Digesting Jung: Food for the Journey - Inner City Books

110 More on Fantasies
“Yes, the ‘poor me’ syndrome,” he nodded, “heavily laced with
inflation, the feeling of being special—nobody suffers as much as
you do. As if depression played favorites.”
I swallowed that and worked on it.
Every time I went to analysis I took something new. Once I
made a pair of clay penises. One was tiny, a shriveled little thing;
the other was erect and powerful. We set them up between us.
“David and Goliath?” said my analyst.
“Bud Abbott and Lou Costello?” I suggested. “Mutt and Jeff?”
One of my first sketches showed a woman tied to a rock. Right
away I tagged it as the feminine fused with matter, which I knew
related symbolically to the Eve stage of anima development—being
mother-bound. I described it to my analyst as my mountain-anima
because it reminded me of fairy tales where the princess is imprisoned
on top of a mountain.
“A real sweetheart,” he observed. “But she has no feet.”
I took this to mean that my feelings weren’t grounded, and I
worked on that too.
Writing is for many the most satisfying form of active imagination.
You have a dialogue with what’s going on inside. You conjure
up an image of what you’re feeling, personify it and talk to it, then