Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D. is a psychiatrist, Jungian analyst in private practice, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, University of California Medical Center, and an internationally known lecturer. She is the author of;

Goddesses in Older Women,

The Millionth Circle,

The Tao of Psychology,

Goddesses in Everywoman,

Gods in Everyman,

Ring of Power, Crossing to Avalon, and Close to the Bone, and More...

You may know me as an author, a Jungian analyst, or an activist.

Since the publication of Urgent Message From Mother: Gather the Women, Save the World, I’ve been a Message carrier. It has led to the formation of 5WWC.org to spur a 5th women’s world conference in 2010. Over forty of us will be at the United Nations when the Commission on the Status of Women meets to inspire and lobby for this. My earlier book The Millionth Circle was the seed idea for millionthcircle.org: when a critical number of women’s circles form, a tipping is reached and peace becomes possible.

"The journey of spiritual beings on a human path holds major questions that have to do with the big picture at each major transition fork in the road. What did I come to do? What is my purpose? What did I come to learn? Who did I come to love? From a psychological viewpoint, those questions can only be answered from deep within."

I’ve been interested to pick up along the way what people are saying about transitions. The cocoon is a place where the caterpillar totally dissolves; it is insolutio in the alchemical model of dissolving into the water, or the emotional side of life. Then it moves on, and from that beginning a butterfly forms in the chrysalis – that “in between” place that is neither caterpillar nor butterfly. I’d like to examine that whole notion of the middle phase. You don’t know whether it is the ending or the beginning. You don’t know whether it is a womb or a tomb. This is the whole image of the return to the earth. In the beginning is the end and the whole cycle.

Every time there is a major transition in your life, and you are in that in between place, you are in the chrysalis and you haven’t yet emmerged into the next place. What is interesting to me is how you gather those pieces together when you are insolutio. What you chose to keep and what you chose to leave has a lot to do with what pieces form and move into the next stage with you.

There’s a very simple myth that applies to all of us at every major stage of life (when we want to be approved of, to be accepted, to have the right friends, or get into that right club or degree program, etc.) Whenever we have an idea of goal, whenever we have a feeling, it’s about destination and not about journey. Then we encounter and live out the myth of Procrustes and his bed – a very short myth.

 In ancient Greece, if you wanted to be famous or creative, to have influence or power, or to be where all the interesting people were doing and writing and acting or what have you, then you were certainly on the road to Athens (which is obviously a symbol of where all the action was.) In the myth of Procrustes, you had to pass by his bed in order to keep on the road. He put you on the bed and whatever part of you did not fit, he just cut off. Whack! So much for that piece! It’s not going to be with you on the way to Athens. Whatever it was about you that needed to fit into what was accepted got stretched to fit the bed. So you got processed on the road to Athens.

Who among us has not been processed and reprocessed over and over again? What was acceptable to your family? What was acceptable to your significant other? What was success? What did you have to cut off and, in many cases, deny that was a significant part of you or a potential part of you?

Often there are gifts that emerge in childhood, only they’re not the kind of gifts or abilities that your particular parents wanted you to have – and you got them. When people who are important mirror us, they focus on that which they find pleasing, and they cast a negative light on that which they find undesirable in us. We pick up the cues very early. And very early on our road to Athens, on the road to acceptability, we cut off that which was not supported, that which was not mirrored positively. We stretch those kinds of gifts that made us pleasing. It might have been our personality, a certain quality of charm. It might have been our brains or athletic ability – whatever was acceptable in our particular beginnings on the road to Athens.

The road to Athens is played out over and over and over again, and at every step along the way. New school: what’s acceptable? New profession: from what do you have to cut yourself off? Sometimes in order to fit the mold, you have to do a major job of repressing your past in order to pass Procrustes’ bed. In order to look like, to act like you belong in that fraternity or sorority or profession, you cut off and don’t talk about certain historical parts of yourself that you deny.

Very often, when childhood was far from beautiful and included some very painful things, what is cut off is actively repressed and forgotten on that first road to Athens – and the second, and the third, and the fourth road to Athens. There are psychic elements about whatever we cut off, potential elements in our personality. Nothing we cut off dies; it just goes into the underworld. There we reconnect with that which we cut off from ourselves, but only in times of transition, and sometimes through major descents.

 Sometimes that which we denied in ourselves meets us as Fate. We are in a transition because we were attracted to someone who carried that which we repressed in ourselves, and we’re drawn to it. Very often major attractions begin transitions. We are attracted to that part of another person that we have denied in ourselves, and yet is our growing edge. By falling in love with that woman, that man, that guru, that capacity, something of our old form gives way. We are attracted by the projection, drawn towards something else that disrupts our old form and often cracks it, destroys it. We are in this “in between” period of chrysalis, and we don’t know what will happen next.

The reality of metaphor is that death and new life happens often. For example, when you are in transition you may have a dream that someone is dying. Your first reaction is to think that it is a little precognition dream. It could be; that’s not out of the question. Much more usual is that something is dying about that particular relationship as an external event, or that particular part of you represented by that person, that character in your dream. Dying puts you on notice that a transition is taking place. Your dream life often knows that some transition is happening before you consciously acknowledge it.

Transitions are often referred to as midlife transitions, but they happen when they happen. Sometimes transitions are described as a crisis (midlife crisis, late life crisis, menopausal crisis, whatever crisis) because they can shake things up so. The Chinese pictograph for the word Crisis is comprised of two different characters: Danger and Opportunity. That is what the chrysalis looks like. Is it a womb or is it a tomb? Is it going to kill something? Is it going to kill you in some fashion? Are you going to despair? Are you going to give up that life has meaning? Or is this going to be a new opportunity to truly grow and enter the next phase of your life? And you don’t know “in between.”

The image of the snake is one of the major symbols that you might be drawn to. It may show up in a dream about transformation and transition. Human beings once lived much closer to all kinds of animals and very much close to nature. We observed certain behaviors. There’s something about the snake that we project on. It is archetypal because it touches a symbolic layer of the psyche from which dreams come. It is comprised of those latent patterns and images that humans recognize and give form to when they are activated.

It’s like a chemistry experiment. You pour a compound into a beaker of water, some of this, some of that. You stir it up and it is cloudy for a while and then becomes clear. You keep doing this and doing this, and it stays clear until it reaches a critical mass…or a critical amount of whatever this energy of the sauce that you now brought to the solution entered the solution. When a critical amount enters, a crystalline structure precipitates out. Now you can see the form that was latently there all the time. This is one of the metaphors of an activated archetype.

Another way of talking about an activated archetype is that it is like the seed of a potential. You have this little seed in your hand. Only when it is put into the earth, and watered, and enough time goes by, do you actually see what grows from it. That plant always becomes what was present in that particular seed. So there are seeds (or archetypes) in our soil (the archetypal layer of the collective unconscious) that we all have. Given circumstance and possibilities of birth, it is born with emotion and image together.

I liked what Michael Meade said this morning. He wasn’t talking directly about transition, but he also was. Something is born that has both form and sound together. Michael Meade’s comments moved my thoughts into the whole idea of womb/tomb and birth. Humankind has observed routinely and, at times, numinously the major transition and liminal experience of new life emerging from the body of a pregnant woman. The pregnant woman who carries this new life is herself the cocoon, the carrier of that fluidity out of which grows a whole new life. The time comes when the new life is able to live outside of the mother. In the timing of birth there is the movement, shifting, labor pains, the cervix that held all the fluid stretches and unblocks. The waters break and labor is initiated.

Well, labor is something that almost all of us have gone through. Cesarean section births cut short that usual process, but there is this experience that we’ve archetypally actually all lived out. Most of us came through labor, delivery, birth canal. There is a moment in the birth process which is called transition, and it is the most dangerous time of the delivery for both the baby and the mother. The head of the baby must pass underneath the pubic arch of the mother and enter the world. If this is going to work, if this baby is going to come out of the mother into the world, it has to go through that danger moment. This is often the most painful part of the labor for the mother. Mother and child go through this transition, which is a crisis, danger and opportunity. Then there is a new being that has never existed on earth before, but that has just come through the birth canal to the other side.

One of the fascinating things about the creative process and actually giving birth is that, not only have you brought something new into the world that wasn’t there before, but when you go through this, you are changed. It affects you. Once you have delivered a baby you are no longer in the mother/maiden/crone archetypal form that women can go through physiologically. Your body has changed. You now have given birth to this child. Out of the darkness of your own creative process, out of the unconsciousness of your process but out of your labor has come new life.

Any artist, any writer, anyone who has birthed a business, who has had a vision of something new that can come into the world, knows that they must be willing to commit to whatever time it takes. A baby takes nine months; an elephant takes two years. Businesses usually take twice as long and twice as much capital to return half as much as predicted. Maybe that’s true about children, too. (Laughter.) But anyway, there is this commitment that changes. An eternal adolescent, or in Jungian terms a puer (the eternal young man) or a puella (the eternal maiden), is transformed by making a commitment that changes her or changes him through the pain of laboring to produce something. You experience the commitment to bring it through, the pain of the production, and also that period when you don’t know whether it’s going to work. You don’t know whether you have spent nine months of your life or even years of your life on something that is not going to survive. That you accomplish it is one of the most maturing things that we have all experienced. If we’re talking about being a mother, it’s not enough just to do something biologically. You can be a biological mother and the Mother archetype of commitment and caretaking, which is part of raising this child.

So, after the birth comes the raising, but this is true of most creative processes as well. If you want to take your book that you have written out into the world, you can’t just write it and say it’s done. Or you can finish a painting and put it away in a closet, but if you have something to bring out into the world, then you now have a responsibility to it. Whether it is the child or the business or the painting or the book that you are offering to the world, you do have to bring it out into the world. The next phase of it is that you’ve committed to raising it in some fashion. This is a maturing part of most of our lives. In making that commitment we often cut ourselves off from other possibilities in another way. It’s not a Procrustean bed in terms of, “I have to cut myself off from this in order to be on the road to Athens.” It’s much more. “For now, in terms of time and commitment, I have to let go of certain parts of myself that I cannot give life to any more because I have this other something that I brought into the world. I am committed to bringing it into the world. I’m going to devote my energies to this task.”

What I’m talking about now are, in one form or another, mostly experiences in the first half of life. But these days people are doing different things in different phases of life. Let’s say that, in the first half of your life, you made a commitment to a relationship. You made a promise to bring something new, whether it was a family or a business or a creative idea, into the world. By doing that, you left others of your gifts behind. They sort of languished in the underworld of potential. What often happens next is that we are successful at what we set out to do, which is always a mixed bag. If you are praised for whatever you do so well, it is like stretching you on that Procrustean bed. One part of you now has this energy and form. Everybody has expectations that this is who you are. A transition occurs when you break that agreement that you are going to stay the same. That’s what causes major crises in the relationship over and over again. One person grows and the other person says, “You’re not the same person I love. You are somebody different.”

What happens often when there are major choices on one’s own personal integrity versus the collective? Somewhere around midlife, and yet more than just once, are crises of integrity, where you have to choose to either stay with the group or break with the group and be expelled. This is something that is especially hard for men, for whom the brotherhood of the corporation, the fraternity, the gang, matters a great deal. We learn from the work of people like Deborah Tannen that conversation differs between men and women as a general rule. Young women learn and continue to converse as a means of bonding, actually as a means of reducing stress.

When I was in medical school, the understanding was that under stress we all exhibited flight or fight. Recent research at UCLA came from watching women whose department happened to be studying stress and happened to have both men and women in it. What they noticed was that men and women behaved differently. Men as a group went into flight mode; that is, they withdrew. As stress rises, men are concerned about their jobs; men are concerned about how things are going to work out. In that moment men do not feel very powerful or in control. The two ways of expressing this stress reaction are flight (watch television, go to the basement, withdraw) or fight (anger, road rage). Women in this study noticed that their male companions as researchers did seem to withdraw, where the women reacted in a different manner. Women ended up talking to each other a lot about the stresses the department was going through. Then they started to examine whether men and women physiologically behave differently. It led to the research that said that women talk under stress, reducing the stress level. Oxytocin levels rise, which is the friendship and maternal bonding hormone. Oxytocin is enhanced by estrogen. Men experience flight or fight because adrenalin levels rise. Adrenalin is enhanced by testosterone. So, men and women react to what happens to us when we are stressed in this different way.

If, for example, there is this individuation experience where life looks like you’re doing pretty well, you’re part of the group, you’re successful. Then you break the form either because you fall in love, or because you have a crisis of integrity over what the relationship you’re in is about. It takes a lot of courage for men to break from the group or blow the whistle in the hierarchy because it’s such an acculturation. Deborah Tannen talked about how men use conversation not only for information purposes, but also to find out, “Am I ‘one up’ or am I ‘one down’?” Who is the more alpha?

 If you’re a boy, in order to get along and know your place within a group you’ve got to have your antenna out to learn how and what kind of indications mean more alpha/less alpha. Usually you can rank an alpha in casual conversations. “So how’s business?” is not really about how is business. Now, women asking,” How is business?” want to commiserate over the worst news. “Business is terrible, really.” By talking about the vulnerabilities, there is a reduction of stress and a sense of support. Women don’t support winners as well, actually. There’s much more of a bonding that happens if women share vulnerability.

If you do it as a guy, you’re automatically ‘one down’, and men don’t want to do that. It takes courage. Let’s say that you are on your path, and life is moving along. Rituals develop as a matter of form. You always do this at every holiday. You’re expected to behave in a certain way. At first it was who you were growing into being. Later you begin to feel constricted by everybody’s expectations (including your own) that you’ll always do Thanksgiving this way, you’ll always do holidays that way, you’re always the person who speaks up, or you’re always the person who doesn’t say a word. Then something happens in which new life threatens the old form. This is when transitions happen.

As an example, someone decides to blow the whistle on something that’s going on in the company. Someone decides to speak up and challenge others in some kind of form saying, in effect, “I don’t want to go along with how we’ve been doing it.” If the idea isn’t put out there and consciously worked through as a process, then what often happens is repression. The potential whistle blower says, “Oh well, I don’t want to rock the boat.” The potential challenger says, “I don’t want to have the discussion. I don’t want to talk about my vulnerabilities or my irritations because he/she/they will react negatively, so I’ll stuff it.” Jung pointed out that what we truly suppress is likely to encounter us as Fate. So, there we are, unconsciously drawn to that person who carries that which we have repressed in ourselves. We have a crisis between who we used to be and who we are in our current situation.

As most of you know, psyche is the Greek word for soul. It’s also the Greek word for butterfly. If you have a protagonist in a story whose name is Psyche you might expect that she will go through a major transition and crisis. Will she survive it? Will she come through and be transformed, or will she die? That’s one way of looking at the Psyche myth. Those of you who heard Robert Bly’s White Bear story on the first day of this conference heard a variation of the Eros and Psyche myth.

The form that Psyche broke was the understanding with her unseen lover who came every night. The piece of the story I want to focus on is what happens in an unconscious relationship when it is broken. Psyche was the third most beautiful princess. She was considered so beautiful that she was worshipped rather than sought as a partner. Her father the king seeks to know whether his beloved daughter Psyche will ever find a husband. He goes to the Oracle at Delphi. You know, if you go ask the Delphic Oracle for advice, you are bound to fulfill the advice, so be careful. Don’t ask for the advice unless you are prepared to really do what you are told to do.

The Oracle tells the king that he must abandon his daughter on a mountain top to meet her fate – an inhuman bridegroom. And so, with death is the beginning of the next stage, Psyche is dressed as for a funeral. All the people of the kingdom grieve. Undoubtedly the king must have had second thoughts of, “Why did I ever ask?” The kingdom then mourned beautiful Psyche, left her on the highest crag, abandoned and wailing.

As it turned out, Psyche was wafted down this wonderful, magical valley where all her needs are cared for. All day long she wanders the valley, enjoying this wonderful home that has all the conveniences and provides for everything. Every night her bridegroom comes through the window, makes love to her, and leaves by morning, so she never sees him. In some ways this sounds a little like the suburban idyllic gated community. (Laughter). This goes on and it’s fine for a long time. In Robert Bly’s version of the White Bear it may have gone on for hundreds of years before anything changes.

Psyche’s older sisters, who thought their youngest sister dead, came to the crag to mourn and cry at her loss. And so Psyche beseeches her unseen bridegroom, asking him to let her see her sisters. She cries…and he tries to persuade her that this isn’t what she really wants. And she cries. Eventually, he gives in, only agreeing “as long as you do not tell the secret.” And he tells her, “Psyche, you’re pregnant. The child you are carrying will be a god if you keep my secret. It will be a mortal if you reveal it.” Then he leaves and allows that the sisters come down, which they do on two occasions.

In coming down and raising questions, the sisters reminded Psyche that she was supposed to wed an inhuman bridegroom. They stirred up the idea that “You must be married to a monster.” In her innocence Psyche thinks, “Oh, my God, what have I done? Maybe they’re right. What should I do?” And they say to her, “You must take a lantern and a knife. After your bridegroom comes to you at night, makes love, and falls asleep, take the lantern that you’ve hidden under this bushel basket. Lift it up over his head. If it should be a monster that you’re married to, take this knife and cut off his head.”

Now, those are the two symbols that really do matter to us: the lamp and the knife. If you are going to examine the relationship that you are in, you need both. The first step is the willingness to really take a look at the situation. You need the illumination of the lamp. This symbolizes your willingness to actually take a good look at the person you’re working with, or who you’re living with, or what you’re doing that is a question in your mind. “Who am I in relationship to this?” So the lamp is important.

But what good is the lamp if you don’t have the knife? This is a symbol that can discriminate, cut through the situation, end the relationship by severing its bonds. What good is knowing that you are in a very dysfunctional relationship, if you haven’t the capacity…that is the symbol of the knife…to draw boundary, to discriminate, to cut it off, to end the relationship if it turns out that what you see really is negative?

In this part of the story, Psyche takes both symbols in her hand. As you know, when she raises the lamp and sees her unseen lover, her unknown bridegroom, he turns out to be the immature god of love, Eros. Immature in that he was carrying on this secret affair. He had promised his mother, the goddess Aphrodite, that he would punish Psyche who was so identified with the goddess because of her beauty that the goddess’s shrines were ignored. People were worshipping a human girl as if she was a goddess, and the goddess plotted revenge for what psychologically is true. If you identify with an archetype, you lose your humanity, your individuality. You get inflated by it. You get taken over by it. You do get Aphrodite’s revenge.

CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE