Chris – I send these comments, not to you, but simply as information. They were not written by me, but are a synthesis of successful therapeutic understanding. But like all ‘facts’ they are useful but should not be taken as the end of wisdom
“Even more disturbing, these emotions out of the past have not simply lain dormant in the museum of the mind, as we prefer to assume. Time and time again, in insidious or flagrant ways, they have broken out of the case of memory and run amuck in the orderly corridors of maturity. The hate the patient feels for his employer, although tidily rationalized, is perhaps a leftover of his hate for father. His wife begins to look like a rather flimsily disguised substitute for mother. He projects the personalities of brothers and sisters to his children. His mind, which seemed a museum of fossilized memories, turns out in fact to be a natural history zoo. The beleaguered patient, staring horrified into the mirror of self-consciousness, sees no more the self-satisfied smirk of the habitual self, but a time-split evolutionary madhouse of squalling infant, doting child, ravening animal—he is all of these and all of these affect his daily behavior.
It becomes clear that the way to change behavior is to change the squalling infant and the doting child and the ravening animal that were never admitted. It is not the accepted parts of personality that snarl up existence; it is the unaccepted ones lurking in the darkness of the subconscious, bound to the past, to primitive understanding, to a limbo of covert urges and nightmare fears.
Having publicized the transformative value of inner rituals, those fantasies which so often borrow content from the ritual and myth of primitive and ancient societies. They suggest that these rituals, noticeably lacking in modern civilization, are possibly necessary in the psychic development of an individual from one stage of maturation to the next. If this is so, their appearance in sessions may facilitate a necessary readjustment of the mental dynamics of the patient at the symbolic level, just as anaclytic therapy does at a more primitive, “gestural” level. (anaclytic - of or related to relationships that are characterized by the strong dependence of one person on another).
His ego, which before he had seen as the master of his mind, now seemed a helpless jellyfish, caught in the grasp of mysterious forces beyond its control or understanding. The symbol is not as outlandish as it may seem; under the therapeutic thought content does not come in words, but in pulsing waves that seem to wash over and inundate the field of consciousness with steady, increasingly powerful surges. Before this evidence the conscious illusion of control becomes a joke. The ego may repress, defend itself as best it can, but inevitably the great slow tides, by coloring assumption and interpretation, will accomplish their movement, or, in ego terms, their purpose. Hostility will out, self-destruction will out. The libido will have its way. And it seems that only by recognizing these forces can we begin even slightly to control and modify them.
In some such way the parents and all the decisive figures in a person’s childhood are built into his psyche. At a certain level of progress in psychedelic therapy, when this awareness dawns, a patient begins to speak of “my father—who is me” and “my mother—who is me,” and then many connections, impenetrable before, suddenly explain themselves. Finally, the patient begins to see that all these images, apparently external to himself, are really manifestations of his own psychic substance, on which they were imprinted. They were created by the involuntary loan of fusion which occurred from infancy through childhood. And he learns that changing the structure of the conscious identity is insufficient to produce a complete change in his behavior. He must change his greater subconscious self as well, and that implies calling home those psychic loans made in childhood, which have become encapsulated into seemingly external identities.
He learns to enjoy without shame the mystic mother in his wife and his mother, to move joyously into the sexual relation, to love fully and deeply one moment, hate furiously the next, to be proud of his masculinity and to call up his feminine side when the occasion demands. He can argue and analyse his problems rationally one moment and then throw himself into the depths of emotion and intuition in another, all with minimal guilt and inner conflict.
One patient looked back at her domineering neurotic mother and for an instant she saw her surrounded by all her flaws and all her virtues. And for the first time she found forgiveness and understanding for the flaws and gratitude for the virtues. Her mother was not a goddess, not even a very good mother, but she was the woman who had borne and nourished her. Without denying the pain she had suffered at her mother’s hands, the patient could now say, “Yes, that woman is really my mother, and I am really her daughter.” And in accepting this reality which neither she nor anyone else could change, she discovered an almost mystical joy. Then she looked at her incompetent, rather befuddled father and thought, “This is my father; I shall never have another,” and again the radiant warmth and gratitude surrounded her. For the first time, her psyche, done with its wandering to the far lands of illusion and denial, had come home to accept the real terms of its existence, and had found peace in them.
In the end patients relieve their guilt by admitting that before most of life’s catastrophes they were utterly helpless. They learn a curious catechism of resignation whose every line begins, “I could not help it that - and every word is both a gruelling admission of helplessness and a singing relief from years of hidden self-accusation. Once this is accepted, patients see in the children they were the vulnerable beauty that children really possess. They cry for the broken dolls, the harsh words and forgotten promises, and for the pettiness of their lives. And from their tears of self-pity springs a sweet relief, for in the wreck of life, real sorrow is one of the sweetest remedies we know, far better than the stunned paralysis that most of us suffer.
As the wounds slowly heal, patients gaze on the awkward shy children they were. They admit, “Yes, this was really me,” and for the first time, it seems, they take themselves to themselves. For the first time they are whole. They have forgiven themselves for being real.”
Tony