by Dawn Garisch
Neurology and psychology, approaching the mind from altogether different perspectives, were in the main openly critical of, and even hostile, towards each other. Now, with the invention of ways to study the working brain in real time through Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scans and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI),, scientists are able to penetrate terrain traditionally occupied by the likes of Freud and Jung. Mark Solms,12 a neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst, has been investigating the neurological correlates of consciousness, the unconscious, and emotional life. Louis Cozolino, a psychiatrist,13 has looked at changes in the occipito-frontal cortex (OFC) that correlate with changes in attitude and behaviour that occur during psychoanalysis. Candace Pert,14 a neuroscientist, discusses the mind/body split as a cultural construct not supported by recent discoveries. Her research straddles the traditionally opposed paradigms of alternative and mainstream medicine, looking for a more inclusive and truthful science. The neuroscientist, Jean-Pierre Changeux,15 argues that the neural connections involved in curiosity, motivation and reward are the same brain processes that underlie social drives towards rights to life, liberty and happiness.
These are significant beginnings. Understanding the links between seemingly mutually exclusive aspects of the brain, the mind, the body and the psyche, might help us understand each other, and even ourselves, better.
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If the Yoruba are onto something with the idea that ‘life is a struggle to recapture the original plan and bring it back as memory so it can act as a guide for living one's life’, we might start looking for clues.
James Hillman, in his book The Soul's Code,16 elaborates on the ancient Greek idea that before we are born we are each assigned a daimon, or a spirit, whose job is to guide us to fulfil a specific task on earth. The daimon is demanding, pressurising, and intolerant of us straying from our appointed task. She invokes all kinds of maladies and misfortunes to discourage us from wandering off, and rewards us when we ‘get it’, and get back on track, as it were. The daimon, not caring for verbal instruction, will resort to anything else to get our attention -boredom, depression, anxiety, curiosity, illness, accidents, forgetfulness, insomnia, blackouts, earthquakes.
Joe Goodbread, a psychologist, recounted in a workshop that he knew a chemist who was bored with his job, but did not have the courage to change what he was doing for the usual reasons – job security, perks, status. He was so bored that he lost concentration one day and blew his hands off. Without hands, he could no longer work in a laboratory and was forced to change vocations. He became a world-renowned mathematician and, despite not having hands, became more contented with his life.
The idea of the daimon is a teleological one. The daimon desires a specific direction, if not a particular end, and embodies an organising principle other than that of rational thought to indicate where we should be going. The influence of the guide is most evident in those children who are determined to follow a particular path from an early age, like the choreographer Gillian Lynne, and the musician Yehudi Menuhin and the composer Mozart, but Hillman suggests that we all have a guiding principle which reveals itself through force of character, chance meetings and synchronicities.
How else can one explain the vocation of the young man who told me that he was a translator for the deaf at conferences. I asked him whether he had learnt sign language because of a deaf member of the family, but he shook his head. He remembered standing in a school playground as a child. Through the fence, on the other side of the road, he saw someone using sign language. He said that he had no idea what they were doing, but was determined to know. He pursued this, despite his parents pointing out with concern that learning to sign would not get him a well-paid job. They were wrong. There are very few professional sign language translators, so he is paid well to work all over the world.
A friend, Ken Barris, recalls coming across the words dactyl, iamb and trochee when he was a boy. They stood out for him in a vast field of words, illuminated by something mysterious that drew him. He later became a poet and writer. Those words, it could be said, were cairns showing him the way to himself. He recognised something of his future self before he had any means to know what it was.
Eugene Gendlin,17 philosopher and psychotherapist, suggests that both while creating a work of art and in living one's daily life, we use what he calls a ‘felt sense’ to check whether we are on track. He points out that when we make anything new in the world – art or the next chapter in the story of one's life – we often have a strong sense of how to proceed in order to complete it. Some aspect of ourselves knows where we are going, even though we have never been there before. We are constantly dipping into a somatically derived felt sense, which contains information collated not only from experience and expectations – which could only produce more of what already exists – but from a premonition of how the lived project or created piece will complete its unique shape in the future.
The psychoanalyst Helen Luke illustrated in her autobiography18 the idea that our lives have strands of the symbolic and the teleological woven in throughout. She maintains that our early dream images recur in evolving forms, and that these motifs provide traces of our psychological development. In her case, the stone motif that first appeared in a dream when she was a young girl transformed from a milestone upon which she sat, through various permutations, ending as a dream of an enormous diamond in the sky just before she died.
In her book An Experiment in Leisure, the psychoanalyst Marion Milner observes: ‘My mind's dominant concern, when left to itself, has been to achieve a conscious relation to the force by which one is lived. There seems to be something in my mind which is neither blind pleasure or pain-seeking, nor yet conscious reasoning; this something seems to be actively concerned with the truth of experience, and seems to express itself in terms of images, not arguments. ’19
This premise of a thread or track or guide speaks directly to my experience as a writer. I had written poetry and short stories on and off since the age of seven, but soon after my first child was born, the muse seized me with intent. My immediate problem was that I had a beautiful, demanding, greedy, sleepless baby that I was hopelessly in love with, as well as a beautiful, demanding, greedy urge to write.
The timing was very inconvenient, but the imperative could not be ignored. I arranged two afternoons to myself each week and plunged without plot into my first novel. I did not know it then, but what I was really doing was growing my capacity for joy, suffering, and not knowing what on earth is going to happen next.
I was the kind of person who liked to plan things and to feel in control, yet here I was, sneaking away for two whole afternoons a week into a world where I was led by the snout of my pen wherever it wanted to go, sniffing out a trail of images and story. Learning to trust my impulse was liberating, even when it led down dark alleys where I was terrified to go. I learnt to trust the arrival of an unexpected character, or the development of a taboo situation or an event I thought didn't fit. I learnt to trust not to turn back too soon – that often enough if I persisted down the track of an annoying development for a few more pages instead of pressing the delete button, something would emerge that made total sense in the overall story. Threads would come together that I could never have constructed consciously.
What, exactly, do I trust? Some call it the muse, and say that the writer is a conduit for what needs to be written. Ursula Le Guin described writing the Earthsea series as a process of discovering something that was already there. Her job was to document it as accurately as possible. Some would call it intuition, or the daimon. Whatever it is, it is certainly not the rational mind, although, of course, the intellect has an important role to play, particularly in the research and editing processes.
I once met a successful international agent who told me that all good writers, writers who write best sellers, decide on an ending for their story, then plot their way backwards to the beginning. They know how things are going to wind up before the
y have even started. He wouldn't have agreed with film-maker Werner Herzog's comment: ‘Coincidences always happen if you keep your mind open, while storyboards remain the instruments of cowards who do not trust in their own imagination and who are slaves of a matrix… If you get used to planning your shots based solely on aesthetics, you are never that far from kitsch. ’20
Many books are written with the writer's ego largely in control. Generally, they do not speak to me, and I do not write that way. By extension, I am learning the value of relinquishing ego control in my life where necessary. The solutions that emerge from living in the moment, rather than planning a future outcome and living backwards from that fixed point, allow for some other mysterious influence, and prevent me from zooming, in a blinkered way, straight past what is perhaps the point of living.
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There are certain themes or motifs that have propelled my life story forward. They derive from images embedded at an early age, and which direct my attention to an underlying and sometimes contradictory pattern.
When I was twenty-nine years old, my first-born son had a freak accident, falling eight metres inside a public building. I found myself sitting helplessly next to his unconscious eighteen-month-old body in the neurosurgery intensive care unit. I could not even hold him, he was so badly injured. I did not know whether he would live or die. If he lived, I did not know how damaged he would be. I sang him his favourite nursery rhymes, and wept, and prayed. He survived, and, despite specialists announcing a doubtful prognosis, despite great personal difficulty, he has flourished. He is a magnificent human being, who chose to celebrate his twenty-first birthday by launching himself into the Gourits River Gorge on the end of a bungee.
I am not someone who believes that if you pray hard enough, or if you are good enough, there is a God who will answer your prayers. My son could well have died. Yet I began to contemplate that perhaps the secular approach to life did not explain events adequately. What I did experience, for the first time, was a handing over. I, the great achiever, the efficient fixer, the reliable doer, was totally impotent in the face of this disaster. Most of the people I turned to for emotional help and hope were unavailable. The specialist, whom I had worked with previously, was coldly factual and exceedingly brief from the other side of the bed. My husband and my parents withdrew, physically and emotionally, into their own versions of hell. Every minute was an agony of waiting, of not knowing what was going to happen next. All I could do was hand over the future of my son to something beyond my medical knowledge and sit alone, and sit, and sit, and wait.
A year later, I drew a picture of a fallen child under an enormous and sharp-toothed tiger fish, like those my father caught when I was young. An androgynous, conjoined figure was simultaneously supplicating and also preparing to attack the monster. Looking at the picture, it was difficult to tell whether the giant fish had pushed the child over, or whether it was instead protecting the fallen boy. It was also hard to say whether the fish was protecting the child from the fused parents, or which of the parents' strategies was the right one to get to their possibly threatened offspring.
I don't fully understand this turbulent image, but it still resonates with me. Over twenty years later I am still writing about falling in all its literal and metaphorical aspects. I am still investigating control and impotence, responsibility and victimhood, the events that shape one's life and the ways in which they do this. Over twenty years on, I am intrigued by the patterns that begin to reveal themselves during a life, and to what extent they are genetic and handed down through the generations, how much they are acquired from early experiences, or whether they display evidence of other forces that live through us.
Great Fish21
My father caught great fish, tiger fish. He pulled their gleaming, dancing bodies from the jaws of the Zambezi, severed and salted their heads and strung them up to dry: necklaces of death.
I felt them watching as I played with trucks, earth and sticks, amongst the mielie stalks; their trapped, flat eyes never leaving my back.
Sometimes I would chance a look and see their rows of razor teeth invite the blood that leapt In my finger to touch them.
I could have touched, seen my blood run.
I went inside at my mother's call, washed the dirt off my hands and face, sat still and straight at a white, starched table, and ate their bodies.
It has taken me most of my writing life to come into a different relationship with this water creature, whatever it represents. The power of this poetic presence is as great as the scientific advantage of electricity through which I am able to use a computer.
Jung taught that image is psyche. Paying attention to the images that underpin one's life story provides a means to access and work with the force that lives through one – the themes and motifs of one's life, out of which we live and create. In Part Four we will investigate this idea further.
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3. The Story of Our Lives
[We are] stories within stories within stories. We recede endlessly, framed and reframed, until we are unreadable to ourselves.
Ivan Vladislavic22
Every day people bring me their stories of pain, hope, frustration and fear. Every day they submit their physical selves to the inquiry of my hands, eyes and ears and of machines. Daily I must translate their words and bodies into facts, numbers and statistical probabilities, and advise them how to proceed.
Some people I meet in the consulting room are not in touch with themselves. They come across as victims of their lives. Many are stressed, anxious and depressed. They work long hours, don't have time to eat properly or to exercise, don't see much of their children, and drink and smoke excessively. They are overweight or they don't eat enough. They sleep badly. They wake up exhausted. When I ask them what they do for pleasure, they look perplexed or give half-hearted replies. There is a huge divide between who they want to be and who they are.
Ostensibly, we go to the doctor for information, advice and appropriate treatment. Often enough, what we really want is reassurance and a quick medicinal fix. Illness and injury are unwelcome disturbances. We want the doctor to get rid of these hindrances so that our bodies remain in the background and compliant. We are constantly trying to ‘fix’ our bodies, or else we hardly notice them at all.
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The thin woman in her thirties came into my consulting room and sat down on the edge of the chair. ‘I have this pain in my heart, doctor, ’ she said, pressing her palm against the left-hand side of her chest. ‘It feels like fire. ’ She was worried she was having a heart attack. However, she had no risk factors for cardiovascular disease, and the pain was relieved by antacids. There was nothing to find on examination except for discomfort over the upper abdomen, and her electrocardiograph (ECG) and blood tests were normal. But she did admit to being stressed. She had financial concerns, and her home life was chaotic. She revealed that her husband was an alcoholic.
I explained to her that stress powerfully induces inflammation of the stomach lining, and that we should treat the indigestion. If it recurred, she would need to have a scope to check whether there was evidence of an ulcer or Helicobacter pylori, a bacterium associated with peptic ulcer disease. I told her that indigestion was her body's way of drawing attention to the toll her domestic stress was taking on her, and that she should get help. I offered the view that metaphorically, her heart was sore, and recommended AlAnon, the twelve step programme for family and friends of alcoholics, or, if she preferred therapy, a psychologist.
For the first time during the consultation, the woman looked happy. ‘Oh, no, ’ she said. ‘I don't need help. I know all about alcoholism. My mother died of it. ’ She smiled confidentially. ‘My husband needs me. If I were not around, he would drink even more. ’
This woman has a story about her life, as we all do. It is a huge plot point to have a mother who is an alcoholic. There are certain motifs to any human existence which set the frame of our time on earth – certain limitations
and experiences that we can never divest ourselves of, and that we will have to live with for the rest of our lives. These are the the raw materials of our lives. Yet we do have freedom to interpret, subvert, embellish, and to use these materials creatively. I have heard it said of the poet Rilke that he did not want psychotherapy because he regarded his childhood trauma as the locus from which he wrote. He was afraid that therapy would rob him of this difficult yet invaluable source.
I don't believe that therapy can extract the thorn from one's side, but self-reflection is very helpful in making one aware of how that early wound informs and forms our entire lives. Without knowing something about the story that resides in your bones, you run the risk of the story living you, rather than you living your story.
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Psychological theories interpret human behaviour. Two of the most influential thinkers based their theories on actual stories. Freud used the Oedipus myth to explain psychological development, whereas Jung taught the relevance of all myths in that they reflect the diversity of human behaviour.
In psychological theory, our lives incorporate plots through which we repeatedly play out our dramas, for example, the addiction to perfection and success, or the inability to see yourself except through the eyes of others, or mourning the lack of intimacy while keeping yourself out of reach. Myth typically represents the interactions and struggles between humans and the divine, and between the gods and goddesses themselves. Jung went so far as to say that the gods have become our diseases:
We think we can congratulate ourselves … imagining that we have left all these phantasmal gods far behind. But … we are still as much possessed by autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians. Today they are called phobias, obsessions, and so forth; In a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious symptoms for the doctor's consulting room.23