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Authors: Clarissa Pincola Estes

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CHAPTER SIX

Finding One's Pack: Belonging as Blessing

  1. Though some Jungian analysts feel that Andersen was “neurotic,” and therefore his work not useful to study, I find his work, particularly
    the story themes
    he chose to embellish, aside from
    his way
    of embellishing them, very important, for
    they portray the suffering of little children, the suffering of the soul Self, This cutting, slicing, and dicing of youthful soul is
    not only
    an issue common to the time and place where Andersen lived. It continues to be a worldwide and critical issue of soul. Though the issue of abase of the souls and spirits of children, adults, or the elderly is one that would be diminished by romantic intellectualizations, I find that Andersen faces it squarely. Gassical psychology in general predates society’s understanding of the breadth and depth of child abuse across class and culture. And fairy tales pre-date psychology in uncovering the facts of humans’ purposeful harm to one another.
  • The rustic teller is one who tends not to have been too much overlaid by cynicism, and one who retains good common sense and a sense of the night world as well. By this definition, an educated person raised in an asphalt metropolis could be a rustic. The word more pertains to state of mind rather than to the physical habitat of the person. As a child, I heard ‘The Ugly Duckling" I drew on from “the three Katies,” my elderly paternal aunts, rustics all.
  • This is one of the major reasons an adult undertakes an analysis or a self- analysis: to sort and arrange the parental, cultural, historical, and archetypal factors and complexes so that as in the
    La Llorona
    stories, the river is kept clear as possible.
  • Sisyphus, Cyclops, and Kaliban; these three male figures from Greek mythos are known for their endurance, ability to be fierce, and their thick skin. In cultures where women are not allowed to develop in all directions, they are most often inhibited in the development of these so called masculine powers. When there is a psychic and cultural demeaning of masculine development in women, women are constrained from holding the chalice, the stethoscope, the paint brush, the purse strings, political office, and so forth.

3. See Alice Miller’s works:
Drama of the Gifted Child, For Your Own Good, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware
(in bibliography).

  1. Examples of cutting a woman away from her own way of working and living do not have to be dramatic to make the point. Among the most recent are laws that make it difficult or impossible few a woman (or man) to earn income at home and thereby stay close to the business world, the hearth, and one’s children all at the same time. Laws that prevent one from maintaining the cohesiveness of work, family, and personal life are long overdue for being changed.
  2. There is still much slavery in the world. Sometimes it is not called that, but when a person is not free “to leave,” and will be punished if they “flee,” that is slavery. If people are “forced out” whenever someone has the mind to, that also represents a slave state. If a person is forced into painful work or demeaning choices not in their best interest but in order to gain basic subsistence or basic protection, this too constitutes a slavery. Under slaveries of all kinds, families and spirits are broken and lost for years, if not forever.

There still exists literal slavery as well. A person recently returned from a Caribbean island related to me that in one of the luxury hotels there, a Middle Eastern prince had arrived with his retinue that included several female slaves. The entire hotel staff was scurrying about
trying to keep them from crossing the path of a well-known black official in the Civil Rights movement from the United States who was also a guest at the hotel.

  1. These included child-mothers as young as twelve, teenagers, and women who were older, those pregnant from a night of love, or a night of pleasure, or a night of love and pleasure, also those who were victims of incest-rape as well; all went unmothered and were viciously attacked because their culture was poised to harm both the infant and the mother with aspersions and ostracism.

There are any number of writers who have published on this subject. See the
works of Robert Bly, Guy Comeau, Douglas Gillette, Sam Keen, John Lee, Robert L, Moore, and so on.

  1. It is one of the silliest myths about growing older, that a woman becomes so complete that she needs nothing and is a fountain of everything for everyone
    else
    . Mo, she continues as a tree that needs water and air no matter how old it becomes. The old woman is the same as a tree; there is no finality, no sudden completi
    on,
    rather a grandeur of roots and branches, and with proper care, much lowering.
  2. Given to me by my friend Faldiz, an Iberian woman, and a kindred spirit
  3. Jung used this word to connote the innocent fool in fairy tales who almost 4ways wills out in the end.
  4. From Jan Vanderburgh, personal communication.
  5. Time has been a bias in Jungian psychology that can obscure the diagnosis of a serious disturbance, and that is that introversion is a normal state regardless of
    che
    degree of a person’s deathly quietude. In fact a deadly silence that sometimes passes for introversion more often hides deep trauma. When a woman is “shy” or deeply “introverted” or painfully “modest,” it is important to lode beneath and see if it is innate or if it is injury.
  6. Carolina Delgado, a Jungian social worker and artist from Houston, uses
    ofrendas
    like sand tray, as a projective tool to delineate the psychic state of the individual.
  7. The list of “different” women is very long. Think of any role model of the ast few centuries, and she is most likely to have begun at the edge or to have come out of a sub-group, or from outside the mainstream.

 

CHAPTER SEVEN

Joyous Body: The Wild Flesh

  1. Tehuana women are always patting and touching not only their babies and not only their men, not only the grandmas and grandpas, not only the food, the clothes, the family pets, but each other as well. It is a very touching culture that seems to make people blossom.

Likewise, watching wolves play, one sees they hit against each other in a kind of rolling dance. It is that connection through the skin that communicates something like, “You belong, we belong.”

  1. It appears from informal observations among various isolated native groups hat although there are tribal loners—perhaps living with the tribe only part-time and not necessarily following the values of the core tribe all the time—the central groups approach males and females respectfully regardless of shape, size, and age. Sometimes they tease each other about one thing or another, but it is not mean or exclusionary. This approach to body, gender, and age is part of a larger view and love of diverse nature.
  2. Some have argued that a regard for living in some of the old ways or with certain ‘aboriginal, old, or ancient” values is sentimental: a maudlin wishing for times past, an illogical fairy fantasy. This reasoning says that women in times past had it hard, disease was rampant, and so on. It is true that women in the past and present worlds had to/havc to work hard, often under abusive conditions, weie/aie mistreated, disease was/is rampant. These are true and are so for men as well.

However, in the native groups and from my own people, both Latina and Hungarian, who are most definitely tribal, clan-making, totem-creating, spinning, weaving, planting, sewing, engendering people, I find that no matter how hard life

is or how difficult it becomes, the old values—even if one has to dig for them or relearn
them—support soul and psyche throughout. Many of our so called “old ways” are a form of nutrition that never spoils and actually increases
the
more one uses them.

While
th
ere
is a sacred and a profane approach to everything, I think there is little sentimentality but rather clear sensibility in the admiring or emulating of certain “ancient values.” In many cases to attack the legacy of oki and soulful values is to, once again, attempt to sever a woman from the legacies of her matrilineal lines. It is peaceable to the soul to take from the past knowledge, present power, and the future of ideas all at once.

  1. If there wore an “evil spirit” in women’s bodies, it would be mosdy introjected by a cultur
    e that is very confused about the
    natural body. While it is true that a woman can be her own
    worst enemy, a child is not born
    hating her own body, but rather, as we see from observing a baby, taking an absolute joy in the finding and the using of her body.
  2. Or her father’s for that matter.
  3. For years there has been an enormous amount of material written and circulated without question with regard to human body size and configuration, women’s in particular. With few exceptions the majority of the work comes from Writers who seem distressed or repelled by various configurations. It is important to hear equally from women who
    are
    mentally healthy regardless of configuration hut, especially, those who are healthy and of size. Though not wi
    thin the scope of this book, “th
    e screaming woman within” appears to be in the main a profound projection and introjection by culture. This needs to be examined very closely and understood in terms of deeper cultural prejudices and pathologies involving many ideas other than size, such as hypertrophic sexuality in the culture, soul-hunger, hierarchical structure aid caste in body configuration, and so
    chi.
    It would
    be good to put the culture an the
    analyst’s couch so to speak.
  4. From an archetypal perspectiv
    e, it is possible that some of the
    obsession with carvkig
    th
    e physical body erupts when one’s world or
    the
    world seems so out of control dial people attempt to control the tiny real estate of their own bodies instead.
  5. Accepted in th
    e sense of parity, as well as cessation of derision.
  6. Martin Freud,
    Glory Reflected: Sigmund Freud, Man and Father
    (New York: Vanguard Press, 1958).
  7. In th
    e magic carpet stories, there are
    many different descriptions of the condition of th
    e carpet It was red, blue, old, new, Persian, East Indian, came from Istanbul, was owned by a little old lady who only took it out
    on...
    and so on.
  8. The magic caipet is a central archetypal motif in mideastem wonder tales. One is called “Prince Housain’s Carpet,” similar to “The Story of P
    rince Ahmed,” and is found in th
    e
    Arabian Nights
    collection.
  9. Th
    ere are natural substances in th
    e body, some well documented such as serotonin, that seem to cause a sense
    of
    well-being, some say even a joyous feeling. Traditionally, these states are accessed by prayer, meditation, contemplation, insight, the use of intuition, trance, dance, certain physical activity, song, and other deep states of soul locus.
  10. In intercuhural inquiries, I have been impressed with groups that are pushed out of the mainstream, and who yet retain and strengthen their integrity even so. It is fascinating
    to see that time after time, th
    e disenfranchised
    group that
    maintains
    its dignity is often eventually admired and sought out by the very mainstream that once ousted it
  11. One of many ways of losing touch is to no longer know where one’s kith and kin are buried.
  1. Pseudonym to protect her privacy.
  2. Ntozake Shange,
    for cobred girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow isemtf(lknt
    York: Macmillan» 1976).

 

CHAPTER EIGHT

Self-preservation:

Identifying Leg Traps, Cages, and Poisoned Bait

  1. From the Latin root
    sen,
    meaning old» come these related words:
    Señora»

Señor,
senate, and senile. *

  1. There are inner cultures as well as outer cultures. They behave remarkably alike.
  2. Barry Holston Lopez defines this in his work
    Of Wolves and Men
    as “meat drunk** (New York: Scribner, 1978).
  3. One am as easily “go excessive** whether brought up in the streets or in silk stockings. False friends, affectations, deadening of pain, protectionist behavior, opacity of one’s own light, all these can come upon people regardless of background.
  4. From Abbess Hildegard of Bingham, also known as St. Hildegazd. Ref: MS2 Weisbaden, Hessische Lantesbibliother.
  5. The technique of “No cookie until you do your homework” is called the Pri- mack principle or “grandma’s rule” in Psychology 101. Even classical psychology seems to ack
    nowledge that such a rule is the
    province of the elder.
  6. Joplin was not making a political statement by not wearing makeup. Like many adolescents, her dun was broken-out, mid, it seems while in high school, she saw herself as a buddy to males rather than as a potential sweetheart

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