From Literature to the Consultation Room

In my 28 years as a practicing Jungian psychologist and as a clinical teacher and supervisor, I have been able to confirm what Victor Frankel and many others have described, namely, that people who enter the mental health field as a first profession usually do so from an unconscious power motive and in defense against their own areas of pathology. Among this group, the worst offenders appear to be those who as young physicians become psychiatrists.

I do not mean this point as an indictment of these professionals, but as a bridge to the phenomenon which Henri Ellenberger described in The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970): that, as with the founding fathers of psychoanalysis, Freud and Jung, it is the attempt to understand the origin and structure of one’s own neurosis — and achieve healing — which serves as the indispensable basis for working with the unconscious material of anyone else. Hence arises the notions of the wounded healer and the creative illness which shifts the psyche’s experience of itself.

Though my entry into psychoanalysis from the background of a PhD in English literature is now considered unusual (and would, in fact, in the over-regulated and bureaucratized climate of today hardly be possible), it accords precisely with the sequence of personal work first, professional development second. I sought psychoanalytic help in 1964 (Jungian, since I had a contact in that specialty) because of writer’s block in attempting to finish my doctoral thesis. My road to completing the dissertation and starting an analytic journey which continues 33 years later is important to note because it introduced me to the central idea of the symptom as symbol which is at the heart of Jungian therapy and crucial to my decision to seek Jungian training.

Thirty years ago, the viability of a prospective Jungian training candidate was based on the individual’s demonstrated capacity to work creatively with his or her unconscious (provided he had also demonstrated academic proficiency in achieving a terminal graduate degree). The premise was that a person could be taught over the six-year training program the principles of psychopathology; the dynamics of transference and counter-transference; aspects of the history of symbolism as contained in myths, fairy tales, and other literature; and comparative theories of neurosis and psychosis. However, the basic affinity for thinking symbolically and for translating intra-psychic dynamics into language that would allow their assimilation by an analysand was understood to be a talent, like a gift for playing the piano. An applicant without this predilection would not be accepted regardless of how many degrees he presented. In the same vein, a candidate who performed well in the program academically but whose personal analytic capacity came into question could never expect to graduate.

For me, this dominant attitude had an enormous appeal. As far as professional categories go, the modern world is organized virtually exclusively around knowledge and skill sets. I was here faced with a striking exception, with an interest in who I was rather than what I knew. I

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realized then that much of what had been most arid for me in the graduate study of literature and the teaching of humanities was the absence of the subjective factor. It was as if we had all agreed to cooperate in the fiction that there was a body of knowledge to learn and pass on, that the methods of literary study (I imagine it to be no different with history) were imagined to offer a way of objectifying a canon. However, if, for example, one is going to confront The Divine Comedy in a living way, it can only be through those experiences of one’s own that correspond to a given circle in hell or a voyage through purgatory. Literary study without that interactive dialogue with the text has no psychological life.

Psychological life is equivalent to the energy one brings to any task. I found my own energy most accessible when I could include my personal responses in a paper or presentation or when I could elicit them from others. This inclination away from content as material presented to ready students for examinations made me realize several years into my analytic training that I could not continue any form of academic career. I have never missed the academy, except for the externals it at one time offered: job security, abundant paid time off, health insurance, retirement plan, and sabbaticals. The fact that for the last twenty-six years I have never had more than two consecutive weeks off from psychoanalytic practice has left no time for writing or lecturing.

The effect of a non-traditional background on the establishing of a viable private practice was very different a generation ago than it would be now. I had the good fortune to complete my Jungian training in New York City at a time when there were fewer than 20 certified Jungian analysts in active practice here, a supply seriously inadequate in the face of demands from prospective analysands. In some cases my having a PhD was sufficient to allow patients to achieve major medical reimbursement, usually at 80%, under their fee-for-service plans.

As is generally known, with the advent over the last decade of the HMO’s, the whole field of mental health private practice is in growing crisis, and the prognosis for those psychoanalysts who do not belong to licensed or certified fields is grave. Not only will the HMO’s limit the number of sessions for which reimbursement is offered, but no one without a license will be accepted as a provider. Furthermore, the generation that is now under 40 is much more likely to turn to psychopharmacology with some adjunctive short-term therapy than to commit to psychoanalysis. While my viewpoint may appear overly pessimistic, I consider it probable that psychoanalysis as a therapy will largely disappear over the next decades, absorbed by collective historical trends.

It is of course nearly impossible at this distance in time to reflect on my response to the experience of analytic training. By contrast with doctoral-level academic study with its emphasis of mastering a body of knowledge, what stands out about Jungian apprenticeship is not content, not even method, but attitude. What in essence I learned was how to approach the psyche. Borrowing an image from the Oedipus story, I assimilated the importance of his tenacious pursuit of the truth, but with humility rather than pride. Whether I am sitting with a patient listening to a narration or watching a series of images unfold on a movie screen, I know I will be lead to the deeper meaning of what is being presented if I remain open and keep asking questions. I credit my analytic training with giving me the ability to hear the psyche speak.

What has felt restrictive to me in my life as a clinician has been the absence of a connection to the larger external world. Psychoanalysts with a broad humanistic and historical perspective strike me as ideally suited to be news analysts, to function as facilitators on the political or educational stage, to fill judicial and arbitrating positions — to represent a model of listening, verifying, and formulating bases for action. I keenly regret my failure to move beyond the consulting room, but, beyond that, I regret the failure of the profession as a whole to impact the wider culture. But at no point in my career have I been victimized through not having entered the psychoanalytic profession in an orthodox way.

Like Oedipus, we find the truth, but the truth makes us an exile. We rest on our island far from the city, left to talk to whoever comes our way while the world proceeds without us. Far from loathing us, the world barely recognizes our existence. A century after Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, no one could imagine a public figure describing the effects of the unconscious on a controversial issue. I believe it would be a significant task for a future historian to make sense of this phenomenon. There has been no work of a humanistic nature comparable in

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importance in this century to the mapping of the unconscious. No one with access to this map would ever dream of operating in life without it, yet everyone else uses maps as outdated as the idea of the world being flat.

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