Honor, Finally, What You Left Behind, and Seize Permission to Be Who You Are

Rousseau began his powerful Confessions with the sentence, “Man is born free, and everywhere is in chains.” We might add a sentence to that: “We are born whole, and everywhere are fractured.” To each statement one must ask the essential question Why? For Rousseau, the why is answered in his analysis of social institutions, how great ideas become institutionalized and impersonal and perpetuate themselves at the cost of their founding principles. So too must we consider the idea of wholeness an elusive goal; however, we also have to ask why it is we are so much at odds with ourselves, why it is that we are so often haunted by the unlived life, so often soured by the “shoulda-coulda-wouldas” of life.

We also know that we cannot stuff everything into this life. Every time we choose one thing, we exclude a dozen others. If we could live a serial existence, we might have a dozen opportunities to follow a talent, an interest, a curiosity, but we don’t. Given the extended life most moderns are living, compared to that of our predecessors, we certainly have the opportunity for several different jobs, professions, friends, lifestyles, even emotional commitments. When we recall that in the classical era, the average length of life was the midtwenties, and only forty-seven in 1900 in North America, we realize how fortunate so many of us are to have the opportunity to change course, to pick up missing pieces, to go back to that we left behind.

We cannot overemphasize the fact that many people live in emotionally, imaginatively constricted environments. When a neighbor child began music lessons, it was suggested to me as a youth that I not associate with him anymore because his mere access to music and the lessons required put him in an economic and social stratum beyond my family’s. While this notion seems absurd at this remove, it was very real for my parents and therefore very real for me at that time. My father had been pulled from the eighth grade and sent to work in a factory when hard times came. My mother managed to graduate high school and work as a secretary. Both of them felt wholly defined by these economic and cultural limitations and meant no harm when they insisted that my brother and I be contained by them also. They discouraged our trying out for athletic teams and theatrical productions because they wanted to spare us disappointment and heartache. Similarly, joy and spontaneity were suspect because they threatened the predictable. And what was predictable? Hardship, disappointment, and disillusionment. Even worse, revealing emotions publicly made one vulnerable.

These personal examples are factual, and they are far exceeded in the lives of children who had much, much worse, as I have seen personally in therapy. As we have noted, we all acquire enormous messages from our environmental settings — family dynamics, religion, education, social contexts, zeitgeist — and all provide compelling messages to serve, run from, or try to solve somehow. All of us internalize these fortuitous events, “message” them, and accumulate a provisional story about who we are and what we are supposed to do and not do. Accordingly, the greatest obstacle to a satisfying life remains the risky permission to live our lives as the soul desires.

Early on, all of us learned that permission was conditional. If one moved too much or not enough, in one direction or another, or expressed a deeply felt conviction, there were often sanctions, ranging from punishment to the withdrawal of approval. Either one of those retributive encounters can be devastating to a child. Just today I was speaking with a man in his eighties, a great success in his chosen career, yet he was speaking of how he seized up when he had to make certain kinds of decisions. When we examined the wiring in these decisions, it all came down to having grown up with a very narcissistic, insecure parent who severely punished deviations from strict compliance to her will. That he would be suffering the activation of these archaic anxieties decades later is not surprising, but it is not acceptable that his life still be run by the emotional needs of a woman dead these many decades.

But when we examine our own inhibitions, our hedging of bets, or our various compromises with the world, we also find such wiring reaching into our emotional basements. Sadly, that wiring will never go away, given its deep programming in the most vulnerable, impressionable stage of our formation. On the other hand, a natural growth process occurs in each of us, and sometimes we just outgrow these old fears, inhibitions, and constrictions. Other times it takes a depression or a series of disturbing dreams to get our attention and demand a larger life.

In 1948, the Israeli Jungian scholar Erich Neumann published his pivotal work Depth Psychology and the New Ethic. Most of our history has been defined by normative ethics, prescriptive dos and don’ts. Adherents claim these desiderata are dictated by gods, some by the elders of the tribe, and others by venerated scriptures, traditions, and institutions. But nature always rebels and seeks its own expression. When we deny nature, it rebounds with compensatory dreams, symptoms, lapses, even somatic disorders. The “return of the repressed” as analysts call it.

But Neumann critiqued even the Freudian notion of sublimation, namely, finding a satisfactory form for the expression of the forbidden. This, he felt, was an evasion of the reality of the soul. The soul was not some unearthly, feathery thing, but our deepest essence, grounded in body and blood and desire. For Neumann the “new ethic” values consciousness over all things. One must become conscious of one’s capacity for “evil,” for the expression of those values contrary to our desire for ourselves, what Jung called the shadow. And one must honor them and sometimes suffer them, however contradictory they may seem to be. It is no small summons to have to deal with the pettiness that lies within us, the murderous rage, the pusillanimity, and cowardice, but what we refuse to face still spills into the world one way or another. The new ethic means one struggles to become as conscious as one can manage, and then one is accountable for all that one has made conscious, including our darker moments and motives.