Marion Woodman: Assent to the Goddess
But O alas, so long, so far
Our bodies why do we forbear?
They are ours, though not we; we are
The intelligences, they the sphere.
We owe them thanks because they thus,
Did us to us at first convey,
Yielded their forces, sense, to us,
Nor are dross to us, but allay.
John Donne, “The Ecstasy.”
Though this was not his intention, John Donne in “The Ecstasy” sets up the kind of situation that can occur when a woman in analysis lacks a genuine bonding with the mother, in other words, is not secure in the ground of her own body.
When that bonding is absent, the woman tends to go into her head.
However illuminating this may be in terms of new insights into the nature of her problems, the insights themselves remain disembodied; in Donne’s words, the spheres are not connected to the intelligences.
Analyst and analysand are then like Donne’s two souls negotiating above the bodies of the two lovers.
In the intellectualizing of a problem, the body is cruelly abandoned.
The shock that follows the analytic hour is the return to the body.
As soon as the soul re-enters the body, as it were, it suddenly appears as if nothing has really changed.
All that happened in the session is that the soul experienced a momentary release from its sepulcher, and was able to move about like the blessed in Paradise, before returning to its earthly grave to experience itself once more as buried alive.
That sensation of being buried alive is a precise metaphor of the obese condition and the sensation of being released from the grave is the sensation of the “weightless” anorexic.
The function of analysis is not to further encourage this body/soul split but to heal it until, finally, the soul in the body experiences itself as having undergone “small change,” the body and the soul now being one.
In the end, once the real limitations of the intellectual level have been recognized and overcome, the dialogue between the lovers negotiating their body/soul relationship becomes “a dialogue of one”
As the analysis progresses, especially where there is a deep psyche/soma split, neither analyst nor analysand dare assume that the body is merely a dumb animal encasing a very articulate, highly aspiring spirit.
The language of the body, to shift the metaphor, is far more than the mutterings of a ten-month-old child sending out instinctual signals that identify certain animal needs but not much more.
Once the analytic rapport is firmly established, pretending there is no body, or treating it with indifference, is pretending there is no shadow—a trickster’s reversal of the emperor’s new clothes, a game the obese trickster loves.
At some point in each hour, even in the initial stages, the messages of the body must be recognized, if only for a moment.
To allow the woman to leave the session joyous in her heady illumination, then face her shadow in the mirror as she puts on her coat, is a cruel reinforcement of the split.
The bodies, as Donne says, must yield “their forces, sense, to us.”
Analyst and analysand must recognize those forces as not “dross to us, but allay.”
Donne’s image of bodily sense as allay (alloy) rather than dross is taken from metallurgy, which has behind it the history of alchemy.
Dross is an impurity which weakens metal; allay is an impurity which strengthens it.
The soul, like gold, if too refined or pure becomes soft and will not hold its shape.
It needs to contain an impurity so that it can harden into an identifiable form.
If the soul thinks it is above all identity, being too pure to have a form (as the anorexic and obese both feel), then it will experience the alloy of the body as dross.
The woman’s task is to persevere with the body until she recognizes that it is not dross but alloy.
And the way to do this is to allow the body to play, to give it space and allow it to make whatever movements it wants to make.
The shift in perception from dross to allay comes when the ego begins to ground itself in the Great Mother, the body of creation itself; in terms of biblical mythology, it is when the virginal, disembodied Mary finally is able to seat herself on the lap of the wise Sophia.
Then the atrophied instinct is able to make contact with the psyche’s healing imagery which is reaching out to the wounded instincts in dreams.
That imagery in its melted or softened condition, the condition of the dream, wishes to harden into the living world of the body until it experiences “small change” in the movement back and forth between the inner and outer worlds.
What is important to realize is that releasing the body into spontaneous movement or play constellates the unconscious in precisely the same way as does a dream.
For this reason, I came to the conclusion that for many of my analysands a body workshop was as necessary as dream analysis.
Since most of my analysands were suffering in one way or another from a deep psyche/soma split, I saw that the exclusion of the body in the exploration of the unconscious was at least as one-sided as would be the exclusion of dreams.
Body movements, I realized, can be understood as a waking dream.
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
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