I ended my last post with broad references to Christian ideals, our animal heritage, intellect, the urge to wholeness, and how they relate to mid-life. They were vague to anyone not familiar with depth psychology; I’m aware that rational viewpoints dismiss as nonsense anything that doesn’t logically follow their reasoning. Images and symbols weave through our lives as fleeting dreams which dissipate upon waking, leaving only traces of ideas and emotions soon forgotten in the frenzied rush of contemporary life.
To the youthful mind, they’re of little importance — the first half of life is designed to strengthen and consolidate consciousness. Over its course, however, those same fleeting, soon-forgotten emotions gain energy and themselves begin to coalesce and consolidate to reveal a greater perspective.
They form complexes of ideas revolving around philosophical questions and religious uncertainties clamoring to be resolved. When they attain a certain degree of unconscious development, and we can’t relate consciously to the ideas informing us of where we are, they appear to doctors as mental disorders.
These are symbols of transition, and they can only apparently be repressed. To medically oriented psychologies, when they’ve attained enough energy (value and purpose) to openly oppose conscious intent, they require drugs to further repress. Causes are usually hypothesized around unalterable conditions: genes, inherited traits, past trauma, even the body’s chemistry.
The intended soul development remains trapped in the body, in the unconscious, where the stress and tension eventually disrupt its natural rhythm. The unrelieved tension, the reinforcement of the biological viewpoint, and the treatments themselves all conspire to effect real physical problems which then prompt this reassuring statement from the physician/therapist: you’ll probably have this condition for the rest of your life (indeed) — but there are treatments which can alleviate the symptoms (but not the cause).
My step-father was a very intelligent, rational man. He confided once when I was a mid-teen that he didn’t dream any more. In the Freudian haze of his wishful assessment, he thought he’d mastered the “subconscious” and was living fully consciously. Ten years younger than my mom, he was thirty at that time. Five years later, he and my mom divorced, he married his high school sweetheart, and I never saw him again.
However — my younger sister lived with them while attending college, and she later described those years. He only drank two or three times a year when I lived with him and my mom — on festive occasions, maybe a Christmas party or a visit from an old college friend. My sister was adopted after I’d gone to live with my father, but we established a close friendship through family visits which we still maintain.
Because of her reserved nature, we didn’t fully discuss those years until he died at fifty-eight from a heart attack. She’d left after her undergraduate work, and procured loans for her graduate studies, visiting him only sporadically over the years, trying to forget the things she revealed after he died. She was so angry at the end, she didn’t want to attend his funeral — though she did.
He and his high school sweetheart bickered constantly and got shit-faced every night. Later, when my sister took her fiancee to meet them, he passed out at the dinner table and his face just plopped down in his plate, drunk. He had to be picked up, cleaned off, and taken to bed like a baby.
I didn’t have to be there to know what people said after he died. “He was a drunk, an alcoholic… his father was an alcoholic… he had the gene… he should’ve gone to rehab…” Yet, he’d been a vital and productive man, however closed off in himself, before the unconscious repression of mid-life consigned him to his slow demise. Because he had no concept of the regression of psychic energy and its purposes, he was stuck confronting his own soul concretely through the projected adversary he both loved and hated in his “real” life.
His is not my only experience of the repression of mid-life psychology which sometimes begins the slow unraveling (or constriction and stiffening) of an ego which has no concept of what’s happening to it — and nowhere to turn when it takes hold. Fortunately, mid-life doesn’t always end in the catastrophes I’ve seen in my admittedly limited personal experience.
Still, as I studied Jung and became conscious of my own catastrophe, I began to see their effects in most everyone I knew. Few, in fact, were spared these trials of Job, and most who navigated them were probably lucky not to have had the money or inclination to seek professional help.
Over the years, they yielded to the inner demand to confront themselves at least on some level. It was the unconscious which guided them through the confusion and distress, though they had little concept of it other than “just getting older”.
How much more meaningful could our development be if we actually had conscious knowledge of the emotional twists and turns this process takes in its natural course? Actually participated in it with some conscious sense of its profound importance in our lives? Jung outlined it for those would be aware of it, and we need those ideas to relate to ourselves. My step-father needed them desperately and never knew it.
You may read an example of the ideas and emotions provoked by the mid-life process and how it can become conscious through the value of Jung’s work in my book, A Mid-Life Perspective: Conversations With The Unconscious.