I am grateful in manifold ways for C.G. Jung's wonderful enlargement of my chosen field of psychology. That gratitude had its fortuitous, unsought birth in the first of my many years as an analysand, a patient in psychotherapy. The first of my two Jungian therapists was Edward F. Edinger, whose office in those years was on Central Park West in New York City. I was young, in my 20s, newly married, a graduate student of political science at Columbia University.
My understanding of psychology, particularly of the dynamics of human development in its social, historical, and cultural context, which would become the calling of a lifetime of practice, had hardly begun to emerge, so it appeared wholly accidental that, in my search for a therapist, a friend urged me to seek out Dr. Edinger, a psychiatrist and analytical psychologist who was prominent among what I came later to understand as the second generation of American students of C.G. Jung.
Our weekly sessions together over the better part of three years were revelatory and transformative, even if I began them imagining myself as the student I remained. At first, I would characteristically arrive early, sit for a half-hour or so on the greensward of Central Park, consciously preparing myself for what I anticipated as kin to an hour with one of my professors at Columbia. In fact, I was beginning, with Dr. Edinger, a lifelong journey of absorption in a deeply meaningful process of what Jung called individuation, the achievement of self-actualization through a process of integrating the conscious and the unconscious, with central attention to human relations, family dynamics across generations, and the central integrative function of dreams. For a thoughtful interview with Edward Edinger, read here in Psychology Today.
I recall that early work now, a full half-century later, as I contemplate a remarkable short poem by W.H. Auden called "The More Loving One." Auden's poem was drawn to my attention today in reading the current issue of Maria Popova's online journal, Brain Pickings. Listen to the poem as read on Brain Pickings or SoundCloud by astrophysicist Janna Levin. The image that comes to mind in reading this particular Auden poem is the night sky, particularly when we are blessed with clarity of vision, so the stars are not obscured by clouds or by a plethora of more earthly and proximate lights. Here is Auden's beautiful, almost whimsical poem.
THE MORE LOVING ONE
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.