Chapter 41
“The path into the light seems dark,
the path forward seems to go back,
the direct path seems long….”
~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.
Psychoanalysis, it has been said, is expensive, inconclusive, and interminable. In contrast to modern therapeutic approaches like Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy that tend to focus more on problem solving—on the future—psychoanalysis presents as a long, leisurely walkabout through the wilds of the psyche, a spelunking sojourn through the vast caverns of one’s past. Who has the time these days?
But however inefficient this continental method may sound to American ears, it had a practical purpose: what Freud called “regression in service of the ego.” The logic is that the unconscious is governed by its own peculiar logic; it “seems dark,” but its threshold is a “path into the light.” The gamble is that by treating with the monsters dwelling in the darkness of the psyche, we will unsnarl the knots in the net that binds us back up top; and that without this descent and return, all our efforts on the surface will only ensnare us more tightly in a matrix of our own making. In Song of Myself, Walt Whitman wrote, “out of the dimness, opposite equals advance.” Or as development psychologist Robert Kegan likes to put it, “Either we feast on our shadows, or starve on our egos.”
Sometimes, the only way forward is downward.
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