On the Couch 6
On necessary angels, and the symbolic life
If you are a paid subscriber and would like to have your question considered for a future ‘On the Couch’ post on this Substack, you can email us at sharon@sharonblackie.org. (Please note I don’t reply from this email address.) I’m clearly not offering therapy here, but you can ask me about any of the subjects I specialise in and work with – depth psychology, folklore and mythology (European only, please), women’s stories, reclaiming the second half of life, writing fiction or nonfiction … Your question can be personal or general, but bear in mind that if I don’t know you, answering highly personal questions or giving personalised advice will be difficult. Please have a look at past ‘On the Couch’ posts for guidance about what’s appropriate.
‘If one accepts the symbol, it is as if a door opens leading into a new room whose existence one previously did not know.
But if one does not accept the symbol, it is as if one carelessly went past this door; and since this was the only door leading to the inner chambers, one must pass outside into the streets again, exposed to everything external.
But the soul suffers great need, since outer freedom is of no use to it. Salvation is a long road that leads through many gates.
These gates are symbols.
Each new gate is at first invisible; indeed it seems at first that it must be created, for it exists only if one has dug up the spring’s root, the symbol.’
Carl Jung, ‘The Red Book’
A. asks, as a sort of follow-up question to what I wrote about in On the Couch 5:
I wanted to ask about becoming whole and how to trust in whatever vision we have of the person we are growing into. (Not the fantasy of what we imagine a perfect future elderhood would be, but a vision guiding us toward who it is we actually need to become—our true selves.)
I wanted to ask about how we arrive at an image or vision of that future self. And how to work with and trust the images that do arise.
I've read your excellent post on the inner imaginarium and the thing is my inner world is quite present with me always. I don't have an issue with finding and seeing the archetypal images but what I'm asking about is how to trust the process when—to the rest of the world and to us at times, too—what we're seeing and going through might seem like we're insane.
I'd love it if you would be willing to write a post on any of that. To get a sense from you about how people feel into who it is they are needing to become. And how to trust in whatever our intuition is serving up.
A. also wrote about a vision she has of two dragons intertwined, representing sort-of-opposites, and balancing each other out.
Dear A.
Thank you for these questions! Let me offer a three-part answer, including a powerful experience of my own with two images battling away inside me, which I hope will shed some light on how I understand this process.
1. Intuition is a proper way of knowing
Because we’ve been trained to believe that this is the only proper way to truly know anything, most of us run the constant risk of trying to intellectualise the images that come to us. Trying to ‘explain’ them. But we can’t understand images and symbols with our intellect; we can only understand them with our imagination. And exercising intuition is part of an imaginal practice, not an intellectual one. Intuition isn’t fantasy, though: it’s a perfectly sound way of knowing. It doesn’t have to be in opposition to rational ways of knowing, though it certainly can be. But you don’t have to choose between these two ways of knowing. Each of them is useful at different times – it’s just that we’ve been taught, in the overly rationalistic West, only to value rational ways of knowing. Intuition is associated with the archetypal feminine, and that’s a sure-fire way of getting cancelled!
I’m always reminded, in this context of worrying that we’re mad if we’re seen to be relying on intuitive and imaginal knowledge, of a character either in Doris Lessing’s The Four-Gated City or The Golden Notebook – I can’t remember which, now. Maybe it was even Shikasta … Anyway! – this character, a woman of course, had bouts of diagnosed ‘madness’ and from time to time was sectioned by her (male) psychiatrist. But Lessing presented her as someone who could actually see ‘beyond the veil’: she could see through the physical realities that are offered up to us as the only permitted realities, and on into another layer of reality that lies beyond. It was only because the culture didn’t recognise her ways of seeing or knowing as valid that she received the label of ‘madwoman’ and was locked up from time to time in the local asylum. She appeared to be mad, but that was because she was the only one who could actually see what was going on. So I don’t worry too much, when it comes to the imaginal or symbolic, about whether we might seem to be insane when we give credence to it all. It’s only insane in the context of a world that limits the concept of sanity to anything that emerges only from the physical senses. ‘What we can see with our own eyes’, and all that nonsense, as if that wasn’t itself filtered by the very organs of perception we’re relying on to give us the perfect truth!
Harrumph.