While I was working on material for my study groups on Encountering the Imaginal in Everyday Life, I came across this bit from my dissertation. It feels important to share.

Throughout most of my life—actually, until the last ten years or so—I felt very much alone in the world, unable to form deep relationships with anyone. It’s still something I struggle with at times, but so much has changed, and in a very positive direction.

This is what I wrote almost a decade ago:

Engagement with others, with community, is a requirement for the soul and for the process of individuation. Jung (1921/1971) said, “As the individual is not just a single, separate being, but by his very existence presupposes a collective relationship, it follows that the process of individuation must lead to more intense and broader collective relationships and not to isolation” (p. 448). Hillman (1972) says that

psychological development stops in isolation; it seems unable to forego the context of other souls…. Soul-making would seem to have a Dionysian hole through which the individual soul is drawn into a communal “madness” …. This leakage … between souls dissolves paranoid isolation and seems required by the soul in contradistinction to the spirit, which proceeds, as Plotinus said, from the alone to the alone…. Psychology is created within the vale of living intimacy. (pp. 26-27)

My engagement with community—the Jung Society, the dance community, the horse owners at the barn, my students, and even Facebook—has been tremendously healing for me. A recent journal entry reads,

Somehow, through this experience, I’m being called upon to rebuild myself. And now, as I realize this, I find a quote from Judith Herman (Robb, 2006):

Recovery can take place only within the context of relationships; it cannot occur in isolation. In her renewed connection with other people, the survivor re-creates the psychological faculties that were damaged or deformed by the traumatic experience. These faculties include the basic capacities for trust, autonomy, initiative, competence, identity, and intimacy. (p. 341)

Whatever trauma I encountered in my childhood—damaging experiences in the hospital, a difficult relationship with my father, the violence of cultural repression—are slowly being healed through my relationships with a community of friends.

Hillman, J. (1972). The myth of analysis: Three essays in archetypal psychology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Jung, C. G. (1971). Psychological types. In R. F. C. Hull (Trans.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 6). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1921)

Robb, C. (2006). This changes everything: The relational revolution in psychology. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.