Hollis, J. (2022). The Broken Mirror: Refracted Visions of Ourselves.

The Broken Mirror: Refracted Visions of Ourselves

Preface

Having ended the essential work of metaphysics, the identification of “reality,” philosophers were still left with epistemology—how do we know, what are the limits of knowing—and axiology, what do we do with what we believe we know. (9)

Whether we are “known” by God, as Paul believed, or by our own psyche as many contemporaries believe, there is something within each of us that knows more than we know, knows us better than we know ourselves, and seemingly is seeking to catalyze a conversation with consciousness, sending forth dreams, symptoms, and revelatory events to crash upon the ego’s permeable membranes. For most of us on our planet in this time, the mirror is broken, and we get only refracted slivers of re-cognition from time to time. If that is all we get, we had better take them seriously then. (9)

I have given up on the idea of peace of mind. I think too much is turbulent, too much rapidly moving for that. (10)

Ch. 1: Fear, skepticism, lassitude: The recovery of inner life

Full professional disclosure would oblige the therapist to inform all new clients of the following realities:
First, you will have to deal with this core issue the rest of your life, and at best you will manage to win a few skirmishes in your long uncivil war with yourself. Decades from now you will be fighting on these familiar fronts, though the terrain may have shifted so much that you may have difficulty recognizing the same old, same old.
Second, you will be obliged to disassemble the many forces you have gathered to defend against your wound. At this late date it is your defenses, not your wound that cause the problem and arrest your journey. But removing those defenses will oblige you to feel all the discomfort of that wound again.
And third, you will not be spared pain, vouchsafed wisdom or granted exemption from future suffering. (13)

We may fear the hosts of evil and intimidation around us, but our biggest obstacle will always remain within. (15)

The spirit of evil, [Jung] notes, is the negation of the life force by fear, or its seduction by lethargy. (15)

My own experience of writing eighteen books and two dissertations is often analogous to being gripped by something that lays hold of me, and to which I am compelled to submit. It is never easy; it is never fun, though there is a marvelous moment when the right word falls into place. (16)

Robert Frost put it this way,
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars – on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places. (17)

Any ego not dwarfed by the magnitude within is simply non-reflective, or unconscious altogether. (17)

We also grow skeptical of our chances of wrestling with the magnitude of this journey because we have so many setbacks. Even those who work earnestly are accustomed to finding themselves in the same-old rut. How many analysands have expressed grave chagrin, abiding reservations about the idea of psychological progress? Jung himself noted this frequent disappointment to the ego. “I have treated many patients who were conscious of the cause of their complexes down to the last detail, without having been helped in any way by this insight.” (19)

Nothing we have ever experienced is wholly lost. It is ingrained somewhere in our neurology and stored in the vaults of the unconscious even if it is not available to memory. (20)

Once begun seriously, that work never ends. Never begun, life is already finished, and only dull repetitions trail behind us. (24)

There are hours in one’s life, in most folk’s life, which are truly desolate. Hanging on is what one has to do. Churchill said that when one find’s oneself lost in a dark wood, keep walking. Jung said that at the bottom of every depression, and there is always a bottom there, one will find a task, the addressing of which will take one’s life in a new direction. And so I, and so many others, have found directives arising from those most dismal soul-swamps. (25)

A dream is not something we choose or direct. It is something that comes to us like a foreign visitor. It is a confrontation with that mysterious Other that abides within. (26)

In those dark hours I found, and so many have found, meaning that transcends whatever the losses, whatever the disappointments, whatever the discarded expectations. (26)

Any seeming resolution today will have to be revised tomorrow for the psyche is a flowing river, and yesterday’s resolution is tomorrow’s constriction. For this reason, Jung added, “There is no change that is unconditionally valid over a long period of time. Life always has to be tackled anew.” (27)

We all do have a calling, the summons to individuation, the assignment to carry into this world, in our short span on earth, whatever the gods intended for us. (28)

Every day is a summons to larger life. Every day a combat between the forces of regression—to fall back into the sleep of naiveté, dependency, unconsciousness—and progression to carry on the mystery of our human incarnation further into the unknown but fallow fields of the possible human. (28)

Ch. 2: The zen paradox: What you have become is now your chief problem

Given that relinquishing our protections causes unacceptable anxiety, we are predisposed to repetition, rationalizations, and stuckness. Only when we recognize this reflexive claim upon us from our past, can we access the resolve to break through into the growth the soul is asking of us. (30)

Life is inherently traumatic, and the conditions in which that trauma is absorbed, mediated, or reinforced is a matter of which fated family, which fated environment into which we are thrown. (32)

How much of our so-called personality structure, how many of our reflexive strategies, arise out of the traumatic encounter between the child and the incessant demands around them? Who among us here operates out of our natural selves? (33)

Who are we, inherently, and who are we, adaptively? (33)

What I had become, what we all become, is a series of respondings. A concatenation of colliding causalities leads us to our choices, persists in doing so, and creates our histories and our patterns. (33)

We all know we have “stuck places.” We often lament our dilatory wills to push through them and get unstuck. What we do not know sufficiently, is how deeply imbedded in our history those adaptive responses are buried, and that they are there to protect us and to manage our anxiety. (35)

Given that getting unstuck will automatically elevate our anxiety levels, we see why we rationalize, repeat, and remain stuck. Where so ever a stuck place abides, thereunto an invisible wire reaches into the deeper regions of the person’s psychological history. (35)

Only in this shift from the child’s perspective, only this move from the marshy swamp of developmental trauma to the ordinary knocks of life can we ever free ourselves, get unstuck. As Freud put it once at the end of a lecture, our task is to move from neurotic misery to the normal misery of life. (36)

In the engagement with the inherent and inevitable traumata of overwhelmment, we have three basic options: avoidance, compliance, and seizing power if possible. (39)

Suppression is conscious, willful, and we know we are attempting a sleight of hand while doing it. Repression, upon which Freud and Breuer spent so much time, and told us so much, is an unconscious pushing under of the imminent disturbance. We push it into the unconscious. But it doesn’t go away. It always goes somewhere. It slides off into the body and becomes a psychosomatic disturbance. It leaks out in slips of the tongue, forgetfulness, camouflaged motives, or troubling dreams. (39)

(Celebrities are folks known for being known. They need not have accomplished anything beyond a callipygean butt, nor do they need have anything life-giving to share.) (41)

In time, the co-dependent person tends to lose contact with the wisdom and guidance of the Self; at worst, they become psychological chameleons, taking on the coloration of the environment in which they find themselves. (42)

This is why I sometimes call myself “a recovering Nice Guy.” We were all raised to be nice, really nice. A reflexive “niceness” is a pathogenic loss of connection to the soul, and is not nice. The opposite of such a reflexive niceness is called authenticity, or integrity. (43)

Wherever we feel weakest, most vulnerable, most embarrassed is where the power complex is most likely to emerge. (43)

Passive-aggressive behavior is still aggressive. It is the power of the powerless, and is sometimes just as deadly. (43)

All of us, somewhere in our history, have experienced insufficiency and therefore internalized that sense of deficit as a telling aspect of ourselves. (45)

Concomitantly, the reverse strategy rises: we tend to over-compensate by attaining outer accoutrements of power, success, achievement: (46)

Contrary to the classical etiology of Narcissus, the Greek youth who fell in love with his own Selfie in the pool, the true narcissist stares in the mirror and no one stares back. That is why she or he must use others to counter their sense of emptiness. (47)

Each of us needs to see all six of these reactive patterns as adaptive measures, necessary and protective in our past, and playing a role of varying influence in our current lives. (Briefly, they are the following: avoidance, compliance, power, and an internalized identification of deficit, power, and inordinate neediness.) If you do not, that missing pattern is unfolding through you unconsciously. (48)

Ch. 3: Necessary fictions: Therapy as the critique of “stories”

Sometimes our narratives address questions important in our search for origins; sometimes they help us bear the weight of suffering better; sometimes they help us live in harmony with the world around us; and sometimes the same stories imprison us within the confines of their mythy motions. (51)

Both stories remain inside, for nothing that ever happened to us is wholly effaced. Either one, theoretically, may be evoked in any moment. Apart from the natural maturation process that moved her into a big body and a person with considerable resources, these two stories may still contend. (52)

So it is with all of us; at all times, we are a congeries of stories, interpretations, epiphenomenal renderings of raw experience into narrative form in the hope of understanding it. (52)

Humans are known for falling in love with their own constructs, for being captivated by their own metaphors. (54)

Forgetting the origins of our fictions creates real prisons. (54)

The provisional, tentative, and often infantile reading of the world, and the stories that rise from those encounters tend to generate an entire operating system that governs a person’s life, what I call a meta-story, a story about our stories. (56)

Thus, one might say, a rigorous therapy might be defined as an ongoing critique of our narrative structures. (56)

Long has humanity recognized the spectral energy that passes over us, possesses us for a short while, and then recedes back into the unconscious. (57)

Fate (moira) limits, and directs us. Destiny (proeiroismus) tugs us into ever-larger futures. (57)

Henceforth, the only appropriate attitude is humility, to know that one does not know, to remember that in the moment of hybristic inflation, the gods are watching. In the Bible, this is what is meant by the admonition of “go in fear of the Lord.” The “fear” is not intimidation by some cosmic bully but a reminder of how seductive it is to think we always know enough to know enough, when in truth we never know enough to know enough, even as action is required from us. Rather, the thing to fear is presumptive “certainty,” inflation. (57)

To bring us to this moment of metanoia, or transformation of consciousness, is the task of therapy, or whatever life experience brings us to enlightenment. In those new hours, we will not be spared conflict or struggle of course, but the struggle may prove in service to enlargement rather than diminishment. Jung put it this way, “Individuation…means intense consciousness of conflict. You never will be saved from conflict as long as you live, otherwise you would be dead before you die. Conflict cannot be removed. If it seems to be removed, that is imaginary. Conflict must be, if one lives at all. But the way you deal with it, that is the question—whether you are overcome by the conflict, whether you get drowned in it, whether you get identified with one or the other side of the conflict. Individuation simply means you find your place amid the turmoil; you keep yourself in the midst of the conflict; you are in the conflict yet above it.” (61)

So it is, we march on into life, doing the best we can, serving the only stories we know, or believe we know. (63)

Sometimes dreams help us challenge our stories. Finding that many folks in later life, myself included, have dreams of people and places left long behind might suggest that our psyche continues to rework this material. Perhaps it is helping us bring to the surface the invisible players, and the ghostly scripts enacted on our inner stages. (66)

What stories ask that I address the questions raised by my unlived life, the one that beckons, perhaps haunts? (67)

When we pay attention, we realize that our life is swarming with fragmented stories, multiplicities of splinter narratives contending for our attention, our investment of energy; and coursing beneath all of our acquired stories an even larger story awaits us; it is the story to be served through what Jung described as individuation. (67)

So much of our story was written by fate, so much written by others. At least some small part of it, perhaps the best part, is yet to be written by us. And the soul’s hour, this hour we inhabit now, asks of us: And how will you write your story from this hour onward? (68)

Ch. 4: Down and out in Zurich: For those who think becoming a Jungian Analyst is a cool thing

What is the numinous, you ask? The idea comes from a Latin verb numen, which means “to nod or beckon.” Thus, something reaches out to us, and touches us, and summons us. If there were not something in us wanting to be touched, perhaps desperate to be touched, we would remain indifferent. But something within has been called forth, and we remain changed in some way. (70) #glossary

One cannot hold, contain, understand, and perhaps facilitate a process one has not suffered oneself. (72)

While I was doing my best to cover everything, I never forgot, nor do I to this day, the family sacrificing at home also. That was a daily crucifixion experience for me. (77)

Apparently, some trips to Hades are worth it, a few even have a happy ending. (79)

Ch. 5: Shipwreck: The importance of failure in our lives

It is not an accident that our ancestors worked so hard to create rites of passage for they knew how strong this regressive surge within was for each person. (82)

then if you ever really heard that cadence, it is magical, and one never forgets it—it resonates in the heart’s systole and diastole like the rhythm of life and death. All of us, in varying degrees, are riven with self-doubt, insecurity, debilitating complexes, all of us—myself included, to this very day. It never goes away. The question, then, is do we show up and meet the demands of life when they come or remain mewling children looking for some parental figure to fix it all for them? (91)

Each of us needs to experience risk and shipwreck sometimes because out of that we have an invitation to figure out who we really are, and what matters to each of us. (93)

Ch. 6: Doing difficult therapy

I witnessed many thoughtful souls who were more in love with their idea of marriage than the person to whom they were married. (96)

One of the most troubling of human phenomena is that no matter how rotten the outcome, or how compromised the motives, there is always a “good” reason for doing whatever we do. I guess no one sets out to intentionally do something for bad reasons….though we all do, and frequently. (96)

Every marriage is an investment in hope, in body, and in soul. When a ship goes down off shore, we may not be able to save the persons on board, but we can grieve their loss, and honor the hopes they had. (97)

Whatever we of ourselves can lift off our partner is an act of loving them. (99)

Men’s lives are as much governed by restrictive role expectations as are the lives of women. Women have heroically, and persistently, challenged the role expectations of gender. Men have been slower on the uptake. (105)

Men’s lives are violent because their souls have been violated. Because men’s souls are as violated as women’s, and because they have fewer psychic resources for protest and support, men will often turn to violence because many of the roles awaiting them will violate their souls even more. (107)

And, perhaps surprisingly, most folks, when asked, have some answer to the question of what their soul is asking of them. They have been living with that for some time, even if they haven’t made it very conscious, let alone a priority. (111)

Can someone somewhere tell me where it is indelibly written that we are supposed to be happy? (117)

Happiness is transient, contextual, and often outside our power to generate, no matter how hard we try. Happiness most occurs unexpectedly, unplanned in moments of encounter, or when we are in right relationship with ourselves, no matter how fraught the circumstances. (117)

It is the phantasy of happiness that makes most of us unhappy, most of the time. (118)

We Project, and Expect, That Right Behavior on Our Part Will Lead to Reciprocity from Life Itself (120)

The notion that we can make deals with the universe is older than the Job legend, but it never fully goes away. Educating ourselves and others to the fact that stuff happens is a beginning, and in every case we have a summons to identify a task which recovers greater psychospiritual integrity and dignity. Identifying and executing that task is what restores a sense of agency when we would otherwise wallow in victimage, rage, desuetude, or despair. (121)

We are “quickened” by a certain piece of music, and not others; we respond to one painting or another; we delight in one experience and are blah in another. What is unique to each of us is the means by which the numinous arrives on our doorstep, and of course, whatever configuration of our interior matrix is such that responds to that stimulus. (125)

When people encounter the numinous, whether a burning bush or the smile of their beloved, they have a felt experience, and in some way transformative encounter. (127)

Thus people wind up worshiping the relic, the husk perhaps, long after the energy has departed. Many folks are more in love with the image of love than those who actually love. (128)

By “Self,” Jung of course does not mean the ego. The Self is the organic and organizing energy that drives our lives. It is both vehicle, energy, and purpose. The self is teleological; it moves us through the phases of our journey from zygote to ghost. It carries us, nudges us, and opposes us when it is oppressed. (128)

The Principle of Resonance When the outer encounter gives rise to our inner experience of the numinous, we resonate. We re-sound; it reverberates; we hum; the tuning fork within vibrates. (129)

In the end, if something resonates for us, it is true for us, at least for that moment. (130)

Sooner or later, whatever is true for us, whatever really resonates must be served, or something within sickens and sours, and life never feels right. (131)

Nouns reify the energies into icons; verbs quicken the spirit. (133)

Ch. 7: Living in haunted houses: The latest news from the madding crowd within

(Jung noted, for example, that in dreams we are the observer, the stage, the audience, and all of the characters, even if we don’t like some of them.) (139)

Knowing, mapping, paying more attention, may often lead us to recognize we have entered that altered state sooner and begin to pull our way out of it. (142)

For all their threat, the present hour is always reclaimed by “going through” the web rather than halting before it. (143)

Ch. 8: The gift, and the limitations, of therapy

Those who have had a dream open up a puzzle for them, or tell them what they knew but were afraid to acknowledge, begin to change. (149)

Sooner or later, surrounded by people or not, we are all alone. (151)

Simple problems will have binary answers—do this or do that! But real crossroads in our growth will never have easy options. (152)

Ch. 9: Invisible means of support: The theogonies of Stephen Dunn

Put most succinctly, the intellectual and emotional duty of literary, philosophical, and artistic modernism is to critique the received structures and dismantle their explicit hierarchy of values. And the project of post-modernism, from Beckett to Stephen Dunn, is to figure out how one is to live amid enormous spiritual ambiguity thereafter: How does one make choices, in service to what, and framed by what larger perspective, if any at all? (155)

An elemental psycho-spiritual fact, or better, psycho-dynamic, is that when “the gods” are not experienced as felt presences, we will project our need for them onto objects of desire. (158)

All addictions, all disorders of desire are, in Rimbaud’s memorable phrase, Une Saison d’Enfer, a season in Hell, mostly because it is a hell we cannot help but keep choosing. (158)

Yeats reminds us that out of the quarrel with others rhetoric rises, and out of the quarrel with ourselves the possibility of poetry, or perhaps an honest psychology. Designed to fail, and yet impelled to ruminate—what better definition of the split we carry, the neurosis we serve? From such ruin only creativity rises to soften and ennoble our suffering, and thereby move us from the merely pathetic to the occasionally tragic. R. M. Rilke suggested that the vocation of the poet was, at heart, to praise—to praise what is, to praise the wonder and terror of it all. (159)

This hope is not hubris; it is the genuine contribution of the creative soul to our fragmented world, a world in which poetry, as Edna St. Vincent Millay noted, does not build the bridge nor mend the broken bone, but may still feed the soul—and the deprivation of which causes us all to sicken and to die long before we are dead. (160)

When Camus observed that life was meaningful precisely because it is absurd, I take it that he argues that any “meaning” presented to us is someone else’s package, and not necessarily ours. Ours is rather to be pieced together through our existential revolt, in our hopeless, extinction-bound but luminous pause between the great mysteries. (161)

This is Dunn’s achievement: a lens through which we see ourselves, in which the absurdities and opacities of our moment are briefly illumined, and in which— through the connective tendrils of art—we resonate with what hums beneath the surface. (162)

Ch. 10: The resources within each of us

William Stafford concludes in a poem, “The Way It Is,”      
There’s a thread you follow.
It goes among things that change.
But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.(164)

There we are just as capable of “possession” as our ancestors were by forces they knew not. Because consciousness is so permeable, whatever floods up from below becomes our operating fiction for the moment. (166)

You may recall being utterly transported by “love,” and utterly devastated by its loss. Little did you know that you were caught up in a limerence—a projection of your self-suficient system under the spell of a complex that denigrated your capacities—that informed you that you were incapable of living a full life without the necessary “other.” (166)

Generally speaking, the chief agenda of the ego is to obtain as much security as possible, gain sovereignty over the external world to the degree it can, and quell the disturbances which rise from within as much as possible. In practice, we all find the psyche thwarting that ordering agenda, bringing us the same old same old, or confounding us by undoing plans, proposals, projects, and prognostications. (167)

So, the common work, [Jung] asserts, “is less a question of treatment than of developing the creative possibilities latent within the patient.” (169)

Every adaptation, however obliged by outer pressures, risks a further injury to the psyche which will not go unaddressed by the soul. (169)

The perverse irony is that these same adaptations that often allow us to “fit in,” become traps, constraints which also contain or deform the developmental desires that course through us as well. (169)

But consciously we can attend to the business of living in the present. Asking the question, “What does this old, persisting problem make me do, or keep me from doing,” obliges us to take responsibility for what spills into the world through us. It also tends to pull us out of the disabling past into an engaging, demanding present. (171)

Often we may catch ourselves envying others, thinking they have an easier life, or possess some magic we have not yet found. But all envy of others is predicated on the perception that someone else has what I want, or need. (172)

In particular, envy is a failure to remember that we are all made of the same cosmic dust, the same soul-stuff, coursing toward the same leveling end, and as carriers of the life force into the next aeon, we are presently provided within all that is needed to survive and prevail. (172)