a cuckoo clockmaker
Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Thu, 04 Feb 1999 08:52:24 +0000
Will asks me for something to connect Carl Jung
with Salinger or - even less probable, I'd have thought
- Holden Caulfield. In either case, I'm afraid I'm not
what Laughing Len would call 'yoh menn.'
My introduction to psychiatry was in a Worcestershire
asylum in 1953 where the head guru was a youngish enthusiast
who was among the first advocates of the newly discovered
drug, LSD. He was using it to elicit from a group of
hysterically gullible young women various fantasies
which he demonstrated - to his own satisfaction if no one
else's - as Jungian archetypes.
As his eager apprentice I was soon up to my neck in Shadows,
Mandalas, Animae & - in the case of the more assertive girls -
Animi. For a year or so it was all marvellously stimulating
& I even took a couple of trips myself equipped with tape recorder
& note book to describe at first hand the self-consuming snakes
& so on as they appeared before my eyes.
Soon enough though, it began to dawn on me that the whole
structure was really just a great load of Swiss bollocks. No one
was getting any better & the girls themselves seemed to be
producing whatever ludicrous imaginings they thought might
please the young gentlemen.
Reading the great man's books as an accompaniment to all
this, it seemed to me that some of his practical thoughts on
the psychotherapeutic process had the ring of truth but a most of
the anthropological-alchemical-mystical-typological stuff had
the ring of something much more like schizophrenia.
I grew disillusioned.
Some years later in London, I fell among Freudians. Which was
a bit like leaving the Boy Scouts to join the 7th.Panzers.
It was also,of course, like coming home.
Holden is a Freudian too. All those hot house ambiguities
about his siblings. The repressed, testosterone-fuelled rage.
His obsession with the reaction formation of phonies.
The strangely absent parents.
Not a mandala in sight.
Scottie B.