Life in the panopticon
“A woman is always accompanied, except when quite alone, and perhaps even then, by her own image of herself. While she is walking across a room or weeping at the death of her father, she cannot avoid envisioning herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she is taught and persuaded to sur vey herself continually. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does, because how she appears to others – and particularly how she appears to men – is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life.”John BergerNo woman escapes this scrutiny, this policing of her appearance...
Source: Jung At Heart - April 10, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: blogs
Days of my life
I am a journal keeper. For the last 45 years I have started most days the same way I did this morningA cup of tea, a cat on my lap, my journal and my pen. I write the date, then any dreams I remember from the night before. Associations to the dream. The maybe just what I hear and see — this morning there was birdsong, and the water in the harbor calm and unruffled by wind. And it is not snowing! My journal is a container for my thoughts and feelings, wishes and hopes, dreams, continuing work in analysis. A reader would not learn much if anything about my outer life or events i n the world around me. My journal is very in...
Source: Jung At Heart - April 8, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: blogs
The struggle goes on
Update on painting - I pushed and shoved myself yesterday to do one of the projects in my art course. Effy Wild encouraged us to copy her process even. So I did the first layer. I HATE it! Now the last time I hated something I painted, I took it with me when I saw my analyst and talked at length about how much I hated it. Then actually looking at it with him, I saw a great deal. I know that hating any expression of emotion, any creative effort we make is to hate ourselves, to crap on ourselves in a way that we would not want anyone to do to our children. So I know that i have to let go of hating this latest effort. It ...
Source: Jung At Heart - April 7, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: blogs
Slow Magic
"Exchanging words is the essence of psychotherapy." Nor HallI met with someone new the other day. When I meet with a new patient, I always have a slight anxiety before this new person arrives -- anxiety and also anticipation Will we "click"? What new doors will open through this person and our work -- because this process changes both of us, though not to the same degree. So there is that ting le of the new and unknown as I answer the door. And then, once in my office, whether in person or on the screen via Skype or FaceTime, we sit down and I ask, as I always do, "What brings you here today?" and we begin.It is a ...
Source: Jung At Heart - April 7, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: blogs
On not being able to paint
My brother is a painter. He paints trompe l ’oile - which means fool the eye. Here is one of his paintings. Not my style but he is good at it. Somehow that he is an artist and was also my mother ’s favorite led me to avoid art, focusing instead on intellectual pursuits. Still something in me kept wanting to paint and draw. My brother once said that anyone could draw, which was not encouraging to me at all. I took the art classes in school that were required but once finished with them I t urned away from painting or any kind of art for many years. I think the last thing I made was a paper mache dog that I meant to be ...
Source: Jung At Heart - April 6, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: blogs
Memory and Magritte
I first saw Magritte ’s “La Memoir” or “Mnemosyne” on a book jacket 20 or more years ago. She is an arresting image, Memory with a wound to her head. Is it memory bleeding out? Will memory be lost if the wound is not bandaged and the blood flow stopped? Or does she show the wound to the head that any of us has from one or another childhood insult or injury? Does the effort to re-member heal the wound and thus stanch the bleeding? Save the memory? And what about the bell and the leaf -- are they bits of memory? Has she forgotten? Did she ever know? Are we all surrounded by artifacts of memory that if we c an only ...
Source: Jung At Heart - April 4, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: blogs
Knitting and Memory
An excerpt from my book,The Fat Lady SingsI am a knitter. We knitters come in two basic types. The project knitter buys yarn and pattern for a specific project and knits that and only that until it is finished. Process knitters knit to knit. We love to look at, touch, and acquire yarn and usually have several projects going at the same time. The finished project is nice but it is the process, the knitting itself, that is engaging. Sometimes the project is never completed or it is unravelled and the yarn used again for something else. I love the feel of the yarn as it slides through my fingers as I knit. I stop frequently a...
Source: Jung At Heart - April 3, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: blogs
What is the myth?
It is often the case that at midlife and beyond life calls us to look again at who we are, what we have done, what we believe in. This is prime time for discovering what is the story we have been living; as Jung put it — I asked myself, "What is the the myth you are living?" and found that I did not know. So...I took it upon myself to get to know "my" myth, an I regarded this as the task of tasks...I simply had to know what unconscious or preconscious myth was forming me."Human beings are narrative makers. We remember ourselves and our lives in stories -- stories we tell our friends, family, strangers, ourselves. When...
Source: Jung At Heart - April 2, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: blogs
Bringing parts together
I used to havre a section of this blog devoted to knitting. I am an avid knitter and always multiple projects in process. Then someone suggested to me that I should focus just on professional material. So I took down the knitting portion. I have often thought about this quote from Marie Louise von Franz on knitting :Everybody who has knitted or done weaving or embroidery knows what an agreeable effect this can have, for you can be quiet and lazy and also spin your own thoughts while working. You can relax and follow your fantasy and then get up and say you have done something! Also the work exercises patience...Only thos...
Source: Jung At Heart - April 1, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: blogs
The challenge of blogging
It seems like every couple of months I come here vowing to write more often and then that vow evaporates and here I am again. Any numbers of the blogs I read seem to follow the same pattern. Maybe because blogging lacks the immediacy of Twitter but this seems to be a common issue. This blog is 11 years old now. It isn ’t that I haven’t things to write about — I think of things often. So I am gad actually for a 30 day challenge that has come along out of an art course I am taking — I should confess that I am no more faithful about painting than I am about posting but that is another issue for another day. In any cas...
Source: Jung At Heart - March 31, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: blogs
Must I be beautiful?
Recently my book was reviewed in the journalFat Studies.It is an interesting experience to read how someone else interprets what I wrote, and by extension, my life. The review is positive and I am grateful for it. But there was something at the very end that gave me pause and has had me thinking for a couple of weeks now.In the book I wrote:"For all the work I have done to come to terms with and embrace my body, for all that I have embraced fat acceptance and eschewed dieting and body loathing, there remains a pocket of shame about my body that gets reawakened every summer – I have very fat upper arms and though there is...
Source: Jung At Heart - January 23, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: blogs
Comes and goes
This is the view from my window this morning. Four days ago the park below was under two feet of snow. Then came a 40 ˚ F increase in temperature and a day of rain and in 2 days, almost all the snow disappeared. The deep freeze arrived again yesterday. As I type this it is 5˚F. And there is a skim of ice on the bay. Winter is not gone, not by a long shot.Tomorrow, I ’ll be posting my thoughts about whether feeling beautiful is a necessary part of body acceptance. (Source: Jung At Heart)
Source: Jung At Heart - January 15, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: blogs
New year, new plan
In a few days it will be 11 years since I began this blog. At the beginning I posted every day. And over the years, especially in the last couple of years, my posts have been less frequent. I come back and promise more but somehow that has just not been happening. I know myself well enough to know that I need to take heed of this and dig into what is going on with me that I do this.The fact is that I feel I fell into seeing writing here as a chore, a chore that lacked the delight and even excitement of those early years. I remind myself again and again to write something here but the desire seems not to come. So how do I f...
Source: Jung At Heart - January 7, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: blogs
The Fat Woman ’s Dilemma
In order to be good, I have to feel bad. In order to feel good, I have to be bad.If I want to be perceived as good, I, and fat women in general, must present myself as the Good Fatty, the fat person who accepts the socially dominant viewpoint that my number one goal in life is losing weight. All I have to do is talk about trying to lose weight, about my desire to be thin. I can say I have lost 10 or 15 or 30 pounds and I will be praised for my efforts, even if it is a lie. The Good Fatty is apologetic for being fat and is in a perpetual state of trying to become thin. The Good Fatty doesn ’t’t threaten thin people beca...
Source: Jung At Heart - October 1, 2017 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: blogs
Betrayal and what comes after
Many years ago someone told me that the Chinese character for crisis is composed of the characters representing danger and opportunity. I don ’t know if this is actually the case, but I do know that it expresses a truth. Crisis offers the opportunity to change course, to come to consciousness, to grow from the shattering of illusion. It also presents the danger of destruction or even death. It is hard to believe, in the pain suffered af ter a betrayal, that anything good can come of it. But even the most painful betrayal brings the possibility for growth and positive change as well as the dangers we are all so familiar w...
Source: Jung At Heart - September 28, 2017 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: blogs
