Edited Repost.
Some research was done in the 70’s in America to determine what brand of psychotherapy was effective and why. What they discovered was that it was down to the therapist involved and whether the client felt loved or not.
People are healed by love and not by theories.
Having said that, you can work with your inner child all you like without touching upon the terrible fracture in our collective psyche that is created by One System systems. And it’s not just about social intolerance and shadow projection onto your neighbour…
but de deep split waaaay down in yo’ own selve’..
startin with alla trouble between Yahweh and his missus Sophia/Hokmah.
back inna day
The Subjugation of the Divine Feminine has left Civilisation trying to build it’s house on a foundation which has not only cracked all the way across, but one half has actually slid into a sink hole and opened up a crevasse deep enough to swallow a carpenter’s lunch pail and maybe a small child.
This wound of the lost goddess is so basic to Western Civilisation we’ve built it into our theoretical frameworks as existential ‘givens’. Balint calls it ‘the basic fault’. A sense of fundamental lack. We forget that other cultures do not necessarily experience this.
Their Gods get on, more or less.
We also forget that the experience of being ‘hollow men’ is precisely because we have, indeed, had something scooped out of us at birth.
In acrimonious divorces and otherwise narcissistically preoccupied parents, being made to feel ‘special’ is the classic substitution for withered affection.
Not gifts as such…
just being let off a scolding…
because its too much trouble..
an’ now you owe me…
an’ preten’ how good you are for not doing the hard work of giving them hell when they need it.
But it never quite fills the ‘scooped out’ experience.
Lucky for us the rift can be mended..
but not without being rather overwhelmed in the experience.
I had a customer who dreamed he had been thrown from a great height by his mother. He fell and fell, down into the sea. He sank down and down until he reached the bottom and found himself surrounded by….. things, but didn’t know what the things were.
‘They were shields and armour..’
I told him.
‘How the hell did you know that?’
memory jogged.
‘Well, because I know the myth of Hephaestus..’
says I.
Who was cast from Heaven by angry Hera,
because he wasn’t perfect.
…fell to earth and learned the craft of smithing, making weaponry and armour.
So now he had a story..
one that came to him from the Blue..
to re-introduce him to himself..
Mostly in the West we treat the Unconscious as something to be brought to heel. Or reduced to interpretation. We’re easily seduced with the notion of self mastery and there are many teachers who gain great followings on that promise…
rather than the humility of realising that not only are you not master of your house you are in fact the tenant.
And so we can’t be fed..
or feel connected.
The dream weaving Goddess gets experienced in her negative form instead, and rather than us approaching Her dream with the awe of visitation, She comes to us as Need and Addiction and Consumption.
So, I came across something that knocked one of my great heroes down more than a few notches..
ah me… but then I dreamt that my Alsation had a big rubber band stretched over his head and across his eyes. He was crazy with distress and I had to tackle him to the ground and grab the band off his face. He was so relieved and grateful.
I woke and thought, ok, you may be disillusioned but your instictive self feels a lot better.
and can see properly..
Imagine if the whole world woke up one morning having had the same dream. We would all be amazed. It would be the greatest event of all time. People would dance in the streets from New York to Ouagadougo for a month and the world would never be the same again. It would unite faiths and end wars.
And yet….
this is what happens all the time..
Not in the content maybe..
but in the fact of being tended by an unseen, unknowable something…
with the power to slip poetic Summaries into our sleep
and gift glimpses of Beyond.
