11.11.2008

Below is a letter from Michael Ventura to James Hillman excerpted from We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy -- and the World's Getting Worse:

Dear Jim,

Words get in the way. (Sometimes I think that's their secret job.) Words like mind, psyche, and soul overlap and obscure each other. I started to write, "So much goes on in the psyche at any given time," but I realized that if I just said those words out loud, at a party, say, someone might think I mean the daydreams and shopping lists that move jerkily along the surface of consciousness. But, as you've written of so well, under that surface noise, and coexisting with all our concerns about getting through the day, are currents of grief, hope, fear, and love that seem (in my experience, anyway) almost independent of each other. Each current whispers a different history of our lives and seeks a different future. When we say the word I we speak only for some, never all, of those whispers.

Which is to say: psychology has to recognize community because the psyche is a community. No: community is too organized and peaceful a word. The psyche is a city like New York or Rome or Calcutta; you'd need a Dante or a Breughel to picture it. It's like having all the TV channels on at once and feeding into each other, late night film noir and afternoon cartoons speaking each other's lines, while epic events like revolutions have the feel of family feuds. It's an inner world that reminds me of something Henry Adams wrote after he had contemplated the gargoyles and saints of Europe's cathedrals for perhaps longer than was good for him, a sentence at the end of Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres: "Truth, indeed, may not exist; science avers it to be only a relation; but what men took for truth stares one everywhere in the eye and begs for sympathy."

Isn't the psyche like that? Sit still long enough and so much comes up ("memories, dreams, and reflections," as Jung put it) begging for sympathy, for understanding, for a voice. And beneath that level...the depths go on and on. So, as I started to say, with all the psyche's innate tumult, with all its levels and voices, one feels so many presences at any given moment that there's no such thing as being alone. If you are the only one in the room, it's still a crowded room.

I'm thinking tonight of something many feel when alone in that crowded room. For don't you sometimes feel accompanied, especially when alone, in a way that you usually take for granted? I do. The people I compare notes with do also. I'm thinking of something I now call "the Watcher." "The Companion Eye," my friend George Howard calls it -- that sense of a constant companion, who is you and yet more than you, and who seems always with you, watching from a slight distance. My feeling of it hasn't changed since I was small. It's always a bit older than I, usually silent, and its features are sort of indistinct, like when you see an old print of a black-and-white movie. It's not exactly passive but rarely active. Its action is to watch.
Robert Bly does a lovely job describing it in Iron John:

When we do look into our own eyes [in the mirror]...we have the inescapable impression, so powerful and astonishing, that someone is looking back at us...That experience of being looked back at sobers us up immediately....Someone looks back questioning, serious, alert, and without intent to comfort; and we feel more depth in the eyes looking at us than we ordinarily sense in our own eyes as we stare out at the world. How strange! Who could it be that is looking at us? We conclude that it is another part of us, the half that we don't allow to pass out of our eyes when we glance at others -- and that darker and more serious half looks back at us only at rare times.

But I think Robert's way off when he calls this presence "the interior soul," because our sense of it, as I said, is that it watches from a slight distance. Even in his example, it's outside of you, in the mirror, looking back.

A friend's therapist calls it "the objective ego," but the whole concept of ego implies a hierarchy in the psyche: Freud's id-ego-superego structure. Freud's idea, now a century old, was a great breakthrough in thinking about the psyche, but as a description it's too simplistic, too rigid. And today the word ego carries too many associations to be specific or useful. Jungians might call this Watcher "the Self," exchanging Freud's linear, patriarchal-style hierarchy for a circular, matriarchal-style hierarchy, with the Self at the circle's center. I know circular hierarchy seems a contradiction in terms, but consider: what Jungians, feminists, and all sorts of antihierarchy people overlook is that circles have structures too. What's on the diameter is not at all the same, spatially or metaphorically, as what's on the circumference; and no circle can be a circle without a center from which the circle radiates. So the idea of the central Self is, in a horizontal way, as rigid as the vertical ideas of the ego.

The Jungian model doesn't apply to the Watcher because, again, our experience of the Watcher is that it's not within, it's a little off to the side, just beyond the circle. (Or it's above: a friend of mine told me that as a child he pictured his Watcher as a television camera that followed him, off to the side, a foot or two from the ceiling.) In the same way, the Watcher isn't one of those inner selves I'm so fond of speaking of; my experience of them is that they're clearly, even defiantly, within, often clamoring to take charge. No, and the Watcher isn't your daimon (guardian angel, genius), either, that impish genie that goads and tricks us toward our fates. Our daimon is, as you said, ghostly; it inhabits events and reveals its image, if at all, as a kind of haunting, or after long visual work. You can't see your daimon just by staring into a mirror.

Yet this Watcher -- is. Anyone who's traveled alone for long distances knows their Watcher well, because we never travel all alone. There is the sense of being in the company of oneself. As I said, a you that is not quite you, a presence felt when you're alone, from which (from whom?) comes the mood of your solitude.

I think some people live in agony because they feel their Watcher doesn't like them. Alone with their Watcher, they feel not accompanied but judged, even threatened. Other people have endured horrors because their Watcher is, as my friend George puts it, a companion. Still, this is very different from "liking yourself." You may not like yourself at all, yet your Companion is calm and doesn't disapprove, and your solitude can be sweet at times because of this.

Things get multiple and murky in this realm. Which part of you isn't liking you when you don't like yourself? I don't know, but my experience is that I loathe myself often, actively, for long periods, and make a lot of trouble doing it. Yet my Companion, my Watcher, is patient -- not condoning nor even reassuring, just patient. Though, as George says, "It's kind of comforting to realize that some part of you is actually seeing things as they are. It doesn't have to influence you at all, but it's not gonna give."

Another wrinkle: Marie-Louise von Franz says that Western civilization has put a little gnomish man on the shoulder of every woman and that this gnome does nothing but tell the woman that she's wrong, wrong, wrong. Thus a kind of artificial, oppressive Watcher has been installed. When I mention this image to women (especially writer women) they enthusiastically agree with von Franz: that's their experience, an almost literal voice buzzing in their ear saying, "No, no, your work's no good, it's worthless, you're wrong." In von Franz's construct (though she'd use different terms), women have to learn to ignore that gnome and recognize their real Watcher, whom civilization did not put there and whom civilization cannot take away.

I'm writing this because there is not, to my knowledge, a psychology of the Watcher. I've never heard of therapists saying, "What's your Watcher like?" Yet according to the people I compare notes with, the sense of a Watcher is so common it's taken for granted. My conviction is that during a bad time one's relationship with one's Watcher is crucial; it may be all one has. You'd think that would make it a therapeutic tool, but, as I say, you don't hear of a psychology of the Watcher.

When I think of fiction made from this experience I think of the 1950 Jimmy Stewart film Harvey, written by Mary Chase. Stewart plays Ellwood, a man who's considered mad because his best friend is a six-foot-tall invisible rabbit. His involvement with this "friend" is neither narcissistic nor cut off from the world. Elwood cares very much for his sister and niece, with whom he lives; he's always saying hello to strangers, taking them seriously in a kindly way, inviting them to dinner, introducing them to the invisible Harvey. He takes nothing for granted. If a salesgirl asks, "Can I help you?" he replies, "What did you have in mind?" Ellwood doesn't care that everyone thinks he's crazy, because his Companion doesn't share their opinion. Harvey is a light and sentimental tale, but its great appeal is that we are watching a man's extraordinary relationship with his Companion, and we know something of such relationships because we feel a presence beside us as well. We feel relief at seeing this feeling addressed, for our culture is so limited in what it allows itself to address, and this limitation makes people feel so isolated.

(That's the real reason for censorship, whether it's the direct censorship of the state or academia's censorship-by-dismissal: the less you allow to be expressed, the more alone and cut off people feel. When certain feelings are unexpressed in the culture, people think those feelings are bad or crazy, and so they trust their feelings less; hence they're more vulnerable to pressure from above.)

Another fiction of the Watcher is Marc Behm's chilling 1980 novel, The Eye of the Beholder. (It's a literary crime that, while lightweights like John Updike are all over the shelves, Behm's novel is out of print.) Behm calls his narrator only "The Eye" -- a private eye, or rather semiprivate: he works for a detective agency. The Eye trails a young female serial killer who marries then murders her men. The Eye falls in love with this killer from afar. He not only watches her for years as she kills, but, unknown to her, he keeps the police off her trail and commits every sort of crime to protect her. Slowly, over the years, she becomes vaguely aware of his presence, until an eerily beautiful moment when they face each other.

Behm is describing a psychological state: that the Watcher doesn't care about society or morality or the ideas of good and evil. The Watcher cares about you, and, if it's on your side to begin with, it's all the way on your side. Thus you can be a psychopath and still have a healthy relationship with your Watcher (which is bad for society); or you can be a good, normal person and have an unhealthy relationship with your Watcher (which is bad for you), perhaps because you're not living the way it knows you should. (Maybe then you should try talking to it?)

So I bring this up to say that perhaps there is something in the city of the psyche that is absolutely apart from one's social community, something that, in and of itself, doesn't care if the whole world shrivels and burns, something focused utterly and only...on you. We began as a tribal race, we lived in packs and small settlements for millennia before there was such a thing as a city and, with it, the possibility of individuality, so perhaps this Watcher served as a kind of buffer or refuge from what was an inescapable community. (We must remember that even among tribal peoples, vision quests and walkabouts happen in solitude, or at least in human solitude, though nothing is quite solitary when you know that the animals and the moon and the rain are your brothers and sisters and uncles.)

(I don't pretend that all this could stand up as either knowledge or theory, by the way, Jim; it's just what you might call my fantasy of how things are.)

Interesting that both Harvey and The Eye of the Beholder are about psychosis. In a world like ours, where what's considered normal is a sickly compromise between how much boredom you can stomach and how much denial you can defend, new thoughts and explorations are often couched in terms of psychosis. (Modern psychology began with studies of psycho-sis.) I wouldn't let that put me off thinking about the Watcher, though. At least, I don't think I should. Should I? My Watcher, who is almost always silent, nods no.

Michael

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