ABSTRACT
In recent years I have become increasingly occupied with thoughts about physicality, about the place of the body in depth psychology, and particularly with my own body – that of me which is of the Earth, dirt, clay, sand, dead leaves, scrub brush, and still sprouting a seedling of something new now and then. It is this humus as much as the imagination that makes me one of the human species and connects me to all other living things on Earth. James Hillman wrote that “concrete flesh is a magnificent citadel of metaphors,”1 which means to me that the body must have co-primacy of place in my imagination. This would not have been possible in the 1950s in America, when I came of age, because my female body then was considered useful or valuable only for the sexual pleasure it could provide men and for making babies. (And it had to look like Marilyn Monroe.)
My body doesn’t work as well as it once did, and some parts hardly work at all, but my memory is sharp and my mind is intact, even retaining a certain suppleness and flexibility – in some ways, more so than in decades past. And so this latest concern with body is joined with another ongoing concern: language. How to speak the psyche’s reality in its own language? If, as I think (following Jung), the psyche’s mother tongue is the language of metaphor, then such speaking and writing must also be metaphorical language. Psychological writing is literary writing. Conceptual language, while often conveying deeply interesting and important ideas, has never touched me emotionally. Only the language of metaphor – poetry, literature, drama – can do this. And so I am casting this essay in the form of a reflection, a reminiscence, a metaphorical tour of that “citadel” and the land on which it lives.
