If I Ain't Jungian

A poem & essay that is rich with ambivalence & patterned after "If I Ain't African" by Glenis Redmond.

Further Reflections on "Rilke: Poetry and Alchemy

Len Cruz

If I Ain’t Jungian

(Adapted by Len Cruz from an If I Ain’t African by Glenis Redmond printed below)

 

If I ain’t Jungian

someone tell my soul

to stop sounding an ancient meditation bell.

 

If I ain’t Jungian

someone tell that woman in me

to stop whispering incantations in my ear.

 

If I ain’t Jungian

someone tell my eyes

to stop looking into the deep

from whence I emerged

Someone speak to my ordered way

of life and tell it to

quit welcoming disruptions.

 

If I ain’t Jungian

How come I know the way home

to Ithaca’s unreachable shores?

Feel it in my loins.

 

If I ain’t Jungian

how come my spirit

calls from deep unto deep.

How come every time I find myself breaking apart

I free fall into the next moment.

 

I I ain’t Jungian

how come I know things I’m not supposed to know

about ancient cultures and the stories

rooted in my deepest parts.

 

If I ain’t Jungian

someone tell the gods

to stop calling on me,

Apollo, Belenos, Ra,

Selene, Yemaya, Máni!

 

Tell me why I get dizzy

every time I

see the sun and moon together in the sky.

 

If I ain’t Jungian

how come I detect spiritus mundi

everywhere I go:

Hear it in my heartbeat

hear it high

hear it low.

 

If I ain’t Jungian

someone tell my soul

to suspend its ceaseless arising.

Someone tell their gods

to call another name.

Someone take this bell

out of my depths.

 

Someone give my intuition

a flatter world to apprehend.

 

If I ain’t Jungian

someone tell my hands

to speak to my arms

to speak to my shoulders

to press a message on my Orphean breast

to compose a song of life

to gently hum that melody in my ear.

 

If I ain’t Jungian

If I ain’t Jungian

If I ain’t Jungian

 

PLEASE

 

Tell my eyes

‘cause if I ain’t Jungian

I ain’t waking, and,

God knows,

I ain’t AWAKE.

On November 9, 2013 the Asheville Jung Center broadcast a conference, Rilke: Poetry and Alchemy presented by Dr. Daniel Polikoff. Polikoff is the author of In the Image of Orpheus: RILKE A Soul History Chiron 2011).  It seemed fitting to start this blog with a poem.  The next live Asheville Jung Center webinar Introduction to Alchemy is scheduled for November 23, 2013 12:00 PM to 1:30 PM.  

Nearly thirty years ago, toward the end of my residency, I devoted myself to the task of reading through almost all of the Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Perhaps this reflected a bit of reaction against the strictly Freudian atmosphere that pervaded my residency program, but I believe it has even more to do with my 27 year-old Self recognizing something in Jung whereby deep called unto deep. Decades passed before Dr. Steve Buser and I found ourselves devoting considerable time and energy  to the creation of the Asheville Jung Center. I attended our conferences, I wrote the occasional blog hoping to generate discussion and subtly noticed myself becoming more transparent with my affection for Analytical Psychology. However, I continued to feel considerable ambivalence until I attended the IAAP Congress 2014 in Copenhagen for Chiron Publication's launch of Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Haunt Our Lives by James Hollis. At the IAAP Congress I felt like I had come home to a place where I had alighted in my youth. Perhaps I was too unseasoned and unprepared for my first visit to the shores of that continent called the Self.

For years I have sought to avoid over-identifying with any school of psychology or approach to therapy, including Analytical Psychology.  Copenhagen kindled a new phase in that elusive return to my own Ithaca. My daily practice as a psychiatrist involves a great deal of psychotherapy with individuals and couples, but it also involves prescribing medications for symptom relief (even suppression).  I am endlessly searching for the right balance between sensitive listening to symptoms for their deeper meaning and efforts to bring relief as quickly as possible. That tension seldom resolves and I suspect the ambivalence pours out in the poem If I Ain’t Jungian.

I hope the poem also speaks to those Jungian-oriented clinicians who practice modern psychiatry or those who work in settings where the tension between listening and extinguishing symptoms is commonplace. But even those who do not live with such ambivalence and tension may find something in the lines of If I Ain't Jungian.  For many people, their first encounter with Jung’s work hits them like something new but also profoundly familiar.

Because we carry within us a collective history whose archetypal patterns can be detected in myth, story, historical sweeps and religious themes across many cultures and many epochs we can locate ourselves in a vast drama. The call to find our own way in the world, guided by large motifs is always burnished by our personal unconscious.  This is one of the many reasons that the Self is like a compass for our journey.

There was a time that Pythia's consultation interpreted through the Delphic Oracles tilted mostly in the direction of listening rather than extinguishing symptom. Currently, there seems to be a much greater emphasis on controlling symptoms and rigorously monitoring the quality of those efforts.   I suspect the same was true in Jung’s time. Then as now, the deepest ways of understanding psychotherapy still required that a balance be struck between listening for latent meaning in a symptom and the sometimes urgent appearing summons to provide relief to the sufferer.

The world makes its demands on a clinician while the soul also makes its demands.  During these uncertain times in American healthcare there is a great deal of chatter about improving quality, delivering efficiency, and extending care.  But there is conspicuously little attention given to the larger project of extracting meaning from our circumstances.  There is is a dearth of conversation about how collective unconscious elements exert substantial influence over unfolding events in the world.  But I see reasons to remain hopeful.  In the modest sized community in Western North Carolina where I practice I saw that there is a workshop titled Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness organized by Professor Laura Hope-Gill of Lenoir Rhyne University.  

In the intervening years since residency the mantle of the Jungian world shifted.  In 1985 there were just two categories in the Jungian world, analysts and all others interested in Jung.  I do not recall there being places like Pacifica Graduate Institute, Saybrook University, the California Institute of Integral Studies, and many others programs (here is a list) when I left residency.  Back then it was audacious to append Jungian to one's bio unless you were analytically trained.  That unspoken tradition seems to have gone by the wayside.  I still remain convinced that there is no substitute for analytic training.  However, through the Asheville Jung Center and Chiron Publications I find myself in an unexpected position to expand the base of individuals becoming familiar with the important things Jung and his successors have discovered and continue to discover.

The publication of the The Red Book may eventually be seen as a watershed moment for the Jungian tradition.  In a few short years it has captured the attention of countless people who might never have been drawn to C. G. Jung and analytical Psychology.  The Red Book's evocative images have generated enormous interest were featured at this year's Venice Biennale Art Festival.   In the midst of such enormous change since the early days of my residency training I become aware that there is no room left in my life  for the reluctant Jungianin my life.

So If I Ain't Jungian, what am I.

Len Cruz, MD

More about Glenis Redmond

If I Aint Jungian is adapted from a poem If I Ain’t African by, Glennis Redmond, a passionate African-American poet, educator, and counselor with an interest in Jung. She has won numerous awards including The Carrie McCray Literary Award in Poetry, a study fellowship from Vermont Writing Center, study scholarships to the Atlantic Center for the Arts and a week of study with Natalie Goldberg. Glenis is the 1997 and the 1998 Southeast Regional Individual Poetry Slam Champion. She placed in the Top 10 in 1996 and 1997 for the National Individual Slam Championship.  See many of her books at   

 

If I Ain't African

by Glenis Redmond

If I ain’t African

someone tell my heart

to stop beating like a djembe drum.

 

If I ain’t African

someone tell my hair

to stop curling up like the continent

it is from.

 

If I ain’t African

someone tell my lips

to stop singing a Yoruban song.

Someone speak to my hips,

tell them their sway

is all wrong.

 

If I ain’t African

how come I know the way home

along the Ivory Coast?

Feel it in my breast of bones.

 

If I ain’t African

how come my feet do this African dance?

How come every time

I’m in New Orleans or Charleston

I fall into a trance?

 

If I ain’t African how come

I know things I’m not supposed to know

about the middle passage-slavery

feel it deep down in my soul?

 

If I ain’t African

someone tell their gods

to stop calling on me,

Obatala, Ellegba, Elleggua,

Oshun, Ogun!

 

Tell me why I faint

every time

there is a full moon.

 

If I ain’t African

how come I hear

Africa Africa Africa

everywhere I go?

Hear it in my heartbeat

hear it high

hear it low.

 

If I ain’t African

someone tell my soul

to lose it’s violet flame.

Someone tell their gods

to call another name.

Someone take this drumbeat

out of my heart.

 

Someone give my tongue

a new mouth

to part.

 

If I ain’t African

someone tell my feet

to speak to my knees

to send word to my hips

to press a message on to my breast

to sing a song

to my lips

to whisper in my ear,

 

If I ain’t African

If I ain’t African

If I ain’t African

 

PLEASE

 

tell my eyes

‘cause if I ain’t African,

I ain’t livin’, and

God knows,

I ain’t

 

ALIVE!