Part of the deep spirituality experienced by Hesse lay in his love of nature, and an early piece of his writing was on the life of St Francis who listened to nature, and found God immanent in actual things – both in their growth and in their decay. For Hesse, the mystic is also a pantheist – God does not reside in Churches or dogmas – instead is immanent in every living thing. God is the power of transformation. Hesse wrote that even individual letters of the alphabet come alive when the words that they compose take on a reality of their own, as in poetry. So it is with rocks, the sun, the rain, and all plants, and animals – they are all inhabited by something divine, the spark that gives them meaning and lends them a voice. And the new wisdom of each generation is at the same time ancient wisdom:

‘Our actual relationship to nature, even where we only still consider it as an object of exploitation, is precisely that of a child to its mother. Furthermore, no new routes have ever been added to the few ancient paths that are able to lead a person to bliss or wisdom.’

Hesse’s discovery in a journey to Southeast Asia was of the wonder of butterflies – where the reality outstripped any flight of the imagination. Butterflies overcame the chasm between nature and art: ‘heraldic beasts of the soul.’ He found that their beauty was both living and a symbol of transience. Butterflies carried within them both the principle of the moment as well as that of eternity. Hesse described them as: ‘the festive, bridal, at one and the same time fertile and ephemeral form of that creature which was previously a sleeping pupa and before the pupa stage a voracious caterpillar.’

Trees, he felt, carried also a wonderful spirituality:

‘Trees have always been the most powerful evangelists. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And I revere them even more when they stand alone. They are like solitary people. Not like hermits who have absented themselves out of some form of weakness, but like great solitary men like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they strive with all their life-force for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to develop their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is more sacred, nothing more exemplary than a fine, strong tree.’

As a result, Hesse maintains, it wounds the very soul when a tree is felled. The godlessness of a person is shown in his willingness to cut down a tree without feeling any great sorrow in having done so. When a tree has been felled, in the open wound of its severed trunk the growth rings tell of its ongoing struggle over many years with the cold, the wind, the sun, and the rain. They provide evidence that the tree, growing ever upward, attempted to form a link between the earth and the heavens. This was why Hesse called trees “saints”.

“Anyone who knows how to speak to them, anyone who knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts; unconcerned by particulars, they proclaim the ancient law of life.”

And the ancient law of life as spoken by the tree: ‘My task is to shape and reveal the Eternal in my smallest individual detail.” Trees are beautiful and their beauty is not just ephemeral – although what remains precious to us forever is the brief moment in which we realize how magical their presence is:

“They would still be beautiful tomorrow too, but right now they had that magical, ever-to-be-repeated beauty that comes from our own soul and that according to the Greeks, can shine in us only when Eros has cast his gaze upon us.”

The after effects of Hesse’s ascetic childhood, particularly the imprint of his highly critical mother, left him unable to relate easily to women, as shown in his three unsatisfactory marriages, and the lack of realistic women characters in his writing. He also had deep ambivalence towards his three sons and family life. Generally limited by various obsessive behaviours and anxieties, he mostly found other people difficult. Accepting his failings, and deeply present to finding spiritual truths wherever he could, Hesse has God speak to one of his characters:

‘I could not have used you if you had been any other than the way you are, and I needed to give you the spur of homelessness and wandering … your function was to repeatedly instil a little yearning for freedom into people living settled lives.’

The motif from the novel ‘Demian’ was ‘become the person you are.’ Hesse saw this ‘be yourself’ as forming the decisive bridge between Eastern and Western thought. He believed that this was a synthesis that could not be institutionalized, and that could be revoked at any moment. His experience showed him that one cannot escape oneself, one cannot with impunity simply transform one’s life into a doctrine. One could overcome life only through living, and you have to travel the route that is assigned to you personally. ‘As I understand it, Nirvana is the return of the individual to the undivided whole … the reversion of the individual soul to the universal soul, to God.’

Despite the childhood damage, Hesse held to belief in God, truth, and beauty, with the knowledge that God always resides in things that are smaller, and more inconsequential, and disregarded. He wrote that one should place no credence in those who teach wisdom, for you can only attain wisdom through your own life and your own sacrifices … about not so much renouncing the Self as finding it.

‘I consider certain maxims from the New Testament, together with some from Lao Tzu and some of Buddha’s sayings, to be the truest, most pithy, and most vital utterances that have ever been said and made known on this earth. Nevertheless, the Christian way to God has been obscured for me by my strict and pious upbringing, by the laughable nature and petty quarrels of theology, by the sheer boredom and yawning barrenness of the established churches, and so on. So I sought God by other routes.’

Two journeys to India and Southern Asia deeply affected him: ‘I have revered the Buddha for many years and have been reading Indian literature since my early childhood. Later on I gained a more intimate knowledge of Lao Tzu and other Chinese writers.’ Hesse’s book ‘Siddhartha’ tries to synthesize Eastern and Western thinking. In the preface to the Japanese edition, he wrote:

‘Nowadays, it is no longer a question of trying to convert the Japanese to Christianity, or Europeans to Buddhism or Taoism. We have no desire, nor should we, to convert or be converted; instead it is incumbent upon us to open ourselves up and expand our minds. We no longer regard Eastern and Western wisdom as mutually hostile forces engaged in a power struggle, but as poles between which a bountiful life oscillates.’

Siddhartha’s concern, like Jesus, was not with doctrinal matters, or dogma, or about one institution sharply demarcating itself from others and declaring all apostates to be heretics, but instead with the atman, the living spirit within all things. This to be treated with reverence:

‘I do not believe in any religious dogmatism or in a god who has created humans and enabled them to develop their expertise in killing one another with a progression of weapons from stone axes to nuclear arms and to be proud of such progress into the bargain.’

Carl Jung and Hermann Hesse

With some academic qualifications, the young Hermann Hesse went to work in a book shop, firstly one near his home, and then moving to Basel. Initially writing reviews and sketches Hesse began to grow in his belief that he could be a writer, and began to succeed. From childhood he took with him the difficult contradiction for the need for closeness with his family, alongside his awareness that he had to get some distance from them. He knew full well that he would be able to start living his own life only after he stopped using his parents as a yardstick for his behaviour. The sense that he was not entirely free after all, and could never leave his origins behind, permeates his early writing. As a child and adult, Hesse suffered constantly from headaches and eye strain, often feeling ‘indisposed’. Unable to sleep, he realised that the night demonstrated how disastrously arrogant it was for the logic of the daytime world to believe that all aspects of life were within the firm grasp of reason.

By 1916, a successful author but with an unhappy marriage plus three children, Hesse’s sense of being deeply ill at ease within himself became unbearable. Seen as a traitor in Germany for his lack of support for nationalism during and after World War 1, and dealing with the death of both his parents, Hesse was near total mental breakdown. When his headaches became unbearably intense, plus panic attacks, dizziness, exhaustion, and lack of sleep Hesse began to meet with a Catholic psychiatrist J. B. Lang. Lang specialised in dream work, and was part of the circle around Carl Jung. The initial 12 consultations in 1916, were followed by another 60 the following autumn, and the relationship continued after that. Lang helped Hesse come out of depression, analyse dream material, and resume writing: leading to Hesse’s book ‘Demian’.

The idea of opposing but related figures – the doppelganger principle interested both men –and emerges in much of Hesse’s subsequent writing. Lang – the more radical, emboldened Hesse to abandon everything that inhibited his vocation as a writer – wife and children included. Whilst the analysis helped Hesse, Lang became overly involved, taking on practical tasks to do with Hesse’s divorce; falling in love with a woman who later Hesse married (a second disastrous marriage); asking Hesse to appraise his [Lang’s] dreams in a complete role reversal; and, an increasing involvement with esotericism: it all led to Lang’s self-destruction. Hesse then preferred to seek out Carl Jung himself, and underwent a course of therapy with him, taking on an understanding of the archetypes, and consulting Jung about ideas that Hesse was exploring in ‘Siddhartha’.

In June 1921 Hesse consulted Jung and in his Zurich notebook, Hesse wrote: ‘He [Jung] has sent me away with the maxim: “Desire to do (consciously) what you (instinctively) want to do!’

The following day Hesse noted:

‘My last visit to Jung. We speak about me having virtually no dreams any more. He tells me that I don’t need any … and that patients often ask him how they should “solve” this or that problem. Jung tells them that they shouldn’t be seeking to solve it, but rather just to have a crack at it, to grapple and struggle with it. Problems aren’t there to be “solved”; they are pairs of opposites that between them produce a tension that is called life.’

Years later Hesse wrote in a letter:

‘I have always had respect for Jung, but his works did not make such strong impressions on me as did those of Freud.  … I also had several analytic sessions with him … I got a nice impression of him, though at that time I began to realize that for analysts, a genuine relationship to art is unattainable …’

The seminary at Maulbronn

The ‘punishment’ for running away from the seminary, was that Hesse was placed in an insane asylum run by a pastor where Hesse worked mainly in the gardens, and was given a diagnosis of ‘melancholy’. The family urged the teenage boy to practice moderation as a way of ‘exorcising all the evil demons’, but Hesse saw trusting in God as displayed by his family as a reprimand and a provocation. Begging to return home, he lasted there for 17 days before being re-incarcerated again at the request of his parents for his bad behaviour. He put his experience into this rhyme:

‘Now freedom’s just run out on me,

it always was illusory,

Sent to the “bin” by mum and dad

For all they know, I might be mad!’

Hesse was fighting against those, who with a clear conscience before God, wanted to break him and divest him of his self-will. He wrote to his parents as his ‘jailors’:

‘You deliver all your sermons, urging people to “Turn to God, and to Christ, etcetera, etcetera!” But though you might curse me a hundred times over for saying so, I can see in this God of yours nothing but a delusion, and in this Christ nothing but a man’.

His parents could not understand why Hesse didn’t comply with the basic rules of coexistence – he was either ill or stubborn – obdurate, and the answer to that was further strictness. With illness they just had to wait. Hesse, by the age of 15 began to realise that he was in danger of remaining incarcerated, and somehow found a way of dispassionately explaining himself and asking:

‘Is it right for a young man who, apart from a slight weakness of the nerves, is pretty healthy, to be packed off to a “mental home for the feeble-minded” and forcibly rob him of his belief in love and justice, and hence in God? … You are Christians, and I – I am just a man.’

And: ‘If I was a Pietist rather than a human being, if I could turn all my inclinations into their opposites, then I could get on harmoniously with you. But I cannot …’ His father’s response urged him to acquiesce, but what Herman Hesse was learning was, that, as his biographer, Gunnar Decker puts it:

‘… revolt was not always advisable when faced with a dangerous environment. He would learn what everyone who becomes an outsider quickly learns: namely, to conceal yourself from the world in order to preserve your individuality.’

The hospital inspector felt that Hesse suffered from ‘a moral infirmity’ and needed strict discipline: that he needed to be disabused of the idea that ‘a person could get through life just by playing the fiddle and writing fiction.’ Hesse, knowing he wanted to leave the asylum and become a writer, wrote to his parents that he couldn’t live at home, but did love them deeply, and eventually, and fortunately, he was allowed to move away from the family, and board with a pastor and return to education. His childhood experiences provided both the impetus for his writing and his lifelong spiritual searching – he thought only those who could carry their childhood into adulthood could become a creative writer – where childhood was a dream of a succession of summits between which deep abysses opened up. As in fairy tales good and bad lived side by side there.

Hermann Hesse

‘I think that reality is the last thing one needs bother oneself about, for it is, tiresomely enough, constantly present, whereas it is the more beautiful and necessary things in life that really demand our attention and care. Reality is something that one ought not under any circumstances to be content with and which one should not on any account worship and revere, for it is accidental, the leftovers of life.’

In his writing, Hesse tenaciously always defended the spiritual dimension whilst also expressing inner turmoil. Part of this ongoing inner turmoil resulted from his highly religious background and upbringing which drove him from later childhood and adolescence onwards to near breakdown. Both his mother and father came from a long family tradition of Pietism – a movement within Protestant Lutheranism that combines biblical doctrine and teaching with individual piety, and living a holy Christian life. Pietism was an evangelical revivalist movement believing that the way of the world leads to death and damnation, and the Pietist route to God, paradise, and blessedness. The way to get to heaven was through strict discipline and rules. In the January posts Dennis McCort disentangled himself from the aftereffects of a strict Roman Catholic upbringing with its long shadow of guilt; Hermann Hesse found it extremely hard to do the same from his Pietist upbringing.

He writes that his parents lived piously, not indulging in any vices ‘and demanded a great deal of themselves in their daily lives, they had likewise devoted themselves and their lives to the service of God.’ Finding the 6-year-old Hesse a handful, the parents decided to send him to a strict mission house to board, where after 6 months his mother wrote: ‘he came home looking pale and thin and cowed’ but ‘he is far easier to deal with now, thank God!’

However, resistance to attempts to break him were born by this experience. He wrote: ‘I only needed to hear the words “Thou shalt …” and my whole being changed and I became as stubborn as a mule.’ So, childhood became for Hesse a battle to protect his inner person from the crude intervention of the outside world. By adolescence the struggle against the rules and regime of Pietism deepened. When at 14 he ran away from the strict seminary he had been sent, to his mother wrote:

‘At first I was worried that Hermann had committed some dreadful sin and been disgraced, and I was in awful torments imagining that something especially terrible must have preceded his disappearance, so I was very relieved when I finally got the feeling instead that he was in God’s merciful hands, and had already died and gone to meet his maker. Perhaps he’d drowned in one of the lakes he was so fascinated by?’

Better to be dead than to sin. Hesse asking for understanding from his father received a letter in reply reminding the boy:

‘Our highest purpose in life is to please God and to serve Him in His kingdom. If that was to become your purpose too, we would find true communion … if we meet one another in this spirit, then we shall be united for all eternity, since it will be under the auspices of the Everlasting God.’

In the absence of God, the boy seemed to count for nothing, which outraged him. As punishment, he was kept in detention with only bread and water while decisions were made about how to bring Hesse back to ‘right’ path, and where he could be sent to expedite this.

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.

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.

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.’

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.

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.”