted several different versions of her death in letters to different friends and colleagues. According to Douglas: What is clear is that on that sweet and sun-drenched morning, Christiana died. She had taken off the emerald ring Harry had given her thirty years before, wrapped it in her little beach bag, and placed it carefully on the sand. Then she walked out into the sea. She drowned in the lagoon just below their cottage, the outline of her lifeless body floating unobscured in the tender ripples of the waves. (1993, p. 314) In the culminating chapter of her book on Morgan’s life, Claire Douglas reminds the reader that Morgan not only was betrayed by the men in her life but, at the deepest soul level, had also betrayed herself: Her visions had combined the masculine and feminine sides of her personality to point to a new way of being a woman, but she failed to claim those visions

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for herself. Instead she sacrificed them to a doomed, romantic fantasy of relationship. She joined the male ranks against herself by choosing the male idea of love and putting that before her own needs. She avoided an honest commitment to her own life. Yet if she had stayed in touch with her visions, her body and her myth, she would have lost Murray, for it was clear that their union was based on her suffering. She cheated herself, selling her soul for Murray and the roller coaster of his attention. Christiana Morgan visioned a path to her own creativity, a Pilgrim’s Way that found and reunited a womanly spiritual, dynamic, chthonic, and sensual self. She discovered a new form and territory in women’s psychology and a new women’s voice. Yet she could not hold onto them for herself but gave her visions first to Jung and then to Murray . . . One of the ways in those days for a woman to have power and a chance to become more of herself was through alliance with a powerful man . . . Living as she was supposed to live, as a femme inspiratrice or an anima woman, destroyed the woman developing in her through her visions. (pp. 316–317) The teleological function of the demon lover is death. For all three of these women, where their own daimons should have been there existed the possessive bonds of a man’s dream of love. They all sought in death the coniunctio and sacred marriage, that which was not available to them in life, at least not with the men they loved.

6 SALOMÉ

It was the day after the talk for the Jung Society, and I was having a hard time settling down. The tension from the panel’s initial meeting combined with the audience’s receptivity to my comments had created a momentary inflation. It brought home the invaluable point Marie Louise von Franz (1980) makes when analyzing the fairy tale from Turkestan entitled, “The Magic Steed.” In her commentary, she reminds the reader that it does not matter whether what one is possessed by is good or bad—“it is the state of possession itself that [is] destructive” (p. 99). The panel experience had been very positive, yet it was hard to shake off. I decided to have a ritual bath, an old folk remedy of crushed dragon’s blood, frankincense, myrrh, and sea salt, made into a tea and poured around the bath water to clear possessive energies and projections. To create a comforting temenos, I lit the bathroom with candles, and as I ran the bath, I played a CD of old-world gypsy music from Bulgaria, Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares. I had received the collection as a gift nearly a decade before but had never listened to it. Phantoms of the old world settled in like fog over a lake at sunset, erasing the superficies of life. I was drifting back to myself across a great divide. With natural deep breathing, I reached empty space; at that precious moment of nothing, before the breath started to flow back into my body, the image of the gypsy woman from the Romanian dream blew through me: pin pricks kindled under my skin like fractal patterns spreading life, awakening flesh. Disparate synapses fired simultaneously, connections came together without effort, rocking me off balance with waves of energy. I vibrated. I felt like one of the pictures of a yogi or bodhisattva opening to the OM. Each thought hummed through my cells, a direct communication from the old gypsy woman. I expanded dangerously. The revelation shocked my system, as I knew all at once, “I could play Salomé now!” Immediately, a chorus of inner voices protested, “Are you crazy? You haven’t done anything in theatre for over a decade. You’re struggling to manage your work commitments as it is. You don’t even know if this is a possibility.”

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Stephen, the man who had gifted me with the gypsy CD, had handed me the script of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé almost 13 years earlier, simply saying, “You should play this role.” In the full consciousness of daytime, it felt silly to phone him after so many years. Would he even remember the Salomé script, my horrid attempt at the final monologue, and his encouragement that I play the role no matter how inaccessible it felt? I called anyway. The moment he answered, I jumped right in as if we had spoken just the day before. “I’m ready to play Salomé.” He replied, “Great. Let’s meet for dinner.” Stephen was of Eastern European descent and ran an acting school where I had taken classes in the past, eventually performing in two professional theatre shows. In the first, I played the female version of Dr. Dysart from Peter Shaffer’s Equus. For the second show, I played a character based on the playwright Tennessee Williams, in his two-character play Out Cry. Although vastly different experiences, the two plays collectively initiated me into the powerful Dionysian world of theatre. Before moving into my encounter with Wilde’s Salomé, I want to share my previous acting experience to show two key things I understood prior to beginning rehearsals for Salomé: it is possible to become possessed by a character, and it is possible for the spirits of the dead to speak through a character, as through a mask. Yet the power and paradox of the theatre is that in donning certain masks, one gains protection from their possession in life. In other words, playing shadow elements or characters can be a way of protecting oneself against falling prey to those energies in life. ≏ One evening, near the end of rehearsals for Equus, while running through lines I felt the spirit of the character move through me. The familiar lines sounded foreign. My voice had taken on a different edge. I had become Dr. Dysart. My chest caved in and my body moved in jerky, staccato gestures. My feeling sense was pudgy, male, and melancholic, as opposed to my usual felt sense of fluidity and height. I felt the places my voice could no longer reach restrained by a lifetime of unexpressed emotion. Disillusionment was at the center of each laborious breath. I was no longer acting but having the type of ecstatic experience I imagined commonplace to shamans and voodoo priestesses. I remained beside myself, at a distance, and watched as the character embodied me. When I arrived home that night, I was absolutely exhausted. I lay on my bed, closed my eyes, and dissolved into the strong energetic waves coursing through me. For a moment, the world seemed to tilt. Frightened, I opened my eyes, planning to get up and make tea. When I saw the clock on my night table, waves of fresh fear prickled through me because four hours had somehow passed! I had momentarily lost my hold on consensus reality, the flow of time. Although the lost time experience never happened again, that moment has always stayed with me. It

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seemed to mark the space/time necessary for the full inner adjustment out of the character, back to myself. In the performance of Equus, as a whole, something akin to beginner’s mind in Zen was constellated. I have never again had such a satisfying personal or public success in theatre. It was enchanting. Suddenly I understood why people give everything of themselves, their lives, in devotion to such moments. When lecturing on the art of empathy in psychology, I often compare the concept to a method actor moving into character, and Wilfred Bion’s theory of “O.” In his book A Beam of Intense Darkness (2007), elucidating the legacy of Bion’s theories, James Grotstein referred to “O” as “the absolute truth about ultimate reality” (p. 106). In regards to acting, I will define “O” as the connection an actor makes to the ultimate reality of the character. One becomes “O” through the acceptance of “the personalness of one’s Fate without denial” and in this way achieves what Bion referred to as transcendence (p. 122). In other words, to touch the other’s “O” requires a strong enough sense of self and connection to one’s own reality that suspension of this usual state is possible. However, Grotstein cautioned the reader to remember what Bion meant by the term transcendence. While I shall endeavor to explicate the concept of transcendence as it was used by Bion, this very term may be misleading unless one takes into consideration that the intrinsic aim of psychoanalysis is to help the analysand transcend the veils of illusion (sensory images and symbols that represent the other) that obtrude between him and the Other and between him and his Being-initself—his “Dasein” [presence]—as well as his desires . . . Put another way, what we commonly call reality itself is an illusion that disguises the real (O). (p. 123) The script of a play also holds layers of illusion that can obscure the “O” of the character. It is the work of the actor to see beyond those veils and to capture what is not obvious in the script—the true essence of the character: [W]ith patience and security this person [the actor] can suspend the distracting din of the language of substitution so as to keep himself open to the unconscious emotions that are spontaneously—meditatively—welling up from within him as he fully experiences himself experiencing the full presence of the analysand [character]: that is, experiencing himself “becoming” O [becoming other]. (p. 110) This radical form of empathy exists beyond traditional notions of empathy as defined by Carl Rogers and enters mystical territory; the other’s reality crosses over to “become known” to the analyst/actor. I have found that one potential bridge to “O” in analysis as well as in acting, in accordance with Stanislavski’s method, is memory. Bion would disagree with this use of memory, as he felt approaching “O” was only accomplished with no memory, no

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desire, and no understanding on the part of the analyst. However, I have found memory to be of great value in the movement towards “O.” When in an analytic session, to psychically reach out toward the other’s “O” I will sometimes invite myself to remember a time or memory from my life that comes closest to what the person is sharing. Once I have the memory in place, I let myself drift into the intersubjective field that surrounds it, evoking the emotional reality and a felt sense of that time. The use of personal memory as a bridge is a common technique adopted by method actors to find a place of empathetic resonance with the character they are playing. If the link is strong enough, one may cross over the existential gap between the self and the “other” and let the “real” experience of the “other” flow through—not the imagined experience or even one’s own resonant shared experience, but a complete felt sense into the experience of the other, something utterly foreign. In such rare moments, everyone feels the magic whether on stage, in the audience, or in the therapeutic temenos. As I prepared for the role of Dr. Dysart, I felt these precarious moments of crossing over into the character’s “O.” I struggled more with the role of Felice in Out Cry. The preparation for that role, to quote a line from one of Sarah McLachlan’s songs, was more like “fumbling towards ecstasy.” I found myself trying to regain a lost self-object experience from my first performance. I naively thought all future roles would take me back to that rapturous borderland between the character and myself. Williams wrote Out Cry to honor his sister, Rose, and their childhood imaginal activities. While he was away at university, she had been institutionalized by his parents and lobotomized, which effectively erased her being. Anyone who has a beloved sibling can imagine how unendurable such a loss would be and the concomitant rage towards one’s parents for allowing such a thing to happen. The loss of his sister was an enormous tragedy in Tennessee’s life, an experience from which he never recovered. The play was his attempt to work through the trauma, a type of wish fulfillment; he was still in the magical space of the theatre with his sister, beyond their parents’ reach. It is a complex, difficult, agonizing play. It is a play within a play. Tennessee Williams, as Felice, is playing with his sister, Clare, in the imaginary world they create together, where they are great actors on tour. Their imaginary play is also a veil that covers the harsh reality they fight to keep at bay: they are in the family home, barricaded off from the world, the site of a murdersuicide in which their father killed their mother and then himself. While working on building the character Felice, I never reached into Tennessee Williams’ “O.” Yet an insidious feeling passed through me. I dropped into a deep depressive state after the performance—a sinister place never entered previously or since. An alien darkness possessed me. In truth, it is hard to even remember back to this time, I suspect because of mood-dependent memory. The psychological research shows it is hard to fully pull back memories that occurred during an intense emotional state unless one enters back into that state of mind. I remember it being bad. It scared me enough that one afternoon, I called Stephen, as I sensed it had something to do with the play. He offered to come over for tea. When I

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explained the situation, his sense was I was grieving the death of the character, a natural process compounded by the fact that this character and the playwright were one and the same individual. Stephen shared that he believed Tennessee Williams was in a psychotic depression when he wrote the play. A week later, I woke one day and felt utterly myself again, as if Tennessee’s haunting spirit had passed from me in the night. The book Lament of the Dead (2013) records the dialogues between James Hillman and Sonu Shamdasani on Jung’s Red Book. There, Hillman argues that the dead are always all around us and that we live in a world saturated by the afterlife. He sees the afterlife not as a separate realm but one that engulfs us. The dead continually call out to us so that the weight and the soul of history can be understood, which in turn means that the dead can have continuation and redemption. According to Hillman, “the dead have to come back” (p. 66), and they do so through art and active imagination, as in Jung’s Red Book; they do not come back through theoretical or conceptual language: This [theoretical] language doesn’t bear the weight of human history . . . And it’s the weight of human history, the voices of the dead, opening the mouth of the dead and hearing what they have to say, not just the deep repressed or forgotten, it’s the actual living presence of history in the soul, the past in the soul. We don’t have a language for that in psychology. I think there is a language for that, I think Jung moved in that direction through anthropology and archeology . . . But we do have a language that would begin to express it. We have it in the Greek plays, we have it in literature, we have it in works of art. (p. 67) A theoretical concept or diagnostic category is not alive. Hillman argues for the importance of personification: “Once you’re engaged with a personified figure the emotion is there, love is there, dislike” (p. 32). Hillman goes so far as to suggest the task of individuation, as put forward by Jung in the Red Book, is “living with the dead” (p. 85). He also considers that part of individuation (living with the dead) is to take on the tasks left undone by the dead (our direct and historical ancestors). Hillman states that the word dead is often misunderstood and used “to mean inanimate, cold, which is not the case” (p. 84). To this, Shamdasani replies: [T]he dead are alive, the dead are animated, and in a certain sense the living are dead, so that there are passages where he [Jung] says that what is required is to be alone with one’s dead and to recognize them, that is the work one has to take on. In this sense he sees it as the redemption of the dead. This is a critical aspect of the myth that he [Jung] articulates. (pp. 84–85). Hillman advises that in Jungian psychology, there should be a movement from psychodynamics to psychodramatics:

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And if we talk about psychodramatics—I used that term somewhere long ago—it implies we are in a different realm of a different God. We’re in the realm of Dionysus who was the patron, the God, of the theatre. And then we have to use another language all together for doing psychology. We have to imagine it as the realm of Dionysian life. Of life force, of passion, of tragedy and comedy and not a clarification that you would get from an Apollonic or Athenian or another perspective of what goes on. (p. 33) Writing Out Cry was for Tennessee Williams a way to redeem Rose, to listen to her after her lobotomy, to stay with her and keep her safe. At the same time, he wrote of his own death through the text, what was taken from him when he lost her. His unresolved suffering entered into me and spoke. Only after I understood that the feeling state belonged to him was I free to come back to myself. As Shamdasani emphasizes, “The dead want to take you over” (p. 26). It is an actual possession that one is at risk of. “In a way it’s only through recognizing their demands that one is actually able to separate out from them at the same time and regain one’s independence” (p. 26). In a lecture Hillman gave at Pacifica Graduate Institute, he referred to Hades as the subterranean Dionysus. I think it is important to consider this. If Dionysian passion and life force go unlived, they can descend into underworld masculine energies that rape the feminine. Theatre contains within it the underworld’s transformative powers but in a way that promotes life rather than death. Dionysus was a central part of the Eleusinian Mysteries and was believed to be the masculine birthed into the upper worlds through the mystery play. He was the Happy Arrival, the seed of a reclaimed masculine innocence from the underworld experience of life. Dionysus holds the life spark that can continue forward. ≏ The ancient Greek word for theatre is θεᾶσθαι, theasthai, the translation of which is “to behold.” To behold alludes to understanding that comes from sight and perception. Playing Dr. Dysart was a protection against falling into the shadow side of the healing profession. In playing Felice, there was a protection against the insanity to which we are all vulnerable—creating an imaginary world and then living within its narrow frame. One of the gifts of playing the ultimate anima woman, Salomé, was that I was afforded a degree of freedom from falling into projective identification with these projections in life. Her character also provided a mouth for the dead. Through Salomé spoke what had died in me during the rape and what later died in me through betrayal by the man I loved. Salomé was potentially the voice of all the women who had physically died with their traumas, betrayals, and stories unspoken. My limited experience with method acting provided me with a healthy fear of what it would potentially mean to experience the “O” of Salomé’s character. I

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considered the untimely death of Heath Ledger in January 2008, merely months after his masterpiece of acting history playing the Joker in The Dark Knight. During his preparation for the role, he virtually locked himself up in a hotel room for months, working on the character and writing in his journal. In his private diary on the character, across one full page he wrote in large letters “Bye Bye” with almost transparent ink. Obviously, I can’t say with any certainty that this role contributed to his death, but I do know how powerful embodying a role can be; that he did so with such a disturbed, sociopathic character so successfully led me to wonder. As with most tragedies, I imagine it was a complex mix of factors that brought about his fate. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder at the role’s impact on his psyche. It was also reported that during filming, his long-standing insomnia had reached epic proportions, with him generally getting only a couple of hours of sleep a night. When the legendary actor Jack Nicholson, who had played the Joker in past Batman films, heard of Ledger’s death he responded, “Well, I warned him” (Christyn, 2015). These fears of crossing over into Salomé’s “O” were not, however, the foremost thoughts on my mind when I first considered the role. I was entranced by the mystery of it all. If the gypsy woman from my dream was powerful enough to pull me toward death, then this dream warranted an ambitious ritual stage of active imagination. The ritual stage of this dreamwork technique is a physical gesture the dreamer makes to communicate back to the unconscious and thus increase the bridge between the two worlds. It can be a painting, a poem, a ritualized gesture (such as burning a significant symbol or throwing a key into the ocean), almost any creative act that honors the dream. For the next year, my version of this creative ritual act consisted of rehearsals and preparation to play Salomé. In connecting with Salomé, and her obsession with the prophet all the way through to the final monologue with his severed head, I would also be connecting with the deep mysteries that the old gypsy woman was trying to reveal to me through her careful unveiling of the head she carried so lovingly. Synchronicity surrounded the production from beginning to end. A notable example occurred after casting was complete and staging had begun. I had been reading through an old journal, trying to locate a particular dream, when I came across a scrawled snippet of a dream wedged between more legible entries. Upon deciphering it, I was not offered entrance back into the full gestalt of the dream, as most often happens. Instead it felt foreign, as though it could have been written by someone else, dreamt by someone else. I must have been deep under when I recorded it, as this is the only time this kind of writing shows up—airy, jagged, large, pushed deep through the page, marking a sense of urgency as if my hand had surfaced straight from the underworld (and amazingly found a pen) while the largest part of me was still asleep. The dream read simply enough: Stephen calls and it is hard to hear him. I understand he wants me to come back to the theatre. I say, “I am not ready. I will come back after I return from Paris.” (Author’s dream journal, 2009)

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Not only had I been unaware I would be traveling to Paris en route to Romania two years later (I had not yet even planned to travel to Romania at that time), I also had no conscious plan to ever go back to the theatre. Yet there it was, this inexplicable confirmation, a dream foreseeing an irrefutable truth; I did go back to the theatre to work with Stephen after I returned from my trip to Paris and Romania. Salomé represented many things to me. First, there was the death and dismemberment of the young, immature, violent, power-driven and patriarchal-identified masculine that needed to be sacrificed for a richer and more complex masculine to be birthed. It was the severing of my need to be an anima woman: the death of the hero and the anima woman, Theseus and Ariadne. It was my divorce from Nicolas. I understood that what began in ritual space could only be severed through another ritual. The theatre, that most ancient form of ritual, was that perfect place. In mythological language Salomé represented an inner move away from blind commitment to a masculine principle embodied by the hero archetype (Theseus) to one embodied by the god of ecstasy and theatre: Dionysus. In her extraordinary essay “Ariadne, Mistress of the Labyrinth,” published in Facing the Gods, Downing (1980) insists that Ariadne’s fate is sealed when she agrees to play the anima woman for Theseus. Ariadne becomes anima for Theseus when she offers him the means to kill her half-brother, the Minotaur. Theseus had volunteered to be one of the several Athenian youths to be sacrificed to the Minotaur as a yearly tribute to King Minos of Thebes for previously conquering Athens. Ariadne (daughter of King Minos) gives Theseus the secret, in some versions the sword, that makes the slaying of the Minotaur possible, which in turn allows Theseus to escape his deadly fate in the labyrinth; in essence, she allows him to sail home a hero. To find his way out of the labyrinth, Ariadne gives Theseus a red thread to unwind and follow back to safety. In return, Theseus promises to take her away from the island of Crete, sail her into a brave new world, and make her his bride. It is only after Ariadne reveals to Theseus all her secret knowledge and in doing so betrays her own blood that he abandons her, in some versions of the myth, for her younger sister, Phaedra. She betrays her deeper connection to Dionysus in her devotion to Theseus: Some versions suggest Ariadne belonged to Dionysus before Theseus ever came into the story. It is as though she only recognized Dionysus’ prior claim on her life after she had betrayed it. (This makes sense at the personal level: perhaps we can serve another as anima only because of our prior experience of the sacred). (Downing, 1980, p. 142) In Downing’s unpublished lecture on shamanism, held in the Opus Archives at Pacifica, she considered the sacred visions of Black Elk and his inner struggle over whether to share these visions with the larger world. Downing noted that the danger of revealing such visions is that doing so can subvert their full realization. The sacred and the secret have been linked from earliest times. Both are defined as being set apart and seen as needing protection. In his book The Mysterium Lectures, Edward Edinger stated that an awareness of “radical separateness is a prerequisite

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for individuation” (1992, p. 134). Having a secret kept safe and sacred in the chambers of one’s heart and the depths of one’s psyche is an essential component along the journey towards wholeness: Like the initiate of a secret society who has broken free from the undifferentiated collectivity, the individual on his lonely path needs a secret which for various reasons he may not or cannot reveal. Such a secret reinforces him in the isolation of his individual aims. A great many individuals cannot bear this isolation. (Jung, 1963, p. 343) In her lecture, Downing noted a letter she had received from a friend, highlighting this caution in her own work: I received a warning about the danger of such subversion in a recent letter from a friend who shared something that had touched him in a book he was reading: “You must subordinate your life to your spiritual practice. As things stand now, you abuse the spiritual revelations you have experienced. You use them for comfort, for power, or for love without allowing them to influence you deeply, to change you.” I related to this in a disturbingly intimate way; it reverberated inside as truth. Until that moment, I had remained quite unconscious of using my experience of the sacred (my connection to the dreamworld, my visions) to seduce, to “be attractive” to the “other,” and to secure love. I have watched this temptation come alive in clients when they first connect with the power that is available through contact with the unconscious depths. This theme of seduction also plays out in the myth of Ariadne and the script of Salomé. The deeper longing behind the active pursuit seemed not just to secure love, but, as with Ariadne, Salomé, and Spielrein, to seduce a man she believed had the power to free her from her father’s kingdom. However, like Ariadne, and like me in my relationship with Nicolas, rather than finding the freedom she sought in her new love, there was instead a repetition of the earlier trauma (through betrayal and abandonment), which mirrored the self-betrayal of her own soul. Downing (1980) gives us another way to see this self-betrayal: as a turning away from a prior call to the sacred, a choice that accumulates in the weight of unlived destiny: I believe it’s not too difficult to have some understanding of what such a betrayal means and why one would commit it. Clearly, at times we are pulled to an involvement with a human other as an escape from a connection with the transcendent, a connection with a prior claim on us that is somehow too much. We flee to the heroic mortal lover, escaping from the deeper experience. (pp. 142–143) In my relationship with Nicolas, I felt very far away from my creative work, especially writing—a creative act that my dreams continued to call me to in precise, alarming ways. For example, I once dreamt that I was having a destiny reading

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from a priestess after coming up from an underground tunnel in India. She was reading the bones for my grandmother, my aunt, and myself—three generations of women. When it came to my turn, she said in a loud voice that started to shake something awake inside of me, “You must create or die.” When I tried to carve time out for writing, in subtle and not so subtle ways Nicolas would sabotage my attempts. It was as if I understood intuitively I could not do the deeper work I was called to and be with him at the same time. I blamed him for my inability to write; I had a hard time taking responsibility for that part of my life. In playing Salomé, I was recommitting to what Jung referred to in The Red Book as the “spirit of the depths.” I was letting go of my need for the externalized heroic masculine—the desire to be saved by another and sail off into a new world with my faithful lover. We had planned to move to South America and build a home. I was consciously taking the energy I had used in service of being an anima woman and redirecting it back to my own soul. I was turning back to Dionysus: For a woman, the psychological move from Theseus to Dionysus is not just a turning from one man to another; it is a move away from projecting one’s power onto a solar heroic “other,” toward finding an inner source of empowerment in the natural flow of life. (Downing, 1980, p. 204) The power of a strong anima projection is intoxicating and initially feels empowering. I remember during a lecture on self-psychology (I believe by Lionel Corbett, while I was in graduate school) I heard the phrase, “the surest way to devalue someone is to idealize them.” I did not understand this concept at the time, but I have a great appreciation for it now; to idealize is to dehumanize, to exalt to a divine status and thus to remove from the “real.” I had played the role of anima for Nicolas; I had given him the thread that led him out of the underworld labyrinth—the endless patterns of repetition compulsion of ancestral shadows—back to the truer threads of his own unique soul. He often said to me that I had given him the greatest gift of his life—a living connection to his dreams. When we separated, he expressed his deep sadness: “This was my spiritual experience in life.” Of course, while this was true, it was also absurd. I could never “give” him his soul; however, I did unwind the thread that introduced him back to the depths. John Sanford (1980), in his accessible and informed, if dated, book on the subject, exposes what are often the essential experiences of these anima projections. Naturally a woman who carries such a powerful projection is pleased, at least at first. She feels flattered and valued, and, though she may be dimly aware of it, enjoys a feeling of considerable power. The person who carries a projected psychic image from another person does have power over that person. The woman eventually regrets the situation in time, however, as she experiences the disagreeable side of being the carrier of another person’s soul. She eventually will discover that the man begins to suffocate her. She may find that he resents it when she is not immediately available to him, and this gives

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an oppressive quality to their relationship. She will also discover that the man resents any attempt on her part to develop her individual personality in such a way that it goes beyond the anima image he has placed on her, for in fact, he sees her not as she actually is, but as he wants her to be . . . When she insists on being herself she may find [him] jealous, resentful, pouting. She may also begin to dread his sexual advances, which, she begins to suspect, are not functions of the relationship between them, but have a compulsive, unrelated quality to them. (1980, p. 14) In the relationship, the anima projection and my projective identification with it were reinforced through sex. Over time, I became more and more closed to sex. My body and psyche sensed the destructive projection attached to it and refused to cooperate. Through sex, I became something like a container for his raw emotional particles. When I let them in, I would become possessed and lose parts of myself—typically my power, strength, confidence, and sense of well-being. Yet I stayed, partly because I was addicted to his anima projection; I wanted to believe his words of love. He also held my projected animus, so his words would take priority over my felt sense; like most women, I had never been taught to take my own instincts seriously or love myself that completely. Sanford reminds us: The same projections are made by women onto men, of course. If a woman projects onto a man her positive animus image, the image of the savior, the hero, and the spiritual guide, she overvalues that man. She is fascinated by him, drawn to him, sees him as the ultimate man and ideal lover. She feels . . . as though it were through him that she found her soul . . . A man who uses words well, who has the power of ideas and is effective in getting them across, is an ideal figure to carry such animus projections. (p. 15) Jung was an ideal candidate for animus projections, given his facility with words, his visions, and his far-reaching theories. In The Visions Seminars, Book Two, Jung stated: When someone has an animus projection upon me, I feel as if I were a tomb with a corpse inside, a peculiar dead weight; I am like one of those tombs Jesus speaks of, with all sorts of vermin inside. And moreover decidedly a corpse myself, one doesn’t feel one’s own life. A real animus projection is murderous, because one becomes the place where the animus is buried; and he is buried exactly like the eggs of a wasp in the body of a caterpillar, and when the young hatch out they begin to eat one from within. (1976, pp. 493–494) I have a sense of what Jung talks of here in regards to the destructive effect of anima-animus projections. I developed digestive problems that increased the longer I stayed in the relationship. There was a physical level to the projection that was

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very real, and I was hit hardest at the extreme positive and negative poles: when admired and when deceived. Now, when there is a strong anima projection on me, I sense it in my body almost immediately as deep rumblings in my belly, an early warning sign that the gates to the underworld have opened and I am in danger of being devoured. In Claire Douglas’ impeccably researched book The Woman in the Mirror (1990), she summarizes the work of early Jungian women writers on the animus. Douglas starts by sharing how deeply moved she has been by the “astonishing courage” of these women (Emma Jung, Harding, Hannah, Howes, de Castillejo, and Binswanger) to write of their own experiences of the animus within a patriarchal world frame. She reminds us of the importance of reading their work with the understanding that they were laboring to find and express their own truths “within a discipline and structure that, no matter how much it honors the feminine, remains patriarchal” (p. 179). Douglas also connects men’s mistreatment and mistrust of the anima with violence against women: I want to restate some of these women’s findings. The psychological impact of women’s unequal treatment as a class speaks through the negative animus. Both the negative animus and man’s anima projections onto woman are linked to men’s unconscious fear and disdain of women. Violence against women is connected to men’s mistreatment and mistrust of the anima and to androcentric hate of the feminine. The misuse of power by men in the patriarchy and by the negative animus recapitulates the androcentric idea that the masculine is free to dominate an “inferior” feminine and disregard women’s rights. This echoes in both men’s and women’s devaluation of women and the feminine, and in violence towards women, nature, and humankind. Much in animus/anima theory clarifies and explains some of the unbearable skewedness of life and gives at least an outline of a way to regain our balance . . . Finally, as is true of what does come down to us as history, much valuable work by women is forgotten or abandoned. This is a serious loss for Jungian theory as a whole, for ourselves, and for our critics. Much that would make Jungian theory—especially on the animus and anima—understandable, current, and serviceable, especially to women, lies neglected in forgotten files and old journals, the passion of its unlived life, its potential to be of use to us today, ignored. (pp. 179–180) Nicolas’ violence was alive in his deception. One definition of the word abuse is deception; to deceive another is a form of abuse. In a book on gypsy dream symbols, Sergius Golowin (1987) shared a traditional family saying: “People can wear a mask when they are awake, but they cannot do this in a dream” (p. 4). While in the relationship, I had several dreams that I was immersed in a domestic violence situation. The dreams deeply disturbed me, yet I could not consciously connect them to my everyday experience of the relationship, especially in its infancy. Many nights, as slept, I was distressed by a radio announcer reporting on appalling stories of domestic violence. I could hear the urgency in his

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voice as he droned on and on with the report. I had to focus my attention from within the dream on his urgent tone, which demanded the message be received. At first, I could not make out what he was talking about and kept struggling in the dream to hear. I knew it was important, and then a rush of repulsion would wash over me as he described images of horrendous domestic violence. I would wake to waves of fear. On waking, I was always shocked that there was no radio playing and that this voice had also been part of the dream. This should have alerted me to the real importance of what was being said, given it sat right at the border of the conscious and unconscious. There was also the dream of his ex-wife coming to stand before my bed, repeating in an ominous voice, “He will destroy you too.” In the beginning, I loved how protective he was. I came to see, however, that these protective instincts masked his destructive shadow—my “protector” was the one from whom I needed protection. Tim Ward in his revealing book Savage Breast (2006) writes of this shadow that lurks behind the heroic persona. In his introduction, he poses a number of compelling questions that he hopes will help women readers understand the hearts of men: Why do we have so much anger towards you? What are we afraid of? Why are we so magnetized by your appearance, and yet seem to know and care so little about who you really are? Ward writes that all men long for heroic glory, emphasizing, “the tough part is, it’s hard to keep being a hero to your wife” (p. 118). The mask slips, and other, less heroic aspects burst through when desire and expectation are frustrated—when a woman fails to hold the anima projection. Ward admits that when he felt his wife withhold this glory, “especially sexually, [he] became frustrated, angry, resigned and then full of despair” (p. 118). Hero means “man of Hera”; Heracles’ name means the glory of Hera. In this way, the hero represents a man who is bound to patriarchy and to trying to impress the mother, the lover—the goddess Hera, wife of the ruling order. Ward continues: When I try to imagine what Hera would have felt at the adulteries of Zeus, I feel from her such rage, and behind it a great sadness that comes with disillusionment. A past defiled, a future spoiled. I’m ashamed to admit how surprised I was when my wife left me after I confessed my unfaithfulness. I thought she would be angry, hurt, dismayed, but would accept my sincere repentance and carry on . . . And by that don’t we mean that we think women would be worse off with no husband than with a bad one? (pp. 118–119) In the darkly illuminating film Antichrist, directed and written by Lars von Trier (2009), this destructive aspect of the heroic masculine is played out to the extreme. A couple in the throes of ecstatic lovemaking don’t hear their son, who has slipped

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through the safety gate of his crib and crawled through the partially closed door of their bedroom, all the way across the floor to a chair under an open window. The floating white gossamer curtains allow the cool winter breeze in, and the large chunks of falling snow beyond mesmerize the little boy. He climbs up on the chair, reaches for a single snowflake, and in breathtakingly slow motion, in one of the most horrifically gripping, hypnotic cinematic scenes ever done, falls to his death. The husband, a psychologist, tries to help his wife through what other professionals are calling an “uncommon grief reaction.” He takes it upon himself to save her. As the film progresses, it becomes evident that the more he tries to help, the more undone she becomes. The projection of his own disavowed grief is a destructive element that escalates her intrapsychic disturbance until she reaches a psychotic tipping point that climaxes in extreme acts of violence. It is as if in isolation and despair, she starts relating directly to his unconscious shadow, his own unconscious violence that forces her to carry raw emotions while he infantilizes her with his care—a type of narcissistic arrogance that separates them and places him in the dominant role. He believes he is helping; this is the tragedy. There is another level of complexity in that at their isolated cabin, she is working on her thesis: an exploration of the witch craze, including the unimaginable violence against women demonstrated in the torture techniques of that time. The film also comments on the collective overlay of the history of violence against women and how this collective trauma plays out in the relational field in their present-day relationship. In attempting to save her, he keeps her from the underworld journey that is changing her. He wants her back as she was, unchanged. In this way, the heroic masculine fights to fix the field so that nothing changes, nothings grows, nothing is initiated, only returned or restored to its previous order. In the Christine Downing Collection of the Opus Archives, at Pacifica Graduate Institute, in Santa Barbara, buried deep in the section “Books That Never Got Written,” I found a folder entitled “Orpheus and Eurydice: Underworld Mythology.” In it, Downing explores the different ways that the underworld is experienced. She notes that the hero’s journey to the underworld is a journey of “no gain.” Downing uses the example of Heracles’ last and most difficult task imposed by King Eurystheus: to go into the underworld and steal Cerberus, the threeheaded hound who guards the gates to the underworld. Somehow, Heracles manages this, only to be told, on presenting Cerberus to the king, to take him back. This archetypal pattern in relation to the king is often demonstrated by the hero, who performs amazing acts of courage and valor only to undo everything spectacularly in the end. This pattern parallels the demon lover modus operandi: securing a romantic relationship with seduction, gifts, and acts of kindness—or in the words of one of my clients, “aggressively pursuing” the relationship—only to abandon it when the individual opens. The whole cycle then simply resets with another woman, another attraction. When the heroic as masculine (man) seduces the feminine (woman), we often see a clear pattern in that there is always one woman he is moving toward, holding his idealized projection (all good), and one he is moving away from, holding his shadow vulnerability, his pain (all bad). Downing emphasizes

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that the myth reveals an essential truth: the hero is “impervious to underworld experience.” The hero never grows, never changes, never evolves. Heroic action becomes a mere repetition compulsion and acts to reinforce a separation from one’s world rather than an engagement with it. The hero needs disasters in order to remain the hero and thus may unconsciously create the very situations that require heroic action. The hero hides his destructive shadow, the lie at his core. It is not about the other; in essence, it is about remaining triumphant over his own reality, history, and abandonment. At its heart, the heroic act seems a denial of death and vulnerability, a type of inflation that may shield a secret death wish, an unconscious depressed state. Jung came to this difficult reality during his active imaginations, recorded in The Red Book, before he understood its meaning: the hero needs to die. Perhaps Hillman (1979) expressed it best when he wrote, “hopefully, we may recover mythical images that lose the hero but save the wound” (p. 101). In other words, the hero needs to stop slaying the mother/dragon (the next heroic task) and start relating to her. This relating to the dragon would entail leaning into tragedy—allowing the full expression of emotions and authentic creative responses, permitting oneself to be deeply moved and changed by experience. The hero and the anima woman are magnetically drawn to one another, their relationship often falling into a state of obsessive compulsive stuckness with an addictive fervor. This pattern constellated in my relationship with Nicolas. We knew that it should end, but neither of us seemed capable of ending it. I once said to him as we watched the sunset on Jericho Beach in Vancouver, Canada, “It is clear we have come as far as we can in our relationship. If we don’t let go, we will only bring deep suffering to each other.” His words to me six months later, when we were in the thick of the suffering part, were, “I know I should leave you, but I can’t.” It is important to acknowledge that I am neither morally nor intellectually against the idea of polyamory. It is not a choice that I make for myself for complex reasons. The main reason for my monogamous stance, however, is that I personally resonate with the idea of a sacred temenos in a relationship and the belief that any energy, especially sexual energy, directed outside of the relationship affects its stability and capacity for depth. What I respond to in relation to diversity is the importance of choice. The most violent part of deception is not being offered a choice and not having your choice respected. If I had been offered the choice to be with a man who wanted to simultaneously be sexual with other women, I would have given it some reflection, but I am quite certain I would have decided not to be intimate with him. This is something he knew. However, if desires are transparent, as between Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, a woman (or man) might decide to surrender to a polyamorous lover anyway and find herself (or himself) growing and learning through those surrenders. There is still the impact and emotional cost of such a choice, but at least there is a choice. Otherwise it is simply oppression. For men caught in this pattern, I find there is often an unacknowledged rage toward the primary mother imago, who was either abandoning or rejecting in

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significant ways. Men dissociate from that primary rage but then project it toward other women in their romantic attachments. In my relationship with Nicolas when he was unfaithful, I became violently ill on more than one occasion. There were physical symptoms, the height of which was when I woke near midnight with my heart beating wildly off rhythm, splintering pain running down my arms, and a great pressure across my chest. I believed I was having a heart attack. I had been dreaming of holding my hand over my grandmother’s heart, trying to keep her from going into cardiac arrest. This was the night after I discovered that the whole time we had been together, he had been lying about his ex-wife. So his lies had not been limited to the present flowing forward but traversed the backwaters of time, polluting everything; there was no clear water to hold onto anymore, no pure foundation, no moment when he had loved me outside of the lies. Now, I believe it is possible to die from a broken heart. My analyst at the time, who trained with R. D. Laing, told me a story of one of Laing’s male clients, which he referred to as “the case of the transpersonal heart attack.” I will paraphrase it. The man hopped on a commuter train in London and sat across from a woman in an otherwise empty compartment. He noticed the red trim on the hem of her skirt and felt the presence of her being before he looked up. The moment he glanced up at her face, she raised her eyes and met his. As he recounted the experience in analysis, he tried to capture in words the ineffable moment; he said that it was like he had known her forever, had always been in search of her—and beyond this, that in the moment of eye contact, he also knew she felt the same. He had looked away to collect himself and happened to fix his eyes on the train station’s large clock, which read 6:14. He thought, “I will never forget this exact moment in time.” He had a sense that nothing would ever be the same. A furious, passionate exchange ensued in the minutes before she had to depart at the next station. They shared phone numbers, promising to meet up the next day. As he watched her silhouette disappear around the corner of the station, he felt undone with an emotion he could only describe as pure love. When she did not show up at the prearranged place the next day and did not respond to the various messages he left, he began to feel slightly insane, as if he had imagined it all. A few days later, she called and said, “Something strange has happened. My husband had a heart attack a few days ago, and I could not bring myself to respond to your messages. Please know that meeting you was the most significant moment in my life, and if I had been able to be there, I would have. Can we meet later this week?” He asked for the day of her husband’s heart attack, and she confessed it was the same day they met. Then he unexpectedly, even to himself, asked the time of day, and she said, “Six fourteen”! He went to Laing, overwhelmed with desire to meet her and distraught with the recurring thought that if their meeting of eyes had the power to bring a heart attack to her husband, was it not possible he could die if they made love? He wished for Laing to reassure him that it was only a strange coincidence. Laing,

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however, a transpersonal psychologist for many years who had delved deep into the mysteries of things that can be felt but not seen, said that he could not say for sure that their lovemaking would not bring about this man’s death. Dr. Edward Tick in his book The Practice of Dream Healing (2001) recounts the experience of a cardiologist he knew who after decades of successful practice decided to go back to school and become a psychiatrist. He did this because of his realization that only 10% of his patients actually had any kind of physiological heart disease and that most heart complaints and symptoms had an emotional or psychological basis. He had to change professions to treat his patients effectively. In the six hard years leading up to this end, my body and soul were worn down like Tibetan prayer flags exposed to harsh mountain winds, rains, and snows—my colors washed away, my prayers no longer visible even to myself. I suffered. Without end, I longed to be free of the relentless surges of pain the relationship brought down on me, yet I could not leave before it was done. I did not want to repeat the destructive relational cycle that I suspected had been plummeting along my ancestral lines for countless generations. The largest part of me called for release, screaming, “Just let go!” yet time and again, when I consulted my deep psyche in active imagination with my ally, I would receive the message: “It is not yet over.” I stayed as long as there was a glimmer of hope that the destructive pattern could be broken between us; however, in the end, it destroyed us. Nicolas had a hopeful dream during one of our more tumultuous periods. He dreamt of a rough country road we were forced to travel to escape the site of a major earthquake. The road was fraught with nearly impassable, sharply unexpected inclines and descents that we had to survive. It was clear in the dream that once we traversed the 13th dangerous stretch of road, we would be free; the road would smooth out on the other side. I remember counting the various hits and bumps taken to our weakened relational container, the holes in our marriage basket; we were very close to 13. His dream gave me hope the way that seeing the first dragonfly in spring does after a long, cold winter. It is quite possibly a great tragedy we did not make it through this 13th threshold. Certainly it was a veritable miracle to have made it as far as we had. I had to accept it was not up to me. We each had our own individual tasks as well as collective tasks that needed to be completed to pass the sentinel at the 13th gate. I had my own, less hopeful prophetic dream at this time: The two of us were sitting around my grandfather’s old oak kitchen table at breakfast, calmly planning a murder as casually and unemotionally as if we were writing out a grocery list to organize meals for the upcoming month. Both Nicolas and myself were equipped with guns. I looked around the table, took in the guns, the maps, the keen, excited spark in Nicolas’ eye, and a wave of nausea swept through me with the tension of the simultaneous knowing that I could not be an accomplice to murder, nor could I stop him if he decided to go forward. Sheer anxiety took me as I desperately tried to ward off knowledge of what my dissension

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would mean for us. I spoke my truth. I would not join him. He decided to forge ahead with the killing without me. (Author’s dream journal, 2010) The dream suggested a type of ordinary, everyday violence had seeped into our relationship, had integrated into our home life and become as natural as eating breakfast. We were both distorted, destructive mirrors to one another, not unlike the reflective mirrors in a fun house at the amusement park—some parts cut off, others dangerously lengthened, still others squeezed into a shape that pleased. And like being in the house of mirrors, it seemed fun at first, until that one crazy flicker of cold anxiety cracked through from the irrational world below and I was no longer sure which reflection was really me, and I thought, “Will I ever find my way out of this silver maze?” One of us had to see through all the romantic distortions to the violence beneath and say, “No more.” For me, the only way to do that was to admit defeat. The agonizing surrender to that defeat led me on the circuitous path to Romania and then to playing Salomé, which turned out to be another defeat of sorts. The night of the performance, I was with the other cast members in a small theatre dressing room, more like a closet really. We were all crammed in together with dim light and no personal space. Herodias was trying to help me with a lastminute costume adjustment by pinning the large, jeweled belt onto my skirt. She managed one side but could not quite get the other when Herod grabbed the pin from her, flipped the belt over strongly, and slid the pin into place. Emergency solved! I took a deep breath and tried to steady myself. Cold, anxious energy coursed through me. Jokannahan reached out for us all to hold hands in a gesture of alliance, as if we were a volleyball team heading into a match at the Olympics. We took a collective breath. The others looked to me to say something. I closed my eyes, felt into the energy behind the fear, and said softly, “May Dionysus, patron god of the theatre, be with us tonight, inspire our performances, and allow the magic of the theatre to manifest.” Then I opened my eyes. King Herod met my gaze and said loudly, “F*&%$ Dionysus!” The door opened and we were called out. Rattled, I walked out behind everyone else, as I would be the last on stage. Standing alone behind the audience, it took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the change in lighting. My slippers felt too rough against my feet, my belt too heavy around my waist. I looked at the rows of people in front of me, the backs of many heads. Then right in the front row, stage left, the shine of the stage lights reflected off a familiar bald head: Herod! Not the Herod I would be playing opposite tonight but the first Herod we had cast, the one we’d had to let go of just before going to production because of an escalating conflict that climaxed, during a rehearsal, with Herod and Herodias literally screaming into one another’s faces, in response to which we all stood stock still, afraid that any wrong move could prove fatal. The momentary, deadly silence spurred us all to action at once, attempting to

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de-escalate the situation. The moment passed, but lines had been crossed. Our king and queen refused to work together, and the “first” Herod was dropped. Everyone felt it was necessary. Nearly a year of rehearsals blew away like a child’s bubbles on the wind. No one had the heart to start again. Yet we did. What was he doing here? How did he get in? What revenge might he be plotting? There had been tension between this “first” Herod and me from the beginning, although I had never provoked him the way Herodias did. She had not acquiesced as I had to keep the peace. I admired her for that. Now he sat right in front of the stage where, literally at his knees, I would have to collapse to the floor and perform my final monologue. I imagined him laughing out loud or worse. Then I heard the words that called me on stage: “Look at the moon. How strange the moon seems! She is like a woman rising from a tomb. She is like a dead woman. One might fancy she was looking for dead things.” There was nothing I could do but walk out on stage.

Salomé’s dance As I prepared for the role of Salomé, I read a segment from Edward Tick’s previously mentioned book on dream healing that moved me deeply. Tick recounts an experience of attending a theatre performance at Epidaurus of Euripides’ The Trojan Women, depicting the final collapse and capture of Troy after a decade of war. His account is harrowing; it cut down to bone for me as I devoured his words. Tick shares that he chose neither to reread the play before the performance nor to bring a translation with him and in this way was able to attend with his full emotional presence. He describes the scene and its impact on him: The chorus of dark-robed women writhed a snakelike dance of their agony, begging the gods and the Greeks for mercy, surrounding each other with gestures of consolation. Hekabe, the Queen of Troy, led them in a dance torn between standing up and collapsing under the terrible loss of husbands, fathers, sons, and home. In the midst of this relentless slaughter, Hekabe cried out from the pit of her stomach, her soul, from a depth out of which I have never before heard a human sound, “A-na-the-ma, A-na-the-ma,” over and over again. Anathema. It is one of our words, too. I understood it, not with my mind but with my body and soul, for the first time, the way some linguists say we first learn a language by attaching raw emotion to sound. Something in me from pre-memory was wrenched free. I shuddered. I felt nauseous. Pity and compassion and revulsion surged up from my heart and flooded my body. Anathema. Cursed. Wronged. Against the theme. Against the way. Against the grain. Against the order . . . Anathema. As I left the theater, I had a strange shuddering, uplifting, insideout feeling throughout my body that lasted for days. How had Hekabe learned to make that cry? . . .

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After the performance, an actress from the chorus told me that she hoped to play the part of Hekabe some day. But she expected it would take her twentyfive years of study and practice to make that cry. (pp. 7–13) The description he gives of the actress’ performance touched my own soul’s longing. I desired the play to be such a contained, ritualized space where I could dive deep. I wanted to wrench forth that cry of my own being—a lament powerful enough to open eternity and connect me to a time and place where the feminine was honored as sacred and full of mystery. I had heard that sound once before in my dreams, so potent it removed my identity and like a black hole sucked me through time, whether backwards or forwards I am not sure, to the dark earth of the goddess temples. I remember the shock of coming back to consciousness and feeling the power of that sound before realizing the cry was my own: I am in a retreat setting with Mary Daly and a number of other women from her inner circle. I am invited to participate in an initiation ritual that requires the initiate to dive into the water and reclaim what is there for her. I wonder if I will be able to hold my breath long enough to make the dive and recover what is mine. In preparation for the ritual dive I am to receive prayers at two and ten daily. When the time comes, the objects are no longer so far beneath the waters. I can see them easily. I simply reach down and take them—my dream journal, a pen, and a necklace. I put the necklace on and clear my throat. I wait until my voice will ring loud and true with the reclaimed power symbolized in the red beads around my throat. What comes forth from me I recognize as a call of worship. I am in a cobra position and as the cry reverberates out, my body instinctively moves down down down, each millimeter taking me farther back in time—temples and sacred spaces flutter behind my eyes. The feel of the sacred runs through my body. As the front of my body, abdomen, breasts, chest, and finally my face makes contact flush with the earth, I am wracked with sobs for all that has been lost. (Author’s dream journal, 2010) I marveled that I had found “that cry” in my dreams and fantasized that some of its force would find its way into my performance. It would have to be real, like the gypsy notion of cante jondo or deep song—a sound vibration that evokes duende: It is truly deep, deeper than all the wells and seas in the world, much deeper than the present heart that creates it or the voice that sings it because it is almost infinite. It comes from remote races and crosses the graveyard of the years and the fronds of parched winds. It comes for the first sob and the first kiss. (Lorca, 1998, p. 10)

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I would have to risk all to make it; I would have to let go of everything if the moment came. The biblical story told in Mark 16:14–29 and Matthew 14:1–12 inspired the Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde to write the one-act tragedy entitled Salomé (1891/ 2013a). In the biblical story, she is said to have danced for King Herod on his birthday. He was so pleased with her that he swore to grant her whatever she desired. After asking her mother what she should request, she was told to ask for the head of John the Baptist. In the scriptures, she is not named, but Wilde moves her to the center of the story by naming the play after her and placing her dance of the seven veils as the axis of the play; Salomé’s dance is the thing everything else revolves around. Salomé is a powerful play that depicts how Herod killed his own brother (Salomé’s father) and married his brother’s wife, Herodias, to take over the kingdom. Herod becomes obsessed with the young princess Salomé. He can’t stop looking at her. Narroboth, the head soldier of Herod’s army is also enamored with her. Herod killed Narroboth’s father in a previous war and took the young prince to be head of his own guard. A prophet named Jokannahan arrives and begins to prophesy Herod’s demise for the blood on his hands. Herod fears the prophet and thus remains unable to put him to death, instead placing him in the cistern, a type of prison. Significantly, this is the same cistern that held Salomé’s father before he was killed. From the depths of the cistern, seemingly from the underworld itself, Jokannahan continues to speak of the one who is coming to save all, of Herod’s death, and of Herodias’ sins. The play opens at a large banquet in celebration of Herod’s birthday. Salomé escapes the unbearable atmosphere of the “barbarian” banquet for the open air on the terrace, where she hears the voice of Jokannahan for the first time. Captivated by his voice and all it dares to say, Salomé asks to see him. When Salomé seduces Narroboth, who guards the cistern, to get her way, he goes against Herod's explicit order that no one be permitted to see the prophet. At first sight, Salomé is enchanted and immediately falls in love with the prophet Jokannahan. He refuses her cruelly. “Back! daughter of Babylon. By woman came evil into the world. Speak to me not . . . Thou art accursed.” Salomé then vacillates between poetic, repetitive words of love and words of hate towards him, yet repeatedly comes back to her desire for him. “Suffer me to touch thy body . . . Suffer me to touch thy hair . . . Suffer me to kiss thy mouth.” When Herod realizes Salomé is missing, he calls his court out onto the terrace, where he finds her. He then aggressively pursues her, first to sit beside him, then to take food and drink with him, and lastly to dance for him. She rejects him in all things, including the dance, until Herod pledges, on his word, that if she dances for him, he will give her whatever she desires, up to a half of his kingdom. Under the spell of this ominous oath, she dances the dance of the seven veils for him. After the dance, he asks her what she desires, to which she replies, “The head of Jokannahan.” Herod is shocked and embarks on a series of monologues, attempting to persuade Salomé to change her mind. He offers his vast treasures. She rejects each of his offerings, her singular focus on the head of Jokannahan. Eventually, he is forced to honor his word and grants her wish. Salomé is brought the thing she

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demanded and then is undone by the reality of death. The play ends with Salomé speaking a long monologue to the severed head of the prophet, voicing her grief, anger, and love, before Herod orders her death. Like a dream, the interpretation of the play Salomé, as well as the character Salomé, has many layers, levels, and threads; it holds many truths. It is a play rich with anima-animus projections seen in virtually every main character: Herod to Salomé, Salomé to the prophet, the prophet to Salomé, Narroboth to Salomé, and the Page to Narroboth. From a generalist perspective, Salomé is a difficult character embodying disparate elements that prove fatal when combined: eroticism, aggression, and innocence. From a more depth-oriented approach, I consider Salomé an intermediary, a transitional object if you will, a character who exists between the worlds of my time and an earlier time that was still in touch with the sacred feminine of antiquity. She carries some of the modern-day world in the abuse she suffers from Herod as a sexualized object under the male gaze; however, Salomé still carries some of the old-world pagan feminine mysteries as well, symbolized in her knowledge of the dance of the seven veils. This connection to the feminine mysteries is also seen in the many parallels Wilde makes between Salomé and the moon. The meeting of Salomé and the prophet can be seen as symbolizing the initial meeting between the opposites of pagan and Christian world views. The initial meeting ends in a death coniunctio, or marriage, which further potentially represents the death and resurrection cycle that always leads to a deeper reality. The removal of the seven veils in Salomé’s dance can be seen as a gradual movement from fantasy to reality. In this way, it is an initiation into reality, Bion’s “O.” Bion, in a personal communication with Grotstein in 2000, defined the mystical as being able to see things as they truly are without disguise. In yet another reading of the play, we see Salomé as a character not of her own at all but as a young woman simply possessed by the various projections of others, a woman without a center: a lost woman. I see her as having more agency, motivated by a desire for freedom and safety. The prophet represents the possibility of freedom and escape from Herod’s kingdom. As evidenced in the script, he is the only man Herod fears. Salomé understands that she is not safe; it is only a matter of time before Herod will demand more from her sexually, the incest and abuse of power that Herodias is continually trying to subvert. This is evident in Herodias’ repetitive lines, “You must not look at her! You are always looking at her!” Herodias’ drive to stop Herod from sexualizing her daughter, as is tragically true for many mothers in a patriarchal world frame, seems less a desire to save and protect her daughter than to protect herself (and her fragile associated power) from being replaced in the eyes of her husband, and the resulting loss of position in the kingdom. One can empathize with this. What would happen to Herodias if Herod took Salomé to be his queen? When Herod pleads with Salomé to dance for him, he offers her anything up to half of his kingdom, an offer that can be read as offering her to sit beside him in a ruling position, essentially the queenship. It is interesting to note that we find it heroic or deserving of veneration, even centuries of

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worship, when a man follows a spiritual vision or pursuit all the way to death—but we don’t find this true of the body’s sacred sexual mysteries. Those mysteries are demonized, banished to the underworld. We don’t have many myths or stories that praise women who find their way to freedom and ecstasy—although we do have the tantras that at least provide an image of women awakened to their sexual freedom, the dakinis who are skydancers gifted in the art of ecstatic travel. I considered Salomé to have a connection to an erotic possibility buried deep in the unconscious of most modern women. She allows herself to follow her body’s call towards sexual union, even if that call pulls her and her beloved all the way down to death. It is the call of Dionysus, her pure, sensual, erotic nature, that she follows. That instinctual pull is in sharp contrast to the spiritual vision of the prophet. Of course, one could argue Salomé’s actions have nothing to do with a true sexual or erotic nature but are driven by pure animus projection, yet is there not always a core of authenticity in the pursuit of the object of desire? A sexual instinct that underlies the projection? I think so. It is often devotion to this underlying authenticity—the call of the body—that leaves individuals bound to compulsive, destructive relationships. I have experienced it myself and seen many clients experience deep sexual awakening in such relationships: something they don’t want to die but can’t keep alive. Although I did not know it when I decided to play Salomé, while researching for a lecture, I was fascinated to find that Jung had an important encounter with Salomé and the prophet in an active imagination. He considered Salomé an inner anima figure. The distrust and demonization of the erotic instinct, shown in the prophet’s rejection of Salomé in Wilde’s play, is mirrored in Jung’s reaction to Salomé in these original visions recorded in The Red Book. In his meeting with Salomé and Elijah, an encounter that Jung called the Mystery Play, Jung entered the deepest visionary space he had ever dropped into. In the past, he’d had visions that took him to depths of about one thousand feet, but “this time it was a cosmic depth. Like going to the moon” (Jung, 2009, p. 177, n. 161). This central vision started the evening of winter solstice, December 21, 1913 and was the initial in a series of visions lasting for three days, climaxing with a last vision of crucifixion on Christmas Day. Jung reports that when he first met Salomé and Elijah, he was shocked and unable to grasp what kind of “miracle could have brought them together,” to which Elijah replied, “Consider this . . . her blindness and my sight have made us companions throughout eternity” (Jung, 2009, p. 175). In the vision, Salomé asked Jung whether he loved her, to which he responded by calling her a tiger with hands stained by the blood of the holy one. Salomé continued to push and eventually declared, “You will love me.” Jung, like the prophet, was outraged that she had the audacity to make such a claim, and when she told him she loved him, he replied, “Leave me be, I dread you, you beast.” Salomé responded:

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You do me wrong. Elijah is my father, and he knows the deepest mysteries. The walls of his house are made of precious stones. His wells hold healing water and his eyes see things of the future. And what wouldn’t you give for a single look into the infinite unfolding of what is to come? Are these not worth a sin for you? (p. 176) Jung continued to demonize her, referring to her words of love as devilish. The conversation created such tension in Jung that a traumatic response to flee was generated: “I long to be back in the upper world. It is dreadful here. How oppressive and heavy is the air!” (p. 176). It is interesting that the words Jung used here are close to the first words spoken by Salomé in Wilde’s play, when she flees the oppressive atmosphere of Herod’s banquet for the terrace: “How sweet is the air here! I can breathe here.” As Jung’s vision continued, Elijah explained that Salomé loved John the Baptist, which left Jung in a confused state. As Jung stirred back into the upper realms of consciousness, he was already reflecting on his experience: Doubt tears me apart. It is all so unreal and yet a part of my longing remains behind. Will I come again? Salomé loves me, do I love her? I hear wild music, a tambourine, a sultry moonlit night, the bloody-staring head of the holy one—fear seizes me. I rush out. I am surrounded by the dark night. It is pitch black all around me. Who murdered the hero? Is this why Salomé loves me? Do I love her, and did I therefore murder the hero? She is one with the prophet, one with John, but also one with me? Woe, was she the hand of the God? I do not love her. I fear her. Then the spirit of the depths spoke to me and said: “Therein you acknowledge her divine power.” Must I love Salomé? (p. 177) Together Salomé and Elijah represent the most supreme of opposites: female/male, pagan/Christian, soul/spirit, eros/logos, young/old. It is noteworthy that Salomé goes straight for love, asking it of Jung and offering it to him just as she went straight into love and erotic longing with Jokannahan in Wilde’s play. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1965), Jung speaks of Salomé as an anima figure and the “erotic element:” Salome is an anima figure. She is blind because she does not see the meaning of things. Elijah is the figure of the wise old prophet and represents the factor of intelligence and knowledge; Salome the erotic element. One might say that the two figures are personifications of Logos and Eros. (p. 182; my emphasis) In the end, Jung made a distinct decision not to love Salomé. He decided to stay in the more comfortable realm of intellect and spiritual power epitomized in the figure of Elijah—the prophet. Although the pair remained at the center of his life’s

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work, which culminated with Mysterium Coniunctionis, a work he was engaged in for nearly a decade and finished in his 80th year (Jung, 1970, p. v), Jung shows an extreme preference for Elijah in his theory, writing, and own inner work. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he states that he turned toward Elijah because he seemed the most “reasonable,” and that he was “distinctly suspicious” of Salomé. Soon after the visions, another figure arose for Jung that “developed out of the Elijah figure” (p.182), whom he named Philemon. Jung describes Philemon as a “guru” to him and states that he was quite real; they took walks up and down the garden. Jung worked with Philemon as a trusted guide throughout his life. There is no record of ongoing active imaginations with Salomé, and in fact there are no references to her in his collected works, compared with over 30 to Elijah. How might Jung’s life and theories have been different if he had afforded Salomé the same kind of dignified status that he gave to Elijah? Not working with the anima figure Salomé in his inner world may have forced him to project her and meet her as fate in the external world, thus forcing the women in his life to carry this intense inner anima figure that never had a chance to evolve as Elijah had. The inner figures also individuate as we do through active imagination with them. The Salomé figure was not able to individuate, as she was cast off by Jung early on. I am convinced that if Jung had done more active imagination with Salomé in his life, he would not have fallen victim to the archetype of the demon lover constellated in so many of his relationships with women. In the Vision Seminars (1976), where Jung analyzed the visions of Christiana Morgan, one of her visions was of a great white egg that appeared to her. When she asked the egg to open, she found the head of a man: “Open that I may know what is within you.” At length the egg opened and within I saw an antique black marble head. I took it off and wiped the dust of ages from it. As I did so tongues of fire leapt from the lips and the face said, “Kiss me woman.” I said, “I cannot I will be burned.” The face again commanded me and I kissed it. Then I felt the fire going all through me. I stood and I felt the head fell [sic] upon the ground and broke into fragments. (p. 370) When a Professor Eaton, one of the seminar attendees, suggested the head represented John the Baptist, Jung dismissed his comment, saying, “John the Baptist was not black . . . and he did not want Salomé to kiss him” (p. 370). Similar to his response to his own vision, where he could not imagine having love or desire for Salomé, Jung here shows he also could not imagine that any part of John the Baptist held desire for Salomé, which is astounding if you consider his theory on the shadow alone. Salomé was a defeat for Jung, arguably a puzzle placed before him that remained unsolved. Jung understood that an experience of the numinous was “always a defeat for the ego.” In Mysterium Coniunctionis, he wrote: You only feel yourself on the right road when . . . you have become the victim of a decision made over your head and in defiance of the heart. From

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this we can see the numinous power of the self, which can hardly be experienced any other way . . . the experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego. (Jung, 1970, p. 778) For me, lines from Rilke’s poem “The Man Watching” capture the integrity of surrendering to defeat: What we choose to fight is so tiny! What fights us is so great! If only we would let ourselves be dominated as things do by some immense storm, we would become strong too, and not need names. ... Winning does not tempt that man [woman]. This is how he [she] grows: by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings. (Rilke, 1981, p. 66) Jung had his own pain, his own traumas that were intimately connected to his daimon. Like the women who carried his anima projections, Jung too was a victim of his projections; these are always blind until we have raised the power to see. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he writes: For some people I was continually present and close to them so long as they were related to my inner world; but then it might happen that I was no longer with them, because there was nothing left which would link me to them. I had to learn painfully that people continued to exist even when they had nothing more to say to me . . . I was able to become intensely interested in many people; but as soon as I had seen through them the magic was gone . . . A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon . . . This lack of freedom has been a great sorrow to me. Often I felt as if I were on a battlefield saying, “Now you have fallen, my good comrade, but I must go on . . .” I am fond of you, indeed I love you, but I cannot stay. There is something heart-rending about that. And I myself am the victim; I cannot stay. (p. 357) There is a time to fight and a time to surrender. Great humility comes when one surrenders to the slings and arrows of fate. Near the end of his life, Jung

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acknowledged the limits of spiritual and intellectual power in the face of the greater mysteries: I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once and cannot add up the sum. I am incapable of determining ultimate worth or worthlessness; I have no judgment about myself and my life. There is nothing I am quite sure about. I have no definite convictions—not about anything, really. (p. 358) Unlike in the original biblical portrayal of Salomé, as well as Jung’s interpretation of her, in the adaptation of Wilde’s play we did, the prophet was portrayed as struggling with his desire and growing love for Salomé. His harsh rejection of her was a defense to preserve his spiritual mission. In Jung’s original vision, Salomé is blind, which may represent a way of being in the world that has a deep faith in the embodied felt sense rather than what is seen or heard. Again, in Bion’s theory of “O,” O is considered a dark spot that can only be illuminated by blindness (Grotstein, 2007, p. 116), and in this way I see that entering into a deep dialogue with Salomé may be equivalent to unveiling an ultimate truth about ultimate reality (Bion’s definition of “O”) that the world desperately needs: something that Wilde understood and Jung did not. In Wilde’s play, Jokannahan tries desperately to avoid Salomé’s kiss, just as Jung never allowed himself to be penetrated by Salomé’s essence, her kiss. For me, it was important, if not vital, to play Salomé as an attempt to uncover a more authentic sensual nature in myself. In doing so, I experienced what most women experience when they try to uncover their true, virginal erotic nature: resistance and obstacles from a collective that fears this in women and wants to keep the status quo of power and privilege firmly in place, a collective that wants women to remain objects of the male gaze. It is political to challenge this. I had to face this not only in the external world through the director and cast but also inside myself. Late in the writing of this chapter, I had to confront my own distrust and judgment of the erotic and the felt sense. I had to admit to idealizing the strong intellectual and spiritual currents in Jung’s writing and the devaluation of my own research and writing because it existed more in the realm of feeling and eros. Only slowly, over time, did I become aware that the director had a different view of Salomé than mine. Initially, we had been aligned. I had the following dream while rehearsing: I am with a well-known Vancouver psychologist who has invited me to do the dance of the seven veils for a large conference organized to raise money for the Jewish community. The conference center is on a large multi-leveled ship. I am nervous when I arrive. I have not been given much time to prepare. I mention my nerves to the man who is organizing

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things, and he seems to interpret this as a bad sign and, thus, comes to the conclusion the dance will not be strong. I reassure him it will be fine but try to conserve my energy for the dance itself. There is something off with my veil. I find plastic hand inserts attached that are quite horrible. I am relieved to realize I use the other side of the veil so can cut these odd things out. As the time draws near, something is off and I am taken to the wrong location. Someone runs off to see what happened. The psychologist looks to me and says sadly, “This is not going to happen. There has been some kind of mistake.” I am devastated and share that just because I am nervous does not mean the dance will not be well performed. He says, “Perhaps it will happen again at another time, but the time is not right for it.” Then we are driving together and he is giving me space to talk and process the complexity of my feelings. Slowly the awareness begins to dawn that all the work I have done may be for nothing and I may never dance the dance of the seven veils. He looks at me and quite seriously poses the question, “Would you rather be lost or fallen?” I say, “Lost.” His shocked reaction seems to imply that this is the wrong answer. It sends a shiver through me and sets me to reflection as I stir awake. (Author’s dream journal, 2013) My conscious self saw Salomé as fallen, a term associated with women who dared to have sexual knowledge, women who had fallen from God’s grace, women who deviated from the social norms; in the not too distant past, this has included eccentric, creative, educated, and introverted women. The unconscious perspective, represented by my dream ego, suggested I preferred to be lost, wandering, adrift, still desired by the “male gaze”: the same gaze Salomé is trying to free herself from throughout the entire script. The transferential field created in the production was complex and in significant ways mirrored the script itself. The director and one cast member had anima projections on me, and at least two of the cast members had previously been sexually intimate, which created tension on set. I kept to myself but was still affected by the “male gaze”; there seemed a part of me that didn’t want to give up the anima position, being an object of desire, even if it meant I was lost to my deeper self. Had I been in my virginal self, I might have been offended when I found out one of the cast members had secretly started calling my dance “the lancer.” When I pressed to know what this meant he said, “Whatever is going on, no matter how boring on set, when you dance the dance of the veils it is like the moment one gets hold of the lancer.” I researched it while writing this chapter, and “the lancer” is a rifle with a chainsaw at the end of it, considered by some to be one of the best weapons ever devised in video gaming. The deadly combination of rifle/chainsaw come together so that a player can feel confident killing from a distance or close up; when close to your enemy, you can simply use the chainsaw and cut through the other’s body. This young man associated the dance with extreme violence: the violence hidden in acts of seduction. To him, Salomé’s dance was a weapon that undid Herod, the moment she

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turned his own desire against him like Artemis turning Actaeon into a stag to be devoured by his own hunting hounds for the transgression of gazing at her naked in her sacred spring. My own projections onto belly dance were challenged when I came to realize, from an embodied perspective, that it was a very interior experience. It was more sensual than erotic. When I danced, I felt the earth flow through me. However, this deeper internal experience was hard to hold onto in the presence of the male gaze when the dance was included in rehearsals. Over time, the anima projections seeped into me and had a lethal impact on my ability to act. As the performance drew near, I found myself feeling less and less confident about scenes where I had previously felt strong. Even the elusive final monologue, arguably one of the most difficult in the history of theatre, had flowed well for me more than once. As we moved closer to opening night, that final monologue felt farther and farther from my reach. The guidance I received from the director slowly, insidiously took away Salomé’s anger, her edge. His words got inside me: “Anger is a weakness, not a strength. It is beneath you to play Salomé this way.” At one point in the process, I had the following dream: A woman I had taught to dance veil comes up to do the performance. There seem to be many things going off. After I go for a costume change, I arrive at the theatre to an explosion of applause. I sit back, hidden in the dark theatre as she comes out to dance. She has black feathers rather than a veil to dance with—like the traditional fans that some belly dancers perform with except they are heavy, dark feathers and I know that she will not be able to handle them, to maneuver them. The feathers will overwhelm her. She cannot carry them and dance simultaneously. I wonder if I should have done the dance myself. There is an understanding that I cannot direct and dance at the same time. (Author’s dream journal, 2013) What stood out most strongly for me from the dream was that I could not direct and dance/act in the play at the same time. I had to surrender to the direction I was being given. That was a mistake. I called the director in a near panic a few days before opening and he said, “Don’t worry. Whatever we need to do, we’ll get you there.” To try to ease my anxiety, we met and rehearsed the final monologue, but I could not “push the world away” in his presence, as he directed me to do. He made a final fatal turn in the direction for Salomé just 24 hours before I walked on stage. He wanted me to play the final monologue like a poem, a declaration of love rather than the mix of intense emotional reactions that come from the reality of being faced with the death behind the projections: denial, grief, rage, confusion, and the edge of madness. This was the final blow that sucked the soul out of Salomé (and me) and stole her power: a last-minute reversal after a year of preparation. A fitting dream around this time was that while playing Salomé, I was replaced with a soap opera actress.

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I dream I am in the Salomé play. We are performing in a large gymnasium-like space with rows of wooden bleachers along the back wall. The audience is already present; however, they are at enough of a distance that I can almost forget their presence. I am in position and preparing to make my entrance onto the stage. With a start I realize I don’t have my veil with me, and a cold panic runs through down my body. I grab the red veil and place it within easy reach. Next, I realize I have not practiced my turns on this particular floor. I go over the floor, noticing there are places I will not be able to turn and making a mental note of where they are. I am concerned I have not danced enough with the red veil and consider switching to my violet practice veil for the routine. The play is happening, and I notice a woman takes my place in the scene. She looks like a typical soap opera actress and she appears to be in distress. I ask her what the hell she is doing: “Do you not understand this throws the whole show off?” She runs back on stage to finish a small piece before taking her leave. Another part of me does not seem to mind the intrusion, as I am unsure of the action and my lines in this place. The director yells, “Cut!” He is clearly upset with how things are going, and as he yells at a few people who missed directions, I start to practice my turns. I find I have the power, if I will it, to lift off gently from the ground and then float back down as I dance. Powerful energy surges through me as I move and direct myself with confidence and grace. It seems that some members of my family are there, and although I don’t actually see my father, I sense his eyes on me; however, it does not distract me from the movements. I drift back off and enter another dream about the black arts and an impending sense that something is off and needs to be changed in the work. (Author’s dream journal, 2013) Afterward, I came to realize that like Herod towards Salomé, the director didn’t want to be forced to remove his anima projection if I played “my Salomé.” He did not want to see me angry, powerful, and aggressively sexual. He did not want to be confronted with the dark feminine in me. He wanted to see a lost, innocent, desiring, seeking, helpless Salomé in need of saving. He tried to save me from my inner struggle with the character rather than direct me to use that struggle to intensify and animate the character. The part of me that needed playing Salomé to be a safe, creative way to explore my own anger at the violation, abandonment, and betrayal by men in my life was thwarted. Women need such spaces in the world to avoid silently passing this violence down to later generations. Perhaps this is what the Dionysian rites did for women in antiquity, offered them a ritualized way to express madness and rage in a world where there was so much to be enraged about. I could not see this clearly at the time. I could only sense something was off. I was hazed by the projective identification with the director’s anima. The soap opera part of me went on stage and played a superficial Salomé. In the place where I might have been strong, I was lifted off solid ground, twirling in midair with the power of projections. I was lost.

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Months later, over pizza at Incendio near Railtown, I expressed to Stephen my feeling of betrayal at what had happened. “You knew how important this role was to me. We were on track and you kept changing the direction in odd and confusing ways. I can’t help but think you didn’t want Salomé to be strong. In theory, you thought she was great, but when she started to manifest in rehearsals, you were disturbed and in subtle and not so subtle ways sabotaged her becoming.” I gave several examples and shared my sense of defeat and disappointment. Stephen’s words confused me once more: “This was not a defeat. It was a success. You can’t go beyond the seal of the king, and the seal of the king here was your script and the cast. You got what you needed in the process, the preparation towards Salomé. Then you surrendered to the Salomé that the script and cast allowed. That was the right thing to do. That’s the place psychology ends and the theatre begins.” I did not take well to being told I could not go “beyond the seal of the king.” Yet still, I wondered: Was this my own narcissism needing to play Salomé my way? I imagined it was quite true that the cast could not support the Salomé I saw, that the collective field did not allow her to come forward and live. But I was quite sure mine was Wilde’s Salomé. Also, Stephen had significantly changed the end of the play so that Salomé would not die. He made Herod’s final words, “Kill that woman,” ambiguous by having him point to the empty space between Herodias and Salomé. Certainly this was a huge departure from the original text that went “beyond the seal of the king.” In retrospect, I find it quite appropriate that Salomé had to be a defeat. It had to be a death—like in a dream I once had of being surrounded priestesses and asked to say what I wanted from life. I went into a deep trance and asked for many things that I could not remember when I woke. I only remembered that when I finished, the high priestesses handed me a piece of rotting corn—as if this was the answer to the mystery of life. It is amazing how we want authentic life but not the death that will take us there. The poets understood this with their prayer for duende—give me the death I need. What the ego experiences as defeat is an expansion of soul. I felt Stephen had tried to keep me from my death, but I had died anyway—just not the way I’d imagined. There was no glory. It was slow, painful, and humiliating. I was utterly without power in the face of reality, and the growth was just that: I was much closer to reality. I saw through. In the end, we are defeated by the final mystery of death, yet we must still try to come to some understanding of what the journey of life means. It is arduous, often agonizing work to pull back projections, and for an anima woman in a world ruled by the fathers, it is a sin. The greatest sins of the anima woman are anger and selfpossession. The feminist philosopher Mary Daly wrote that women must learn how to sin big, to have needs of their own and to protect those needs, to send back violent, possessive projections with intention, and to own their own violent

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shadow without acting it out. To commit the sin of being a strong, autonomous woman places one on dangerous ground. It is well-known that the moment a woman speaks out or decides to leave an abusive relationship is the moment she is in the gravest danger of losing her life. The narcissistic injuries of being left or rejected incite narcissistic rage. In my mid-20s, my closest friend, who had recently moved into a new apartment building, was being sexually harassed by a male neighbor. She told him he needed to stop or she would be forced to say something to his wife. He killed her a few days later. At the time, he was out on parole for kidnapping, sexually assaulting, and attempting to kill another woman. Her death changed the course of my life. Every year in April, I read the court report outlining all the details of her death. The intensity of the grief I still access is like Demeter’s well at Eleusis: endless, timeless. It sends shocks, volts of realization through my body, like shards of glass falling through water, of the reality of the loss, her body, her life. This is real and is always happening. You need never look farther than the local news to hear stories of violence against women. Women have reason to rage, reason to doubt, and reason to protect themselves. Herod’s anima projection on Salomé dissolves when he sees her capacity for violence and rage; shortly after, he orders her death. I imagine the breaking of Jung’s anima projection for Spielrein was connected to her speaking out in the community about her outrage, as well as the moment when she reportedly attacked him in his office with a knife. And while I don’t advocate violence (in either gender) in order to send back oppressive projections and set appropriate boundaries, I do think anger is essential. Anger is a protective and motivating force strong enough to sever the threads of the heart that are often used against women to maintain their obedience and silence. Disorders such as hysteria and borderline personality in women are intensified by women carrying men’s dissociated emotions, just as disorders of psychopathy (antisocial personality disorder) and narcissism in men are magnified by men carrying women’s split-off anger and capacity for violence. Jungian analyst John Beebe in his book Integrity in Depth (2005) explores the idea, similar to Hillman’s theorizing, that each person holds an inner anima and animus (the syzygy). Beebe takes this one step further with the thought-provoking addition of a lunar masculine and a solar feminine. What I like about this theory is that it still honors the possibility of essential masculine and feminine qualities, the mysteries associated with each gender, while at the same time freeing up both men and women to be more fluid in their consideration and recollection of the different projected elements that have traditionally been polarized as masculine or feminine. Beebe suggests that everyone feels the “rigidity in Jung’s understanding of the gender opposites” (p. 95). Initially, narcissistic personality disorder (characterized by arrogance, lack of empathy, and a sense of entitlement) was predominantly diagnosed in men (as antisocial personality disorder still is), just as borderline personality disorder (characterized by excessive emotionality, fear of abandonment, self-harm, and impulsivity) was predominantly a women’s disorder. The fact that statistics have changed significantly, with more women diagnosed with narcissism

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and men with borderline than ever before, hints that these rigid gender opposites are starting to soften in the collective. In my relationship with Nicolas, it was a formal warning of a restraining order that finally broke the anima projection. I am outside in the snow. I am severing a final cord that leads to a heart. I keep it steady on the snow so it remains pure. I angle the sharp spade to travel deep and then offer the entire weight of my body in one piercing thrust but it does not separate. I prepare again and finally, about the third try, it is free. I feel proud. I know this was a near impossible task. I bend over to pick up the heart. It has become the head of a man. Another man nearby, whom I had not noticed before, comments that the heart/head is large, some 15 lbs. I feel the weight of it in my hands and go to set it in a clear, open space. The man poses a question directly to the head: “How was it to be severed?” The head responds, “It feels good, real powerful.” The standing man then says only to me, “He should not have left his death undone for others to complete.” (Author’s dream journal, 2013) I had repeatedly asked for no more contact. I knew that he had a way of using my love of him against me, and in his presence, I did not trust myself not to get drawn back into something. I knew he had not changed. I needed distance and time, something he seemed incapable of honoring. Time and again, he violated my requests for boundaries. I warned him it was a serious offense to continue to do so. His pushing started to frighten me. I began to wonder whether I knew him at all. What was he capable of? It was true that months before, I would not have thought it possible for him to lie so boldly to my face. I also knew virtually no one from his past before we had met. There was also the fact that one night shortly after we had separated, I was sitting in my living room when a man peeked his head around the corner of my fire escape and looked right at me through my main living room window. This is something you have to contort your body to accomplish, after breaking into a secure area in the building. It was a brief flash that left me feeling extremely violated. I was quite sure it was him. He denied it. Even though I found the thought of him being physically violent highly unlikely, I did not want to be naive. I knew the statistics, that most women are attacked by people they know (husbands, lovers, colleagues, friends, uncles, fathers, and neighbors). An article by The Globe and Mail, a Canadian newspaper, in preparation for International Women’s Day (2018) stated that “every six days in Canada, a woman is killed by her intimate partner.” I thought of all the women who have doubted themselves and relinquished their boundaries the moment before they were killed. I have seen this in my practice—the vicious attack that was not believed possible, even with several early warning signs. Still, I took what I was contemplating doing very seriously. The night before, I stayed up most of the night deciding.

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The next day was an eclipse of the sun by the moon, which seemed appropriate on so many levels, as I would be honoring my deep feminine moon energy over his sun. I threw the I-Ching, the divination tool I most rarely use. I did active imagination, journaled, and meditated. I decided it needed to be done. I met with the police and started the formal file, which would begin with a simple warning and escalate to a full restraining order if violated. Through doing this, I consciously sent back to him all his unconscious violence and set a strong protective barrier for myself. A year later, we saw each other out dancing and he broke the order by asking me to dance. I said yes. This was when we tried one last time, but it was over. For him, it was my act of sending the formal warning that had irrevocably severed things. He could not get past it. Curiously, it was my act of self-protection, of setting a boundary, that he experienced as violent. He said when the police came to the door, he was struck down immediately with an intense migraine. His violence I felt in my heart, whereas mine (through the act of returning and not holding the energy) he felt as a blow to the head. Like Psyche, we both had tasks to complete if the relationship was to deepen and mature. I felt he did not complete his task. He left things undone, which forced me to sever the last heart threads so I could be free. Beebe (2005) suggests that uniting the opposites within is a prerequisite for a more mature relationship. He goes on to conclude that “women have long been ready to unite the opposites within their gender. It is time for men to prepare to meet them with a similar integrity” (p. 98). While I find this statement true, I also find compassion for men in that it is easier to pull back projections of the daimon often placed on men by women than for men to pull back the demons (emotions and traumas) they often place on women. Their seemingly privileged position makes it more difficult to discern that what is projected onto the other also oppresses them; it prevents wholeness. What is hardest for women seems to be pulling back projections of anger and fierceness. Florida Scott-Maxwell (1957) also thought that women had come much further in integrating their animus than men had in integrating their anima. She saw that men’s continued projections of their anima onto women had a regressive and limiting effect on both themselves and the women who acted as carriers for the projection, “while women’s integration of the animus causes a positive and unsettling advance” (p. 163). According to Douglas (1990), “Men can feel they have a natural right to something that is being taken from them” (p. 73). I believe this is what Nicolas felt when I set a strong boundary—that his natural right for me to be the container of his intolerable emotions was taken from him. I see this in my practice so often with women who protect men from seeing and reclaiming their shadow aspects. They save men from the deeper truth, perhaps to keep the fantasy of the hero alive in the man they love. Theseus is Ariadne’s hero, but she is also his; she is responsible for his escape from the death that awaited him at the center of the labyrinth—arguably a death he needed! It is hard to let someone you love die, even if that death is in service of greater life. I knew Nicolas was in pain over our ending. He reached out for help at one point. I could no longer

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be his Ariadne. He needed to find his own thread out of the underworld, just as I had to find mine. I dreamt of him dying and me, devastated, chanting over his deathbed. The desire to run to him to make sure he was all right was tidal in its power. I re-enter a previous scene in an attempt to undo fate. Although this may not have been my original intent, the understanding rips through me as I enter the scene again that this is my task. I find myself in the same scenario and at the same entrance I was in time past. There are dangerous men exiting and one brushes against me as he passes. It is in this instant that I recognize it is possible for everything to change. In this moment, I have the power to alter the past. In the original moment, no one physically touched me so I know my presence now can alter the past and the future. All of a sudden, I am hit with the fullness of the responsibility of this moment—I must be as conscious as possible—I am playing with the threads of time and fate. The men sit with us—myself and the two women I am with. One of the men asks me to read his cell phone. There is an invitation to the main races at the horse track. I am flattered even though at another level I know the danger I am in the presence of. I am somewhat paralyzed between desire to accept the invitation of this dark man and knowing some other truth that seems to be quickly slipping away in the power of his presence. The woman I am with gives me a deadly serious look that says “We are leaving now!” and just beyond that, “What the hell are you doing? Do you want to get us killed?!” We excuse ourselves from the table. I remain flirtatious and marginally apologetic as we take leave. I follow her, my senses coming back to me—yes, I know the vicinity of the racetrack is where everything in the scene goes down. This is where my brother died. I am now walking towards the track alone, in deep reflection. Just before the crossover into the psychic killing field, between worlds, everything goes dark. I look up to find a star falling endlessly through space—the power and numinosity of it stun me, change me. The words form spontaneously on my lips and spill out into the eternal chasm, star-bound—(the gift of seeing into the eternal darkness that is behind everything), “Please don’t let my brother die!” The voice comes directly from my heart, part cry of a wounded animal, part divine inspiration. It is not until after they are spoken, the air charged with potential for change, that I wonder if I will now have to die in his place. Death anxiety shakes me as I confront the real possibility I have just called my own death into play. As the scene materializes back around me, I see I have been separated from the others, who are now safe. I exist alone in dangerous territory. (Author’s dream journal, 2013) Like most women, I was in conflict over the anger I felt. More than this, I feared its power. On more than one occasion, I had the disturbing fantasy that if I played Salomé just right, it could kill him. The dream of the old gypsy woman and the severed head lingered. I was in the territory of death and underworld initiations. There was much I didn’t understand. In this dream, I wanted him, my

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brother, to live, yet as soon as my devotion and compassion flowed toward him, I feared for my own life. It’s true that at the first stage of the coniunctio, love is more narcissistic than mature in that it is built more on power-seeking from a wounded core (I am speaking of us both here). This contrasts with the second stage, which reflects the true capacity for love—the ability to see the other as they actually are without the distortions of projections. The first stage ends in a death marriage, but the second can travel all the way to the true marriage bed. Yet even in this blood-stained first stage, love survived through the death in a way that makes me think of Salomé’s last words from her monologue: “Love is stronger than death.” While this connected to Nicolas, in that somewhere in that eternal space, my love for him still existed along with my desire for him to be well, it was primarily my internalized masculine that needed to die, the immature masculine represented by the narcissistic hero that, like the vampire, steals the vital life force from the feminine soul. Patricia Reis writes: Somewhere in all deep initiatory experiences, the process of psychic dismemberment is present as a necessary step. [Dionysian dismemberment is primarily a masculine transformation process. In a woman’s initiation, the dismemberment happens to her internalized masculine elements.] (1991, p. 195) According to Barbara Hort: In order for the psychic vampire to be killed, the mind must be briefly unplugged; that is the rationalizing psyche must be beheaded . . . [T]he tyranny of reason is pervasive in the psyches of most human beings, and we are remarkably inept at beheading ourselves and unplugging our minds. (Perhaps this is why legend tells us to place the severed head of the vampire far away from its former position at the neck—under the arm or feet—so the head won’t reattach itself and enable the vampire to reanimate.) (1996, p. 69) She goes on to suggest that once one has escaped the rational mind (the head), the heart, body, and soul find their true voices and health is restored. Dionysus receives the rage and madness that the straight-minded hero rejects in the feminine, but his rites also demand extreme boundaries for the feminine to safely explore these psychic depths. He can relate to women’s condition within patriarchy and rape culture. It makes perfect sense that he is known as the “god of women” and simultaneously feared as evil and dangerous. He is the only god in the Greek pantheon never to have raped a woman. Dionysus is threatening to the masculine ruling principle that does not allow the authentic feminine to be seen and evolve. His presence sublimates her raw emotions into ecstatic expression. He

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collects Ariadne after she is abandoned by her hero-lover. He embraces her and they unite. Their child is born in the underworld. As Downing (1980) notes, it is the only example in Greek mythology of birth in the underworld, which hints that something exceptional has taken place. Hopefully this child will one day rise to be seen in the light of consciousness. For all these reasons, I danced the dance of the seven veils for him. My heart has been cut open My blood drained in the name of freedom What remains? Sweet music in my veins Ancient dance in my broken bones Happy and sad My spirit sails into the unknown With no land no home to call my own Hopelessly searching through the past To find my people who scattered Like glass that shattered Long ago Listen and you’ll hear the song of longing Look into the far distance beyond the horizon And there you’ll see dancing My lonely gypsy soul (Hancock, Dowd & Djuric´, 1996, p. 42)

EPILOGUE

In the spring of 2015, a year after playing Salomé, as I approached the tombstone of Oscar Wilde, at the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, I was the same age that he was when he died—46. The wing-and-stone monument, a sphinx carved by Jacob Epstein, considered by some a demon-angel, now restrained behind a barrier of glass, not unlike the barrier between a passenger and driver in a NYC cab, or the glass shield of an officer in riot gear, or the glass that separates a premature baby from its mother. It is speculated that Epstein was inspired by Wilde’s poem “The Sphinx,” which contains the verse “Sing to me all your memories” (2013b). Epstein’s monument to Wilde has come to be known as the embodiment of modernity. According to most literary scholars, Salomé is Wilde’s least-known work—certainly his least-understood. I was redeemed somehow by seeing the inscription on his grave, which begins: “Oscar Wilde. Author of ‘Salomé’.” For Salomé had brought me here. Hemingway wrote that a man can be destroyed but not defeated. He was a man. Salomé was my defeat. Salomé was my protest against the “male gaze” and all that it kills in women. It was my rage at how much the spiritual world rapes from the feminine soul. Salomé held the voice of my heart and the dance of my freedom. She was my gypsy. I spontaneously spoke to Wilde in my mind: “You who knew betrayal at the hands of your lover yet found a way through art to gift the world from your own despair. Your life remains a symbol for outcasts everywhere to find the strength to remain true. You whom they tried to silence in life.” In the words of Ellen Crowell (2018), Wilde’s life stood in opposition to “the radical potential for silence in the face of communal trauma.” And in an online article, Heather Love (2007) pleads that we must see Wilde’s “revolutionary imagination as bound not to the redeemed world but to the damaged world it aims to repair” (p. 132). My thoughts continued, “This may be my own hubris, but I like to think that if we had ever met over coffee, absinthe, or wine, if we had ever talked, if I had shared with you

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my understanding of Salomé and the dance of the seven veils, that you might have said to me something like what you wrote to Aubrey Beardsley when first you saw Beardsley’s illustrations of Salomé: ‘For the only artist who, besides myself, knows what the dance of the seven veils is, and can see that invisible dance.’” Joseph Campbell (Campbell & Moyers, 1988) said, “It is whether you say yes or no to the serpent. [To] the adventure of being alive.” Wilde said yes to the adventure of being alive and did not censor his brilliant imagination. His tombstone stands today not only as a memorial to his life and work but also to the symbol of Salomé—the dark feminine rising. The faded kisses on his grave are reminiscent of Salomé’s last words before her death: “I have kissed thy mouth. I have kissed thy mouth” (Wilde 2013a).

CONCLUSION

In the middle of a seven-day, solitary, silent retreat, shortly after my separation from Nicolas, I sat meditating under a Balinese full moon. A single bat kept flying in a linear pattern, deep into the rice fields and then back to hover briefly over my head. Every time the bat paused above me, I let the vibrations it ignited in my body increase. When I felt I could no longer hold the intensity of the vibration, I heard the words, “You never loved him.” Shocked, I immediately wanted to defend myself, my love, but simultaneously a deeper part of my soul understood this to be true. At the time of our relationship, I was not initiated into the deeper mysteries of love. Only many years later did these mysteries slowly begin to reveal themselves to me. These ineffable moments began to find me first through dreams and then in my life. Such as times spent lying in bed, still, for hours, vibrating with a deep felt sense that I can only describe as love, a type of ecstasy not at all unpleasant. These experiences have made me wonder whether the central initiatory experience on the mystery nights at Eleusis was the evocation of an embodied felt sense of love. Whether somehow, the priests and priestesses of Eleusis, through careful preparation and ritual, were able to create in the bodies of the initiates the moment when fear turns to love, when narcissistic love turns to soul love. An instant of seeing beyond all the veils of illusion, the kind of felt vision powerful enough to break the final threads to the death instinct at the core of the demon lover complex. Like the resounding truth of Salomé’s words in her final monologue, “love is stronger than death”—an experience that can call one to life, can call one to be present for one’s life (Wilde 2013a). Moving into the Red Sea This is about faith Body trembling, weak from pleasing

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Mind awash with dark longings for forbidden fruits She steps anyway Suddenly, Eyes drop their fear The knife slices the veil In the silence of a thousand years The bees stir, their song renewed This is about love

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INDEX

acting 134–139, 150–152, 162–163 action, as symbolic language 31 active imagination 62, 80, 88, 93, 106, 108, 137; demon lover complex 44, 51, 52; and Salomé 139, 149, 155, 157, 166; see also imagination Adam and Eve myth 67 Adler, M., “Out for Blood” 79 afterlife 137 Aizenstat, S. 34 Allan, J. 126, 131 ally, the 103, 104 anger 50, 51, 65 anima-animus projection 143–145, 162, 164, 165; archetype 78–79, 80; Jung and demon lover 120, 121, 127, 129; positive or negative animus 115; and Salomé 154, 155; see also projection Anthony, M. 127, 130–131; Jung’s Circle of Women 128 archetypes 5, 6, 9, 10; anima-animus concept 78–79, 80; archetypal core 44; archetypal patterns 71; Christian 33; dark-feminine 32, 51; demon lover 26, 38, 42, 44; Madonna-Whore 35; mother 33; puer 81, 95; vampire 79; wounded healer 63; see also demon lover complex; imagery; individuation process (demon lover complex); mythology Ariadne, myth of 140, 141 astrology 9

Bacon, F. 4 Bair, D. 127, 129 Bakker, D. 35–36 Beardsley, A. 171 Beebe, J. 166; Integrity in Depth 164 Benedict, H., Virgin or Vamp 12–13 Beneke, T., Men on Rape 12 Bermingham, J. 54 Bhagavad Gita 62 Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho) 76 Bion, W. 135–136; Beam of Intense Darkness, A 135; theory of “O” 135–136, 138, 139, 154, 159 bisexuality 80 Black Goddess 33 Black Madonna 32–33 body memory 22 Bourland, J. 72 breastfeeding 55 Breuer, J. 49 Brickman, J. 12 Briere, J. 12 Brownmiller, S. 49–50 Buber, M. 49 Burkert, W. 68 Campbell, J. 58, 171 Canada, sexual assault incidence 12 Carotenuto, A. 115, 121, 124; Secret Symmetry, A 120 Cassandra, legend of 69–70 celibacy, conscious 44–46

180 Index

Chadd, B. L. 28 Christ, C., Laughter of Aphrodite 4 Christianity 4, 65, 95, 154; Judeo-Christian myth 64 Christyn, R. 139 Cicero, On the Laws 64 Coleridge, S. T. 75 collective unconscious 31 consciousness, collective 37 containment 54–55 countertransference 115, 118, 123, 129; see also transference Covington, C. 122, 123; Sabina Spielrein: Forgotten Pioneer of Psychoanalysis 120 Cronenberg, D., Dangerous Method (film) 112, 113 Crowell, E. 170 Cummings, E. E. 62–63 Daly, M. 125, 152, 163; Outercourse 100 dance: bachata 86, 89; belly dancing 161; dance floors, Vancouver 77, 83, 86–88, 92; dance of the seven veils/dance of Salomé 151, 153, 154, 159, 160–161, 169, 171; salsa 86, 89 dark feminine 32–33 Dark Goddess/Mother 8, 31–33, 35, 70, 88 darkness, images of 32–34 de Mijolla, A. 131 De Shong Meador, Betty, Uncursing the Dark 65 death 3, 5, 23, 78, 101, 103, 127, 129, 130; and afterlife 137; alchemy 102; collective 34; death instinct 121, 172; death marriage/death coniunctio 27, 43, 52, 68, 91, 102, 132, 154, 168; death wish 115, 125, 147; demon lover complex 29–31, 49, 132; and dreams 60; experiences 6, 63; life and death 51, 63, 98, 102; mystery of 60, 61, 64, 68, 69, 163; portrayal in film 145–146; and rebirth 63; of relationship 101 deception 144, 147; see also lying, in relationships Demeter and Persephone myth 8–10, 12–24, 64, 68, 73; demon lover complex 27, 29, 32, 33, 51, 52 demon lover complex: archetype 26, 38, 42, 44; defining 26; Demeter and Persephone myth 27, 29, 32, 33, 51, 52, 73; demon lover constellated in psyche of a woman 26; honoring the demon lover 52–53; individuation process see individuation process (demon lover complex); and Jung 112–132; omnipotent control over

demon lover 37–39; patriarchy 30, 33, 39, 46, 47, 51; projection 34, 35, 41, 43, 55, 57; and Spielrein 120–121; trauma 26–27; truth 44, 46, 51, 52, 57; underworld 29, 31, 47, 51, 52, 54 depth psychology 7, 50, 80, 126, 130; female perspective 2, 5, 130; field of 1, 2, 5, 85, 126; and tantra 84–85, 95; theory viii, 78; see also psychology Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) 31 Diamond, S., Anger, Madness and the Daimonic 26 Dickson, E. 51 Dietz, P. 36 Dionysus 138, 140, 155, 168–169 dissociation 50, 115, 118 divine feminine 4 Djurić, R. 169 Donner, F. 85 Douglas, C. 5, 129, 131–132, 166; Translate This Darkness 126; Woman in the Mirror, The 144 Dowd, S. 169 Downing, C. viii–ix, 73, 140–142, 146–147, 169; “Ariadne, Mistress of the Labyrinth” 140, 141 dragonflies, symbolism 85 dreams: amplification to the mythic/ collective level 67; death 60; dream healing 151; dreamwork 70, 80, 139; eclipses 91; experiences/journal of author 1, 2, 8–11, 37–41, 46, 53, 56, 58–60, 64, 66–67, 70–72, 77, 85, 90, 98–100, 105–107, 139, 144–145, 149–150, 159–162, 167; gender identification 80; gypsy woman symbol 105–107, 133, 139, 144, 167; imagery in 34, 66–67, 80, 133; and rape 36–37; sadomasochism 52 eclipses, dreams of 91 Edinger, E. F. 85; The Mysterium Lectures 34, 140 Eekhoff, J. 55 Eleusinian Mysteries Rites (480 BCE–364 CE) 57, 63–64, 69, 72; Dionysus 138, 140, 155, 168–169 Eleusis, Greece 72 Eliade, M. 4, 57; Shamanism 103 Elijah (prophet) 156, 157 empathy 135, 136 enantiodromia (emergence of the opposite) 30 Ensler, E. 72

Index 181

Epstein, J. 170 evil 54 family relationships: father-daughter 64–65, 71; mother-daughter 9, 10, 21–22, 23; siblings 14–15, 20–21 feminine, the 3–6; dark-feminine archetype 32, 51; divine feminine 4; feminine principle 100; ideal feminine 39; and insanity 47; mystery 154; and psyche 80; splitting 75; see also masculinity; women Ferenzi, S. 29 field: of depth psychology 1, 2, 5, 85, 126, 130; of meaning 78; of power 100; of psychology 5–7, 115; puer 95; of trauma 48 Fifty Shades of Grey (James) 37 Freud, S. 5, 32, 53, 80; death instinct theory 121; and Jung 112, 115, 116–118, 121; talking cure 115 Frey-Rohn, L. 34 Gary, J., “Sleeping Beauty Wakes Up” 12 gender identification 57, 80 Gilligan, J. 54; Violence 31 goddesses, temples of 4 Golomb, J., Nietzsche and Depth Psychology 32 Golowin, S. 144–145 Graves, R., Mammon and the Black Goddess 33 Grotstein, J. S. 135, 154, 159 gypsy woman symbol 105–107, 133, 139, 144, 167 Happy Arrival ritual 57 Hades (god of the underworld), myth of 10, 23, 27, 29, 64, 94, 138 Hancock, I. 169 Hannah, B. 115, 144 Harding, E. M. 3, 69 Hazelwood, R. 36; Dark Dreams 28 Healy, N. S. 128, 130; Toni Wolff and C. G. Jung 126 Hebrew canon 4 hell 21, 54, 94–96 Hemingway, E. 170 Herman, J. 25; Trauma and Recovery 47–50 Herod 150, 151, 153, 154, 156, 160, 162, 163 Herodias 150, 151, 153, 154, 163, 164 hero/heroism: and anima projection 145, 147; hero and alchemist, archetypes 5; masculinity 145, 146; in

mythology 146–147; and narcissism 117, 168 heuristic research 6–7 Hillman, J. 29, 53, 58, 80, 94–95, 138, 147; Lament of the Dead 137; “Peaks and Vales” 5; Puer Papers 81; Re-Visioning Psychology 6 Hofmann, A. 100 Hort, B. 168 Howard Johnson hotel, Vancouver 88, 89 humiliation 101–102 hysteria 49, 50, 118–119 ideal love 78, 79, 113 identity: androgynous 80; dissociative 25; gender 57, 80; projective identification 78, 94, 113, 120, 162; unconscious identification with perpetrator of violence 28 imagery 80, 82, 83, 88, 101, 120, 129; anima-animus 78; archetypal/mythical 9, 143, 147; children 36; darkness 32–34; demonic/demon lover 26, 38, 43, 46, 53; dragonflies 85; in dreams 34, 66–67, 80, 133; feminine, the 2, 3, 39; foreign 6; ideal love 78, 79, 113; idealized, of Jung 113; initiation 56; lightness 34; lunacy 6; lunar 10, 11; opposite gender 78; sadistic/ violent 38, 39–42, 145; serpent/snake 66–71; trauma 33–34; unconscious 65; women 36, 155; see also archetypes; demon lover complex; dream journal (of author); mythology imagination 3, 6, 50, 63, 78, 103, 171; active see active imagination; revolutionary 170; as voluntary psychosis 62 Inanna (goddess of love), myth of 1 individuation process (demon lover complex) 2, 5, 26–57; early stages 25, 26–47; later stages 25, 47–57; stage 1 (possession) 26–37; stage 2 (omnipotent control over demon lover) 37–39; stage 3 (breaking the bonds) 39–40; stage 4 (re-experiencing the trauma) 40–47; stage 5 (reclaiming the victim) 47–52; stage 6 (honoring the demon lover) 52–53; stage 7 (wounded masculine, seeing through to) 53–56; stage 8 (transformation of the demon lover) 56; stage 9 (initiation) 56–57 infants 55, 56 initiation 56–57, 63 Inquisition, techniques of 4 insanity 47

182 Index

intellect 7 Irvine, F. 128 James, E. L. 37 Jenkins, P. 35 Jensen, T. 4 John the Baptist 156, 157 Johnson, R. A.: Balancing Heaven and Earth 71; Ecstasy 72, 104 Jokannahan (prophet) 150, 153, 156, 159 Jones, E. 53 Judeo-Christian myth 64 Jung, C. G. 3, 4, 5, 26, 78, 140; childhood 113–115; and demon lover 112–132; depressive illness of Jung’s mother 114, 115, 118; Dream Seminars 71; and Freud 112, 115, 116–118, 121; Jungian psychology 103, 113, 137; Jungian theory 112, 144; Memories, Dreams, Reflections 103, 114, 156, 157, 158; Mysterium Coniunctionis 156–158; and Philemon (guru) 103; and projection 115, 118, 120, 122–124, 128; Red Book 137, 142, 147, 155; and Salomé 155, 156; sexual assault on 115–116, 118, 125, 126; and Spielrein 113, 115, 117, 118, 120–127, 129, 130; Vision Seminars 129, 143, 157; and Wolff 127; and women 114, 118 Jung, E. 113, 118 Jung, F. 131 Jung Society 112, 126, 133 Kalsched, D. 42 Kama Sutra 27 Keats, J. 5, 61 Keen, S. 7 Kerenyi, C. 63–64 Klein, M. 94 Laing, R. D. 148–149 Ledger, H. 139, 154 Lee, J. 36 Lehrer, R., Nietzsche and Depth Psychology 32 Leonard, L. 44 LGBTQ2 populations 80 Libra, sign of 9 Lindemans, M. F. 34 Lorca, F. G. 152 love, ideal 78, 79 Love, H. 170 lying, in relationships 3, 11, 87, 93, 94, 102, 148 McAfee, J. 44 McGuire, W. 115–117

McLachlan, S. 136 McLynn, F. 127 Madonna-Whore archetype 35 Malcolm, R. M. 23–24 Maleng, N. 30, 35 Malleus Maleficarum (”Hammer of Witches”) 4 Márton, E., My Name was Sabina Spielrein 112, 120 masculinity: authentic masculine 53; author’s relationship with father 64–65, 71; and dreams 80; heroism 145–146; male authority figures 65; masculine archetypes 5; and psyche 80; wounded masculine, seeing through to 53–56; see also feminine, the; men Maslow, A. 5 masochism 41 Matus, D. J. 85 Mead, M. 52–53 Meador, B. D. 3 memory 135–136 men: borderline personality disorder 164–165; god-like powers, 28; violence against women see violence against women; see also masculinity mental illness and violence 31 method acting 136, 138 Michaud, S., Dark Dreams 28 Miller, D. 92 Miller, H. 147 Minder, B. 118 misogyny, in Western culture 35 Moll, J. 125 Monster (film) 35 moon 9–11, 32, 154; eclipse of 91, 166 Moore, T. 81 Morgan, C. 113, 118, 126, 127, 129, 131–132 mother-daughter relationship 9, 10, 55, 64; of author 21–22, 23 Moustakas, C. 6 Moyers, B. 171 Mozol, A.: acting experience 134–139, 150–152, 162–163; commitment ceremony with Nicolas 91–100; dream experiences/journal 1, 2, 8–11, 37–41, 46, 53, 58–60, 66–67, 70–72, 77, 85, 90, 98–99, 100, 105–107, 139, 144–145, 148–149, 159–162, 167; name-changing 76; Ode to a King 66; personal memoir of assault 10–11, 14–23; relationship with Nicolas (false bridegroom) 77–78, 81–101, 141, 144, 147–149, 165,

Index 183

166–167; Romania, visit to 105–112, 150; Thailand, visit to 76–77 Mudd, P. 114, 115, 120, 123, 129–130 Murdock, M. 23 Murray, H. 127, 129 mystery/mysteries 3, 43, 58–74; of body 155; death 60, 61, 64, 68, 69, 163; Eleusinian Mysteries Rites (480 BCE–364 CE) 57, 63–64, 69, 72, 138; feminine, the 154; gypsy woman image 105–107, 133, 139, 144, 167; mother-daughter relationship 64 mythology: Adam and Eve 67; amplification to the mythic/collective level 67; Ariadne 140, 141; Cassandra, legend of 69–70; Demeter and Persephone 8–10, 12–24, 27, 29, 32, 33, 51, 52, 64, 68, 73; family relationships 75–76; Hades 10, 23, 27, 29, 64, 94, 138; hero 146–147; Inanna 1; Judeo-Christian myth 64; Psyche and Eros 2, 89; “rape myths” 12–13; underworld see underworld; Xenophon 61, 62, 90, 102–104; see also archetypes; Elijah (prophet); Herod; Herodias; John the Baptist; Jokannahan (prophet); Narroboth; Philemon; Salomé (daughter of Herodias/anima woman) name-changing ceremony, Thailand 76 narcissism: arrogance 146; and heroism 117, 168; love 2, 32, 41, 79, 99, 168, 172; in men 123, 164; mothering 56; narcissistic bubble 113, 126; narcissistic personality disorder 79, 113, 164; rage 65, 113, 164; spectrum 113; in women 56, 164 Narroboth 153, 154 National Film Board of Canada, The, The Burning Times 4 nature 61–62 Navaho tribes, warriors 2–3 negative capability 61, 62 Neumann, E. 112 Nicholson, J. 139 Nietzsche, F. 32, 34 Nin, A. 147 Northrup, C., Mother–Daughter Wisdom 52 “O,” theory of (Bion) 135–136, 138, 139, 154, 159 Olsen, G. 11, 15–20 paganism 154 Pappenheim, B. (Anno O.) 49 patriarchy 64, 76, 77, 84, 125, 168; demon lover complex 30, 33, 39, 46, 47, 51;

patriarchal cultures/societies 34, 125; and rape 2, 168; world-frames 56, 144, 154 peak experiences 5 personification 137 Phantom of the Opera 26 phenomenological research 6, 27 Philemon 157 Pickton, R. 30, 31, 32 polyamory 147 polytheism, demise of 4 possession, by trauma 26–37 prisons, as places of protection 54 projection 4, 78, 79, 146; anima-animus 78, 120, 121, 127, 129, 143–145, 154, 155, 162, 164, 165; demon lover complex 34, 35, 41, 43, 55, 57; and Jung 115, 118, 120, 122–124, 128; projective identification 78, 94, 113, 120, 162; and Salomé 154; shadow 57; and Spielrein 120, 122–125 prophecy 71 prostitution and murder 30, 35–36 psyche 5, 11, 23, 26; acting role, effect on 139; collective and objective 79; masculine and feminine elements 80; “normal” 31 Psyche and Eros, fairy tale 2, 89 psychoanalysis 5, 26, 29–30, 55, 75, 121, 135 psychodramatics 137–138 psychodynamics 137–138 psychoidal 11, 90, 103–104, 110 psychology 61, 77, 137, 138, 163; accessibility of 7; archetypal 6; clinical 113; contemporary theories 113–115; depth psychology see depth psychology; and empathy 135, 136; field of 5–7, 115; Jungian 103, 113, 137; meaning-making 6–7; self-psychology 142 psychopathology 32 PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) 40, 48, 50 puer archetype 81, 95 Raff, J. 103, 104 rage 50, 51; narcissism 65, 113, 164; unacknowledged 147–148 rape: as aggressive attack 13; as crime of opportunity 13; defining 13; demon lover complex 26–27; denial of 20; and dreams 36–37; life experiences of the rapist 54; and lust 13; and patriarchy 2, 168; personal memoir of author 10–11, 14–23; and power 49–50; “rape myths” 12–13; reasons for author speaking out 14; serial sexual offenders 28; as sexual

184 Index

attack 13; shame 20; unconscious identification with perpetrator 28; vulnerability of victim, denial of 27; war analogy 50; will of the “other” penetrating armor of self 27; see also sexual assault; violence against women rape crisis counselors 13 Reage, P., The Story of O 41–43 recidivism 54 Reformation 4 Reis, P. 168 Renaissance 4 repression 30, 39, 118; sexuality 44 research: detached, intellectual style 7; heuristic 6–7; phenomenological 6, 27 Ridgeway, G. (Green River Killer) 30, 31, 35 Rilke, R. M., “The Man Watching” 158 Rogers, C. 135 Romania, author’s visit to 105–112, 150 romantic love, idealized version 78, 79 Romanyshyn, R., Ways of the Heart 61 Ruether, R. R. 4 Rukeyser, M., “Kathë Kollwitz” 2

shadow, the 44, 57, 112, 121, 164 Shaffer, P., Equus 134, 135 shamans/shamanism 60, 63, 100, 103, 140; bridging practice 106 Shamdasani, S. 137, 138 Shaw, M., Passionate Enlightenment 95–96 snake image 66–71 soul 6, 53, 95; feminine 168 Spielrein, S. (Russian physician) 112, 121–122, 141; Burghölzli hospital records 118, 122, 126; demon lover possession 120–121; hysteria 118–119; and Jung 113, 115, 117, 118, 120–127, 129, 130; and projection 120, 122–125; trauma suffered by 118–119, 126 “spiritual purity” 34 Statistics Canada (1993) 22; Violence Against Women 12 Stone, M. 31, 69–70; When God Was a Woman 67–68 stoning of women 30, 31 surrender, in relationships 77–78 symbolism see imagery

sadomasochism 10, 41–42, 52, 126 safety, feelings of 84, 87–88 Salomé (daughter of Herodias/anima woman) 133–169, 171; capacity for violence and rage 161, 164; dance of 151, 153, 154, 159, 160–161, 169, 171; as fallen 160; and Jung 155; play by Oscar Wilde 2, 134, 153–156, 170; underworld 138, 139, 142, 144, 146, 147, 153, 155, 167–169 Sanford, J. A. 142, 143 Sataniello, W., Nietzsche and Depth Psychology 32 Sattler, L. 42 Schultes, R. E. 100 Scott-Maxwell, F. 166 Sebold, A., Lucky 27 self-awareness 79 Serpent Goddess 67 serpent image 66–67 sex workers 30, 35–36 sexual assault 12, 14, 164; failure to report to police 22; on Jung 115–116, 118, 125, 126; see also rape sexuality: conventional view 84, 93; LGBTQ2 populations 80; sexual abuse of Jung 115–116, 118, 125; sexual awakening 83–85; see also rape; sexual assault; tantra; violence against women

tantra 80, 93–96, 155; and depth psychology 84–85, 95 Tao Te Ching 5 Thailand, author’s visit to 76–77 Thesmophoria 68 Tick, E., Practice of Dream Healing, The 149, 151 transcendence 135 transference 112, 115–119, 121, 122, 7127–129; see also countertransference trauma 14, 23; aftermath 27; demon lover complex 25–26; field of 48; imagery 25, 33–34; inter-generational transmission of 49; and Jung 115–116, 118; re-experiencing 40–47; silence surrounding 48; splitting in 42; theory 118; see also PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder); rape; sexual assault; violence against women truth 8, 11, 60, 62, 76, 81, 98, 121, 135, 140, 141, 147, 150, 154, 166, 167, 172; absolute/ultimate 95, 159; demon lover complex 44, 46, 51, 52, 57; existential 48; inner 79; as protection 2–3; in relationships 87, 94, 96 Ulanov, A. 45, 46 Ulanov, B. 45, 46 unconscious, the 5, 28, 31; imagery 65 underworld 2, 6, 65, 69, 112; demon lover complex 29, 31, 47, 51, 52, 54; false

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bridegroom 76, 87, 88, 95, 101; and personal memoir of author 8, 11, 14, 21, 23; Salomé legend 138, 139, 142, 144, 146, 147, 153, 155, 167–169 vampire archetype 79 Vancouver (Canada): Howard Johnson hotel 88, 89; Jung Society 112, 126, 133; murder in 30, 35–36 victims/victimization 48, 51 violence against women 2, 4, 5, 146, 164; god-like powers, 28; profile of violent criminals 36; prostitutes 30, 35–36; statistics 165; stoning 30, 31; UN study (2013) 12; see also rape Von Franz, M. L. 62, 100, 133; Way of the Dream 79 Von Trier, L., Antichrist 145–146 war, effects of 50 Ward, T., Savage Breast 145 Warren, J. 36 Wertz, F. 27 Wharton, B., Sabina Spielrein: Forgotten Pioneer of Psychoanalysis 120

Wilde, O., Salomé 2, 134, 153–156, 170 Williams, C. 13 Williams, T. 137; Out Cry 134, 136, 138 witches, persecutions of 4, 49 Wolff, T. 113, 118, 126–128, 130, 131 women: control/ownership of 30–31; demon lover constellated in psyche of 26; the feminine 3, 4, 5, 32; individuation process 2, 5; Jung on 114, 118; mysteries of 3; power over 49–50; suppression of female symbols 4; see also feminine, the; individuation process (demon lover complex); rape; violence against women Woodman, M. 5, 38, 43–45, 47, 51, 57, 73, 113 wounded healer 63 Wuornos, A. 35 Xenophon 61, 62, 90, 102–104 Yalom, I. D. 79