Author Archives: Fiona Gardner

Suffering and God

Dorothee Soelle

At the end of the last post on ‘Anxiety and God’, was the suggestion that God was with us in our distress. The theologian Dorothee Soelle in her book ‘Suffering’ includes a reflection on the upsetting and difficult story taken from the Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel’s book ‘Night’; a story that could be sadly transposed to many contemporary places of suffering – Gaza, Sudan, and where any child is in anguish and hurting.

The account is of the hanging of some of the camp inhabitants – including a small boy who takes time to die in great pain. The rest of the inhabitants of the camp are assembled to watch:

‘“Where is God? Where is he?” A man behind me asked … I heard the man cry again, “Where is God now?” and I heard a voice within me answer, “here he is – he is hanging here on this gallows …”

Soelle writes that this is an assertion about God, where God is no executioner and no almighty spectator to what is going on – which would amount to the same thing. God is not the mighty tyrant:

‘Between the sufferer and the one who causes the suffering, between the victim and the executioner, God, whatever people make of the word, is on the side of the sufferer, God is on the side of the victim, he is hanged.’

And for the boy, Soelle wonders how what  assertions can be made without cynicism. Rather than the traditional phrases used about a child’s death: ‘he is now with God, has been raised and is in heaven’ – phrases that she defines as ‘clerical cynicism with a high apathy content.’ Instead, she wonders how language can still hold onto the affirmation given in classical theology, and yet also become a message of liberation leading to attempts to relieve and prevent further suffering as best we can.

Soelle suggests we return to the Roman centurion by the cross: “Truly this was God’s son.” As indeed are all who also metaphorically or literally hang on the gallows. All are God’s children. For Jesus’ suffering cannot be distinguished from that of other people – as though Jesus alone awaited God’s help – in that way ‘every scream is a scream for God’ and every experience of extreme suffering evokes the feeling of being forsaken by God. All deep suffering that is experienced as a threat to life touches our relationship with God, the very ground that our existence depends on is being shaken. Yet Jesus moved beyond this sense of destruction to the experience of assent, where the ‘cup of suffering becomes the cup of strengthening’:

‘If there were no one who said, “I die, but I shall live”, no one who said “I and the Father are one” then there would be no hope for those who suffer mute and devoid of hoping. All suffering would then be senseless, destructive pain that could not be worked on, all grief would be “worldly grief” and would lead to death. But we know of people who have lived differently, suffered differently. There is a history of resurrections which has vicarious significance.’

Soelle writes that a person’s resurrection is no personal privilege for themselves alone – even if the person is called Jesus of Nazareth, but rather that contains within itself hope for all and for everything. Whilst it is undoubtedly true that analytic insight and study can lead to understanding, it is spiritual and religious beliefs that offer this sense of hope.

 

Anxiety and God

 

Dom John Chapman

How can anxious or depressed states of mind that never quite go, despite all the best efforts at treatment, be seen in the context of a relationship with God? Repeatedly in the bible we are encouraged to let go of fear and gloom. Take this verse from Joshua 1: 9 ‘….do not be frightened or dismayed for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.’ Or John 6: 20 ‘It is I; do not be afraid.’ Is it possible then to meet divine presence in the midst of anxiety? Whilst it seems possible that ‘perfect love can cast out fear’ – what about imperfect love?

In the ‘Spiritual Letters’ of Dom John Chapman, Abbot of Downside, he corresponds with a Benedictine nun offering thoughts on this. He initially tells her not to worry, reminding her that in the past when she had ‘trials’ she was able to practice a ‘prayer of recollection’ – turning inwards and towards Christ in the heart. Chapman writes how practicing this detaches us from the world, and presumably from fear, and so begins the journey on the ‘illuminative way’. But such mental suffering can in itself he thinks be seen as a trial, and indeed he suggests such experiences as part of “The night of the spirit”. In the past this could be seen as ‘punishment’ or as a temptation against faith. Instead, Chapman recommends seeing how everything can be a chance to become close to God.

He writes:

‘At the end (and all through) you will be thanking God for giving you this particular prayer and no other; it will probably consist of (i) only distractions and worrying; or (ii) nothing at all; or (iii) utter misery, and feelings of despair; or (iv) that there is no God; or (v) that it is all dreadful, and waste of time and pain. And you will then (not at once) feel – in a higher part of the soul than you have realised before – how much better this is than what you used to have … When you begin to live in this higher part of the soul, you will have made progress, and will perhaps be worthy of having still more unexpected trials. Only you will always have the necessary strength for them all, so there is nothing to be frightened about.’

Here Chapman is suggesting that states of mind like anxiety and depression are part of a plan of teaching, and also of being held as God acts on the soul. This seems counter-intuitive in many ways. Chapman writes that the Benedictine sister must be courageous, and at the same time must pray for deliverance, but only by saying – “Father, let this chalice pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will but as Thou wilt.” He shows compassion here:

‘I know the darkness is appalling sometimes; – but it is the only way of learning that we depend entirely on God, that we have nothing from ourselves, that even our love and desire for Him tends to be selfish. The “royal way of the Holy Cross” is the only way. But you will find out that the darkness is God Himself; the suffering is His nearness.’

A psychoanalytic response to seeing the neurosis as part of God’s plan might be that it is a projection onto God of a chastising authority figure/parent. The ‘I’m punishing you for your own good’ school of thought, and ‘it didn’t do me any harm’ – destructive entitlement. Or it could be a defence against or justification for masochism …

A final thought – perhaps it’s more that suffering and trauma happens, but we can become open to the realisation that we’re not left alone with it – Emmanuel – God with us.

Anxiety leading to the spiritual

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.’

 

Anxiety 3

 

Cobra with fangs 

In this post the connection between analysis and spirituality is explored following a dream recounted by Dennis McCort in a session with Dr P. In the dream it is dark, and McCort finds himself stuck below a boardwalk running alongside the ocean. He is walled in by darkness and mounds of sand and looking down on him is a huge cobra with fangs.

The dream clearly links to McCort’s anxiety which include claustrophobia –as well as problems with lifts, tunnels, and bridges. But McCort also wants to discuss the bout of depression that has descended on him out of nowhere. About a year into the analysis, he thought his anxiety was lower, but then the depression came leaving him barely coping with getting to work and managing the daily routine. This had coincided with Dr P being ill and off work – what Dr P calls ‘a perverse synchronicity’. McCort writes:

‘Only my years in Zen meditation made it possible for me to concentrate … when I needed to and so muddle through each day. To this day I thank the Buddha for what Zen taught me about navigating one’s mind through the minefield of one’s own inner chaos.’

Furious with Dr P who thinks that the depression has come ‘right on schedule’, McCort listens sneeringly while the analyst explains of the need to descend before ascending, and wonders what the hell has hit him. Dr P.:

‘A myth has hit you, and now you’re being called upon to enact that myth, to realize it in your own life, for your own sake and in some mysterious way we can’t understand, for the sake of the world. “He descended into hell. The third day he rose again from the dead. He ascended into heaven …” The dialectical principle that there is no resurrection without crucifixion is not just a religious truth; it is a living – and fundamental – psychological truth as well. We must undergo the pain, the self-mortification, of analysis – or something like it – and suffer the death of the old self if we would hope to know the birth of the new.’

McCort connects with this truth, because, as he says, meditation has shown him that the opposites do meet ‘somewhere deep within psychospiritual reality. But to feel as if I’m betting my sanity, my very life, on that truth …’

As they continue McCort then links the depression to an early relationship with a woman who then bore his child but not telling him she was pregnant she married someone else – cutting off all contact. This had at the time triggered depression and obsessive worrying. Dr P speaks of ‘the cobra of dread’ that has stalked McCort:

‘through all the years of this half-repressed emotional trauma, and it will stay right there, poised under the boardwalk of consciousness, until it’s brought up into the light and tamed; we tame it by coming to understand what … psychological ingredients go into its deadly venom …’

And so McCort begins to speak of the effect of his Catholic upbringing and the teaching of the Church and his parents’ views on sex. Whilst the phallic nature of the cobra links to this, Dr P reminds McCort that the psyche is dynamic – not static and so there is always an inner struggle going on to restore the lost wholeness – the symbols are then also about shifts of energy and attempts to unstick where things have got split off, helping the person back up the slippery right-hand side of the ‘U’ to integration.

Anxiety 2

Long term readers of these posts may remember that back in February 2019, I wrote about the ideas found in Dennis McCort’s autobiography, the history of his inner life: ‘A Kafkaesque Memoir, Confessions from the Analytic Couch’.  He had sought help for recurring bouts of anxiety and depression that had persisted despite trying different therapies and spiritual practices. Brought up a Catholic: what McCort calls a draconian nightmare particularly with respect to conscience and sexual morality, attending a Jesuit university, he later turned to Zen meditation. Having tried different therapies, McCort was looking for a ‘quick fix’ possibly hypnosis for an increasingly problematic phobic anxiety about driving on the motorway especially when huge lorries were in the next lane.

Approaching sixty, McCort had given up fantasies of personal transformation, reigning himself to taking his ‘neurosis with me to the grave.’  Highly sceptical about psychoanalysis, but impressed by some interpretations given by Dr P (the name given to the analyst) as well as Dr P’s interest in spiritual practices and openness to religion, McCort settles down to a long-term analytic experience, once a week over a 9-year period.  Much of the work is based on dream analysis through which McCort discovers deeper levels of insight and self-realization.

Early in the treatment, he brings a recurring dream from age 5 or 6 when the family was living on a farm. In the dream the child McCort is heading with a young cousin into a wood, but looks back to the home only to see his mother, glaring like Frankenstein at him – a look that fills him with horror. This dream has cast a pall over him most of his life. As the dream is discussed, he begins to unpack the effect of his mother’s depression, plus his father’s long hours working as a clerk in a trucking company (Dr P wastes little time linking this to the phobia about driving on the motorway), and McCort’s resulting symptoms of obsessive behaviours and various debilitating anxieties.

Dr P discusses all the mixed feelings for the young boy leading to an ‘internal tug-of-war’:

‘the dream is fraught with painful contradiction: there stands Mom, the source of any child’s comfort and security, a lethal obstacle to that very comfort and security. Your sense of abandonment must’ve been horrific.’

This leads McCort to suddenly remember how his sister Iris had told him that their mother liked to take her son shopping to a department store with her when he was three and four. When he got distracted, she would hide behind a counter and wait for him to notice she’d gone.

‘Of course, as soon as I did, I’d burst into tears, which would be her cue to pop out, run up to me and take me in her arms. She told Iris she loved the feeling of being needed by me in this raw, brutal way. Naturally, when she revealed this to Iris decades later, she was filled with remorse. I think she sensed clearly how much of my fearfulness of life as an adult – travelling phobias, sticking close to home even in youth – came out of those earliest years of feeling trapped with, and at the same time abandoned by a mother who desperately needed help herself.’

Dr P muses how the chain of pathology and anxiety/depression grows, link by link, generation by generation; whereas the Greeks mythologized this ‘we moderns have internalized the gods in the form of psychoneurosis.’ He also sees how old dreams accrue new meanings as we recall them later in life. In the context of bringing this old dream, he suggests that the unconscious is prompting McCort to leave the ‘old’ false home or at least deconstruct it, before trying to find his true home. A spiritual way of looking at this would be:

‘we’re born enlightened … but inevitably the cloud of forgetfulness and ignorance descends upon us – it’s called “life”- and we spend the rest of our days struggling to get back there, to climb up the greased right-hand side of the “U” of history, our own life-history, and regain paradise.”

Anxiety

 

The young Carl Jung

Perhaps the start of the new year is partly celebrated as a way of coping with the inevitable anxiety of the uncertainty of what may lie ahead. Of course, everyone hopes for a good year, but the hope is tinged with worry.

The interesting thing about anxiety is that we all experience it in different circumstances, but for some it can become an underlying way of life. With such levels of anxiety, the anxiety is never an object – something out there, but it becomes us or as Carl Jung writes it ‘has us.’ We can become possessed by anxiety, but if we can find a space to reflect on it, it’s possible to see what is possessing us and why. Jung responds to a PhD student who, researching Kierkegaard, is asking about anxiety as neurosis, and its effect on creativity. Jung’s reply is that anxiety neurosis doesn’t produce art as it is essentially uncreative and harms life, so the question is rather would the writer or creative person have produced a different sort of art if they hadn’t been neurotic.

‘Neurosis is a justified doubt in oneself and continually poses the ultimate question of trust in man and in God. Doubt is creative if it is answered by deeds, and so is neurosis if it exonerates itself as having been a phase …’

Jung continues that if anxiety becomes a chronic habit, it then becomes something different ‘the daily catastrophe ready for use.’ In his autobiography, Jung describes his own experience when he was 12 years old and knocked down by another boy. Nearly losing consciousness after his head hit the kerbstone, he remained on the ground longer than he needed to after the thought flashed through his mind – ‘now I won’t have to go to school anymore’. Jung then had fainting spells whenever he went to school, or was asked to do homework. His anxiety about this grew to the extent that he had six months away from school doing what he wanted: ‘I frittered away my time with loafing, collecting, reading and playing but I didn’t feel any happier for it; I had the obscure feeling that I was fleeing from myself.’

His parents consulted doctors, sending him to relatives for a change of scene, but it was only when Jung overheard his father worrying about what would become of Jung as an adult if he couldn’t earn a living, that Jung realized the situation. He then determined to overcome his anxiety by taking out a school book and forcing himself to concentrate.

‘After ten minutes of this I had the finest of fainting fits. I almost fell off the chair, but after a few minutes I felt better and went on working … This time it took fifteen minutes before the second attack … I stuck it out and after an hour came the third attack. Still I did not give up, and worked for another hour, until I had the feeling that I had overcome the attacks. Suddenly I felt better than I had in all the months before … A few weeks later I returned to school, and never suffered another attack, even there … That’s when I learned what a neurosis is.’

Jung was able to then understand how he ‘had arranged this whole disgraceful situation … a diabolical plot on my part’ after the other boy had pushed him and why. Jung clearly had the strength to take this neurotic anxiety pattern on – for others where the original trauma is deeper and earlier, this maybe too much to try to control so effectively. Psycho-spiritual help is needed.

 

Carl Jung on the incarnation

Jesus Christ Cefalu cathedral apse

This is from Jung’s work ‘Answer to Job’:

‘Although the birth of Christ is an event that occurred but once in history, it has always existed in eternity … the identity of a nontemporal, eternal event with a unique historical occurrence is something that is extremely difficult to conceive.’

Jung’s thinking is that ‘time’ is a relative concept, and so needs to be held alongside the ‘simultaneous’ existence in the spiritual universe of all historical processes. Jung calls the spiritual dimension the pleroma – here he’s taking this from Gnosticism and he means an eternal process that is repeated in time in an irregular fashion.

‘All the world is God’s and God is in all the world from the very beginning’ yet the incarnation is for Jung ‘a world-shaking transformation of God.’ God first of all revealed himself through nature at the creation, and then in the birth of Jesus he became human. There were earlier intimations of this which Jung sees as a pattern of the life of a hero across all religious traditions and cultures, but Christ is to become the universal saviour where the everyday is interwoven with the miraculous and the mythical – the divine and the human.

The human side of Christ, Jung writes, stands out in his love for others, and yet it is when Christ cries despairingly from the cross: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ that his human nature attains divinity:

‘at that moment God experiences what it means to be a mortal man and drinks to the dregs what he made his faithful servant Job suffer … And at this moment where one can feel the human being so absolutely, the divine myth is present in full force.’

But myth doesn’t mean fiction, but rather facts that are continually repeated, and can be observed over and over again. It is something that happens to everyone, and we also have mythical fates. Jung writes:

‘The fact that the life of Christ is largely myth does absolutely nothing to disprove its factual truth – quite the contrary, I would even go so far as to say that the mythical character of a life is just what expresses its universal human validity … The life of Christ is just what it had to be if it is the life of a god and a man at the same time.’

 A bringing together of different natures: ‘Yahweh’s intention to become man … is fulfilled in Christ’s life and suffering.’ The incarnation for each of us is then the intuition and realization of ‘Christ within us’, and for Jung this is about how what he calls ‘unconscious wholeness’ penetrates into the psychic realm of our inner experience, and we become aware of our true nature.

Jung, writing later in his autobiography, ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’ sees how in the twentieth century Christianity has been undermined, and how this is evidenced in an ‘outpouring of evil’.

‘We stand in need of reorientation … the individual who wishes to have an answer to the problem of evil, as it is posed today, has need, first and foremost of self-knowledge, that is, the utmost possible knowledge of their own wholeness. How much good we can do, and the opposite too.’

And so, we travel on in time to 2025 … aware also of the eternal.

Christmas thoughts from Thomas Merton

 

‘And the lights are lit one by one outside the door of our Church, week by week. And we plunge more into the cold and the darkness. I wish I knew more about doing Teshuva [metanoia or penance]. It is the only thing that seems to make much sense in these days. And in the political dark I light small, frail lights about peace and hold them up in the whirlwind.’

Letter to Zalman Schachter, December 1961

 

‘Last night after a prayer vigil in the novitiate chapel, went to bed late at the hermitage. All quiet. Cold. Lay in bed realizing that what I was, was happy. Said the strange word ‘happiness’ and realized that it was there, not as an ‘it’ or an object. It simply was. And I was that. And this morning, coming down, seeing the multitude of stars above the bare branches of the wood, I was suddenly hit, as it were, with the whole package of meaning of everything: that the immense mercy of God was upon me, that the Lord in infinite kindness had looked down on me and given me this vocation of love …’

Dancing in the Water of Life December 1964

Experience will decide – the out of the ordinary

I was recently recommended the book ‘The Way of the Pilgrim’. This is translated from the Russian by R. M. French, and tells the account of an unknown wandering pilgrim in the mid- nineteenth century. He travels through Russia and Siberia going from one holy place to another in his search of the way to use the Jesus prayer: ‘to pray without ceasing’.

The Introduction warns us against trying to copy the life of the pilgrim – indeed it would be nearly impossible to replicate in this 21st century, but we are invited through the pilgrim’s story to pursue true prayer and to engage in the Jesus prayer: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me’.

In his wanderings the pilgrim eventually learns this as interior prayer from a kindly old ‘starets’- a spiritual director and religious teacher in the Eastern Orthodox Church. The old teacher shows the pilgrim by using teachings from ‘The Philokalia’ – a collection of texts from spiritual masters between the 4th and 15th centuries. The pilgrim is to begin by imagining looking into their own heart, and inwardly say while breathing out the Jesus prayer, initially by moving the lips or simply in the mind. The starets tells the pilgrim to always come back to talk with him as such an inward process needs guidance. The pilgrim gradually increases the number of times he says the Jesus prayer in the day moving from his mind, into the throat, and down into the heart. The old teacher dies and the pilgrim continues at times in bliss, and in other times dealing with different sometimes challenging encounters. Gaining a copy of ‘The Philokalia’ the pilgrim begins to understand how the constant praying deep in his heart changes his consciousness and amongst other things opens up creation:

‘The trees, the grass, the birds, the earth, the air, the light seemed to be telling me that they … witnessed to the love of God … that all things prayed to God and sang His praise. … I saw the means by which converse could be held with God’s creatures.’

Without his previous teacher, the pilgrim soon feels lost in his reading of the old texts, and so prays deeply for help. When he sleeps, he dreams that he is with the old teacher again who then helps by showing what order the pilgrim needs to read the book, particularly advising that he turns to one part to begin with.

‘In my dream I held the book in my hands and began to look for the passage, but I was quite unable to find it. Then he [the teacher] turned over a few pages himself and said “Here it is, I will mark it for you.” He picked up a piece of charcoal from the ground and made a mark in the margin.’

When the pilgrim wakes the book is open at the very page, and in the margin a charcoal mark just as in the dream.

‘Even the piece of charcoal itself was lying beside the book! I looked in astonishment, for I remembered clearly the book was not there the evening before, that it had been put shut, under my pillow, and also, I was quite certain that before there had been nothing where now I saw the charcoal mark.

It was this that made me sure of the truth of my dream, and that my revered master of blessed memory was pleasing to God.’

 

Experience will decide – our inner world 2

 

In this post, parts of the second half of Mike’s therapy with Jungian analyst Donald Kalsched (see previous post) are explored. Much of the work took place through dream analysis, and the gradual restoration of the hidden parts of Mike that had been repressed, and gone into hiding during childhood.

After losing his temper with his small son, Mike later dreamt that he has committed murder and in the dream is to be judged in a church where he sits with his son on his lap, looking into the child’s eyes. ‘I can see his innocence and goodness … I feel enormous deadness about my situation, but I’m prepared to give myself up.’ Kalsched interprets this as the baby boy in the dream not only being Mike’s actual son, but also the carrier of Mike’s own early trauma – ‘his soul-child.’ In the dream, the choice is being made by the unconscious to open to vulnerability.

In the course of the work the old defences regularly reasserted themselves – after all often in therapy it’s a question of oscillating between change, and returning to old familiar patterns that though they may be unhelpful are so deeply embodied and established in the psyche. However, over a long analysis these defences do certainly begin to lose their possessive power, and become ‘humanized’ through the analytic relationship.

Mike dreamt towards the end of the therapy:

‘I’m in some kind of spiritual sanctuary. People are praying out loud, each in turn. When it comes to my turn I don’t have a prayer. I think to myself “but I can talk of my experience of God”. I then prayerfully say that “in opening to the pain of life and loving, I touch into God as God … that with that awareness I release myself into the great suffering of all humanity and release myself into God’s mind.”’

Here Mike seems to link his own suffering with the suffering of God, yet it doesn’t appear to be a self-important or omnipotent dream. Kalsched sees how Mike has been able to understand how much his early trauma affected him, and how much suffering occurred through the defences he ‘had’ to employ from childhood.

‘And yet no longer did his suffering these defences seem like a meaningless waste. He had seen the “God” in these defences – their mysterious meaning and intention and he realized that impossible as they had become in his life, ultimately, they had saved him from psychological breakdown.’

The ‘tough God’, who had bolstered Mike in his childhood and early adulthood by being macho etc, now asked Mike to open to the ‘suffering God’ and all the vulnerable feelings of the small child still within.

But behind this apparent clash of opposites there seems also to be something else “waiting” for us to make a choice about our way of living in the world. This would take me (FG) back to the ‘more than ourselves’ the transcendent Other – the mysterious “third”. This is what Jung is referring to when he writes: ‘a living third thing … a movement out of the suspension between opposites, a living birth that leads to a new level of being’. So not either/or, and not both/and, but something more and beyond that contains and transcends all aspects of ourselves.