Wanting to be wanted

When I was nine, we lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico. My mother, not an easy woman, thought I would never become a desirable catch, as I was too preoccupied with books. Her poking, prodding, and criticism did not work, so she enrolled me in a ballroom dance/etiquette course. As it happened, that same year, the University of New Mexico was mounting a production of Euripides’ “Medea”. They needed two nine-year-olds to play the sons, but it was thought that nine-year-old year old boys were too rowdy to take the discipline to be in a play like that, so they came to the dance class to pick two girls. I was one of them.

 I remember being fitted for the costume, being taught to walk like a boy and to scream like a boy. I did not know what the story was, but it was fun learning those things.

I finally saw the play all the way through the day of the dress rehearsal. I remember standing in the wings watching. The meaning of the play rolled down the aisle like a dark cloud and swallowed me as I realized she kills her sons. In a moment, I understood what role I was playing. I can remember the hair standing up on the back of my neck and the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.  

 I woke up the next day with a fever and by the end of the day, it was clear I had the measles. I missed the whole run of the play.

Fast forward many years to graduate school. Medea continued to fascinate me so I decided to write my dissertation about her. I was struck by how modern her situation seemed. Imagine Medea as a girl, star-struck by the hero, Jason. Her name means cunning or knowing. She is the niece of Circe, granddaughter of Helios, daughter of a king. A powerful woman, a priestess of Hekate. Yet, when she sees Jason, described as good-looking, tall with long blond hair, a Fabio of his day, she becomes infatuated. Jason represents the glory and civilization of Greece, adventure. In order to help him to survive the tasks given him by her father as the price for obtaining the Golden Fleece, she must choose love over duty. In turn, in order to secure her help, Jason swears to marry her. In choosing Jason, Medea breaks the tie to family and home to go with Jason to a land where he is hero and she a barbarian.

Jason wants her, needs her, in order to successfully complete his quest. He is willing to give her what she wants—that feeling of being wanted and a place to hide her power and control. In agreeing to marry Medea, Jason gains everything—his life, the Golden Fleece, his safe return as a hero. In one version of the play, the Nurse raises the important question: “Why must a woman seek a man who seeks his special gold?”. Men with this kind of commitment, more to their quest than to the woman, seem unlikely to match the devotion of a woman like Medea. But she feels wanted, needed and so surely, perhaps she thinks, he must be the one for her.

I hear variations of this story again and again in my office from smart, competent women who spend their days wanting to be wanted and being disappointed time and again. To a degree I lied it myself when I was a young woman. Too often the women seem to see themselves as trophies or dolls on the shelf and convince themselves that whoever chooses them must be the right one, because after all, he is choosing her. And too seldom see themselves as also in position to choose, not merely to wait until being chosen.

Following from Lacan, who asserted that women want to be wanted more than they want to be loved, women too often seek to be desirable rather than to be fully known. Polly Young-Eisendrath explores this “wanting to be wanted” not as the normal outcome of female development but as a problem in her book, Women and Desire: Beyond wanting to be wanted. 

She observes

“The compulsion to be desired and desirable undermines self-direction, self-confidence, and self-determination in women from adolescence through old age, in all our roles, from daughter to mother, from lover to wife, from student to worker or leader, whether or not the affliction is conscious.

Wanting to be wanted is about finding our power in an image rather than in our own actions. We try to appear attractive, nice, good, valid, legitimate, or worthy to someone else, instead of discovering what we actually feel and want for ourselves. In this kind of conscious or unconscious arrangement, other people are expected to provide our own feelings of power, worth, or vitality, at the expense of our authentic development. We then feel resentful, frustrated, and out of control because we have sacrificed our real needs and desires to the arrangements we have made with others. We find ourselves always wanting to be seen in a positive light: the perfect mother, the ideal friend, the seductive lover, the slender or athletic body, the kind neighbor, the competent boss. In place of knowing the truth of who we are and what we want from our lives, we become trapped in images.” (Young-Eisendrath, Women and Desire: Beyond Wanting to Be Wanted, p.3)

Sound familiar?

 

Looking Ahead

That image is of Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and endings. We see he has  two faces in order to look ahead to the future and to look back to the past. New Year’s Dayis the province of Janus, as we look back on the year just past and forward to the new year ahead. 

If you are inclined to make New Year’s resolutions, I am sure you already have a list of things you are vowing today that you want to do or accomplish in the year ahead. You have no doubt done this before and likely will do it again. If you are like me and most people I know, those resolutions tend to fall by the wayside in the twists and turns of daily life and by year’s end, they too often have become something to feel guilty about — the weight not lost, the gym rarely visited, the projects languishing in a corner somewhere.

I stopped making New Year’s resolutions years ago, when I realized that resolving the same things year after year because I had not met what I had resolved the previous year was no accident, it was meaningful. Most of the time the resolutions were about something I thought I ought to do or change in order to become some cultural approved version of being a better person. When my ex-husband and I realized we had never gotten past day 6 of Miss Craig’s 21 Day Shape-up Program, on any of the half dozen or more times we started it, I knew that we never would — because we didn’t want to do it!

So this year I suggest you try something different. Don’t make one of those resolutions. Instead, starting today, try paying attention to what you feel, including what you feel in your body. Give yourself the gift of your attention and loving care. Maybe write in your journal about what you are feeling today — about where you are in your life, about the year just ended, about what you have learned this year. Use the camera in your phone and take a selfie to see yourself today. Take a bubble bath. Or go for a walk. Cuddle with your pet — and/or your partner, your kids. Make a cup of tea and survey the landscape of your life and see what you like and what you don’t. Give to yourself.

Bringing parts together

I used to have a section of this blog devoted to knitting. I am an avid knitter and always have multiple projects in process. Then someone suggested to me that I should focus just on professional material or maybe it was that I was feeling self-conscious. At any rate, I took down the knitting portion.

Then I remembered this quote from Marie Louise von Franz on knitting :

Everybody who has knitted or done weaving or embroidery knows what an agreeable effect this can have, for you can be quiet and lazy and also spin your own thoughts while working. You can relax and follow your fantasy and then get up and say you have done something! Also the work exercises patience…Only those who have done such work know of all the catastrophes which can happen — such as losing a row of stitches just when you are decreasing! It is a very self-educative activity and brings out feminine nature. It is immensely important for women to do such work and not give it up in the modern rush. (The Feminine in Fairy Tales, Spring Publications, 1972, p. 40)

She makes it clear to me that knitting, like painting or writing, has its place in this process of self-discovery that I am so much engaged in, for myself and with my patients.

Knitting, among other things, is one way I understand my work and my life. My office is at home, in the middle of my domestic life. I have a basket of yarn in my office — because I think it is beautiful. I also have there art supplies on the table I use when I attempt to paint.  I used to fantasize having a house that had a big kitchen with a fireplace and I would see my patients there, in front of the fire, sitting at the table and drinking tea. Because for me the kitchen is the place of transformation.  There are things in my professional life that I want to explore more deeply. But those things have grown out of ordinary life — aging, figuring out what it is to be a woman, working at my story, embodiment, dreams all of it.

When I was in my 20’s, in the heydays of second wave feminism, I always felt I had to hide my interest in things domestic. To acknowledge having a domestic life — cooking, knitting and the like — was all but a betrayal of what we women were striving for: to be taken seriously as thinkers and doers and not be relegated only to hearth and home. I don’t think my friends in graduate school then even knew I loved to cook or that I knitted and crocheted and sewed. And when I got married, it was a point of honor that I do half of the work around the house and not a bit more.

But that was then. And in the course of growing older and growing up more, I seem to have lost that need to split my life as I did. Maybe this is the gift of third wave feminism to women like me — that we can bring the parts of our lives together. And in mending the splits in our lives, perhaps we can move toward mending  splits in our husband’s and son’s lives as well.

As Jung says:

Individuation means becoming an “in-dividual,” and, in so far as “individuality” embraces our innermost, last and most incomparable uniqueness, it also implies becoming one’s own self. We could therefore translate individuation as “coming to selfhood” or “self-realization.” (C.G. Jung, CW 7, para. 266)

Awaiting the return of the light

Here in Maine we have just 8 hrs and 50 minutes of daylight today, the shortest day of the year. As I write this, just after 1 o’clock with overcast sky, the light is a little dim. Lights turned on. It’s a good day for candles and knitting or reading or just being cozy as we await the return of the light.

Better to be bad than weak

Some years ago I read Harry Guntrip’s Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations, and the Self. I often think of something he wrote in that book, that many of us would rather be bad than weak. Now that seems paradoxical at first but think about it — it is often more satisfying to believe that we, in our “badness” ,create the behavior in others that bothers us, because that way, if we become good, then they will change too.

If my mother treated me badly because I was bad; if my lover is abusive because I am not good then all I have to do is change, become good and then I will have the mother I wanted, the lover who will cherish me.

But if I have no control over my mother’s behavior or my lover’s abuse, then I have to live with knowing that I cannot change them, that I have to deal with who they are as they are.

To accept that I cannot determine the behavior of others means I must be more aware of my own choices and what drives them. I have to surrender my illusions about my power to control others.

Days of my life

journal page image

I am a journal keeper.

For the last 45 years I have started most days the same way I did this morning

A cup of tea, a cat on my lap, my journal and my pen. I write the date, then any dreams I remember from the night before. Associations to the dream. The maybe just what I hear and see — this morning there was birdsong, and the water in the harbor calm and unruffled by wind. And it is not snowing! My journal is a container for my thoughts and feelings, wishes and hopes, dreams, continuing work in analysis. A reader would not learn much if anything about my outer life or events in the world around me. My journal is very interior.

My Journals:

I am a bit picky about my journals. I want unlined paper so that my handwriting can vary with mood and feeling rather than be constrained by lines. I want the blank book to be attractive so that it signals that it is something important to me. Others I know use spiral notebooks or loose sheets of paper or type on their computer. But for me, I am more inclined to write and maintain my journal keeping practice with the kinds of journals I hav chosen. I always write with a fountain pen. I like changing ink colors, the way the marks made by the pen appear on the paper. There is something tactiley pleasing to me in the combination of fountain pen and good paper. This is just what works for me and says nothing about how others should tend to their own practice.

After 45 years writing this way, even though there have been a few periods of not writing, needless to say I have a lot of filled journals. What on earth do I do with them now and what do I want to happen to them when I die? That is a question I wrestle with a fair amount. Because they are so interior, there really is nothing to inform historians or archivists and I am far too little known for my papers to be of interest. What about my kids, you might ask. As much as they love me, I really can’t see them being particularly interested in what I have written in journals. 

Art Journaling:

I have found something I can do with a few of them. I can re-purpose them as art journals. A bit of matte medium and clear gesso and I can make pages that I can then use. Here is what I have begun –

At the rate that I work in this one, I am unlikely to do much more than complete this volume, much less make a dent in the pile of use volumes I have. In the meantime this feels good. And every morning I start by writing and soon will begin yet another volume.

journal page image
Journal to art journal
Converting a Journal to an art journal
art journaling
A bit of gesso and gel medium and away we go.

Memory and Magritte

I first saw Magritte’s “La Memoir” or “Mnemosyne” on a book jacket 20 or more years ago. She is an arresting image, Memory with a wound to her head. Is it memory bleeding out? Will memory be lost if the wound is not bandaged and the blood flow stopped? Or does she show the wound to the head that any of us has from one or another childhood insult or injury? Does the effort to re-member heal the wound and thus stanch the bleeding? Save the memory? And what about the bell and the leaf — are they bits of memory? Has she forgotten? Did she ever know? Are we all surrounded by artifacts of memory that if we can only see them will allow memory to heal?

With Magritte’s Mnemosyne, we can consider the possibility that the blood is an image, a  memory, memory sticking the colorless face of the woman, the only sign of life we see of her.  As mother of the Muses, Mnemosyne would give birth to spontaneous impulses toward speech, song, art, dance, poetry, and other manifestations rendering the numinous visible and experiential — not just spoken of but enacted, enacted here in the splash of red on her head.

Think about a vivid dream you have had. When you write, it becomes something other than the dream. It becomes a text, an adaptation of the dream, but the dream, consisting of images, cannot be fully and accurately captured in words. The same with memory. The experience remembered is not a record, faithful in every detail. The memory is particular to the rememberer. Even in a family, the same event can and often is recalled differently by parents and children, even by siblings.

Knitting and Memory

An excerpt from my book, The Fat Lady Sings.

I am a knitter. We knitters come in two basic types. The project knitter buys yarn and pattern for a specific project and knits that and only that until it is finished. Process knitters knit to knit. We love to look at, touch, and acquire yarn and usually have several projects going at the same time. The finished project is nice but it is the process, the knitting itself, that is engaging. Sometimes the project is never completed or it is unravelled and the yarn used again for something else. I love the feel of the yarn as it slides through my fingers as I knit. I stop frequently and pull the fabric into shape and touch it and look at it and enjoy the color and shape. Knitting a sock, knit from top to toe with a single thread which is never broken, I marvel at the genius of the first person who figured out how to “turn the heel” and change the sock from a simple tube into something which hugs the form and shape of the human foot. These days I knit a lot of lace, knit with fine thread on small needles with intentional holes, for lace without holes is not lace at all.

Some years ago I dreamed:

I am in my analyst’s office talking with him.  I am knitting as I talk. I’m making a large deep purple shawl, something to wrap myself in to keep me warm.  I see a hole, a place where I made a mistake and I know I will have to take out several inches of work to get to it and fix the error, that a short cut won’t work.  He says this work is like that.

In the dream, I am working with beautiful deep purple yarn. The yarn is deep rich purple, my favorite color. Purple – the color of the vestments of Lent, a color of mourning. Purple, “the red of passion balanced by the blue of reason, or the real by the ideal, or love by wisdom, or earth by heaven, or, psychologically, the union of opposing energies within an individual.”(The Book of Symbols, p.694) The color of royalty. The color of an ancient dye made by the Phoenicians from the sea snail. The color of grapes and lavender and wisteria and iris and violets. Purple is the color of the Crown chakra. “…the highest and most sacred values are represented by purple.”((The Book of Symbols, p.694) 

I had a large quantity of this very yarn for some time, a soft and elegant yarn 100% cashmere, almost unimaginably soft to the touch. Lustrous and rich in feel and color. I had the yarn but couldn’t find the right pattern, couldn’t find what it wanted to be. I would look at it on the shelf with my cones of beautiful yarns and try to feel, to imagine what it should become.  Then I had the dream, a dream about the purple yarn, analysis and my efforts to create something I can wrap myself in, something warm and soft. In the dream, I pause in my knitting to look at the fabric and see, several inches below where I am working, a hole, not a hole belonging to the pattern but a large hole, a hole which distorts the lace. 

I am not a perfectionist with my knitting. When I find an error, I don’t often rip out work I’ve done. I try to find some relatively easy way to fix it, to cover the error so no one will notice. But this hole in the shawl I am making from this yarn is one I cannot ignore or overlook. The knitter’s adage that if a mistake can’t be spotted by a man galloping by on horseback, then it needn’t be repaired just doesn’t apply for this hole. In the dream, I know I will have to rip out several inches of knitting. Many lace knitters use safety lines, a contrasting yarn threaded through the stitches every few inches making ripping back easier. They rip back to the safety line and needn’t fear losing stitches because they will be held by the line. I work without such a line. When I rip back, I must move slowly, stitch by stitch, paying as much, even more attention to the unknitting as I do to the knitting. Slow and painstaking work,

Some time after the dream, a designer who created wonderfully intricate patterns which usually feature a lot of beads, announced a new design, one she called “In Dreams”. And it was to be done in a mystery knit-along, with sections of the pattern made available every two weeks over a span of three months. As soon as I learned of it, I knew this was the project for this yarn. I had no picture to tell me what the final shawl would look like, only that it would be a semi-circle and have many beads. I had to be willing to knit each part as it became available and trust that the finished design would be pleasing to me and would suit my purposes. 

I began. I completed the first section. But the beads were wrong, too large and not the color I wanted. So, I ripped it out and began again. This time a significant error appeared right near the beginning. Ripped it out again. Finally I completed the first clue and began the second. The work goes along without incident until near the end of the clue, when I discover an error. I have to slowly and tediously take out several rows, nearly an inch of work. I must pay careful attention as I come to each beaded stitch lest I lose the beads, and there are nearly 100 of them, tiny beads, in each row in this section. I fix the error and then discover I have made it again, in the same place. Three times I have to unknit that inch of work, three times I have to work not to lose a bead or drop a stitch. Finally, on the fourth attempt I succeed in completing the pattern section. There are five more sections yet to come. And then another large error. I have to rip it out again. This is not smooth going.

I used to knit sweaters, for me, for my children, for my husband. And afghans. Then for a long time I mostly knit socks. These days I am drawn to knitting lace, the more intricate the design, the larger the stole or shawl, the better. What does it mean that I want only to knit designs with deliberate holes in them? Donald Kalsched tells us, “Memory has holes.” In my dream I am knitting a lace shawl as I do in waking life after the dream. In the midst of the intentional holes which shape the pattern of the lace appears a misplaced hole, a mistaken hole. Memory has holes, holes which both shape the pattern and disrupt it, as in my dream.

The word “memory” comes to us from the middle English/Anglo-French word memorie, and from the Latin memoria, derived from memor, which means “mindful.” It comes from an Indo-European root smer– — which in one form refers to grease and fat. How is memory connected to ‘fat’? Think about how difficult it is to get rid of fat. Russell Lockhart writes,  “It sticks. It adheres. It won’t leave. It leaves traces. A memory is what sticks, what adheres in the mind. Memory is the fat of the mind.”(Lockhart,Word as Eggs, p.188)  Related words that share the history of memory include remember, commemorate, memorable, memento, and memorandum. The word mourn also shares its derivations. The same root that gave rise to memory gives rise to mourn. Lockhart continues: “When someone has passed away or slipped away, we mourn. When we are in mourning, we are deeply engaged with the memory of that person. Our mind is full of memories. We can only mourn through memory and with memory. We mourn for what we had and can now have only in memory.” Memory, mourning and fat.

I pick up what I have been knitting and it contains memory. I see what the day was when last I knit on this piece. My hairs get knitted into the fabric as do my cats’ hairs. The daydreams dreamed, the worries worried, the interior dialogues are all there, part of the fabric that I knit. Each piece carries my life knit into it, its fabric also the fabric of my memory. I am knitting lace. I am doing analysis. There I am working on knitting the lace of my life, repairing holes that don’t belong, trying to work out the pattern.

Note: I intended to include a photo of the finished purple shawl. Alas, when I dug it out, I discovered it had been heavily damaged by moths so that it is now filled with many many unwanted holes. All that remains to show its complexity is this shot of one part of the design.

Personal Myth

“I suspected that myth had a meaning which I was sure to miss if I lived outside it in the haze of my own speculations. I was driven to ask myself in all seriousness: “What is the myth you are living?” I found no answer to this question, and had to admit that I was not living with a myth, or even in a myth, but rather in an uncertain cloud of theoretical possibilities which I was beginning to regard with increasing distrust. I did not know that I was living a myth, and even if I had known it, I would not have known what sort of myth was ordering my life without my knowledge. So, in the most natural way, I took it upon myself to get to know “my” myth, and I regarded this as the task of tasks…”  C.G. Jung

 

I return to this subject over and over again, in my personal life and with the people I work with. Your personal myth is the story you have for making sense and meaning of the world. It is the story you are living. Keep in mind that myth is our story about our experiences as a human. It is not something that is false or unreal. Discovering and exploring  the myth you have been living opens the door for editing and changing the story. And in changing the story, you change your life.

Your personal myth might develop from myths you have read and heard — stories of Greek or Roman gods. Or it could be that you find your myth in fairy tales.  Or try writing your own fairy tale — begin with Once upon a time…

Years ago when I was early in my own analysis, I began to write a fairy tale. It was a new experience for me, though I had long kept a journal. I sat down one evening and began to write , starting of course with “Once upon a time in a far away land…”.  I didn’t have a preconceived idea about the story or where it would. I simply let it write itself and when the words stopped coming, I stopped. It was nowhere near finished after that first bit of writing and I didn’t pick it up again until the urge to write more came to me. The process continued like this — write until I had no more to write, stop and out it away, start again whenever the urge stuck again — for seven years. I was tickled by the length of time it took to complete the fairy tale because somehow 7 years felt like it belonged to the realm of such stories. In the years since then I have revisited the fairy tale, made minor revisions, reflected on it. Just this past week I have been with it again, this time contemplating a major revision. 

Here are some ways to get started writing your own myth:

1. Take the lyrics to a song you like — change them  and add lyrics that tell the story of your life’s journey. For example, consider the song “I Would Do Anything For Love” — could that be your story? How would you change the song?

2. Think of a favorite children’s story and put yourself into that story.

As your write, consider what is the story your are writing? How does it end? Is there a spell cast over you? How do you break it? And what do you feel as you write?