Hidden Things: Reflections on the 2011 Summer Dream Conference

The Haden Institute’s summer dream conference at Kanuga , North Carolina  is a wonderful experience, for it transports me out of my normal round of activities. I always make notes on the various lectures and workshops intending to read them later, but have rarely done so. This year, however, my recent retirement offered me the opportunity to re-read my notes a few days after returning home.

Getting caught up with the news

Also, after getting back, I had to catch up with events that had happened while I was away. Dominating the news coverage in Canada, in the aftermath of the Boston Bruins’ winning the Stanley Cup and the Vancouver Canucks’ humiliating at-home loss, was the riot in Vancouver. The chief of police and the mayor both opined that it was the work of a small number of anarchists and criminals from elsewhere who had come deliberately to ruin the expected celebrations. Vancouverites were seen as just too nice to riot.

However, as the story unfolded (especially on Facebook), the faces of those who were to blame turned out mostly to be the ordinary children of middle class parents living in and around Vancouver. This unpleasant discovery led to questioning in the media about why these seemingly normal, well-brought up kids acted the way they did. 

Unexpected sub-text

I was curious too, and as I read my conference notes, I noticed a sub-text, which was given vitality in my imagination because of the Vancouver riots. Mind you, no one addressed this issue directly during the conference, but hindsight showed it lurked about the fringes — of my unconscious, at any rate.

Jeremy Taylor

So imagine my surprise when after seeing the image of the riots, I read the following words in my notes on Jeremy Taylor’s lecture: “What do we do with unregenerative archetypal male energy?” I took this to mean a type of male energy that is self-referential, entitled, potentially destructive and consequently incapable of creating and supporting life.

 Joyce Rockwood Hudson

Then I read my notes on Joyce Rockwood Hudson’s presentation on the masculine in which she described John as the warrior Beatle with his “tough, brazen, and hard masculine energy.” I reflected that perhaps this one-sided aspect of masculine wholeness was evidenced in the mayhem in Vancouver. Not being balanced by the other three parts of the masculine, the misplaced warrior energy of the young hockey fans led to the vandalism and looting.

In He, Robert Johnson calls this behaviour red-knighting: lots of energy but very little regenerative purpose, or as Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz call it, in The Grail Legend, “a streak of ruthless masculinity which will entangle him (Perceval, the young knight-in-training) in difficulties.” The Red Knight symbolizes “emotion and barbaric thoughtlessness” which are components of Perceval’s shadow and similar to the covetous negative energy released by the young people in the crowd in Vancouver.

Murray Stein

Then, in re-reading my notes on Murray Stein’s presentation about individuation and the Bible, I found another example of ruthless masculine energy: In the creation myth in Genesis, Yahweh “defeats the amorphous dragon-like Mother figure who rules the water, Tiamat.” Murray added that to establish ego consciousness, “the unconscious had to be defeated.”

I asked myself why defeated? Were there not other ways to relate to the unconscious and its chaos: Differentiation of its contents might reveal Wisdom, who much later in the Biblical account says she was beside Yahweh during creation.

Yahweh is shown to resemble other jealous primitive Gods — like Kronos who ate his own offspring. Because of his anger at humankind’s disobedience, Yahweh decides to bring on the flood to drown his creation. In my imagination, this is God’s shadow side, evidence of his inability to properly relate to his feminine relational side, something he realizes just in time before he annihilates what he so carefully created.

Often our lives stick at this point in individuation, and we find it hard to move forward to a better understanding of and relationship to what we do not know or want to know about ourselves. We just want to destroy what will not obey us: In Vancouver, the Canucks were supposed to win, not lose. Therefore, it was accounted justifiable to take to the streets in anger and to do so in the chaos of a crowd.

 Jean Orost

Referring to Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power, Halifax Chronicle Herald reporter Stephen Maher wrote that people in crowds struggle violently to avoid dispersal and “seek discharge, often by smashing windows and doors, symbols of boundaries that hem us in.” Jean Orost’s workshop on the door provided insight on the various levels of symbolism involving doors, including the idea of exclusion, but also the concept of crossing over the threshold to transformation, a theme which arose in Kirk Webb’s workshop on fairy tales.

 Kirk Webb

Jack and the Beanstalk tells about the transformation of a boy who, in various versions, is described initially as either lazy or inexperienced or as a failure at work in the world beyond his mother’s house. A giant living in the sky has stolen his birthright, and Jack climbs the ladder-like bean stalk beyond the clouds to get it back. Kirk alluded to the Biblical story about another thief and a ladder, that of Jacob, who supplanted his brother Esau to inherit from his father (Genesis: 27 and 28).

Kirk said, “We often become ‘murderers’ when we can’t control others and get from them what we think we deserve.” This observation about Esau echoes the crowd’s emotions in Vancouver after the prize they felt their team deserved was taken from them. They felt they could, as it were, murder their normal civil relations with their fellow citizens by smashing windows, stealing merchandise and setting cars on fire.

To apply the projective dream technique to this fairy tale, “If it were my fairy tale,” Jack, who is a bit of a delinquent, is actually on a quest to destroy the complex he has around the kind of father who would “grind his bones to make my bread.” Growing up fatherless, Jack is possessed by a highly inflated and negative idea of what a father is. His imagined father has grown to giant-like proportions of greed and blood thirstiness, perhaps to over-compensate for Jack’s lack of success in launching his own life. To properly enter his own life, Jack needs to slay this complex and be in a better relationship not only to his masculine side but also to his feminine.

In one version of the tale’s ending, Jack asks his mother for the axe (of discernment, perhaps), but significantly, he asks her to stand aside while he wields it to chop down the beanstalk and cause the giant’s death. He then can live happily with the mother side of his nature (he’ll no longer feel nagged or pitied by her) and in some versions, he marries a princess. He will also be able to connect with the memory and the wealth of his real father, who was apparently in many versions, a true knight full of generosity and good will to others. Jack won’t be trashing downtown Vancouver when his team loses, in other words.

Or as Jeremy also said, “We must show up for our lives and not put off the encounter with unsatisfactory relationships in our lives, holding back for a theoretical ‘later’.” This encounter involves what we are unconscious of, what we might prefer to have hidden from us in our shadow, whether it is our personal shadow or the collective’s. Otherwise, riots will continue to boil up seemingly out of nowhere – both in our inward and personal lives and in society at large.