Author: Janet O. Dallett
Aequitas Books, 2008
147 pages
Reviewer: Craig Chalquist
Chalquist.com
2010
Although many books have been written about the psychology of violence (as I learned during my days directing a program for court-referred perpetrators), Dr. Dallett's clearly and concisely written book offers thoughtful and sometimes surprising reflections, case anecdotes, and scholarly musings on violence as a spiritual problem.
One of the most refreshing aspects of the book is that instead of filing away discussion of aggression and violence in a handy “archetypal evil” pigeonhole (the Jungian “daimon made me do it” counterpart to Freud's unfruitful hypothesis of a death drive), Dallett uncovers the actually lived relationship between repressed archetypal potentials and the conscious mind that does the repressing. “To the extent we are...torn between perfectionist ideals and the reality of what a person can be or achieve....a rage-filled counter-personality builds up energy in the unconscious” (p. 82). In my men's groups we always knew which men were at greatest risk for another violent incident: those who maintained that their anger was an aberration they had now overcome with penance and good intentions.
The same dynamic of denial applies to entire nations—and goes far toward explaining why the “nicest” and most restrained people sometimes pick up a gun. Here is a sentence that should be framed in every courtroom instead of the Ten Commandments: “...Violence is the human spirit's protest against the enforcement of more goodness than it can stomach” (p. 92). An overemphasis on decency and virtue not only darkens the personal and collective shadow, it unconsciously identifies with divine goodness and thereby falls into inflation and self-righteousness. In the light of this observation, the missionary and the terrorist stand revealed as brothers-in-arms.
Listening to the Rhino deals not just with outwardly expressed violence, however, but with confronting and transforming archetypal violence (as imaged by the dream figure of the Rhino) manifesting from within the psyche. The chapter headings reflect this depth-psychological emphasis:
Freeing the Spirit Trapped in Sickness
The Rhino
How to Listen to The Rhino
Teresa [a case example]
The Paradoxical God of Violence
Sedating the Savage
The End and the Beginning
Following up on Jung's advice to translate emotions into images, Dallett writes about how a symptom or an illness, whether somatic or psychogenic (or both), represents an attempt at incarnation imparted by a spiritual force badly in need of translation from a literal source of suffering into an actively lived symbolic work. “Your symptoms are a potential friend, not an enemy to be destroyed, for they speak with the voice of a vital spirit that is asking for attention” (p. 64). Healing requires finding what this force wants and needs for its own realization. Making a work of art, breaking a therapeutic impasse, or modifying a relationship are three of many possibilities for new forms of expression that liberate the archetypal power from remaining trapped “in matter” (in symptom or illness).
Active imagination furnishes a primary Jungian tool for this kind of deep work, but as Dallett reminds the reader, Marie-Louise von Franz always insisted on the importance of completing at least these four steps: setting the ego aside, tending the images, reacting to the images, and putting the results to work in life (italics added). It is easy for introverts in particular to skip the final step, but doing so severs inner from outer, contemplation from action. (I once inadvertently offended an analyst who was boasting that her male patients were adept at writing love poems to the anima and painting passionate pictures of her by wondering out loud, “Do these guys ever go out on a date?”) As an introvert I know that we will seize any excuse to hide, especially when the outer world feels dangerous; one of our best strategies for staying under cover is the omnipotent but largely unquestioned belief that inner change somehow magically transforms outer reality.
This belief may well be a candidate for what Dallett identifies in another context as a pathological identification with spirit: what Jung identified as inflation. An example discussed in the book is the New Age canard that we cause all our problems. Also criticized is the widespread habit of using meditation to get rid of (repress) the emotionally charged images flowing from the unconscious. These and other New Age maneuvers are enlisted in the service of propping up the happy persona that conceals the darker dimensions of conflictual psychic life. One can almost hear in popular “thinking positive” propaganda the voice of the family cheerleader castigating brothers and sisters for being so “depressing” as to discuss Dad's alcoholic violence—or on a national level, the violence inflicted by the precarious rule of empire—out in the open.
In the chapter “Sedating the Savage,” Dallett presents many examples of how psychotropic medication represses unpleasant emotions while supporting artificial idealized states of happiness and surface contentment. James Hillman has presented a similar critique, which can be summed up by the dictum: Silence the symptom and lose the soul. Furthermore, all forms of repression ultimately strengthen that which they repress. Yet Dallett goes farther: Psychiatric medication should only be used to contain severe symptoms, she argues, preferably in small doses and even then only temporarily. Although the alarm should be raised about overmedication—psychotropics are even being found in public water supplies—I have known people with major psychiatric disorders for whom the advice to go off meds to do “psychological work” has been disastrous. I am thinking of people legitimately diagnosed with bipolar disorder who took similar advice from their gurus and ended up psychotic; one, a former student, is still homeless and ranting in the streets. I have also known people with schizophrenia who could never hold down jobs or attend school without some kind of long-term antipsychotic medication. What's important in such cases is to prescribe a correct and accurate dosage not only to contain extreme symptoms but to make psychological work possible—work that includes dealing with the psyche's responses to the need for medication.
“Some—maybe all—destructively violent actions spring from the ego's inability to respect, confront, and wrestle with the Self's enraged response to galling levels of powerlessness” (p. 104). I would like to see this insightfully expressed logic extended more often to the state of the oppressed struggling on every side and in all corners of the world. Most of the examples of violence in this book break forth from the uptight middle class, where swings are removed from parks to prevent lawsuits. What about the poor who live in the parks? As fantastic amounts of money continued to be funneled upward, the number of Americans living below the poverty line soars higher than ever before. Racism and sexism continue to be major American sources of suffering. If the Self in such sufferers is enraged, social constraints and injustices give it excellent reason to be, for as Martin Luther King pointed out long ago, a riot [like a symptom] is the language of the unheard.