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 he saved my
life," Rafael Lopez-Pedraza said slowly and vehemently during lunch, "she
literally saved my life." He was talking about Irene Claremont de Castillejo, whom we
recognized as analyst and author of Knowing Woman, and what she had meant to him.
Rafael had said earlier in the day that if somebody's feelings are killed, his interior
life suffocated, then he is indeed dead. A man opposite him at the table remarked, "I
remember that book, Knowing Woman . . . there was a whole chapter in it about the
question, 'What do women really want?' — but what was the answer?"After a pause Rafael replied, "What a woman really wants is feeling. She wants the man to know what she is suffering." He turned to his friend Bill Willeford and added, "Do you remember, Bill? Some therapeutic work at the Zürichberg Clinic was done solely by feeling — not by the analyst's being a nurse, nor by words, but by suffering with the person." 
Just before lunch Rafael had told us that sexuality of itself is not necessarily feeling — that Freudians at the turn of the century who believed that woman's problem was repressed sexuality were not taking feeling sufficiently into account. Rafael had been pointing out how Pentheus in Euripides' The Bacchae confuses Aphrodite as goddess of sexuality with Bacchus-Dionysus as god of passion; the Titanic ego of Pentheus mocks passionate feeling, reduces it to sexuality, and grievously dishonors its divinity. On entering the restaurant, another man in our group had said with great excitement, "Oh! The soul is feeling. Rafael said this directly. I am so moved. The soul is feeling. He just said this outright and simply. Oh!" Yet Rafael had noted that "there is no tragic view of events now"; the contemplating and suffering of "the great affliction of life as destiny" is instead often repressed by the practice of giving depressed people "little pills" to avoid awareness of feeling. Participation in tragedy, however, is meant "to leave the audience in a fruitful state of perturbation." |
Within a parenthesis in the
morning, Rafael had mentioned that, while many women loved Dionysus, he was married only
once — to Ariadne. This parenthesis led me to remember. Ariadne was the woman who
fell in love with Theseus and gave him the saving thread. Theseus was the Athenian hero
who sailed to Crete with the young Athenians who were supposed to be sacrificed to the
minotaur in the labyrinth. Theseus entered the labyrinth, killed the minotaur, and found
his way out by means of the thread Ariadne had given him that he had unrolled on the way
in. The young people were saved. Theseus won Ariadne sexually but abandoned her and sailed
away as she lay sleeping. She soon woke up. In her grief and loss she became an initiate
in the Dionysian mysteries. I have seen a sketch of her marriage bed — sitting
against it on the floor is a handsome man with ivy in his hair, waiting for her. It is for her thread that Ariadne is important. A thread is small yet it is continuous. It can be felt in the dark. Often that is all a woman has — a thread of meaning, a wisp of hope. Yet that may be enough. In any case, giving up a sense of the persistent thread of life is a disaster. The mob of frenzied women in The Bacchae had rebelled against the shuttle and the loom, we are told at the outset of the play. They gave up weaving the thread; they found ordinary tasks to be uninteresting. They were too busy to pay attention to something small but significant — to the nuances of feeling in our bodily existence. They did not believe that what a woman like Semele had given birth to could be divine. They rejected the proper worship of Dionysus. They met horrible consequences. In recounting their tragedy as relevant to our time, Rafael moved us. He gave us much to ponder for a long time. Through him we tasted of the juice of the vine — a bitter and purgative juice, it is true, but of a green and profuse vine. Rafael impressed us from the start. When Sterling Nelson was introducing him at the opening of the day, she reported their original phone conversation as she had been inviting him to come speak to us — coincidentally the book she had just been reading had referred to him several times as a great authority to be respected, and she was awed. Rafael Lopez-Pedraza is indeed a world figure in Jungian psychology. Yet the moment of his presentation I remember most vividly (and tenderly) is the moment when, just after lunch, he was sitting down and called out with passion to his wife, "Valerie!" He had a toothbrush in his hand and he needed her to take it back now. He had just completed the ordinary task of brushing his teeth. He was giving his attention to something small but significant. "It is the hardest thing," he said much later, "to be in one’s body."
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