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Strephon Suffering A Terrible Bout With The Unconscious

8 June 2009 3 Comments
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Strephon Suffering A Terrible Bout With The Unconscious

Issues – … evil … collective unconscious … sickness … overwhelm … love … choice to live … projections … responsibility … consciousness … ones own evil …

It’s like I’m going to die. The nausea comes up in an overwhelming way. I am doing normal, preparing Stefania’s work sandwiches, and the sweats start and I grow cold and it seems like I will have to heave and heave and heave my guts out.

But fortunately I don’t. I sit at the computer reading Helen’s reply to me on an issue, just to have focus, but even this doesn’t work.

Stefania comes in the room ready for work and sees me. I have grown completely pale apparently. It’s a horrible suffering, brought on by the unconscious, though I had a few pieces of pineapple and grapes just before.

Collective Evil In The Unconscious

Since early childhood I have had these bouts, terrific bouts with the unconscious. In one at the Guild my analyst, Elizabeth Howes, did not know what to do with me. I was paralyzed. Could hardly walk. Walking so slowly to meet the new doctor reminded me of this symptom. The reluctance of the Jews to go to their deaths in the gas chambers, so much darkness is there loaded into the collective unconscious.

Stefania is worried, she tells me. She has never seen this. I welcome at last this bout coming. Where was my unconscious in this crisis process?

The lack of love in the world. What is wrong with Obama is he talks a much more humanitarian story than he practices. He increased troops in Afghanistan and thus increased the killing of the native peoples who suffer at American and Talaban hands, both, apparently.

  • Apparently the weight of evil that the human race generates is almost overwhelming and there are few people who take responsibility for this.

So in my personal life I also face my own visitations with evil from some of the people I have interacted with, mostly in good faith.

Encounter With Evil At Age Six

Being sent to boarding school at age six alone on the train with a sign around my neck was cruel. Put in isolation with an old, very cold, farm couple was traumatizing.

I can remember being in the huge grain silo and sinking down in the middle of the grain until I would be buried in a sea of grain. I must have struggled to get out. I must have chosen to live. But no one came to rescue me.

Why have I been able to help rescue others in my long career as a psychotherapist? I went beyond talk to emotional process with them at core levels. I’ve rarely heard of a therapist going this far.

You don’t go into your patient’s world, they say. You stay in your role, you talk, you listen.

Even the Jungians I trained with were keeping it safe with talk and their symbol system developed by Jung based on archetypes in mythology. It’s not the same as getting in there directly and drinking from the cow’s tit.

So I seem to be calming down, though I have not dared to move about, and refused to go back to bed. I hate too much bed in life. I want to be homo erectus, awake, active.

But it’s such an awful feeling, the coldness, sweat, nausea, need to vomit.

In former bouts the earth would start spinning around. I was losing my ground of being, my reality picture. The spinning would get out of control and I would just have to endure it. Terrible feeling!

No, I’m not crazy. I have my bouts with the unconscious, but I get through them to new stability and learning. What characterizes a mental illness is being stuck in such an overwhelming mental condition one cannot get out of it, sometimes not even with help.

Stefania wants to stay home from work today and take care of me. Maybe it’s needed, maybe it’s not. The caring is needed.

The original boarding school was so cold and devoid of caring adults that once a year I developed the unconscious strategy to get sick like this, a terrible flu or nausea. There at the boarding school little hospital I had individual attention. Some people actually knew I existed. I existed in a few other people’s eyes! There also I would get ginger ale and ice cream which helped my digestion. But in three days I would have to leave this little paradise and go back to the harsh world of 30 kids my age locked up together with one house parent and supervised by older bully boys who made us do painful things.

My father never visited me at boarding school and my mother once a year. Of course they were ashamed not to take care of their own son. Of course they failed the goal they set of becoming famous poets. They simply were too neurotic to realize their ambition and talent.

I was left with terrible bouts with the unconscious. It’s like the suffering of mental illness, only the mentally ill have their bouts of terrible mental suffering lasting months and years.

I sought whatever help was available.

The Great Weight Of Evil

It’s unethical to let the Great Weight Of Evil overwhelm one or dump that weight onto others. I had a sense of ethics even then as a boy because nobody else among the adults had, though few adults were met.

One teacher, Dorothy Day, was a kindly teacher and a communist, so said my mother. So some people did what they could. Thousands lost their lives then fighting the Germans who had identified with Evil and acted it out in World War II and concentration camps.

The Collective Evil Unconscious

In conclusion, I was wondering when my big bout with the unconscious would come to me in my present affliction. This morning was certainly a bout, or also the start of something terrible.

It’s the terribleness I need to experience. I need to go through the fire again, experience the fears, the hatreds, the projections, the angers of others, that I may have evoked.

When a consciously realized person has that core being certain unconscious people try and destroy him or her because they have been trying to not face their own evil inside themselves and take responsibility for it.

My own mother knew psychology from books and recommended it to me. But she never took on an extensive analysis for herself. Instead she stuck with being a ‘genius’, as she tried to reinforce for herself. Her typewriter still had a paper in it where she typed over and over, ‘I am a genius, I am a genius …” It’s this kind of unreality that made me nauseous from childhood on up.

Thus I knew I could work with deeply troubled people as a dreamwork psychologist, but that also I had to keep working on myself, seeking help when needed.

I included in my intensives sometimes process time for myself. Yes, I the chief therapist am doing good work, but I am evoked also by 25 other people’s unconscious’s. How am I going to handle this without being overwhelmed, or evoking too much in others. My longer intensives were truly psychological battle situations.

I don’t have respect for psychotherapists who don’t get in there and fight the battles with evil in their own and their clients’ unconscious’s. What I mean is, don’t take on the role unless you meet the expectations of others for battle with evil and the healing that can only follow after the battle.

Well, you would hardly know how sick I have been since I am able to write this. Stefania has just come home with a variety of ginger ale like drinks for me to take.

Update – Later In The Day

The above is writing through part of the terrible bout with the unconscious, that can also be seen as a flu episode or something to do with my possible cancer.

After, Stefania took me to bed and we slept a couple more hours where I sweated but slept. Then I spit up phlegm for the first time that may have had blood in it. It was kind of like grape stain but I had not eaten grapes before the nap.

Not to just give details but the psychological feeling was of having been through a crisis a terrible bout with the dark side and all the evil I have had to content with, my own and other people’s evil as I worked with them over the years.

I spit out the embryo, I aborted the dark little evil baby. Strangely for hours after now I have not had the compulsive coughing. I’m sure there is more evil to get out of my system. Having this destructiveness inside me makes me more destructive in behavior, but also makes me more vulnerable to other people’s evil, and I can give cases!

The historical Jesus supposedly taught, ‘beware when you clean your house of the demons that live there that your house becomes empty and even worse ones move in.‘

Okay, that’s maybe a good point. I would have to say though, ‘beware when you don’t expel the evil within, by making it conscious and choosing against it, that these little devils do not find you complacent and invite into you all their destructive relatives as well.’

Evil Questions?

  1. Why don’t we all realize that an essential task in life is to know evil?
  2. Why don’t we realize that if we don’t take responsibility for our own evil and the evil others do to us that we are that much more likely to become overcome by evil?
  3. If you still have any fear left of anything in life maybe it means you have not discovered the evil behind the fear in yourself?

Complacency is also a great evil because it allows evil to go unchecked.

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3 Comments »

  • Jeremy said:

    Dear Strephon,

    Thanks for sharing this intimate adventure. Questions of evil I have avoided much of my life. But you certainly have highlighted it. I have denied evil as a force in itself, but rather have seen it as the reverse of good, or the pure stained, not something that stands alone. Perhaps a lostness or immaturity, the failure to realize the truth of the beauty of the clear human soul. Hence whenever I had seen or heard of evil I have sought to or thought to transform it, particularly in myself. Evil to me is ignorance, the belief in our isolation, and that brings pain. Its opposite knowledge, that of our unity, brings happiness.

    Why don’t we all realize that an essential task in life is to know evil?

    So in the above sense, it is important to know evil – as disease – and seek it’s remedy, or cure.

    Why don’t we realize that if we don’t take responsibility for our own evil and the evil others do to us that we are that much more likely to become overcome by evil?

    You are correct here, too. We must recognize the dis-ease in ourselves and work to overcome it, primarily through acts of universal love.
    If you still have any fear left of anything in life maybe it means you have not discovered the evil behind the fear in yourself?

    Now here you have a very revealing question for I still do have fear in me – do to the uncertain situation of my life here and blows to my ego over the years – but lately I have found a way to face them through self-hypnotism – building faith or trust in myself or self-confidence. Still, I just read one of Ellie’s books called the Boy in the Basement – about a boy who was beaten and forced to live in a cold basement for years by his brutal father – it brought back my own fears as a child faced with a sometimes brutal and very powerful father. This is even though before he died we had reconciled. His ghost appeared in authoritarian adults throughout my life, generating fear. It is something I am working with affirmations like I will be self confident in all my social and learning relationships because I want to realize my full potential as a human being.
    Thanks for helping me along with your reminders.
    You shall overcome!

    Jeremy

    # 8 June 2009 at 3:27 PM
  • Arthur B. Treadway said:

    Dear Strephon,

    Your bouts with the Unconscious sound very similar to certain bouts I have had, occasionally throughout life and now still infrequent but becoming more frequent maybe. Nausea, feeling I have to vomit, loss of balance, even when lying down still, the room seems to whirl and heave around, cold sweat, fever symptoms, like aching joints.

    Every morning before breakfast, the first thing I take is: (1) the juice of one lemon, (2) a single clove of garlic mashed into a pulp so it dissolves in the lemon somewhat, (3) a certain measure of Sears’ oil. Well, sometimes, not often, that mixture gives me those symptoms for maybe five minutes, after which they go away, especially if I eat something.

    Another thing that will do it for me is a strong fall in my blood pressure, usually caused by waiting too long between meals to eat again. It can last a long time, if I don’t give myself some food in these cases.

    Those are also symptoms of a bad trip with certain substances I have had the good fortune to take. Some people have this kind of symptoms with a first experience with marihuana. I have had a horrendous version of it once with Ayahuasca, after throwing up, I spent all night reading the pages in the book of my life,…, and each page was signed by my mother, right up to the recent end of the book.

    For you it is a bout with the Unconscious. That too. Why not?

    It might sometimes be a bout with your unconscious forgetting to eat, too. No?

    Evil? Those who pay a lot of attention to Evil and spend a lot of energy supposedly studying it, very often end up attracting it, Evil is missing the mark.

    Best to you, Strephon,
    Arthur

    # 9 June 2009 at 11:54 PM
  • Strephon (author) said:

    Jeremy, your comment about the Boy in the Basement story that is one of your daughter’s books reminds me of the ethical principle, ‘If it can be done it will be done.’

    Yes, ethics has to start with reality, even if to oppose certain behaviors.

    Thus it is hard to face that if someone has enough atomic power to destroy the world, ethically they have the right to do so. Or if someone gets raped, and I was raped at boarding school, my oppressor has the right to do so. It is my job to recover from it and not let such evil ruin me and make me an evil person also.

    Ethics must include deliberate evil, the conscious choice to destroy, just as Obama is doing now in Afghanistan with drones killing whole families, even when the local government protests this intrusion by the United States.

    The US military realizes there is no one to stop them, not even President Obama. He wants to use his power this way.

    Thus we cannot simply condemn evil, we must always stop it.

    Now if we don’t have the power to stop a certain evil then how can we truly condemn it?

    Best always then to look to our own destructiveness, visited upon us or what we visit upon others. Here with our own evil we do often have the power to stop evil. This is where we can be effective, and what we can be effective with can be ethical.

    # 10 June 2009 at 10:52 PM

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