NOTE:  THIS IS PART TWO OF A SCHOLARLY PAPER RE-PRINTED FEBRUARY 2002 BY MYTH*ING LINKS WITH THE KIND PERMISSION OF THE AUTHORS, WHO ARE COLLEAGUES OF MINE AT:Pacifica Graduate Institute

The self that relates to "otherness" in an instrumental way, in terms of how the other can serve the self, must necessarily be involved in a set of serious dissociations. Lifton (1986), in his work on Nazi doctors, describes how the self doubles in order to perpetuate violence against others without experiencing it as such. In exchange for the material and psychological benefits conferred on them for helping with "racial cleansing," i.e., genocide, Nazi doctors underwent a splitting of themselves into two functioning wholes.  The Auschwitz self allowed him to adapt to and accomplish his genocidal tasks, while his prior self allowed him to see himself as a caring physician, husband, and father. Such a doubling protected him from feelings of guilt associated with the violation of the ethical principles he was originally committed to.  In this state of psychic division, murder was seen as "cleansing," medical tortures as "research," the other as "vermin."

In globalization, we have an analogous situation where practices that undermine local economies and their sustainability, that have led to increasing poverty and massive dislocations of populations, are called "development." Colonialism's story of the Other as inferior, backward, and primitive mitigates against direct perceptions of violence perpetrated against that other. This causes a dissociation within the self between the dominant cultural narrative and any other empathetic feelings or transgressive knowings that must now be defended against. It is in this way that dissociations within cultural history become translated into psychic dissociations. Such dissociations require energy to be sustained.  This is why psychological dissociation is a state that is connected with neurotic suffering and symptoms as well as compromises in vitality, creativity, eros, and compassion. The projective field that reduces the personhood of the Other acts as an obscuring cloud, allowing one not to experience human suffering.  The work of healing requires asking what of our own suffering, thoughts, feelings and perceptions have been "disappeared" in this process.

To see the self in terms of multiplicity has further implications.  Once the ego splits in terms of claimed superior and disowned inferior parts, two processes result.  What is designated as inferior is projected onto others--seen as belonging to others --if one identifies with the superior position.  Secondly, what is seen as inferior is also a possibility within the self; that is, once split, and even projected, it threatens the self internally by being a position into which one can always fall.  Psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva (1982) calls this part of our personality "the abject" (p. 51) and suggests that we live in fear of owning it.  Thus the individualistic self must be controlling even in relationship to its own feelings. When theorists describe our time as one of narcissism they are describing this precarious psychological situation which we must navigate given our propensity to split experiences into binary opposites of superiority and inferiority.

 © Robyn Bellospirito  -- used with permission [Link updated 3/17/02]

Not only is the multiplicity of relations in the world denied, but so too are relations amongst the multiplicity of the self.  The individualistic paradigm of the self attempts to imagine selfhood as unitary.  It does not encourage listening-in to our own ambivalence, to discern the multiplicity of voices that are internalized through our unfolding relations.  Not only is the other treated as an object, but in so far as others become internalized through the course of our development, we are capable of turning a deaf ear to some emerging inner dialogues and exploiting other dialogues to serve the aggrandizement of the ego.

In her novel, A Model Childhood, Krista Wolf (1980) explores the psychological dynamics of this self in the making. The child Nellie has witnessed Kristallnacht in her hometown. Wolf writes:

Nellie couldn't help it: the charred building made her sad, because she wasn't supposed to feel sad. She had long ago begun to cheat herself out of her true feelings....Gone, forever gone, is the beautiful free association between emotions and events. That too, if you think of it, is a reason for sadness....It wouldn't have taken much for Nellie to have succumbed to an improper emotion: compassion. But healthy German common sense built a barrier against it: anxiety. (p.158)

The narrator of the novel, who has suffered chronic anxiety attacks, sleeplessness, tension, and headaches, along with many members of her family, suggests that there are difficulties "regarding compassion for one's own person, the difficulties experienced by a person who was forced as a child to turn compassion for the weak and the losers into hate and anxiety" (p.158).  The novel suggests that beneath the dominant cultural narrative, bodily symptoms are expressing non-verbal protests to a constrictive imaginal frame.  We could begin to take this protest seriously, to see in our symptoms and felt discomforts the seeds of alternative tellings of our personal and social histories.

 © MorrisoN's Gallery -- used with permission

The colonial self, profiting from the oppression of others, has created a view of others that justifies oppression.  The other is inferior, impulsive, underdeveloped, unable to abstract, superstitious.  The other needs colonial stewardship to contribute to their minimal survival. Colonial superiority, intelligence, disciplined work ethic, logical thought, resourcefulness, scientific thinking elevate the colonial self and justify control of the "cake." But this colonial self must also split-off its own inferior, underdeveloped, impulsive, and vulnerable aspects. This binary splitting, whereby one pole is lauded and the other degraded, falls into the psyches of both colonizer and colonized, creating caricatures of identity, and mis-readings of history.  Intelligence becomes severed from feeling, intuition, imagination.  Work becomes disassociated from spontaneity, vitality, generativity.

To begin to face the legacy of a rigid dissociative complex requires a defeat of a striving, individualistic ego with its attempts to control history, and to avoid painful memories. It is only in the recovery of cultural memory, in the listening to previously unheard feelings, symptoms, and narratives that the internal dissociations can begin to heal. To hold our history in ways that can inform our present we must nurture our capacities for grief and mourning, for truth and reconciliation. We know that mourning requires the availability of support and rapport. Part of the sadness that must be faced is how we may have prevented some of our deepest knowings from informing the major choices in our life.

We can feel the suffering created by the individualistic paradigm of the self: the isolation and loneliness, the internal self-doubt and criticism, the narcissistic oscillation between poles of inferior and superior assessment of self and other, the remove from and objectification of nature and others, the resultant shrinking of compassion, the consumptive frenzy occasioned by an empty self.  The liberatory post-colonial alternative we are seeking is to live into the self's capacity for interdependence, its thirst for relation and connection.  To do so is to mitigate against the dissociations that have been practiced internally, as well as those externally. How we treat the other must be understood as the stuff from which the self is made.  Habermas calls the self that can reflect on and disidentify from identifications with injurious cultural norms as having a "postconventional identity."  Santner (1990) describes such a self as follows:

[It] feels entitled to play with its own boundaries (rather than denying them or reifying them), and it will be a self more consistently able to experience the vitality of that 'free association between emotions and events' which ultimately grounds the human capacity to bear witness to history and to claim solidarity with the oppressed of history, past and present. (p. 162)

Kindred Spirits /// ©  Larry Poncho
Courtesy of Black Heritage Gallery

Only with the creation of more permeable membranes between self and other can we register the narratives of suffering that awaken our ethics and our compassion, an awakening which is needed to re-imagine the structures we are a part of. This requires an awareness of "the Other" to as important a category as "the self," bringing otherness into our view from beyond the margins where it has been pushed in colonialism and now in global capitalism.  Once we stretch past the falsely constructed boundaries we are met by awareness of great sufferings created by the individualistic self, awareness that has itself been dissociated.  In cultural trauma work, as in trauma work generally, the path to healing entails allowing bits and pieces of disconnected feeling and memory to surface, to be experienced for the first time, in an environment of care. The key is to be able to create dialogical containers for this work and to enter them with the intention of sharing.  These dialogues need more space, patience and silence, and more capacity for ambivalence to emerge than the ordinary rapid-fire give-and-take of English-language discussions. Our time is necessarily one for the work of hearing into being the narratives that might arise from silenced post-colonial margins in our communities as well as silenced feelings and symptoms at the margins of personal consciousness. This work entails insight into the larger cultural forces that have split communities and individuals into oppressed/oppressor identities.

The self attempting to experience its interdependence with all being can not do so without membership in groups that welcome discord from the margin, that open toward dialogue with the unknown in us and in the world, that make room for the grief that comes as dissociations are healed. Research conducted by an expert who keeps those he is learning from at a distance needs to be supplanted by participatory action approaches to research, where self and others collect together bits and pieces of knowing in order to transform shared situations in the light of mutual desires. These kinds of groups, these kinds of relations, reveal springs of renewal and imagination that have been forgotten, that have been thirsted for without awareness.  Such groups must make space for forms of creative dialogue to be improvised, practiced, and brought into increasingly resistant settings.  If individuation is seen through the lens of liberation, we become aware that each of our individuations also includes something for the culture, something we become able to see through, to become conscious of, to dream differently. At the same time, if we accept the idea that important parts of our own personality have become forgotten and dissociated, each voice from the margin represents the potential for an encounter with lost parts of ourselves.

The method of recollection we are proposing builds on many successful models of restorative justice. Depth psychology suggests that participants in such dialogue practices may feel discomforts with themselves and the group that they cannot articulate and do not yet fully feel or know. The knowing is not yet present but still absent. The work done in depth psychological therapy begins with the notion that many images, experiences, and knowings crucial to the client are not available to consciousness. Instead they exist as losses of pressure, ruptures of narrative, symptoms, unexplained feelings, and dream images. Helen Cixous (1993) says it this way:

I'll tell you frankly, that I haven't the faintest idea who I am, but at least I know I don't know....We have extremely strong identifications, which found our house. An identity card doesn't allow for confusion, torment, or bewilderment. It asserts the simplified and clear-cut images of conjugality.  If the truth about loving and hateful choices were revealed it would break open the earth's crust. Which is why we live in a legalized and general delusion. Fiction takes the place of reality. This is why simply naming one of these turns of the unconscious that are part of our strange human adventure engenders such upsets (which are at once intimate, individual, and political); why consciously or unconsciously we constantly try to save ourselves from this naming.     (p.51)

One way to think about the work of recollection both in individual and group work is that it is done through the principle of metonymy. Unlike metaphor, where two already known things are compared, metonymy functions when something we are trying to feel and think about is still relatively unknown.  All we can do in such a situation is name what is nearby, what seems connected, without yet knowing how the whole will emerge from the parts.

Poet Mary Oliver (1986), writing of the effects of rage on a survivor of childhood sexual abuse gives us this image: "in your dreams she's a watch/ you dropped on the dark stones/ till no one could gather the fragments." To reconstitute the whole out of a crater of lost stories we have to lovingly take-up the pieces of the watch in our hands like bits of a puzzle whose outline is only just beginning to emerge. This requires new types of dialogue: more listening than speaking, more wondering than knowing, more imaginal than goal-oriented. We can't assume we know what meaning is being reached for, because all of our knowledge comes from the dissociative past where the watch was broken. Even if we can name the parts - spring, gear, disc - we still can't know the moment in advance when the hidden springs of spontaneity, joy, and creativity return to the lost center in a new image of wholeness. Each voice and story contributes to the outcome.

Back Stage /// ©  Frank Morrison /// Courtesy of Art of Color

Wynton Marsalis (in Burns, 2000) has suggested that jazz could be a metonymy for a democracy that we have not yet been able to create in America. In his vision, jazz begins to experiment with the kind of democratic dialogue that is needed, where in the spirit of improvisational creation each voice in turn is invited to surge forth, supported in its rhythms and breakthroughs by the other instrumental voices.  Each voice improvising its own melody intends to create something whole and beautiful, together with all the members of the group. Marsalis (in Burns, 2000) says,

In order for you to play jazz, you've got to listen to [each other]. The music forces you at all times to address what other people are thinking, and for you to interact with them with empathy and to deal with the process of working things out.  That's how our music really could teach about what the meaning of American democracy is.  The thing in jazz that would get Bix Beiderbeck up out of his bed at 2 o'clock in the morning, to pick that cornet up and practice into the pillow for another two or three hours; or that would make Louis Armstrong travel around the world for 50 something years, just non-stop, to get up out of his sickbed and crawl up on the bandstand and play; the thing that would make Duke Ellington, the thing that would make Thelonius Monk, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Mary Lou Williams, the thing that would make all these people give their lives for it...and they did give their lives for it...is that it gives us a glimpse into what America is going to be when it becomes itself....and this music tells you that it will become itself.  And when you get a taste of that, there is just nothing else you are going to taste that is as sweet...that's a sweet taste, man.

In this spirit, our work together, our conversation loses the chains of pragmatism, critique, and complaint and moves toward grace.  You might argue that time for improvisation, for the voicing of missing narratives, for the holding together of stories that have been forcibly separated is not pertinent to the kind of efficiency we have been taught to work on behalf of.  We caution that what is sacrificed for this kind of efficiency will not only rise up to threaten from the outside, but will twist and turn within us, smoldering, decomposing, sabotaging, taking refuge in symptom until voice is found.

The Death (1914) ///© Teodors Uders, Latvian artist

When Adolf Harash went to Chernobyl after the nuclear accident as a trauma psychologist, he worked with many of the nuclear plant's workers and engineers.  A frightening number of them confessed with tragic dismay that prior to the accident they had been beset by nightmares about the plant's possible malfunction, given their familiarity with its difficulties and bad repair.  Rarely, were any of these knowings given voice, even within one's family.  Such knowings felt forbidden in the workplace.  Yet these forbidden knowings could have prevented the worst nuclear accident in history, the effects of which stretch far, far into our shared future. Here the personal suffering of individuals and the collective danger to the community coincided and interpenetrated completely. If there had been a possibility to share personally disowned voices in dialogue, the surrounding community might have been able to prevent disaster in time.

Prayer /// ©  Kadir Nelson /// Courtesy of Art of Color

We are convinced that from the psyches of its members, communities of all kinds could have access to crucial knowings that have long been silenced; knowings that if listened to could restore a sense of wholeness to what is now fractured, denied, and dismissed. It is itself a moral choice to open our hearts and minds to hear the pieces of story that have been depotentiated by their dissociation. From the liberation of these silenced knowings a deepened sense of ethics can emerge; individual development and ecological survival can coincide. No truly sustainable development can develop out of the repression of silenced knowings.

We invite you into the experiential work that will bring forth the pieces of knowing that you have access to. By listening deeply to the pieces of melody your neighbors and colleagues offer, there may be ways to re-imagine how such alternating voicing and listening could be incorporated into the places where you work and live. Everywhere  around you there are invisible unspoken narratives waiting to emerge, stories from which we could learn much about our environment and ourselves. Breaking the normalization of silence is a crucial first step.

************************************************************
Experiential Small Group Work
(to accompany: "Silenced Knowings, Forgotten Springs:
Paths to Healing in the Wake of Colonialism,"
by Helene Shulman Lorenz and Mary Watkins)
************************************************************

Reconnecting
 © Helen Redman -- used with permission

Seeking to see, to know, to take in all that is, as it is.  To meet all that exists.  It is by such a sacrament that wounds will heal us.  Any healing will require us to witness all our histories where they converge, the history of empires and emancipations, of slave ships as well as underground railroads; it requires us to listen back into the muted cries of the beaten, burned, forgotten, and also to hear the ring of speech among us, meeting the miracle of that.
                        Griffin, 1995, pp. 152-153

Participants should divide into groups of 6-8 for the small group work.

Small group convenors should read the following introduction:

 This work will be conducted in the manner and spirit of council (Zimmerman & Coyle, 1996).  Council is a method of dialogue that allows for deep listening to self and other. It is a method of shared leadership. By using a "talking piece" (a stone, branch, picture, or any other object that can be passed around) the opportunity to share is evenly available to each participant.  When it is your turn to hold the talking piece, it is also your turn to share. At other times you are asked to listen attentively to try to discern what narratives are emerging. Do not interrupt, ask questions, or comment; listen as deeply as you can. If a person chooses they may decide not to share and simply pass the talking piece to the next person. Please keep in mind, however, that the complexity of thought that is possible increases as each member of the group stretches to share his/her piece of the mosaic. In the work we will be doing this morning there will be several opportunities to share, and many more to listen deeply.  In this council foremat we will not be engaged in debate or discussion.

I, as the convenor, will initiate each round by asking a question.  We will take several moments of silence to allow a response to arise within us.  Please also pause between speakers, so that we have the time to really absorb what has been shared before another person begins to speak. It will deepen our process if we can each keep in mind the four intentions of council:

    --Speak from the heart
    --Listen from the heart
    --Be of "lean expression"
    --Speak spontaneously

As you think about it now, where has or does your life intersect with the history and issues of colonialism and globalization? What are the pieces of our collective story or mosaic that you are in a position to see and to know about from your own autobiography. It is tempting to think that colonialism and globalism are far too big for us each to address with our beings.  Yet, we are each given particular pieces in our history, and in our current contexts.  It is here we must begin.

Take a few minutes and write out the thoughts, feelings, and images that come to you.  Focus on the pieces of this knowing that resist sharing, perhaps even with yourself.

[Using the talking piece, invite participants to share what they wish to, with the hope of seeing more of the whole mosaic by listening deeply to the pieces each of the participants brings.]

Second Round of Council

Convenor reads aloud:

You have described how your own life has intersected with the issues of colonialism and globalization.  What is the legacy -- positive and negative--of this intersection in your life currently? How does it affect your thoughts, your relations to others, and/or your experience in the workplace?  You may find yourself extending what you have already reflected on or you may find that new intersections arise with this question. We will take five minutes to reflect on this, before sharing. Feel free to make notes for yourself.

Hold Me /// © Robyn Bellospirito -- used with permission [Link updated 3/17/02]

In this round we will explore the experience of silenced knowings in your workplace, community, or family group and the provision of contexts for their voicing. Try to sense something(s) that you know deeply about from your own work or community experience that may be difficult to admit fully to yourself and even more difficult to express to others in your community.

--Have you ever been able to express this to anyone?
--If so, what was the context like that welcomed this knowing into words?
--If you haven't, what are the dynamics that make speaking about this difficult or impossible; what silences your knowing?
--What kind of context would be needed within your workplace, community, or family group to welcome this knowing into voice; that would release the hidden spring of creativity within this knowing?
--Can you feel any ways in which this silencing has ramifications for you in your family life, in your relationship to yourself?

Further Explorations

These exercises are intended to help you locate the interior landscapes that mirror colonialism and its recent manifestation in globalization. How have colonialism and its present equivalents mapped themselves onto your psyche, your psychological experience?

The accumulation and depletion of resources; sustainability
1. What are the resources that sustain you on a deep level from day-to-day?
2. In what ways are these resources currently being depleted?
3. In what ways do resources run in your direction? Which of these involve the depletion of resources for another or others? When you look deeply at this, what is your feeling response?
4) Who inside you knows about this dynamic?  What does he or she have to say to you about it?

© Robyn Bellospirito -- used with permission  [Link updated 3/17/02]

The plethora available in the marketplace creates a cavernous internal emptiness that corresponds to it.  Consuming fills this space and soothes the feelings that arise in it. How do you experience emptiness?  What are the strategies you use with regard to inner feelings of emptiness?  If you associate these feelings as in part produced by the marketplace, what might be your alternate strategies for dealing with feelings of emptiness?

 © Robyn Bellospirito  -- used with permission  [Link updated 3/17/02]

How do you experience the inferior-superior poles within yourself that are internalized from the culture?

Fold a paper in half lengthwise.  You will not need to share the content of this exercise with others. Write on the left side ways in which you generally feel superior to many others.  On the right side list the ways you ordinarily feel inferior.

Chose one or two of the ways in which you feel superior.  Write down any thoughts and/or feelings you may have around the fear of slipping from this place of relative superiority.  Note any familiar interior dynamics between the ideas of superiority and the feelings and ideas of possibly slipping downwards.  Share anything interesting you have noted with a partner.

Describe a situation at work where you felt most fully engaged, alive, in a transformative process.  What were the conditions that enabled that to be possible?  What would maximize the conditions at your workplace for an experience of aliveness?  What would be your utopian vision of how to create conditions where people in the workplace (the community) feel most alive?

Premise: the springs of energy, creativity, and eros are increasingly released as one's calling, one's bits and pieces, overlap with the mission of the workplace, and where one's ethics overlap with the ethics of the workplace.

Where in your daily life are there opportunities for the work of reconciliation between oppressor and oppressed, internally and in relation with others? Do you engage with these opportunities or evade them?  Study the internal and group dynamics related to this.

In what ways might you show solidarity with the oppressed in your day-to-day life, internally and externally?

Fromm speaks of how the idea of profit changed with the rise of capitalism and industrialism from meaning "profit for the soul" to monetary profit. What would profit for the soul look and feel like in a context in which you work/live?  What changes would it require over a ten year period to move toward this vision?  What changes could begin to be made in the present to begin movement toward this end?

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Helene Shulman Lorenz, Ph.D., is a Core Faculty Member in the Depth Psychology Doctoral Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute.  She has taught philosophy at Tulane, San Francisco State, and Sonoma State University.  She participated for many years in social justice work in the Civil Rights Movement, the United Farmworkers Movement, the Women's Movement, and the Sanctuary Movement.  After receiving a diploma as a analyst at the C.G.Jung Institute in Zurich, she has led group dialogues on diversity, decolonization, and personal transformation, while maintaining a private practice. She is the author of Living at the Edge of Chaos: Complex Systems in Culture and Psyche, and articles on depth psychology, globalization, paradigm change, decolonization, and the failures of multiculturalism in university settings.

Mary Watkins, Ph.D., is the Coordinator of Community and Ecological Fieldwork and Research in the Depth Psychology Doctoral Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute.  She is the author of Waking Dreams, Invisible Guests: The Development of Imaginal Dialogues, the co-author of Talking With Young Children About Adoption, a co-editor of Psychology and the Promotion of Peace (Journal of Social Issues, 44, 2), and essays on the confluence of liberation psychology and depth psychology. She has worked as a clinical psychologist with adults and children, and has also worked with small and large groups around issues of peace, imagining the future, diversity, vocation, and social justice.