Dennis McCort

Dennis McCort is interesting about the tenacity and intractability of certain childhood experiences – so 8 years into the long analysis with Dr P, he is dreaming again about his mother with links to what he calls ‘the abandoned child scenario’. The subject has come up again and again over the years – often indirectly: ‘This was the magnet that drew all my other issues to itself and seemed to shape my psychopathology into a perverse whole.’ Dr P insisting on the importance of reviewing the matter as often and as long as it took to work through it.

‘Whenever I would confess my own embarrassment over the intractability of the problem, its refusal to just “fold up and blow away” … he would say things like, “Why shouldn’t you complain about your symptoms? After all that’s where all the pain is” or “Jung always stressed the centrality of symptoms to the analytic process … Symptoms contain their own solutions within themselves”’.

McCort sees the endless repetition as a way of slowly reducing the power of the past trauma and then seeing the connections in the present: both are both part of the healing process. Dr P responds:

‘The past has no independent existence of its own but is always an aspect of the present. Raising the past into consciousness acts on the oldest, most calcified emotional structures deep inside you, raising then from the “living death” of unconsciousness, quickening them, making them malleable as new energies for use in fashioning the work of art that is your life. It is in this psychic sense, contrary to all common sense, that analysis claims the past can be changed.’

In this way there is no reason for what McCort calls ‘the analytic cast of mind’ to end – even when the actual treatment analysis finishes.

‘After all, what could possibly be a sufficient reason for someone to resume the habit of relative unconsciousness, the condition that made formal analysis necessary in the first place? … For me, continuing to deepen consciousness, literally ad infinitum, is now the way I choose to live.’

McCort sees this as part of a religious sense – he was brought up a Catholic and seriously practiced Zen meditation for decades, and both were important in different ways but neither gave him the analytic insight he needed to manage his symptoms. Religious awareness he sees as openness to the extraordinary in the middle of old, humdrum, everyday routine. He quotes the theologian Schleiermacher on religion ‘The experience of the Infinite within the finite.’ Here are the two realms of consciousness – dealing with one’s personal trauma can often lead into ‘the mysterious abyss beneath and beyond the limited threshold of individual experience’. Carl Jung would call this the collective unconscious where the archetypes are to be found.

‘This is the realm of the spiritual: bottomless, inexhaustible, it is, in its deepest depths, where what we call “God” is to be found. Everything common, discrete and familiar to us, our ordinary everyday world, notwithstanding its appearance of solid stability, “hovers,” “vibrates” in the cosmic palm of this abyss. It is the land of deep dreams … [where] images are communicating something of great moment about your life.’