Three
My Early Professional Life and Personal Analysis
For ten years before my application for candidacy at the Jung Institute, my life revolved around two and then three hours a week of Jungian analysis with an analyst I will call Benjamin. If you have never experienced an analysis, you may not know the level of commitment and involvement this implies. In addition to the hours spent in the room with the analyst, there is travel time, which for me meant a three to four hour round-trip drive. Then there are the hours between sessions that one spends journaling about what happened in the session, one's reactions to what happened, and dreams and insights, as every relationship in your life becomes more transparent. In short, for the first few years of my analysis, my entire life revolved around my work with Benjamin.
In fragile shape I first arrived in Benjamin's office on June 30, 1978, after a series of catastrophes in earlier therapies and training experiences that today would be considered ethical and professional violations. But we of the seventies were unapologetically breaking through barriers without a thought about transference (the unconscious patterns from earlier relationships that are projected upon the analyst), without consideration for the dangers of dual relationships (therapist/client relationships outside of the therapy), and without respect for the boundaries in therapy that are essential for inner work to be successful.
My first therapist, Priscilla, was just a year ahead of me in graduate school. We were both part of what, in retrospect, was a therapist cult in our area, led by a charismatic and disturbed supervisor, Jen. Nothing in my Midwestern background prepared me for the early seventies in California, and particularly for Sonoma State University and a powerful cult personality like Jen. Jen had been hired independently by her supervisees as an adjunct to our training, not by Sonoma State University. Her modus operandi was, in her own words, to lie beside the road in the weeds and “rape” the non-suspecting client with her interpretations as he or she walked by.
I was in my early twenties when I first met Jen and was completely taken in by her power. I worked with her for several years as I finished my degree and became licensed to practice psychotherapy. Many of us felt that hers was the only true way. All other approaches paled in potency. We knew this because she told us so, repeatedly, and it took me a full year with Benjamin to let go of this notion. After a diet of heavy confrontation, particularly around any dissenting voice, and the threat and use of public humiliation by disclosure of personal material, many of us were wounded, to say the least, and I was one of the first to know it. So when my friend Harold gave me Benjamin's name—saying, “Get out of this system, it is killing you, and here is a Jungian analyst”—I was ready.
I wore a mid-calf black dress with tiny white flowers to my first appointment, a long pink chiffon scarf wrapped about my throat, and high, burgundy boots. Benjamin was an attractive man in his mid 40s with a tall muscular frame and thick, curly brown hair. His voice was soft and calming. As I told him about the mess I was in, he began a process that would last for several years, by containing my anxiety with sane statements and alleviating my feelings of self-hatred and blame. I recited the litany of faults that Jen, and then Priscilla, had repeatedly accused me of: I was secretive, manipulative, passive aggressive. To my surprise, Benjamin simply asked, “Is that a threat or a promise?” And for the first of what would be many times over the next eighteen years, we both laughed.
At the end of the hour, Benjamin, reflecting on our session, stated that there had to be some energy between us for the therapy to work and that he could see such energy was there. I was relieved but did not reply. I was horrified at his next comment, that he had never seen a person so white, so drained of blood. I had lost a fair amount of weight in the preceding months, forcing myself not to drop below 105 pounds. I also had forced myself to sit in the sun to tan, telling myself that at the ripe old age of 29, sunning was not a good idea, and that this was the last year I would do so. Apparently, the white ghost of myself was showing through anyway.
I worried that Benjamin did not find me attractive enough. It was a tension that would continue for years: the attraction between us feeling dangerous, so dangerous that I could not talk about it. He tried to get me to express my feelings about him or something he said, by asking questions that required no more than a “yes” or a “no.” In time, in a convoluted way, this behavior confirmed that I mattered to him, but after my experiences with Jen and Priscilla, I had no capacity to be more direct about my feelings for Benjamin. Much healing would have to happen before I was whole enough to do so.
Nevertheless, after that first session I felt a “righting” inside. I wrote in my journal, “I have this feeling that I do not have to swim upstream to be a good person. He is gentle, kind, smart, and supportive. His words are vague. He can be as spacey as I am. But he is intuitive.”
Over the next months, Benjamin's listening and training formed a protective circle around me, and once a level of safety was established, I descended into the greatest and most frightening depression of my life. It was as if the full impact of a massive and malevolent storm waited to hit until I was in his care. At night I would go to sleep picturing him as a gold chain encircling me. I felt psychically dizzy and feared for my sanity. Outer events pummeled me.
Having left Jen behind, my referrals from her group shriveled, threatening my private therapy practice. I suspected that I was being used as a teaching example in her consultations and seminars and so worried for my reputation. I was sharing an office with my old therapist, Priscilla. When that relationship deteriorated, I had to buy her out.
During each session with Benjamin I related a new drama: a large hole in the wool carpet of the office after Priscilla left, furniture being taken without agreements. Benjamin was the only voice of sanity in a crazy world. “You can't make agreements with people who do these things; you have to get out.”
In January, six months later, I returned early from a vacation to keep a Tuesday appointment with Benjamin. A seasonal storm was dumping torrents as I drove my 78 Honda Civic through water collecting on Highway 101. The skylight was leaking. I recognized that I was in an emergency situation, but at least I was finally getting help.
Over the next months I was able to stabilize my life, separating completely from the community that had spawned me professionally, finding a new office in which to practice, getting another therapy consultant, and totally cutting off relationships with members of the former group. I agreed with Benjamin that not everything can be fixed and that sometimes you just have to move on.
One day on the way home from therapy, about a year into my work with Benjamin, I looked in the rearview mirror to find myself smiling spontaneously, something that hadn't happened in a long time. Then I dreamed about “whitening,” the albedo, an alchemical stage Jung interpreted as coming after the burning away of ego attitudes or ambitions not related to the larger Self. Finally, thirteen months after I had started with Benjamin, I married Lynn, the man I had lived with for the past six years. My depression had ended.
But the real inner work had only just begun. At last I had the reserves to move deeper into my relationship with Benjamin and to understand the wounds that had opened or been inflicted by my experiences with Jen's group. And the focus moved from the outer crises onto the relationship between us. One day late in that first year, after the usual greeting at the start of our session, Benjamin picked up a notebook and jotted something down. I stopped talking.
“What just happened?” he asked.
Feeling closed down, I said, “Nothing!”
He reiterated, “You started talking. I picked up the notebook and made a note, and you stopped talking.”
“It didn't bother me,” I insisted.
“Come on, tell the truth!” he pushed.
“No really, it didn't bother me,” I said. “I don't know what happened.”
“Would you tell me if it had bothered you?” he questioned.
“Not necessarily,” I said.
“I can relate to that!” he said.
Again, we laughed. After that session I wrote in my journal: “I don't want to talk about feelings because I don't know anything when I do. I feel helpless. I don't want to be vulnerable, like I was with Priscilla. Priscilla was disgusted by my feelings.”
Immersion into Jen's group added years of work to my analysis. The rebuilding of trust in others, and more importantly in myself, took a very long time. I came to think of Jen and Priscilla, and the larger cult group, as my dark teachers with even darker gifts, ones who led me to difficult places in myself that otherwise would have been avoided.
Reflecting back to those early years of analysis, I remember the intensity of total absorption in the process. Analysis is not always comfortable and takes a great deal of life energy. For long stretches of time, one session can feel remarkably like the one before. A large part of my own healing was due to the quiet weaving of attention that I got...
