Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

Kes insisted I use that (highly misleading) title, just because I happened to mention that I've been sitting in front of the computer in my nightgown all day, taking advantage of the fact that, until classes start up again next week, I don't actually HAVE to go anywhere or be seen by anyone, especially on a gray and gloomy day like today. But the little gray cells are working hard, never fear. This is me being productive. Seriously. No, REALLY.

I've been thinking about a lot of different things, like the weirdness of family solidarity (in BtVS and real life), and the different notions of spiritual and physical wellness over the past 80 years (I'm not that old! -- I just read a lot of dead authors, and comments from Jonesie and Kes on my last LJ entry had me dusting off the Jung), and how odd it is to finally see a movie in which I find Keanu Reeves attractive ("Something's Gotta Give").

Watching "The Yoko Factor" and "Primeval" (BtVS 4.20 and 4.21) for the umpteenth time this morning on FX (ostensibly to keep myself company over breakfast, but even I can't drag out my cereal and coffee THAT long -- the second hour is pure laziness, or "time to digest", if you prefer), I found myself thinking about my relationship with my sister earlier in our lives. I think those painful scenes from the end of "Yoko" with Buffy, Giles, Willow, and Xander ripping up at each other, while Anya and Tara hide in Giles' bathroom and try to distract themselves by discussing the decor, are just too familiar for comfort. Sometimes I was Tara in the bathroom trying not to hear the fighting, and sometimes I was Buffy or one of the others (not Giles, though -- if I'd started drinking while I still lived at home, I'd have had even more problems to deal with). Sooner or later, it seemed, family 'togetherness' invariably turned into family 'verbally-tearing-each-other-apart' time. ("Gasoline, meet my friend, Lighted Match.") However, angry as I often got at my father, or even my mother, or little brother, nobody could get under my skin and make me forget myself like my younger sister. She pushed my buttons like nobody else could, and most of the time it seemed that we each GENUINELY wished the other non-existent (as in never born, rather than dying in a terrible, highly improbable and untraceable accident, . . . mostly). And though the reconciliation experienced by the Scoobies in "Primeval" (after Buffy begins to suspect Spike's role in stirring up those underlying tensions) at first seems a little too facile (being pulled together by opposition to common enemies, rather than resolving their real conflicts), there's something about that "joining" spell they do in the Initiative, to combine all their differing strengths temporarily with Buffy's, that I gotta love.

It reminds me a bit of all those times on the schoolbus when, much as I might want to take a swing at my sister myself, if anybody else started to pick on her, I was right there, telling them to "Get ready for a world of pain!" Of course, the rest of that speech went more along the lines of, "'Cause my little sister's gonna kick your ass! After all, she can beat ME up, and I'm a lot bigger than you are. So just whaddya think she's gonna do to YOU?" (I just realized why that sounds so familiar: Cordelia scaring off the surviving Gorch brother in the Homecoming queen episode.)

All joking aside, though, maybe it IS the pulling together and standing by each other in the crunch time that really matters, and not whether or not all the underlying psychological and interpersonal issues get completely aired and processed in the group -- an unrealistic expectation of mine, based perhaps on too many years of STUDYING psychology without ever having the guts or gall to try to counsel anyone myself. I tend to look for some perfect, complete understanding to be achieved, rather than realizing that between "being completely known" and the "Good Will Hunting" band-aid of just repeating, "It's not your fault," there is a whole lot of middle ground where people achieve partial understanding and manage to be there for one another when it really counts.

[As a side note, and a possible testimonial to the therapeutic effects of fandom, let me say that my sister and I have actually grown quite close and fond of each other in the last five years, ever since we started exchanging long e-mails discussing the latest episode of "Buffy" or "Angel" or some other genre TV show or movie. I guess we just needed some combination of distance, maturity, and, most of all, common ground that didn't involve re-hashing our miserable family history. As long as we shared only our common sense of deprivation and resentment, we had little hope for meaningful communication.]


Comments from Jonesie and Kes, responding to my somewhat disjointed maundering about mythos and ethos and the possible significance of the popular craving for epic SF and fantasy dramas, reminded me of something I'd looked at when writing a Jungian interpretation of the movie "Enchanted April" some years ago. It may have some relevance for any ongoing discussion (maybe). Since most of what follows is excerpted and slapped together from different parts of a 25-page paper, please excuse the rough transitions or seeming non sequiturs.

In "The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man [sic -- none of these guys use anything remotely resembling inclusive language, so I apologize in advance for them]," Carl Jung wrote of 1920's Europe that the "revolution in our conscious outlook, brought about by the catastrophic results of the World War, shows itself in our inner life by the shattering of our faith in ourselves and our own worth." (Jung, C.G., THE PORTABLE JUNG, ed. by Joseph Campbell, trans. R.F.C. Hull. New York: Penguin Books, 1976; p.464) Therefore, a need exists which requires new ways of attending to the soul, Jung declares: "Whenever there exists some external form, be it an ideal or a ritual, by which all the yearnings and hopes of the soul are adequately expressed -- as for instance in a living religion -- then we may say that the psyche is outside and that there is no psychic problem, just as there is then no unconscious in our sense of the word." "But today we can no longer get along unless we pay attention to the psyche." (Ibid., pp. 461-462)

Writing in 1980, Jungian scholar Harold Schechter is willing to go even further in stating that traditional articles of faith are in shards and completely unequal to the task of containing and expressing the needs of the human soul. Speaking of the religious qualities of the archetypes, he writes: "To traditional man, this power, through the mechanism of projection, was experienced as emanating from a divine force outside himself -- from God. For modern man, however, God is dead and the great religious symbols of the West have lost their mana. . . . According to Jungian psychology, then, the primary -- indeed, critical -- goal of modern man must be to rediscover the gods within, to integrate his alienated ego with the transpersonal powers of the deep unconscious." (Schechter, Harold, THE NEW GODS: PSYCHE AND SYMBOL IN POPULAR ART. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1980; p. 11) The means to accomplish this goal is the process of individuation, according to Jungian theorists. But that process is not all joy, we are warned.

This is the picture Jung draws for us of the beginning of our discovery of our own souls: "...No wonder that unearthing the psyche is like undertaking a full-scale drainage operation. Only a great idealist like Freud could devote a lifetime to such unclean work. It was not he who caused the bad smell, but all of us -- we who think ourselves so clean and decent from sheer ignorance and the grossest self-deception. Thus our psychology, the acquaintance with our own souls, begins in every respect from the most repulsive end, that is to say with all those things which we do not wish to see." (Portable Jung, p. 474)

Compare Jung's sewer analogy from the 1920's with these comments on the state of our faith and mental health made by comedian/social critic Dennis Miller on his regular HBO television show, March 29, 1996: "In an age where science has triumphed over religion, psychotherapists have become our shamans, our exorcists, and parent-confessors. They are privy to our most intimate secrets, things we can't or won't tell lovers, families, or spouses. And in exchange for performing the distasteful task of rummaging through the rancid, cobwebbed, appallingly personal contents of our cranial dumpsters and tilting quixotically at the windmills of our minds, they charge us prices that are steeper than the heels on the Artist-Formerly-Known-As-Prince's wedding pumps." (Sorry -- I love a good rant and couldn't resist keeping this one around.)

So, briefly ('cause I just realized I'm missing "Tru Calling," which I usually tape), in his essay on "The Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry," Jung makes one of his core arguments about the work of the artist in any time.

"Therein lies the social significance of art: it is constantly at work, educating the spirit of the age, conjuring up the forms in which the age is most lacking. The unsatisfied yearning of the artist reaches back to the primordial image in the unconscious which is best fitted to compensate the inadequacy and one-sidedness of the present." (Ibid., p. 321)

But what is the lack or unsatisfied yearning of our current age? What does the artist need to provide in order to restore the balance, to strive for a unity of body and spirit? Jung describes the spirit of the 1920's as including "a rediscovery of the body after its long subjection to the spirit." It is the body which has been getting the short end of the stick, until recently, and both it and the unconscious need to be given some attention, Jung writes:

". . . if we can reconcile ourselves to the mysterious truth that the spirit is the life of the body seen from within, and the body the outward manifestation of the life of the spirit -- the two being really one -- then we can understand why the striving to transcend the present level of consciousness through acceptance of the unconscious must give the body its due, and why recognition of the body cannot tolerate a philosophy that denies it in the name of the spirit." (Ibid., pp. 478-479)

This is not, I feel, the pressing need of the 21st century, at least not to the extent Jung describes. Rather than a long subjection of the body to the spirit, it might be said that we are on the return swing of the pendulum, responding to decades of emphasis on the body as the definition of humanity and the spirit as a somewhat old-fashioned and unscientific notion that no one needs to worry about. That might be the need to which the artist of the present age unconsciously or consciously responds, whether in literature, art, music, or film.


No more time, so let me just say, "Something's Gotta Give" is VERY funny and entertaining, and not just because Keanu Reeves is so attractive to me when he's being sweet and seductive to a woman more than ten years my senior! But that sure didn't hurt the film any, in my opinion. I never really felt drawn to him or attracted to him in other roles he's played (maybe because he always seemed way too young, or else to be taking himself way too seriously), but now I can see some of his charm. Nice!