An anonymous goodbye

The following is a message I posted to an on-line community of people who used to be involved in a New Age centre here in Flatchester, now sadly defunct. It's a kind of obituary for someone who had a very major influence on the course of my life. I have changed his name and omitted a few other details to preserve the anonymity that characterises this blog. But I hope you will enjoy reading it anyway. Those who know who I mean will know who I mean, and those who don't, don't really need to. I believe the subject of my message would agree with that sentiment if he were still here to read it.

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Hello everyone,

I know that I am not the only one on this list who benefited from sessions with the Jungian therapist John Smith. And I suspect there may be some of you who I don't know who also went to John, and that many of those who didn't will have heard him mentioned more than once.

I learned yesterday that John died a couple of months ago. The news only reached me through a bare mention of his name in the funeral listings in the magazine of our parish church. It was not unexpected -- he was old, and seemed quite physically frail even when I was in therapy with him in the mid-nineties -- but I still found it a bit of a shock. On the other hand it was somehow typical of his unassuming way of presenting himself that he should just appear in a list with several other people, without even the "Rev." before his name.

I had a look on the web for an obituary, and the only one I found was from a newspaper in the city where he was born. It gives details of his family and of the first part of his life. But in doing so, it misses out rather a lot, to say the least. John must have conducted several tens of thousands of therapy sessions over the years, and the extent and depth of his influence will probably never be fully appreciated. He used to say "Flatchester is the size of a teacup", and I think a large fraction of its tea leaves, at least those of a certain cast of mind, must have spent fruitful hours sitting in his (well-appointed) garden shed. I will just share a few memories which I hope will at least exemplify his influence in a fragmentary and highly incomplete way.

I had heard John speak at a couple of meetings before I became his client. The main image I remember from those talks is his "egg" diagram of the psyche, with squiggly lines to show the currents flowing in the unconscious, and a little bubble at the top to represent the conscious mind. He stated with some certainty that 97% of the psyche was unconscious. That figure in fact varied between 95% and 98% in different things he said to me over the years, but I'm sure he was more or less on target. I wish I had asked him how he was able to quantify it so exactly and why it went up and down slightly over time, but the occasion never quite seemed to be right.

At any rate, those talks impressed on me that here was a source of profound wisdom. When within a year of hearing him, my own 97% started to erupt through the other 3% in a way it had never done before, and a certain degree of chaos ensued, I knew who I had to call. I was aware that he saw a lot of people, and because I was worried he wouldn't have a space for me, I remember saying to him on the phone that I thought I would probably only need half a dozen sessions to sort myself out. It was typical of his measured approach that I didn't even hear him suppress a guffaw. He just said "Well, we'll see how we go". Four years later, I was still going to see him, which I'm sure didn't surprise him at all.

Ken Wilber defines psychotherapy as a process of "learning to tell the truth about our insides", and with hindsight I think a radical change of world view and self-view was the main thing I got from John. He really helped me to see and experience the fact that I lived out of two centres, not just one, and that there were multiple forces active within me. It took me a while to realise that whatever I came out with, he would gently try to bring the other side of it out to be looked at too. His favourite image was that of the "committee" around the table -- he must have asked me at least six times "did I mention this to you before?". The table had the ego at one end, various archetypal forces down both sides and the mysterious half-glimpsed figure of the Self at the far end. Making decisions should be a process of ensuring all voices are heard and really feel heard. And then eventually you just have to act. As someone who is a prime case of "I used to think I was indecisive, but now I'm not so sure", that was a very helpful model as I changed just about everything in my own life at the time -- I still supported the same football team by the time I'd finished, but that was about it.

Another of John's refrains was that we are all "fallen, finite, fallible fucked-up sods", a phrase which I think you would probably have to hear in his soft-spoken mid-Atlantic accent to fully appreciate. That thoroughly Christian insight seemed to me to be the source of his humility. He certainly applied it to himself, and I think it was also at the root of the gentle and respectful way he treated his clients. He never played any of the power games that many therapists are trained to indulge in. It was always entirely up to me what we talked about, how long I continued in therapy and, within the constraints of his diary, how often and when I came to see him. He was even very relaxed about my indulging in other kinds of therapeutic work while I was in therapy with him, not imagining he could necessarily offer me everything I needed. The only time he ever got really cross with me was when I unthinkingly referred to something as "just a symbol". You should never use that phrase within earshot of a committed Jungian, and I don't think it's ever passed my lips in conversation since.

The money side of things was always handled very simply. He gave his clients a two-line bill every month, created using an ancient typewriter for years after everyone else had switched to word processors, and never seemed to worry if I forgot my cheque book several times in a row. The typewriter also creaked into action on one occasion when I asked him to write me a reference for a counselling course I was applying to, and he insisted not only on showing it to me before he sent it off but on my being happy with what it said.

There is more I could say, but I won't, either because it's too personal to me or because it would break someone else's confidentiality. Suffice it to say that John is my model for the last decades of the human lifespan. If I could live my life with anything like his depth and integrity and be used to help even a fraction of the number of people that he helped, I believe I would have fulfilled my calling.