Every human has a story

Jung came to the conclusion that every human being had a story, and the derangement came when that story was denied, or if the story was rejected; and it was only in the discovery of this story, enabling the patient to rediscover his personal story (within it), that the patient could be healed again.

Laurens Van der Post: BBC - Time Life film on Jung,

Untangling what it was about Jung that so fascinated, engaged and enthused a group of Geneva Quakers that they would spend the rest of their lives expounding his virtues as someone who had given them the keys to unlocking their deeper selves and vitalised their spiritual lives was perhaps the biggest challenge of my research. Between them, they had created an extensive archive of materials, contributed articles to two journals, one either side of the Atlantic, addressed conferences, written books, acted as editors, and mentored and inspired many younger people as well as their contemporaries. They had been catalysts for change and modernisation, reinforcing trends that has already been at play in the communities they were part of.

The discovery of Jung, and their direct contact with him and his circle, made them more at ease with their spiritual life, more fully engaged with it and more willing to explore it. It helped them to realise its importance to their lives in spite the pull from their being 'modern', well educated and forward thinking people. They bucked the trends and fashions of their age: the affectation of a somewhat bohemian detachment from anything over serious, allied with a cynical disparagement of old fashioned things like religion which could not possibly stand the rigours of critical analysis. Religion was the opium of the people, and was utterly dreary. The stripped down religion of a set of left over tea-total puritans, with all their earnestness, social conscience and pacifism, was unspeakable. 

But somehow, that set of young, intelligent, and highly motivated people found something at the core of the Quaker tradition; in the shared, contemplative, ruminating silence, and in what arose from it; something that inspired and liberated them; and Jung gave them the intellectual justification for opening up to it.

For me, researching their left-overs – what little survives in the aftermath of life – it meant following their spiritual journeys, and tracking their footsteps in what material there was. Annoyingly, such material is always deficient. It is like a giant dot to dot drawing, stretching over three-quarters of a century, two continents and two world wars. Sometimes the dots are years apart. Sometimes they are scattered across diverse and disperse documents, articles and books. It was a six year journey on my part, and one which in some ways shadowed their own. To comprehend their journey meant undertaking one of my own, being forced to question many assumptions about my own life and attitudes. 

In many ways they confirmed Jung's contention: they found the big story which could contain the smaller stories of their lives. I think I have yet to achieve that.

Have I found the bridge?

It was tiny, just a single sentence editorial introduction to an article in a monthly magazine produced in 1970 – the Quaker Monthly – but had it finally provided the bridge I had been looking for? Somehow, I felt that two of the people I have been writing about may have had some connection, but how or when was lost in the mists of time: it sometimes amazes me how little trace is left of many people's lives – just faint scatterings, motes of dust – that a historian has perhaps the fortune to find, if he is lucky. 

The rich, the famous and the powerful leave heaps of traces. They have big footprints in history. So, you wish to research into the life of a Churchill or a Orson Welles? No problem. You will have oceans of source material. Such lives are massively recorded. But try to research the lives of more obscure people, people who have not courted publicity, people whose lives are much more private and out of the limelight of media attention, you often have little more than scattered and vanishing vapour trails.

I suspected that Irene Pickard, whose archive had launched my researches, must have had some contact at some time with Pierre Lacout, the author of a much translated Quaker booklet, God is Silence. They had both been members of the small community of Quakers in Switzerland. They had both lived in Geneva, but not at the same time, as far as I could see; Irene had left Geneva in 1955, and Lacout can only be definitely connected with the Swiss community of Quakers sometime in the 1960s, becoming a member of the Lausanne Meeting after he settled near there. He had undertaken a course of psychotherapy in Geneva prior to that. They both shared a common attitude to the centrality of the practice of silence waiting as the wellspring of Quakerism, and the significance of psychoanalysis – especially that of Carl Jung – as an aid to spiritual development. They both had many Swiss Quakers they knew in common. It was a small pond in which they both swam with a reasonably high chance that they had either directly or indirectly connected.

Irene had maintained an active interest and connections with the community of European Quakers in the years following her and her husband's retirement to England. Significantly, they had been involved in the Friends World Committee on Consultation (FWCC) European conferences, both at the planning stage and during the events. We know for sure that they were highly involved in the 1959 conference on Depth Psychology as a help in the Religious Life, and maintained an interest in, and connections with, later European conferences.

The editorial introduction to Lacout's article in the March 1970 edition of Quaker Monthly notes that the article is:

Concluding our Swiss Friend’s address to last years European Conference, in which he told of his passage from Carmelite Monk to Quaker.

Sadly, what I don't know is if Irene was present at the 1969 conference, or had anything to do with it. Irene would have been 78, and was still involved in many Quaker things, especially the Seekers Association. She was also perfectly fluent in French – her years in Geneva having made her bilingual – but was she actually there? Did she ever meet Lacout? Did they correspond about the conference? We shall never know: there is no record. All we do know is that she had a copy of his booklet in her archive. If there was ever a bridge, it has been washed away.

What we do know is that Lacout and Irene were very much in sympathy with each other as to what was at the core of Quaker religious experience, as were so many of the members of the Seekers. Here I quote from a letter written to me in 2013 by Candia Barman, about the Seekers Movement:

The Seeker Movement aims to explore the discipline of waiting on the spirit at the still centre of our lives. We try to deepen our spiritual awareness in a devotional way based on mutual support and sharing with like-minded people. This leads to the search for expressing Quaker witness in the world.
Much of traditional language has become ineffective and diminished in meaning for people today, including ourselves. We seek through exploration and sharing to connect with the mystery at the heart of our world and our lives. We are active in opening ourselves to new light; this may come from modern scientific, theological or artistic endeavours as well as older traditions. We aim to promote a creative interplay amongst the diversity of understandings within the Religious Society of Friends.
This is done through residential and other gatherings, with a particular emphasis on working in small groups. Also correspondence groups on various topics and the movement’s journal.

It compares well with Lacout's description of what is at the heart of the Quaker experience in his 1969 address:

Silent worship, taking for us the place of dogma and creed, gives to us, by its unsullied transparency, infinite possibilities of dialogue. We think in a climate of absolute freedom with no fear, in principle, of condemnation by the Quaker community. Our faith, not being the prisoner of any form or words, can go without reservations towards the truth of every man, whether he be Christian or not, believer or not. We are as attentive to men as to God. Is not a human brother a part of the presence of God? If we dwell in the receptive state of mind which living worship develops in us, we shall not go towards the other man with the proud assurance of one who seeks to make a convert, but with humility of one who goes forward in gratitude for a revelation he is about to receive. To love the other man is to love his difference. Free from dogma we have more chance than others of building bridges between the fragments of our broken world. In this age of confrontation and hostility, let us learn to draw from silence, as from a well, the strength and art and skill of truthful reconciliation. No other religious family grants such liberty to its members.
 

The need for a symbolic life according to Carl Jung

We have no symbolic life, and we are all badly in need of the symbolic life. Only the symbolic life can express the need of the soul - the daily need of the soul, mind you! And because people have no such thing, they can never step out of this mill - this awful, banal, grinding life in which they are "nothing but." . . . Everything is banal; everything is "nothing but," and that is the reason why people are neurotic. They are simply sick of the whole thing, sick of that banal life, and therefore they want sensation. They even want a war; they all want a war; they are all glad when there is a war; they say, "Thank heaven, now something is going to happen - something bigger than ourselves!"

Carl Jung - The Symbolic Life

 

There is a need to relate to an overarching narrative of who we are and why we are. If not, then we all to easily sink into the malaise of consumerism and sensation seeking, or even a state of ennui. Is there a need for a sense of mission, for a rubric to live by?

This is the vulnerability that cults and demagogues feed on: "I will lead you; I will save you: I will inspire you and give meaning to your life."; and whilst intoxicated by the newly found sense of purpose, of being valued, people are induced into 'the cause' much to the benefit of its hierarchy, its leaders.

It is a serfdom of the soul engendered by a profound abdication of responsibility for finding your purpose in life; and there are always those ready to profit from it.

 

[The Guild of Pastoral Psychology: Guild Lecture No. 80: “The Symbolic Life”: Prof C G Jung: a seminar talk given on 5th April 1939: transcript from shorthand notes of Derek Kitchen: April 1954, reprint 1964]