for crisis is comprised of the ideograms for “danger” and “opportunity.” Every serious diagnosis, especially when life-threatening, is a major crisis for everyone concerned that shakes the foundations of previous assumptions. Such a crisis is not restricted to the person with the illness, nor is it just about the fate of a body. All aspects of life are thrown into a time of turmoil and transition. When death and disability come close, it is indeed a time of danger and opportunity, which raises questions about the meaning of life and tests the bonds of relationships. Life-threatening illness is a crisis for the soul.
This book grew out of a series of lectures and workshops about illness as a descent of the soul into the underworld and the healing that can result. The central message that illness is a soul experience was one of the inspirations for a series of conferences for women surviving cancer called, Healing Journeys: Cancer as a Turning Point, along with Lawrence LeShan's ground-breaking book, whose title inspired the second part of the conference name. Cancer as a turning point was a personal perspective for the organizers: three of the original four had been diagnosed and treated for cancer of the breast.
I have accompanied family members, friends, and patients through illnesses and hospitalizations that were descents into the underworld. The terrain is very familiar, though the gateway of physical illness is not as familiar as the psychological entry points that bring people on a soul path into a Jungian analysis with me.
Whether the life-threatening illness is psychological or physical, when depression colors or influences thought and action, people often give up on themselves and on the future. It is then not enough to treat a depression only with medications or to only pay attention to the physical signs and symptoms of disease, when giving up on life having any meaning, now or in the future, is the underlying life-or-death issue.
The parallels between psychiatric and physical life-threatening illness are easy for me to see because I have straddled both worlds. Before I was a psychiatrist and even now as an analyst, I am, in some essential way, still a physician. Medical school and a rotating internship in a large county hospital were an initiation, not just an education. To be a doctor of the body or of the psyche is to be at those border crossings between ordinary life and life thereafter. The onset of a life-threatening or life-changing illness brings an end to a phase of life, as it may to life itself. The doctor of the body or of the psyche is a witness to and a participant in the outcome.
A serious illness has the impact of a stone hitting the still surface of a lake, sending concentric rings of disturbance out, as feelings, thoughts, and reactions radiate out from this center. It impacts relationships, it stirs the depths of others, it potentially brings the patient and those who are affected “close to the bone,” into the proximity of the soul. Soul questions arise about the meaning of life when the mind is ill or the body is ailing. Healing and recovery may depend as much or more upon a deepening of relationships and connection to one's own soul and spiritual life, as on medical or psychiatric expertise.
I have learned over and over again that a life-threatening or progressive, disabling illness is soul shaking for everyone involved, that it provides us an opportunity to get intimations and intuitions about why we are here and what and who really matter. It is this experience, along with the archetypal underpinning provided by mythology, that is the soul of the book
I hope this book will be an inner companion during a time of descent or difficulty. Maybe it will come to you through synchronicity to affirm what you intuitively know and to support you to do whatever it is that will heal you. I can imagine it being read aloud, a portion or a chapter. I hope that it opens the way for significant conversations with others and to rich internal dialogues with yourself.
1
CLOSE TO THE BONE: ILLNESS AND THE SOUL
In noisy wards and crowded waiting rooms of county hospitals and clinics, in quiet private rooms in medical-center pavilions or in well-appointed waiting rooms, examining rooms, or offices, wherever there are patients, there are long moments of silence, pauses sometimes preceded by a sigh, a transient stillness when the air feels heavier. When the eyes of the patient or others who are there turn inward. When someone retreats inside as others chatter, or seems to be somewhere else even as the doctor is explaining something important. Sometimes I have glimpsed that same look with its attendant quiet on the face of a doctor or nurse. Occasionally, a room suddenly, collectively, goes silent in this same deep way. When this happened in ancient Greece, people would observe: “Hermes has entered.”
Hermes was the messenger god and the guide of souls to the underworld; dreams and divination came under his auspices. Today, when that hush happens, someone might break the silence with, “An angel has come.” A subtle perceptible shift in the air unaccountably occurs that people from ancient times to the present have attributed to the presence of invisible winged messengers from the eternal world. In these moments, the persona or face we wear for the ordinary world to see drops away and the mind is empty of its preoccupations and responsibilities and we are with soul.
Illness and the Soul
The reality and possibility of serious illness evokes soul from the first moment it registers. It might be after hearing a report that something serious was found on the X-ray or more sophisticated scans or in the specimen sent to the lab, or after an illness announced itself with the sudden onset of acute pain, loss of consciousness, or bleeding, or after the discovery of a suspicious lump or discolored area, or after surviving a suicide attempt or a disabling injury. Whenever or however that line from health to illness is crossed, we enter this realm of soul. Illness is both soul shaking and soul evoking for the patient and for all others to whom the patient matters. We lose an innocence, we know vulnerability, we are no longer who we were before this event, and we will never be the same. We are in uncharted terrain, and there is no turning back. Illness is a profound soul event, and yet this is virtually ignored and unaddressed. Instead, everything seems to be focused on the part of the body that is sick, damaged, failing, or out of control.
A hospital has much in common with an auto-body repair shop. It is there with its staff of specialists to diagnose, fix, or replace what it can of the physical body to get it running again. The patient and those accompanying the patient through this crisis are considered to behave well if they do not get in the way of whatever the doctors want to do with the ailing body. Troublesome patients (or their troublesome significant others) ask questions, want to understand what is wrong and why a particular treatment and not something else has been selected, bother doctors with requests, or don't respond properly. The medical setting is one in which there is a definite line of authority with the doctor in charge and others responsible for carrying out orders. A good patient like a good soldier is one who cooperates or obeys orders. Especially when cancer is the diagnosis but in many other conditions as well, the doctor's perspective is often similar to a general at war: the disease is the enemy to be fought, with the body of the patient the battleground.
Threshold Between Life and Death
When something is wrong with our bodies, we want whatever is wrong to be fixed. When something destructive is going on in our bodies, we want the disease to be stopped. We go to doctors and to hospitals with the expectation that they will take care of our bodies. That the soul might also be engaged is not our expectation. Yet, a life-threatening illness calls to the soul, taps into spiritual resources, and can be an initiation into the soul realm for the patient and for anyone else who is touched by the mystery that accompanies the possibility of death. When life is lived at the edge—in the border realm between life and death—it is a liminal time and place. Liminal comes from the Latin word for “threshold.” It is not an everyday word; it is one whose meaning I want to evoke out of the remembered experience of the reader and the collective memory of the human race, which we all have access to. Whenever we participate in something that will change us, and change how others relate to us—as when we marry, are inducted into the armed forces, or are ordained, become a doctor, or survive an ordeal— that experience is a liminal one. Whenever we are initiated into knowing something we did not know before on a body level—for example, through sexual intercourse or pregnancy—we