Wilna van der Walt Practice

Category: Blog

  • Fire-bird

    Fire-bird

    The phoenix or fire-bird is a mythical bird the size of an eagle and graced with certain features of a pheasant. When it sees that its death is drawing near, it builds itself a nest and exposes itself to the rays of the sun until it burns itself to ashes. Another phoenix then arises from the marrow of the bones of the old one. In Egypt it was called the Bennu bird and was associated with the sun god Ra and with Osiris, the Wise Old Man as a representation of the positive father archetype. (1)

    This potentially transformative aspect of fire, as portrayed in the myth of the phoenix, is further demonstrated by the fairy tale, Fitcher’s Bird: an old man disguises himself as a beggar only to abduct one beautiful maiden after another. They all end up locked away, decapitated and hewn to pieces, until the third daughter is cunning enough to trick the old man; she makes her escape by disguising herself as a magical bird, and by burning down his house.

    Inspired by Fitcher’s Bird, Kalsched emphasizes the potentially beneficial influence of symbolical creative work in therapy with traumatized individuals. (2) In the story, the third daughter makes her final escape by ‘becoming a magical bird’. She gets into a barrel of honey and then rolls in feathers, after having cut open a feather-bed. Her act implies total commitment; she acts with ‘her whole body,’ with her whole being.

    By disguising herself she enters a fantasy space, but at the same time, she also exists in reality; she embodies energy from both consciousness and the archetypal world of the unconscious. In this way she creates a living symbol in the form of the magical bird that may bring about change. The symbol is not merely an intellectual fact.

    When she leaves, the house of the old man burns down, and the negative complex is destroyed. This in turn allows for positive masculine energy to enter, perhaps in the form of the Wise Old Man.

    Photo credit: website of Ancient Origins

    References

    1. JE Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, 1971, p. 253
    2. D Kalsched, The Inner World of Trauma, 1996, p. 186 – 200

  • Homecoming

    Homecoming

    The process of individuation draws one into a gradual homecoming. Listen to how Martin Prechtel describes his initial experience in Secrets of The Talking Jaguar, Memoirs from The Living Heart, p. 80 – 83.

    “Coming into the village of Santiago Atitlan as I did that day, after more than a year of roaming on my own, was not like reaching the promised land, but more like the homecoming of a spawning fish, or a migratory bird hatched elsewhere, following its nature, flying hard, not always sure of the way, but arriving at its true indigenous place of origin. I was coming back to a home I’d only glimpsed in my sleep.

    “Some say dreams come from people, from an individual’s personal life, and maybe they do. To others like myself, a dream was simply a bud on the Tree of Life, a small leak from the other world’s story, whose speech made life live. My life was a strange tale whose salient points had been broadcast to me in dreams long before I had to live them out.”

    “What for me seemed overpowering was … the quality of familiarity. Never once did I feel foreign or alien in this wild enormous Tzutujil village. It was a new feeling: after being an outsider my whole life, here I felt like I belonged. Not that I fit in, because I didn’t at first; not because I was welcomed by all, because I was not. But I felt good here, on account of I was actually from here in some way that I didn’t comprehend.”

    “I didn’t come to Atitlan to become a shaman or to study Mayan culture, or to learn how to be a better person, or to get enlightened. I came because I was called there, whether I knew it or not; because the spirits had carved a space for me in the matrix of my destiny and, fishing me out of the womb, had reeled me slowly but surely into this ancient citadel of Southern Quichean Mayans in a time when their own destiny was imperiled. The spirits had a job for me, and I would do my best for them.

    “I knew this place. I had smelled and tasted it hundreds of times as a child, thinking it a place found only in dreams. So when I drifted into Santiago, I recognized my own arrival home, welcoming myself into my own heart…”

    Image credit: Grief and Praise by Martin Prechtel.

  • Synchronicity

    Synchronicity

    Synchronicity refers to two or more events that appear simultaneously, that were born from the same moment in time. It means that they are meaningfully related, although they do not originate from the same cause. (1)  

    I Ching, the ancient Chinese book of wisdom, is based on an acausal system as opposed to the familiar Western system of cause and effect, and centers around the concept of what Jung had named synchronicity or meaningful coincidence.

    Jung described it as “the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state and, in certain cases, vice versa.” (2)

    At Richard Wilhelm’s memorial service in 1930 Jung expressed his gratitude for Wilhelm’s translation of I Ching described it as radiating the simplicity and ‘plantlike’ wisdom of Chinese culture. It emerged, came into being, as if like a light out of thousands of years of dark background ‘horrors.’ (3)

    In Western culture it answers a need, with Christianity having become ‘debilitated.’ It no longer contains us with wisdom. Western culture is tired of rationalism and intellectualism; it “wants to hear truths that broaden rather than restrict, that do not obscure, but enlighten, that do not run off them like water, but penetrate them to the marrow.” But new sensations alone will not help us; we have to “earn the right to it by working on ourselves.” (4)

    Jung wrote a foreword to Wilhelm’s translation of I Ching. He viewed it as a testimony to his individual experience of the book: he asked the oracle for its judgement on Jung’s intention of presenting it to the Western mind. In answer I Ching told him “of its religious significance, of the fact that at present it is unknown or misjudged, of its hope of being restored to a place of honor.” (5)

    I Ching, whose wisdom may be said to center around the principle of Tao, refers to a quest for meaning in life. This has become a collective phenomenon in our time (6).

    Seen from this perspective, I Ching can be a great support to anyone seeking deeper meaningful containment.

    Image credit: Bodhi Tree Leaf Yin Yang artwork from the Royal Thai Art website.

    References:

    1. CG Jung, CW 8 par 849.

    2. CG Jung, CW 8 par 850.

    3, 4, 6. CG Jung, CW 8. Richard Wilhelm: In Memoriam, par 87 – 90.

    5. Foreword by CG Jung from I Ching, The Wilhelm Edition, p. xxviii.

  • An African Tale

    An African Tale

    Seven maidens went down to the river to fetch water. One girl went a little further. While the others were waiting, they decided to play her a trick and hid their bead necklaces in the sand. On her return, the girl trustingly believed her friends when they pretended that they threw it into the pond to see what might happen. So she threw her necklace into the pond. Laughingly they retrieved theirs and went away. In great distress the maiden cried out at the pool, a voice told her to move on and she obeyed.

    At another pool she was told to enter. Without hesitation she jumped into the pool and encountered a one-legged, one-armed old woman. A cruel Dimo (1) kept the old woman enslaved and had devoured her one arm and leg. Deeply touched by her suffering, the girl cleaned her wounds. In turn, the old woman protected her when the Dimo appeared, declaring that he smelled a human and, after he had left, rewarded her richly. On returning to her village the other maidens were jealous of her fortune and thought they could also be lucky. They jumped into the pool, but they were rude to the old woman and mocked her. When the terrible Dimo appeared, she did not protect them… (2)

    A tale of individual seeking and descent leads to encountering one’s own one-sidedness, the wounded old woman, in the depths of one’s being. A trusting, sincere and compassionate approach is naturally rewarded by the archetype itself. But natural resistance to “the other world,” the unconscious, often results in a self-damaging attitude of disrespect. The wounds have to be tended. In another version of the tale, it is cleaned by licking it, like an animal might do: “saliva is symbolically a healing water that we are all born with.” (3)

    The girl wants to retrieve her necklace. “The threaded bead necklace stands for the unifying of diversity… it becomes a cosmic and social symbol of ties and bonds.” (4) Associated with the heart chakra it represents our capacity to relate to our deeper selves and others. An apt symbol of the African concept of Ubuntu, a conscious descent may restore this sense of identity and interconnectedness. (5)

    REFERENCES AND NOTES:

    1. DIMO: is said to be ‘partly man, partly animal, partly spiritual’, a trickster figure. It is widely found in Africa in Swahili and the Niger-Congo basin and in Southern Africa, e.g., in Zulu and Sesotho cultures. From “Tricksters and Trickery in Zulu Folktales” by Noverino Noemio Canonici, 1995; PhD dissertation, University of KZN, SA.

    2. Edith McPherson, 1919. Native Fairy Tales of South Africa, London Harrap, UK. Distributed by Heritage History. “The lost beads” p. 45.

    3. Helen Luke, 1995. The Way of Woman, Double Day Publishing, US, p. 100

    4. JE Cirlot, 2002. A Dictionary of Symbols, Dover Edition, p. 227

    5. UBUNTU: a quality that includes the essential human virtues; compassion and humanity.

  • The Wounded Healer

    The Wounded Healer

    The birth of healing power from the ‘original wound’ that we must address in the therapeutic relationship, belongs to the archetype of the wounded healer. Jung described this archetype as “the mythological truth that the wounded wounder is the agent of healing, and the sufferer that takes away suffering.” (1)

    The myth refers psychologically to the capacity “to be at home in the darkness of suffering and there to find germs of light and recovery with which, as though by enchantment, to bring forth Asclepios, the sun-like healer” (2)   

    Chiron, then, represents ‘the one who is wounded,’ the one who wounds self and others, ‘the wounder’, and ‘the one who suffers’ because of the wounding. (3) Asclepios, often called the Father of Medicine, was said to have been rescued from his mother’s funeral pyre and raised by the centaur Chiron, who taught him the art of healing. (4)

    An archetypal image can manifest in human psychology consciously or unconsciously, but mostly as a mixture of the two, entangled with our wound and presenting us with a problematic situation which we must address consciously, both as therapist and as patient.

    The therapist as the healer has his/her own wound which may be drawn in if it provides ‘hooks’ for the patient’s projections. By each working separately on the problem, the archetype is constellated within the therapeutic space, bringing movement along the path. (5)

    The wound holds a key: it plays an important role in the process of individuation as that which is the source of one’s inner suffering as well as the bringer of healing and transformation, not only to oneself, but also to others, a gift in service of Life. Looking back upon wounding encounters, we might see that it brought us inner growth and a deepening of compassion.

    Von Franz said that, “In seeking for the meaning of your suffering, you seek for the meaning of your life. You are seeking for the greater pattern of your own life, which indicate why the wounded healer is the archetype of the Self – one of its most widespread features – and at the bottom of all healing procedures.” (6)

    It might therefore be helpful to ask yourself: what purpose does my suffering, my difficulty serve?

    References:

    1. CG Jung, Four Archetypes p. 136
    2. ARAS Concordance (wounded healer/TRANSFERENCE-COUNTERTRANSFERENCE): E. Edinger, Mysterium Lectures p. 317
    3. M Reinhart, Chiron and the Healing Journey p. 81.
    4. ARAS Concordance (wounded healer/NIGREDO): E. Edinger, quoting Kerenyi, Anatomy of the Psyche par 0.
    5. ARAS Concordance (wounded healer/SHRINES-AND-ORACLES-OF ANCIENT-GREECE): E. Edinger, Eternal Drama par 0.
    6. ML von Franz, Puer Aeturnus p. 114