Online Transcript:

Jim: Christianity has a tremendous need for a psychology like Jung’s, and the wide-spread interest on the part of Christians in his psychology can be taken as a recognition of that fact. But the Jungian-Christian dialogue has been going on for more than 40 years, and something keeps it from flourishing. In this series of profiles we are going to meet people involved in different facets of this dialogue, and try to discover what is happening in it today, and what hopes there are for it in the future.

Today we are in Chicago near the Bahai Temple to talk with Thomas and Mary Ellen Lavin.

Tom: My name is Tom Lavin, and background in terms of how I got into Jungian psychology, and the beginning, what the person of Jung did for me. I was in a Roman Catholic seminary, and was on the verge of leaving after a year and a half, and I really felt I was losing my soul. I was doing what I was told to do, I was studying philosophy at age 19, metaphysics in Latin, the courses were in Latin, the textbooks were in Latin, and everything was in Latin. I felt I was losing my soul. Not only that, but there was also a community problem because people around me were having nervous breakdowns, and I felt that this – qui regular vivet deus vivet – kind of summed up the whole mentality. If you live according to a rule, you are living the divine life, and I found that I was strangled by rules, but then I was 19, and that’s normal. But when you bring God into it, that makes it worse.

I was ready to leave, and a friend said, "Don’t leave dumb. Leave smart, and it would be important for you to read more than philosophy in Latin before you leave. It’s February. You can’t get into another school anyway. Here’s a list of books." And at the top of his list was Carl Gustav Jung, another person by the name of Joseph Goldbrunner and his book, Holiness is Wholeness, and that really touched me right away because I said there is something psychologically sick about this holiness stuff. But then it must be me. It must be my fault.

Anyway, I did read Jung, and from the very beginning of reading Jung – and what I was given to read was Psychological Types – the inference was, at least at the school I went to, God loves extraverted thinkers best. I don’t know who she loves best, but at that time that was a strong inference, and as a helpless intuitive I didn’t know what to do. I all of a sudden began to read that there is a place for everyone in the Kingdom, in humanity, in life. There is a place for every woman and every man and every type, and that every type has its own genius that can really serve other people, and in my case for me, the church, as well. I couldn’t get enough of Jung, but at the same time I am reading Freud, Maslow, Carl Rogers was big. Time frame we are talking 1961 at this particular time. Eventually I left the seminary. I did stay. I didn’t quit. I stayed for two more years of philosophy, and three years of theology, and prior to what would have been my ordination to what would have been at that time the diaconate and subdiaconate, the Archbishop of Chicago and I agreed to disagree. He felt there was a future for me in canon law, and if I wanted to study in Europe I could go to Rome. I, on the other hand, felt that my gifts were in other areas and wanted to go to Zurich and study Jung, and then come back and work with priests and nuns because by that time I was very much aware of what an ecclesiogenic neurosis was. So really, it was my own pain. It wasn’t, "Gee, it would be a neat idea to study Jung." It was my pain and the people that I was studying with, working with, and not knowing what to do about this before this. But knowing that Jung’s psychology was deep enough and wide enough to give me a foundation for a physics of the soul that I didn’t see in other psychologists. Not that they didn’t have a dynamic, not that there wasn’t a lot of truth and a lot of genius, and I say that still today about Freud and Maslow and Rogers and others, but it is almost as though their containers were a bit small for the inner conflict, real religious conflict that I was feeling inside of myself, and I began to read Jung at this man’s suggestion, among other people. But I thought, "Yep. Jung’s where it is at for me." So I didn’t get ordained. My own ethic was, how can I speak to people from a pulpit about the heart of God if I don’t know anything about the heart of a person? Other people could do what they wanted, but I wanted to find out more about the person and her or his relationship with the divine. So that’s what got me to Zurich.

I think it is really important to get a flavor of Zurich, what Zurich was, what training was, right after Jung died, because I showed up in Zurich in late ’66, early ’67. Jung died in ’61, and it was really a little village. I likened it to – do you remember the old double cookers? Zurich at that time was a double cooker in that you were cooked not only in your own analytical vessel, your own therapy, but the whole community was a vessel for becoming an analyst. Everybody knew everybody. I think many times too many people were in one another’s business, but that’s my value judgment. But it was an absolutely fascinating time. I had corresponded while I was still in the seminary with Goldbrunner, and said I would like to come over as a deacon or a priest and study Jung at the Jung Institute, right there. What about that? And he said, "Fine. Come over." First it would be good if you learned German, so I did that in Germany at the Goethe Institute. I was studying at the University in Munich at the time, and I walked into the Director’s study and said, "Hi, I’m Tom Lavin and I would like to become an analyst. Goldbrunner sent me." He said, "Really? We didn’t get your letter." I said, "I didn’t write one. I’m here." He was very kind. He said, "Why not come and have a cup of coffee." So we talked about becoming an analyst, and I talked about being a seminarian in Chicago, and he said, "Have you ever been analyzed?" And I said, "No." He said, "Not one hour of analysis?" And I said, "No." He said, "You know that analysis is the core of training. You do want to be analyzed, don’t you?" And I said, "If I could get a "bye" on that, I kind of feel I have my shit together and I just came out of the seminary so I couldn’t get into a hell of a lot of trouble." He said, "You want a "bye" on analysis?! Really." I said, "I came to learn how to do this with other people." He said, "Oh. If they did make you, if the Curatorium of the Jung Institute made you have analysis, who would you have analysis with?" And I said, "Goldbrunner said this professor Meier and a Dr. Frei are very good, and they work together, and you are supposed to work twice a week with a man, and twice a week with a woman, 4 times, I guess I could work with them." He said, "Do you have any idea that people wait years to work with them?" I said, "No. That probably means I should get a "bye". He said, "Uh huh. Why don’t you call C.A. Meier up and see if you can get an appointment before you go back to Munich." So I did. And I walked into Meier’s office and sat down. Meier looks at me, peers over his glasses, and the first question was, "What’s a "bye"? What does it mean, "bye?" I looked it up: "buy." I said, "No. It’s "bye." He said, "You don’t want analysis, do you?" I said, "Well, I don’t mind, but I’d rather not." So we go through this, and he laughed. He said, "You come from the Jesuit?" I said, "Yes." He said, "How’s your Latin?" I said, "I speak it and read it and write it fluently." So he got up and went over to the library and pulled out Cicero or Julius Caesar that I probably couldn’t translate today, and he said, "Translate." So I did. He said, "Oh, that’s very good, very, very good. For an American that’s exquisite." He said, "How’s your Greek?" And I said, "Well…" And he got up, and he found the Gospel of John in Greek, or somebody. So I translated. He said, "For an American, that’s very good." And then he said something in German, and we began speaking in German. After ten minutes he stopped and he said in English, "Herr Lavin. You are educable. We will start on Monday. I will talk to Dr. Frei. You will see us four times a week, twice with me, twice with her, bring the dreams. We get started." And that was the beginning of the trip.

I was in therapy for 11 ½ years, the kid that didn’t want it, who wanted a "bye," sometimes three times a week, sometimes two. Years later I got a letter from Meier from Zurich, and he said, "I would like you to be my biographer." And I cried. He’s got all these Swiss guys. I couldn’t believe it. But I went over, and I’ve got about 30 hours on tape, stories. Stories about himself, about Jung. Anyway, it is all written, done. It’s in Italian now, but sooner or later it will be published in English. Mary Ellen and I were there last summer, and I said, "I’ve got 30 hours of stories, good stories about you and Jung and whatever. May I do whatever I want with this?" He said, "Of course. I wouldn’t have asked you to be my biographer if I didn’t trust your discretion." There are some stories that sooner or later will come out, but he was wonderful in his way, very interesting, and Lilliana was really wonderful in her way, and I would think, "Oh, God. Here I am, bringing in the same dream. He’s going to talk about it. I’ve already written it out, and she’s going to talk about it. It’s going to be so boring." I never had a boring hour because they worked wonderfully typologically, they were interested in different nuances, gender nuances that were there, and I really didn’t need a "bye." At that time everyone knew everyone and knew who was going to whom. There were all sorts of biases in terms of who loved Jung the most, who was the better follower, and so on. Someone gave me very good advice when I got to Zurich. He took me out to lunch, and over lunch he said, "Look. We’ve got some camps here. There’s this camp, and this is in this one. Basically, do your dream work, do your active imagination, take your courses, do your reading, do your analysis, and don’t get caught up in the Jungian collective." And that’s the same advice I give to somebody right now. Don’t come in taking sides, the whites and the blacks, the greens and the reds, or whatever.

Oh, I have a wonderful dream I can tell you because I was to start maybe with, once I got in, I thought maybe I should be working with Jolanda Jacobi, the only Catholic because I am a Catholic, instead of Lilliana Frei who was Protestant – one of the most spiritual persons I have met in my life. But again, should I go with the Catholic because most priests went to Jolanda Jacobi. While I am still thinking about this, I have a dream. I am standing on the bank of the river that goes through Zurich, and I am looking at the Guild House across the way. They had all of these guide houses for carpenters, and so on, so I am looking at the carpenter’s guild hall, and there are two doors. One door says Dr. Lilliana Frei and the other door says Dr. Jolanda Jacobi. I am standing there looking at the two doors, and this old Swiss man comes up next to me, and he says, "Can I help you?" And I looked and smiled. And he says, "Are you lost?" And I smiled at him and said, "Yeah, I am, but not the way you think. But thanks for your help. I don’t need your help." And he looked at me and he said, "Look. After the first floor, it is all the same. It doesn’t make any difference what door you go into first, whether Frei or Jacobi." And then he vanished. And that was the end of the dream. So I went with my heart and went with the Protestant instead of duty-bound going with the Catholic because after the beginnings of work with the soul, it is all the same. In the beginning the personality and the gender of the person you are working with is, indeed, going to influence you, but not determine you. The guild house had maybe 5 floors, and after the first encounter with someone who is in touch with her or his soul, it doesn’t make any difference. The process has begun. You will never be the same. And then you can begin to enjoy it. It is not a question of right or wrong any more. It’s a question of growing in a whole sense of gratitude about who you are becoming. In the beginning you are struggling and you have to deal with shadow stuff and the dark side, and talking to people about things you have never talked to anybody about, and that’s why I chose to begin with a woman because I could always talk to the guys in the seminary. That was no problem. But with a woman? And so that’s how I began.

I think that we have to look at contemporary Catholic groups as a group of people who are deflated, people who have not been given, or who have not given themselves permission to experience the spirit within, so instead of inspired, we are deflated as a group. I am not only talking about Catholic Christianity, either. The amount of our friends and relatives that are on Prozac in this country must be saying something. It is a metaphor as well as a necessity of what is going on in our culture. When things aren’t going right in culture, then we have to look at cult, and creed, and codes. If a culture is deflated and depressed and down, then we have to look at the same root of "cult" and say we have cultures of bacteria. In other words, we have something that gets special care is a culture, some thing or even person that feels himself to be different or special or in need of special care, because that’s the root word etymologically, "cultus." Somehow special care is not being given. People don’t feel they are special. People feel they are rather robot-y. People feel they have lost their spirit. Now it is not named, but if you travel around the country lecturing, as you do, you notice that there is a tremendous hunger for things of the spirit. There is a tremendous longing for a return of the soul. Thomas Moore has done a wonderful thing in allowing the word soul to be used again in polite company, or even academic company. People are using that word again. It’s used in many ways. I don’t care how it’s used, but that it is again coming into common parlance is very important, that we have a realization that we are more than just our egos. Now, what happens – let’s just take the Catholic Christian culture. What type of special attention is needed or necessary, the special care for this culture? I think we need to be aware of our own energy first and foremost. If you are inspired, you are aware of your breath, you are aware of your life force. I remember our younger son, Brian. The church we went to, the Newman Center, had the Gospel choir from Holy Cross Church down on the south side, and they came up and they sang. After Mass little Brian who was about 6 or 7 then turns to us and says, "Can we go down to 29^th and Cottage Grove every Sunday for Church? This is neat." There was something where he was touched. I’m not saying that we all go to Gospel choir, but that something was touched in this child, something very important. Music will touch the soul. There is a soullessness about contemporary Catholic practice. It is sad. All the icons… Remember Joseph Campbell when Bill Moyers asked him, "Well, where’s your church?" And Campbell kind of leaned back and smiled and said, "Well, my parish is Chartre." That’s where the icons are. There is energy with the icons. People in the East, the Byzantine painter will fast before she or he paints an icon. There is a ritual in portraying an aspect of the divine. There’s soul in it. But sometimes I think that a wrangler in Wyoming knows more about soul than a Ph.D. in theology, but I mean that. You go the corral in Wyoming, and he’ll say, "You ride a lot? You want a spirited horse? You want Bess, or do you want Harry over here?" He knows what spirit is. He has a working definition of what spirit is. And you know the presence of spirit. That’s an important thing. It is more than semantics. It is a whole cosmology, the difference between spirit and soul. We have spirit. How do you know we have spirit? How do you know we have pneuma right here in Lake Michigan? Because there are waves, we can see the sails, we know that the wind is there through its effects. We don’t know windy in a vacuum. You know spirit, and you also know, by the way, know archetype present because of its effects, and when that spirit is embodied, like in a person, you have soul, or soul food, and when the soul leaves the body, Thomas Aquinas, we go back into the realm of the spirit. All Saints Day, All Souls Day. We have a whole rich tradition in history to become remembered to, to become mindful of, to understand that we as a people, for whatever cultural reasons, and there is no blaming, because blaming is futile, and often unkind, and the ones we blame the most are ourselves. Sure, it makes money for analysts, but it doesn’t do you any good. The idea of how do we get our soul back, how do we get yeast back into the body of Christ is a pivotal question, and I think it is a question that needs to be addressed not in RCIA or Christ renews our parish, or Mary renews our home, but rather, in very small groups of people who are open to one another’s wondering. And the whole idea of culture, cult, how we have a cell forming in this bacterial culture, and I think that there are cells of deeply caring, probing, feeling people who do want to feel their own spirit in their persons, in their church, and we do have to look at spiritualities, and I don’t like the word "spirituality," to tell you the truth. It bothers the hell out of me. I understand it. You know the story of Bell Shamtof, the Hassidic story about the rabbi who finds the divine light in the forest and then his followers find the place where Bell Shamtof used to find the light, and then several decades later they know there is some forest some place where one could talk to the divine, they say. How many degrees are we removed from numinosity? How many degrees are we removed from the road to Emmaus? Not in terms of what happens in the church, but also our intercourse with one another, whether that be marital or social intercourse. We are spiritless, and that is the primary neurotic condition that we have to begin addressing as the people of the Book. We have a moral obligation, inner imperative, it seems to me, to begin to open our hearts and our minds up to our legacy. Christianity is an aristocracy of the spirit if we really look at it. But people don’t want to deal with the ethical obligation, the ethos. People who are on a spiritual path are people who have pep, i.e., they are positive, they are energetic, and they are playful. What happens when we get bottlenecked? I think the whole question of loss of soul is one thing. Often it doesn’t get that bad that people become dispirited, but we can say that things don’t flow, or they are not in flow, or things get bottlenecked, that people can’t feel their own energy any more. They don’t feel inspired anymore. Then they leave, and they go looking here, there, and elsewhere for something that will break the bottleneck. I think there are a couple of things here. One important thing that Jung’s psychology can offer religion as an institution is to validate the 8 functions, or vectors of energy, that thinking people learn that they can feel. Feeling people can learn that they can think. With thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition we can overuse them and then lose our spirit. That’s one. Or we can lose the spirit, the effervescence, if you will, because we are bottlenecked. Our energy is not able to get through, and that happens very much when you are with people who try to push the divine into a sensation, thinking, feeling or intuitive way. Each energy has its own history within the Church. The thinkers are the dogmatists, the sensation function people are the fundamentalists. It’s right there, and that’s it. Dot for dot, crossing Ts and so on. They bring us back to basics. Feeling people are enthusiastic – in God, or in the divine. They stand out many times, or feel they have to, or stand up, or give witness. And intuitives, God help them – us – are people who really need to have a vision to get the energy going. We need the icon. We need to visualize, and so you have people who need facts. Other people are very much interested in form. Other people are interested in feeling. Other people are interested in fantasy. And to realize there is a place for all of this outside and inside, I don’t have to be guilty about who I am, energetically, my physics is what it should be energetically, nor do I have to point fingers as we Christians have done for a millennia now at other people who don’t see the divine, who don’t approach as an extravert the divine, or receive the divine as an introvert the way I do. It’s all sibling rivalry, and to get beyond that to a sense of a dynamic family where everybody belongs, that’s not going to end suffering, but it will end a lot of misunderstanding, a lot of lack of support. I think there’s a great distinction that we can make between being broken, and being broken open. All of us have been broken hearted because of under information, misinformation, no information, about how we can approach the divine as individuals and as a group. The question of the divine is always going to bring pain with it, but we have to ask ourselves the question, "Am I a person who has been broken, or am I broken open?" I would submit there is an ocean of difference, clinically, or in experience, there is an ocean of difference between being a broken hearted person and a person whose heart has been broken open because of family suffering, or personal suffering, bodily illnesses, or whatever. Let’s look at our brokenness as a broken-open-ness, and that there is hope for us as individuals and as a people. We are not a divine joke even though we are very often confused. And I think we should sometimes just sit back and wonder and laugh. We are all fools. Now what was the worst thing as a kid? "Don’t make a fool out of yourself." "You are representing our family. Don’t make a fool out of yourself." I think inherent in the Gospels is, "Make a fool out of yourself. Become foolish, for Christ sake, or Buddhist sake, or whoever." Understand the archetype of the fool. Be able to laugh, and then to come back, really refreshed, to be able, as Jung was, and I think this was one of Jung’s greatest contributions as he viewed Christianity, he was able to be in the valley and at the peak at the same time, or switch. This is so important because a meeting of Christians should not always sound like the annual meeting of the survivors of the Bataan Death March. The keening that goes on, the wailing that goes on, we are all victims, and I guess we have to take up our cross. But what about crossing over? I think we stay too much in the archetype of the martyr victim. We have forgotten how to dance. We have forgotten how to circumambulate mystery because we are too busy climbing the ladder. And now we are senior persons of Our Lady of the Last Thorn, and we find out the ladder is leaning up against the wrong wall. That’s devastating for those who are 50-something, or 60-something, and they have paid pew rent since they were kids. And now they are beginning to wonder whether the grail has left the grail castle. And in some places it has.

The problem is this. Do I lose hope in the grail, do I lose the energy for the quest just because I can’t find it in my diocese, or in my parish, or my subculture? I think the importance of the quest is still on. Every morning, every dawning, is an occasion of wonder, not a source of temptation or despair. And I think that’s what Jung adds very much to this, that the hope is psychologically justified, that the Church, like an individual, to go through shadowy times, or to know negative soul energy – these are stages on the process. It is not the end of the line. And so as we make our circular journey and go into deeper dimensions of understanding, coming to terms with our life cycle and the cycle of the divine, we can be and should be very hopeful because in any intimate relationship we have the cycle of expansion, contraction, and resolution.

Mary Ellen: My name is Mary Ellen O’Hare Lavin, and was born here in Chicago, and have a slight background in Jungian psychology. I do want to start by telling a little bit about myself because I think it is important to describe this journey from an experience that I had. I was born into an Irish Catholic family. My father was from Ireland, and he died when I was 5 months old, leaving my mother to raise three children without much financial support. I grew up in the Catholic Church. One of the major things that my mother felt she had to do was to make sure that the 3 of us received a Catholic education. This was the least and the most important thing that she could do as a mother. My mother cleaned houses, and this was how we were able to support ourselves. Well, when I got to a certain age, I had to decide what I was going to do with my life, and I knew that as a woman living in a poverty of such that I didn’t have money – I had a rich life, but it wasn’t financially supportive – I knew that perhaps I could get an education by going into the Church, and so I joined the convent. I lived the life of poverty, chastity and obedience for 8 years. I also was able to earn a bachelor’s degree, which was very important to me as a young woman in the 1960s. I lived the life of a religious, but during that time I was also in communication with my own husband, Tom Lavin. Tom had been in the seminary, and he and I would communicate while we were living our religious life. When I was asked to take my final vows, I somehow was not drawn to the religious life as a celibate, nor was I drawn to the life of poverty, and so I said no and that I wanted to leave. I wrote Tom a letter – he was studying at the Jung Institute in Zurich at the time – and I said I am going to be leaving the convent. And Tom said, "Oh, that’s wonderful because now we can get married." And I said, "Wait. I’m not ready for that. I want to go out and find my life as a young woman, as an educator, or step out in the world. I have been in a cloistered existence." So Tom came home from Zurich that summer, and he and I were married, and we were married in October, and one week later we went off to live in Zurich. The irony was that we had no money, we had high hopes, and I knew nothing about this man Jung, and I really didn’t care, to be honest with you. When we got to Zurich I avoided the Institute as much as I possibly could because I didn’t feel that I fit in, and I didn’t understand the whole idea, although I did enjoy the people I had met, namely, Lilliana Frei and Freddy Meier and Jolanda Jacobi, and we had some nice conversations, and I was not enthralled with them that I did enjoy visiting with them, and they were very inclusive with me. My mode of operation was to be a wife and a mother. I think because of my religious experience I saw that as the ideal for me, to be the support of my husband who was a student at the time. I became pregnant very soon. Tom and I laugh because we thought that since we had both been in religious life, we had been saving up that seed. We got pregnant quite fast and quite often. We of course weren’t able to stay in Zurich. It got very expensive. So we moved to Munich where Tom worked for the military and I was a teacher in the elementary school system. We eventually came back to Zurich because Tom needed to finish his studies, and it was at that time that I realized that perhaps it would be a good idea for me to have analysis. Here was the opportunity of a lifetime. We lived in this lovely little flat outside of Zurich. Once a week I would get on the tram with at that time 2 children in tow, and I would take them down to the department store, Yamoli’s. Yamoli’s had an agreement with the women in Zurich. They would baby-sit for them while the women of Zurich would shop. Well, I dropped the children off in the nursery under the pretense that I was going to go shopping, and instead I would hop on the trolley and go over and meet with Mary Breener, and I did this for a year. I was in analysis with Mary Breener while the children were at the nursery in the store, and I would pick them up afterward, and we would go home. That’s how we lived our life. That’s how I was introduced to Jungian psychology, and to paying attention to my dreams, and becoming perhaps more involved in a soul search that I hadn’t found in religious life or in organized religion.

I do want to backtrack. I want to share a dream with you which I think was very important at the time I made the decision to leave the convent. I had had a dream that I was in a boat with another friend, and we were in our nuns’ habits, and I had my ring, which I still wear, which is interesting because the ring actually belonged to my great-grandmother, and somehow I was playing with it on my finger, and the ring fell off and went into the lake. So I said to my friend, "I have to go in search of the ring. It is very important to me." I dove into the water, and I couldn’t find the ring that I was supposed to receive, or wear if I had taken final vows as a religious. Instead I found another ring, a ring that was made of brushed gold. I can remember diving down into the water, it was so vivid, and I came up, and I was not wet. I was still intact. I held the ring and looked around to see if anyone knew to whom the ring belonged. And there was an older man standing on a bridge. He waved at me, and I asked him if the ring was his. He said it was, but he had thrown it in. It was from his wife who had died, and that I could have the ring. That dream happened 28 years ago, but I still remember interpreting it somehow that I was giving up the ring of religious life, and I was finding another ring, a ring of more significance for me, a new life. And I think that the dream was probably helping me make that transition from religious life to married life, which is what we did. After many years living in Europe and being in background of Tom – Tom as you know is very extraverted and I’m very introverted, and that’s probably why we married one another because we complement one another in a lot of ways – I realized after raising our children, and they are now 26, 25 and 20 – but when they were in their late teens I decided I wanted to return to school, and I took Tom for a walk along Lake Michigan, and I said, "Tom, I’ve backed you in everything you have done in becoming an analyst and becoming a psychologist, and I want to go back, and I want to get my degree now." And Tom said, "Well, of course. Absolutely without a doubt." And so I did after raising the children and almost turning 50. I returned to class to earn my own doctorate in clinical psychology. I looked around for an institute that would honor my needs to deal with soul, and I found an institute and it was in Santa Barbara, California, the Pacifica Graduate Institute, and every month for 3 years I got on an airplane and flew to Santa Barbara. I would come home, and on Monday morning I would go in to teach at a school where I was teaching. So it has been a long journey of making my connection with Jungian psychology and honoring that intellectual side that had not been honored as a young woman within the Roman Catholic Church. And I feel that it was a very important part of my own development to go back and become something other. So it has been a long journey.