It takes great courage to break with one’s past history and stand alone.
Food and alcohol hold an overwhelming fascination for a vast majority in our society, and it may well be that the numinosity of food and drink reflects the central crisis in our 20th-century culture: the crisis in faith.
We live in a predominately Christian culture which has lost its living connection to the symbolism of wafer and wine.
Lacking spiritual sustenance there is a genuine hunger and thirst.
The archetypal structure behind the wafer and wine is slowly giving way to a new configuration, but we are in chaos during the transition.
That chaos breeds loneliness, fear and alienation.
While that sense of aloneness is hard to endure, it can be of supreme value in the analytic process.
The new life always comes out of the dispossessed, as Christ came from the cow stable.
The danger in joining a group is that one can become identified with its image, or the image that society has put upon it.
Thus a woman who joins a feminist group may be locked into 1970’s ideas of repression instead of flowing with her own creative process.
If an obese woman gets locked into “Big is Beautiful” and starts preaching that philosophy, she has effectively stopped her own inner development just as an alcoholic who joins AA and becomes the best speaker on the circuit may find himself once again on the bottle.
I have a deep respect for both Alcoholics Anonymous and Overeaters Anonymous and I encourage my analysands to join those groups, because understanding from others can be tremendously liberating.
But the fact remains that if we are to find our own inner truth, we have to go into our darkness alone and stay with our inner process until we find our own healing archetypal pattern.
Once that relationship is established, we are on our individual path whether we are with a group or not.
It takes great courage to break with one’s past history and stand alone. ~Marion Woodman, Addiction to Perfection, Page 28
