Over time, the analytical practices that Helen and I established began to grow and prosper, and I became increasingly aware that I needed additional training, though I wasn’t sure where to get what I needed. The C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich continued to evolve over the years and add to its requirements, but Dr. Jung himself had insisted that I not join any groups and that I would be better served by apprenticing myself to a master. So I began thinking about who I might seek out. Helen immediately suggested her former analyst in London, a woman named Toni Sussman. I trusted Helen’s opinion, but once again my fate was decided not by a rational, linear decision-making process, but by a slender thread. The final decision came from a dream, which presented itself to me as follows:
I am diving into a pool of water. I love being in the water, and I am swimming around with great ease and pleasure, coming to the surface every now and then to refresh my lungs with air. In my enjoyment, I decide to dive deep down below the surface, and I propel myself so far that I can feel the bottom of the ocean. This amazes me, but in the same instant I realize that I have gone down too far. I realized that there is not enough oxygen in my lungs to allow me to get safely back to the surface. I am in a terrible panic, fearful of drowning, and then I wake up.
This dream convinced me that I should not wait any longer to pursue my training or I would soon be getting myself into real trouble. That very day I began to make arrangements to travel to London. It is no easy matter to leave a practice for four months, but even that worked out easily. Of course, I had a warm recommendation from Helen, so after an exchange of letters with Toni Sussman, the plans were set. Once again, when you are on the right path, doors begin to open that you could never anticipate. I had planned to stay in a boardinghouse after arriving in London, and then suddenly a friend of Helen’s wrote to say that I could stay in her guest room, use her car, and even avail myself of her housekeeper during my stay. All the pieces fell into place so quickly and painlessly that it seemed clear to me that fate was once again at work.
So, in the spring of 1954, at the age of thirty-three, I found another ship passage across the Atlantic, a much more stable crossing than the preceding one, and presented myself at the home of Dame Evelyn Sharp on Sloan Square in London. Dame Evelyn occupied the highest position a woman had ever held at that time in the British government, and I was a bit intimidated by her. She had the feminine equivalent of the title Sir and later loved to tell me of the time she had stood before the king as the only woman to be knighted in that official ceremony. Each of the men who were to become knights had been equipped with a small hook on their lapels on which the king could hang the insignia of the order of knighthood. But no one had known what to do with Dame Evelyn in her formal gown. The King came up to her during the grand ceremony and whispered, “What the hell am I to do with this thing?”
“I don’t know, Your Majesty, but you could just put it in my hand,” replied Dame Evelyn. This the king did, and the greatest honor that England can bestow was conveyed.
Each morning, Dame Evelyn and I would breakfast together. She was so different in character from me that we were both often at a loss for words, so we would talk about the weather or current events.
In London I had four months of free time to devote to my studies, which centered around an analytical hour each day, including Sundays, with Toni. She had sent me directions to her flat that were impossible to forget—I told the taxi driver to go to 34 Baker Street, the famous address of Sherlock Holmes. Sure enough, when I arrived, I found a placard on the wall honoring the famous detective of Scotland Yard, and right across the street was the study of Toni Sussman.
It was Toni’s custom that the first meeting with a trainee or a patient should be brief and formal. It was designed simply for the two personalities to sense each other. She felt strongly that you shouldn’t talk much but simply be in each other’s presence at the first meeting.
It was a positive shock to meet her. It was instantly a meeting of opposites, masculine and feminine, tall and short, young and old, America and Europe, the new world and the old. She was imperial looking, with a regal bearing and formal, though not unfriendly, face. She welcomed me with a proper British greeting, we exchanged a few pleasantries, and our conversation seemed to end before it had even begun. Soon she was showing me to the door and telling me to return at 10 A.M. the following morning.
Toni’s father was a Hasidic Jew from Spain and her mother a Swedish gentile. Somehow out of this mix Toni had emerged as an ardent Roman Catholic. She and her husband, an eye surgeon, had escaped from Berlin just as the Nazis were coming to power. Like so many people, they had given up everything and had left Germany with scarcely more than the clothes on their backs. The couple had settled in London, but her husband became ill within a few months of their arrival, dying shortly thereafter. Toni had to find a way to make a living, but despite her training with Dr. Jung she soon learned that the analytical community in London would have nothing to do with her. It was operated as a private club, and Toni was perceived as an intruder. At least that is how she told the story. I suspect that she didn’t help matters along with her aristocratic personality. Toni did not suffer fools gladly and was quick to say whatever came to her mind.
On the morning following our first meeting, I returned to Baker Street and took a seat in Toni’s office. She looked across her desk at me and informed me that we would meet for one hour each day, seven days a week. I wondered to myself what we would find to talk about with a full hour every day. I was certain that my simple life would be analyzed within a few days. It turned out, however, that seven days a week was scarcely enough to process all that came out of me.
Once the nature of our therapeutic contract was defined, Toni looked directly into my eyes and said, “Well, Robert, I presume you are here because you mean business. You have come a third of the way around the world to work with me. So, let’s begin. Whom do you love?”
Her manner was so direct and her presence so intense that I was immediately scared out of my wits by this tiny woman. I sat there like an idiot for nearly a full minute. The silence became heavier and heavier, but I had no idea what to say and she would not toss me a life preserver.
“I am waiting. It’s really a simple question. Whom do you love?”
I couldn’t think of a phony answer, and so I began to pour out my heart’s sorrow, recounting all the loneliness of my life, all the failed attempts at friendship and relationship and community. I said that certainly Helen and I had a special relationship. I was literally sobbing through an unending stream of torment and sorrow.
Toni listened intently, waiting for a pause in my lamentations, and when at last I stopped for breath she replied, “Well, good. Now we have something to work with.” And off we went.
Effective analysis is a curious blend of passivity on the part of the analyst coupled with guidance and challenge. Toni was an expert. She never overwhelmed me but was a master at probing into vague places in my consciousness and demanding clarity. She gave me homework assignments. One day she told me to go home and draw my mandala. A mandala is a diagram of the human soul as taught by the Hindu religion; essentially it is a nonverbal way of defining one’s character. Toni stressed that it was extremely valuable for a person to draw a mandala and to learn from this about the interior dimensions of his or her personality. That seemed simple enough, and I assumed that I would bring it back the next day, but this assignment began a process that lasted more than a month. I worked and worked on it. I would bring it to her each day, and we would discuss the mandala’s evolution. The outward form stayed essentially the same, but I couldn’t decide what to put into the circular shape, especially at the very center.
I still have that mandala. It is a very slender, starlike figure with long rays emanating out from the center. Toni told me it was the most extroverted mandala she had ever seen, which totally confused me because I have always been an inward, introverted person. Her comment simply didn’t fit. But she insisted that the mandala revealed that I was meant to reach out in the world to a great extent. Within two decades, her prediction would come true, though there was much work to do before I could maintain my essential introversion while lending myself to the world of lectures and books. It is no small task to be a highly introverted person in an American setting and in a public position. I felt as if I were required to square the circle, a medieval preoccupation, in bringing these two elements into some kind of harmony.
It’s difficult to describe what goes on in an analysis without making an intense process sound trivial. In a way it is a love affair, without anything personal going on between the two parties. When the analytic vessel is properly constructed, it provides a safety, openness, honesty, and directness that one rarely experiences in life. In my analysis with Toni I could bring up any daily experience, every fear and hope, and there was no need to be tactful or on guard. I trusted her completely, an experience not often available in our power-dominated world. This gift of safety is one of the rarest treasures anyone can give to another. There was nothing I had to do to impress her or to earn her unconditional support and positive regard.
As the therapeutic experience proceeded, I was drawn into its inner intensity in inexplicable ways. I would leave the sessions and make the rounds of London’s churches. On some days I would light vigil candles. Other days I would meditate in silence. Mostly I would just walk and observe. Toni understood that analysis can be its own kind of mass, a religious event of the highest order. She also taught me that it is important to store up energy during major life transitions. People rarely store up energy; almost everyone today has their energy mortgaged way into the future. I nurtured myself, trying not to make any major decisions and allowing my unconscious to wander wherever and however it would.
One day I was talking with Toni Sussman and feeling terribly discouraged. I told her that I didn’t know how to become a success. Although my analytical practice in Los Angeles had been growing before I left, felt incompetent about turning it into a self-supporting profession upon my return, and I had no sense of how to ingratiate the right people so as to climb up in the ranks of my profession. In my self-pity I was on the verge of tears. Toni, who was often quite sharp and authoritative, responded with great gentleness on this occasion. “Robert,” she said, “when you go home all you need to do is leave the door open a crack, and the people who belong to you will come.” I believed in her and trusted her advice. That is exactly what I did, and it worked out just as she predicted.
In addition to conducting individual training analysis, Toni also led a group one evening each week. I joined the group, and at first no one knew what to make of the quiet young American. I felt a sense of inferiority, but very early on Toni made a show of presenting to me a certificate. Dr. Jung had authorized her to train analysts in his name and had given her special certificates to recognize the completion of training. These were her most prized possessions, as they were among only a few items that she had managed to smuggle out of Germany. She wrote out a certificate with my name on it and declared to the group that I was from that day forward a Jungian analyst. I was speechless and could not stop a flow of tears. I then felt that I deserved to be among the others in Toni’s group. I still have that certificate in a safe deposit box, and it is among my most prized possessions.
Toni was an excitable and passionate person. When inspiration struck her, she would rise to the full height of her four feet, eleven inches and make some pronouncement. I still recall one time when I brought her a dream. I told the dream, and she leaped to her feet.
“Now I see. It is absolutely clear,” Toni declared. “It is your job during this lifetime to reorganize the Catholic Church. You simply must follow through and carry out the will of God.”
I sat there wondering what to do with such a grand statement.
Toni was in a rush of intensity. Before I could object, she reached for her telephone and called up a friend of hers who was a powerful member of the Catholic Church. It was the abbot of Prinknash, the second largest Benedictine house in the world.
“I am sitting here with a very gifted young man who has had a vision from God,” she said with absolute conviction. “Well, I believe it is a revelation for the church and that you may be fortunate enough to participate in it.”
I squirmed in my chair. I would have laughed, except I knew that she was deadly serious.
“Yes, we can be there tomorrow so that you can meet him. Yes, we will discuss this completely.” The matter was settled. Toni dismissed me with a wave of the hand and a pronouncement that the next day we were bound for Gloucester, the town nearest the abbey.
My sleep that night was full of promise.
During our drive from London to Gloucester the following morning, Toni explained that she had been the prime mover in setting up a lay community in affiliation with the Prinknash Abbey. It was organized much like a commune. It began with Toni placing a small, two-shilling advertisement in the Gloucester newspaper. The ad read: “Worthy Catholic cause needs 10,000 pound donation.” An elderly woman had answered the ad and subsequently donated 10,000 pounds, allowing Toni to buy a farm next to the abbey and to establish her community in a delightful pastoral setting. Several of the spiritual seekers were former communists who Toni had single-handedly converted to the Catholic Church. I had personally witnessed her powers of persuasion, and though the tale seemed preposterous I thought that if anyone was capable of turning communists into Catholics, it was Toni.
When we pulled up to the farm, the head man from the commune was waiting in the yard to greet us. In the midst of our mutual introductions, Toni startled everyone.
“This is Robert, and he is your new leader. He will be taking over now.” She said it matter-of-factly, like one might comment on the road conditions or the weather.
Toni then went on to say that I would be conducting an experimental program that was certainly destined to revolutionize the church and bring it into a new era.
“Soon he will be setting up psychotherapeutic communities next to abbeys all across the world. It will quickly become the Catholic solution to dealing with the ills of the modern world,” Toni said.
I gulped hard and smiled sheepishly at the head man. As he stood there silently, I could see that he was as astonished at this outburst from Toni as I was.
In a swirl, Toni led us into the community house. My thoughts were racing. I was thrilled at the prospect of joining a community. It was what I had been searching for all my life, and here I would have therapeutic and monastic aspects of life all rolled up into one neat package. Over a pot of tea I learned that the community lived in substantial poverty, by choice as much as necessity. As I looked about, I could see one middle-aged woman who never seemed to smile and was dressed much like a scarecrow. Everyone at the abbey was very proud of their poverty and showed it off. Already, cracks were beginning to show in my ideal vision.
THAT NIGHT, THE ABBOT CAME for a special dinner and sat between Toni and me. Toni had told me to kneel and kiss his ring upon his arrival.
“Whatever you do, do not tell him that you’re not a Catholic,” Toni insisted.
It seemed to be implied that eventually I would see the light and join the Catholic Church, but in the meantime I was to at least keep up appearances. After dinner we walked down the road to visit the adjoining abbey.
The abbey had approximately one hundred and fifty monks. It was a large institution that had survived the Reformation in England and had changed little over five centuries. We were given a brief tour. In the chapel the seats were made of beautifully carved oak constructed in such a manner that they folded down but could not be made level. Their natural resting place was at a forty-five degree angle. Monks were not allowed to sleep much in the early days, and the fear was that a flat seat would put them immediately to sleep. After our tour, we were invited to join the monks for a humble dinner.
Toni’s enthusiasm had already convinced the old abbot that this idea of an experimental therapeutic community was foretold in scripture. While Toni and the abbot sat and talked, I excused myself on the pretext of exploring the abbey a bit more.
As I walked through the old stone building, I was thinking that my fondest dreams had come true. How many hundreds of times had I fantasized that I might do analytical work in a monastic setting with the power of the church to back up the process? I always believed that analysis, at its best, was really a new statement of the old teachings of the church, and I longed to see the arcane art returned to its source. After all, isn’t psychology the study of the soul? And is this not the province of the church? But still something else in me was squirming. Red lights were flashing in my head.
As I continued my walk, I wandered back to the community house. The old scarecrow whom I had seen earlier in a cast-off sweater and shoes that didn’t fit was in the kitchen preparing porridge. She stood over a ten-gallon iron kettle, stirring with a large wooden spoon. This lugubrious sight sent a chill down my spine. It was too much like the witches’ sabbath in Faust. That moment burst the bubble of my inflation, and I knew immediately that this was a totally impossible situation. Part of me wanted Toni’s proposal to be right; I wanted to forget the modern world and to pretend that a medieval existence was still possible. But deep down I knew better. It was a charade. Even the pride that the community took in its poverty was a hoax. Whether I liked it or not, I knew from that moment that I am an irreducibly modern person and that there is no going back to a medieval lifestyle.
We had brought another student of Toni’s along on the trip, Kevin, an Irish lad I had made friends with. I hunted up Kevin and said, “Kevin! I need to talk with you!”
“It is about time!” he said. Kevin with his earthy insight had seen me floating off into my inflation and had been helpless to do anything about it. But our urgent talk brought me back to my senses, and I remembered the warning of Dr. Jung, “Don’t ever join anything.”
How to let this be known to Toni without insulting her enthusiasm? I took the quiet way and said nothing until I was back in America and then informed her that I did not think I could be the head of such an organization even though I wanted exactly that more than anything else in my personal world. An impersonal world had claimed me.
I spent four months training with Toni Sussman, and I gained immeasurably from the experience. If there is a single model for my analytic work it is she. I might have learned as much from Dr. Jung if I had been allowed an equal amount of time with him, but Toni was a master therapist. She had perfected the arcane art of drawing the best out of people, demanding that they explore their own depths but never intruding into the process in any personal way. Each school of psychotherapy and each individual analyst has his own definition where this line should be drawn. I remember a comment about Dr. Jung: this action would be malpractice in ordinary circumstances but it was genius coming from him. It is extremely difficult to define the right stance for a therapist, and each person must find his or her own way in this matter. I remember one day Toni greeted me for my hour with a sigh. “Oh, Robert, I will never learn. I think all my geese are swans.” Yes, she had many disappointments, but if there was a swan to be found, she would search him out and demand that he follow his true heritage. It was hard on her, however, to release the geese back to mediocre lives.
I had once thought that it was desirable in the analytic hour for the analyst to keep his or her own thoughts and feelings separate from those of the patient. To bring them into the process was called countertransference and was looked down upon in the psychoanalytic community. However, Dr. Jung believed in selectively sharing such thoughts and feelings, and Toni taught me how to be present in a session as a full and complete human being without contaminating the patient’s process.
I also learned from Toni that the analyst must aim for clarity but avoid taking sides with any part of a patient’s psyche. Leaning to one side or the other just constellates the opposite force, and the analysis becomes stuck. That doesn’t mean that I will not take a stand. Back in my student days in Zurich there was an argument in the Jungian community about whether an analyst has the right to save a patient from some impending disaster that seems to be anticipated in a dream. Some argued that the analyst must fight for that part of the personality that wants to heal and grow, while others insisted that no person has the right to play God and interfere in the fate of another human being. In my analysis with Toni I met a healer who was prepared to battle for my growth, for which I am eternally grateful, and, following her model, I have always tried to do the same for my patients.
Near the end of my work with Toni Sussman, I again had a pivotal dream. It presented itself to me as follows:
I am in Italy on a hot day. It is afternoon, and I am sweating, working very hard carrying a bell in my arms, the bell of the Virgin Mary. It is extremely valuable, I don’t know why I have it, but I am carrying it, this precious relic.
It has been known in the church for centuries that this bell would turn up one day, and they have built a basilica for it the size of Saint Peter’s in Rome. It is specifically intended to house the bell. There is a niche and a hook in the altar of the church that is just the right size for the bell, since its exact dimensions are somehow known in advance.
There has been a priest on duty twenty-four hours a day every day for centuries, waiting for the bell. I come walking up the central aisle of the basilica and wake the priest to say that the holy bell has finally arrived. He is dazed with excitement. The custom has been arranged that the very big bells in the west tower, which have never been used, are ready and waiting to let the world know that the bell of the Virgin Mary has arrived. The priest goes hurrying down the aisle to let the world know that the bell is here!
I sit down on a marble bench. There is a stone in my shoe that hurts, so I take off my shoe to remove it. Thoughts are furiously rushing through me head: What should I do? If I stay they will make a big fuss over me for being the one who brought the bell. Part of me wants to be the big man, but another part says this will engulf and totally destroy me.
The bells in the west tower are beginning to ring, but I still have time to escape. I am torn between two destinies. I finally get up and walk out the side door of the choir; townspeople are already flocking down to the basilica, marveling that the bells are ringing. I am totally lonely in my anonymity, as I am going the opposite way from everyone else.
This dream foretold the next three decades of my life. I believe that it was an anti-inflation dream, showing how my ego was considering getting everything it possibly could gain—money, power, fame. But another part of me decided instead to duck out and keep my anonymity. It took years before the deep meaning of this dream sank in, before I grew strong enough to incorporate the dream into my life. At the time of the dream, however, I still wanted recognition, fame, and achievement. In fact, my ego tried for a while to turn the meaning of the dream around, perceiving it as a prediction that I would become a big shot, a famous person. I tried to live up to that expectation for a number of years, thinking that I would discover the long-awaited bell and become a big man. But some other part of me has shunned fame. Any time I have been about to arrive, to gain some power or fame, I have tried to slip out the side door. This has been a tension in my life—wanting in but simultaneously wanting to stay out.
This dream comes back to my mind whenever I am tempted to do something big or extravagant, and it reminds me that I am to find the bell of the Virgin Mary (I take this to be a very feminine, introverted, feeling function), but I must let others have the show of putting it on its hook in the church. To do otherwise would be to dispel the power of the process and turn it into personal inflation.
Clearly, the images in this dream are religious. Over the years I discovered that virtually everyone who comes to analysis is in some way facing a religious crisis, a term I prefer to neurosis, and every analysis is in some way a religious dilemma.
This is the essence of what I learned from Dr. Jung: listen to your interior intelligence, take it seriously, stay true to it, and—most important—approach it with a religious attitude. His psychological term for this is individuation—discovering the uniqueness of yourself, finding out what you are not and finding out what you are. Individuation relates to wholeness, but it is not some indiscriminate wholeness but rather your particular relationship to everything else. You get to the whole only by working with the particularity of your life, not by trying to evade or rise above the specificity of your life. This is the blending of heaven and earth. This is a truly religious life.
Of course, Jung didn’t invent this; it is as old as humankind. Other teachers in my life, such as Krishnamurti, were saying the same thing in their own ways, but Jung presented it in a very practical way and in a language for modern times. After I learned from Dr. Jung the process of approaching daily life with a truly religious attitude, then I could begin to see how the great symbol systems of the world’s religions were saying similar things. I had grown up with Christian symbols and rituals all my life, but they had become empty; it is ironic that work with my dreams (and, later, living among Hindus in India) would teach me what those symbols and rituals were really about. Only when I could understand, for example, that the virgin birth was about a birth of new consciousness in me did that story begin to have profound meaning for me.
Dr. Jung linked religious experience to the numinosum, a word for dynamic effects not caused by an act of human will, and he distinguished between religion and creed. A creed is a codified and dogmatized form of an original religious experience of the numinosum. Dr. Jung believed that all of the prophets for all the world’s religions experienced the numinosum, what I call the Golden World, and over time creeds were developed to help channel the energy and to explain such experiences to the uninitiated. Replacing the immediate experience of the Golden World with an institutionalized set of symbols and rituals has a valuable purpose in defending people against religious experience that might be overwhelming. Direct experiences of the Golden World are glorious but also painful and dangerous, and some people shouldn’t try to contain these energies on their own. The church, synagogue, temple, or mosque mediates between the numinosum and the everyday; it is a good place to reconcile the Golden World and the earthly world.
Dr. Jung always tried to return patients to the religious systems in which they had experience, if that was possible. Later, in my own analytical practice, I had many patients in Los Angeles who were German Jewish refugees, and often they were afraid I would try to convert them to Christianity. I never took a Christian standpoint but instead worked with the symbols that came up out of the psyche of each patient. If religious symbolism came up in a dream of a nonreligious Jew, I might ask, “Well, why are you not in synagogue?” and this would completely surprise the person. I wasn’t pushing any form of religion, but I was very sensitive to the importance of the religious function in each person.
I do believe that the Christian tradition is etched deeply into the collective unconscious of the West and that the symbols of the Christian Church speak eloquently of the psychological process that occurs in Western people. But for many modern people, the traditional institutions and symbol systems no longer work, and the Jungian approach makes a religious life possible for such people by providing tools to facilitate a direct experience of the divine. While this approach does not provide the sense of community provided by a church or other institution, it also does not mix up the cultural task with the religious task.
Everyone has a double duty in life, to maintain a cultural life and a religious life, and the laws of these two realms are often diametrically opposed to each other. The duty of the church (whatever the creed) should be to assist people with their religious life, which involves seeing past duality and advancing consciousness. The cultural life consists of choosing between good and evil and keeping the human side of life in order and proportion. So many religious institutions today focus on the cultural life almost exclusively instead of helping people cultivate a different kind of consciousness. I have searched the world over for formal religious training that would assist in this process, and, tragically, I never found an institution that satisfied me. I spent decades trying to make collective religious forms work—the Christian Church, monasticism, and various spiritual communities—and over and over again found them inadequate. The best one can hope from an organization is some tools and encouragement. This is the invaluable gift that Toni Sussman gave to me.
After several months of training with Toni Sussman, I decided to take a month off to travel in Europe before returning home. There were several more cathedrals in France that I still wanted to see. I took a ferry at Dover and crossed the English Channel. It was nightfall by the time I arrived in Lyons, France. I knew I was in trouble as soon as I got off the train; once again, I didn’t know anyone in a strange city and my inner demons began acting up. As soon as I could find a hotel room, I sat down to have it out with my unconscious through active imagination. I sat up writing most of the night, and the vision that came to me was a Kafkaesque nightmare in which my soul was on trial. Here is the vision:
A prosecutor presented all of the sins of commission and omission that I was responsible for throughout my life, and the list was very long indeed. That went on for hours, and it fell on me like a landslide. I was feeling worse and worse to the point where the soles of my feet were hot. After hours of accusations from the prosecution, a group of angels appeared to conduct my defense. All they could say was, “But he loved.” They began chanting this over and over in a chorus: “But he loved. But he loved. But he loved.” This continued until dawn, and in the end the angels won, and I was safe.
Despite being up all night, I greeted the dawn with renewed energy and purpose. I checked out of my hotel and took a train to Cologne. I tried to visit the cathedral there, but I could not get my heart into sight-seeing, so I found an express train and channel crossing back to London. I turned up at Toni Sussman’s door and told her, “I’m back.” She said that somehow she was not surprised and agreed to continue my analysis for several more weeks. That remarkable vision heralded some change that was taking place within me, though I wouldn’t begin to understand the full extent of it until I returned to the United States.