Looking for Gold - A Year in Jungian Analysis

Foreword

Susan Tiberghien is a writer, a wife, a mother of six, a believer, with a laughter that keeps situations in perspective. I see her book as a writer’s journey (but that is only a starting point), renewing faith by calling creation’s trickle and flood from life’s mysterious bedrock: the dream. An annealed beginner emerges from her months of exploration. Stronger, and in possession of her woman’s voice, she charts steps of knowledge, purpose and no turning back.

Susan selects dreams from her Jungian analysis that pick up unconscious and soul material where one meets hunger and thirst. Opening her life to these lacks, we see her go through periods of disorientation, physical symptoms, and a suspension of disbelief. Waking hours often become like dreams. Her climb up a mountain that she has known with her family for thirty years, suddenly reveals a reality: she has been climbing it by strength of will, not from a deep inner pull. Fear, like a biblical angel, grounds her, so that almost paralyzed, she has to crawl down, collapsing at the bottom. We follow the woman into her self and its seasons – the task so foreign to most of us – accompanied by her Virgil, the analyst Keller.

The material is dynamite. The raw magma in our mind, the stuff that connects us with the reality of life, and our own beginning and end, is so powerful that it cannot be taken in large doses or lightly. Once tapped, it flows and spills. Susan pans it for what she consciously wishes to know. Coaxing insights from dreams, she and Keller invite the independent signs to live incarnated in daylight.

Susan Tiberghien’s year of work is thorough, passionate and round in shape. She made the time to devote herself to it, to speak to her inner spirits, to catch up after years and years of family and organizing things for others. She wrote these pages because we need voices that sound distances, showing where order and pattern play with information incredibly hidden to us. Susan is one acquainted with the invisible.

We are fortunate when someone is seized by the painful fervor of recording faith. In a world of no answers, Susan points to discarded resources in our human minds. Why did she transcribe how an analysis feels? Because she grew; this impelled her to share firsthand how she gained ground on our waking hours.

In an inspired and factual way, she tells about how deeper connections fed her. Analysis renewed her commitment to write, seriously, and at greater cost. It burned off layers of inhibiting denials. It rejoined her spirit to infinite energy. By writing about dreams, she shows us an old door, a heavy one, that every being rubs against. This book may help the reader to decide to push it open.

Wallis Wilde-Menozzi

By Way of Introduction

I did not set out to write this book, but when I entered a Jungian analysis, more and more people questioned me. An analysis? they asked. What’s wrong with you? Aren’t you happy with yourself, your family, your writing?

I said I didn’t think anything was wrong with me, rather I was searching for something deeper. I tried to explain the dimension of an analysis which deals with soul, the pondering alone in the night and the sharing with someone.

Then, at a writers conference in New York, summer 1992, I woke early one morning with the title and chapters of this book clear in my mind. I’d call it Looking For Gold. Each chapter would treat a dream image from my first year of analysis – out of control, cat at the door, maple tree, green frogs, witch in the yard, vertigo.… I’d write about each dream as I’d throw a pebble in the water. I’d look at the ripples as the circles widened and overlapped.

Back in Geneva, I took the idea to Keller, my analyst.¹ He said, Go with it. So for one year, I wrote about dreams. Fiction or non-fiction? Certainly the dreams, the analysis, the life experiences were mine, making it non-fiction. But it was so much mine, how I saw and heard it, how I imagined it, that it was also fiction, in a way that Hermes, the Trickster God, might well recognize.

By the time I got to the witch in my back yard, I realized my dreams were closely following the seasons. I had planted my maple tree in the fall, traveled into the dark with my frogs in the winter, experienced vertigo, and was looking forward to spring time and new life. The dreams were in harmony with the cycles of the earth.

My second year of analysis was all the richer because of this ripening of the first year. It was truly an opus, as in alchemy, difficult and obscure. Earlier dreams were distilled into new meanings which touched later dreams and reflections. The ever widening circles were becoming concentric.

In September 1993, I gave my manuscript to Keller. I was entering my third year of analysis, the sessions attuned to the seasons of my life and dreams. The goal of finding the darker, more soulful part of life had become the way of my analysis.

You know, Keller said, if you had asked your unconscious for a good story, it could not have given you a better one.

I thank all those who helped me along the way, both Keller my analyst and Pierre my husband – cellar and stone, telling images, one accompanying me downward, the other keeping me here on earth. I thank also Kim, Wallis, Kristina, Jo Ann and so many other friends.

And now I share this work with you the reader, hoping that somewhere in the stillness of the night, gold too will find you.

Susan Marquardt Tiberghien

*

1 For obvious reasons, the analyst’s name is a pseudonym.

"For everything there is a season,

and a time for every matter under heaven …"

Ecclesiastes 3:1

1. Going Somewhere

I am going somewhere to have my shoulder healed. There is a woman to my left and a man to my right, I do not see their faces. We are walking down a large staircase, the three of us abreast, descending many stairs, all the way to the basement. Here everything is dark and obscure, we have to walk around obstacles to find a table where I can lie down.

I ask the woman if the operation will hurt. She says my shoulder has been put to sleep. I touch it and tell her that it doesn’t feel asleep. She says that only the surface is awake and that underneath it is asleep.

Across the large basement room, a doctor is walking in my direction. I recognize him as an old friend, tall and attractive. He is dressed in a dark suit. He sits down, says nothing, and looks at my shoulder. I feel that it will be healed.

(March 19, 1991)

This was my dream the night before my first session with an analyst. I am a writer, a woman writer. I am also a wife, a mother and a grandmother, and a friend of many wonderful people. I am fifty-eight years old and decided two years ago that I wanted to deepen the way I was living, the way I was writing. I had been reading a lot of Carl Jung’s thinking and felt it was time to assimilate it, to take it down to the heart instead of leaving in the head. And in so doing I wanted to find a way into my unconscious, to learn to live in both worlds, the visible and the invisible.

I asked one of my friends, a Swedish Jungian analyst who had worked in Switzerland, to suggest an analyst here in Geneva. She sent me a list of about ten, saying I should shop around until I found one who really fit. I seriously questioned how I would know. This was all new territory to me, and I felt like a schoolchild being told to pick out her favorite teacher the first day of school.

Finally I chose two from the list, a Swiss man and an English woman, both of them having trained at the Jungian Institute at Zurich. I first telephoned to the Swiss analyst, saying I wished to see him and explain my desire to start an analysis in the fall. He set a date in a month’s time. Then I called the English woman. She had an opening the following week so I would go to her first.

That was that, and I went about my daily life, wondering where I had found the courage to call these two people. When Wednesday arrived, I woke up early in the morning with my shoulder numb. The entire dream came back, in playback first, image upon image. I had written it down on my computer in the middle of the night. This is the dream that is copied above. It seemed made up, invented, so many of the details obviously symbolic. I was still more anxious about the coming analysis than before.

I left home early in the afternoon to find an address which was unfamiliar to me in Geneva, arriving ahead of time, nervous and on the defensive. I reminded myself that I had decided to do this freely and on my own, a conscious decision, an adult decision, but I still felt like the little schoolchild shopping around for the right analyst.

I also told myself that I didn’t have to ever see this woman again, that maybe an analysis wasn’t my thing. So many of my friends had questioned my decision. They wondered what was wrong, what I was hiding. I didn’t think anything was particularly wrong with me. Physically and psychologically I felt quite well and thought I was functioning correctly. But there was another level, the soul² level that reaches down to the unconscious. This was the level I wanted to reach. I knew that somewhere it would communicate to the other levels.

At 3:00 exactly, Madame A. came for me and ushered me into a small study, two armchairs, a table in the middle, a bookcase along one wall, some pottery, deep yellows and browns. She was dressed similarly to me, dark skirt, light blouse, little jewelry, low heels. Her face looked familiar, a bit like that of my older sister but she was younger than I – short light brown hair, pleasant face, glasses. For a moment we looked at one another over the table.

I explained where I was in life. Marriage: French husband, met at the University of Grenoble, intercultural differences, he traveled a great deal, we had moved around Europe. Family: six children, aged 32 to 20, ranging from doctor to dancer, four married, several grandchildren, youngest son came to us from Vietnam. Work: a writer, freelancing now that the children have left home, short stories, an unpublished novel, a collection of essays with an agent, leader of a women writers workshop.

I tried to be honest, to say that all this was well and good, but perhaps a bit too good, I needed to mess it up a bit, find some dark areas, dig my heels into the dirt, maybe also my fingernails. Still everything hadn’t been all that easy, there’d been illness, accidents, jealousy, anorexia, drugs, bouts with the police, violence, but I tended to gloss it over and make it all right. I always wanted everyone to get along, everything to go well.

Fair enough, she said. And spiritually?

I’m Catholic, I explained, converted from a Protestant background after university, after studying contemporary French writers and thinkers, and after meeting my future French husband and his family. I had a deep spiritual hunger for the Eucharist as a way to approach God and behold incarnation – God becoming man so that man becomes God³. After marriage, Pierre and I were active in different church movements in Europe, Pax Romana, prayer groups, weekend retreats. And when we moved to Geneva in 1970, I found quiet and solitude at the monastery of the Petites Sœurs de Bethléem on top of the Voirons mountains in nearby France. I finished my little summary saying that I saw God as a source of love, as a way of naming what Jung called the collective unconscious⁴.

Madame A. smiled. She moved back to the Petites Sœurs, the little sisters of Bethlehem. She too had often gone to their monastery above Geneva. We were speaking English. I didn’t know anything else about her, other than she was married to a Swiss and had two adult children. I felt that perhaps I was discovering the fit my friend had spoken about. It was all pleasant, as if I were talking to a new acquaintance. I wanted her now to talk about herself. I was ready to sit back and ask her questions.

Do you have a dream to work with? she asked.

I was startled. A dream? For this one session? I asked.

Yes, she replied, this way you’ll see how the dream will guide us.⁵ Each week, she explained, I would bring one dream to our session The other dreams I would write down and bring to her once a month. She’d read them but we would not have time to work on more than one dream at each session.

I asked her what would happen if I stopped dreaming. I had been writing down my dreams for about two years. They were irregular. I was worried they would become still more so.

Don’t worry, she replied. And now tell me your dream.

I related my dream, as it is written above, putting myself back into it, going down the staircase, lying on the metal table, waiting for the doctor.

How did you feel about this dream?

I said it had seemed very real, that my shoulder was actually aching when I woke up, that I was unable to write it all down so I went to my small computer. And when I returned to bed, my shoulder was still numb. But I had felt also very uneasy, even suspicious, in writing it down. It was just the night before our meeting, I had read about initial dreams and their importance. Some of the details sounded too evident, the long wide staircase, the woman to my right and man to my left, the cellar, hints of alchemy, experiments, the darkness, my shoulder asleep underneath.

And what happened to your shoulder? Why did it need to be healed?

My shoulder? I fell on the staircase in our house and pulled it apart, split the rotator cuff, tore the ligaments. Almost ten years ago. The injury slowed me down and made me change my habits, the way I was living. I could no longer do housework – vacuum or iron. I couldn’t ski, I couldn’t play tennis, sports I did with Pierre. I had to change my car and get an automatic gear shift. I couldn’t write by hand and even tapping the keys of my electric typewriter tensed my arm until I changed and bought a portable computer. I saw doctors and specialists of all sorts, finally a surgeon in New York City. He said there was little chance that an operation would be successful.