Borderlanders

Suzanne Wagner, Ph.D., is a Jungian analyst in private practice in Sausalito, CA and a training analyst at the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. She co-created the feature documentary, Matter of Heart, 1985 and is Director of The Remembering Jung Series: 28 hours of interviews with people who were close to Jung, forthcoming in DVD format.
This is a groundbreaking book for psychotherapists interested in the extension of Jung’s original findings on the dynamics of the ego and the collective unconscious. More broadly, it breaks ground for all people who are reflecting upon the destructive nature of the neurotic, one-sided Western ego. Jerome Bernstein is a man with a unique background of experience, reflection and action. With more than thirty years of experience as a Jungian analyst, he has worked directly with Navajo and Hopi medicine men exploring their healing traditions. He also has worked with the Navajo tribal council in their attempts to sustain healing rituals now in danger of being lost.

In this new book, he proposes that we are undergoing a major shift in the nature of consciousness itself. He sees this shift in consciousness as an evolutionary development with its basic source in the mysterious intelligence operating from deep within the psyche and the natural world. He calls this new consciousness Borderland consciousness. He defines a new space “The Borderland” that is opening up between the Western ego and the deeper dynamics in the body, in the natural world and in the collective psyche. He suggests that there are growing numbers of people who exhibit this new kind of consciousness. The transrational communications they receive often reflect the problems experienced in other life forms suffering from the destructive effects of industrialized society. The messages are direct, symbolic and linked to events in the body, culture and nature. They are missed if they are referred only to subjective, perceptual reality. Navajo healers would instantly recognize the kinds of phenomena that Borderland people report and communicate.
The book is laid out in three major sections. Part I begins as Bernstein describes how he opened up to this new kind of consciousness through his challenging work with a woman artist who had suffered severe trauma in childhood. She experienced a special awareness of nature and direct connection to the feelings of animals in her environment. Bernstein listened more deeply and recognized he could not continue to pathologize her feelings and perceptions as defensive, dissociated experience or as projected material. It took an expansion of his feeling orientation, his empathy and his willingness to listen to this patient without clinical judgment to discover her particular gifts of consciousness. His experiences with her are used as a kind of Ariadne thread through later sections of the book to help the reader better comprehend the nuances of this new consciousness.
Bernstein then gives a scholarly presentation of the history of the Western ego. He designates the story of the creation myth in Genesis as the source of our orientation to the Word, to logic and to an attitude of total domination over nature. He explores the nature of evolution first explicated by Darwin, and discusses the problems for survival created by overspecialization. He shows how we developed an anthropomorphized ego cleaved from nature. This development of a rational, narrowly focused ego, favoring thinking and abstraction, has made possible the wonders of scientific discovery and technological development. This had to happen, but now it must change if we are to survive as a species and if life on planet earth itself is to survive our destructive habits. He brings in his understanding of new developments in chaos theory and the psychological notion of a fragmentation complex to illustrate the fact that the Western ego is prone to fear of chaos and enacts a super-determined need to control, assuming godlike omnipotence. This focused ego becomes deaf, dumb and blind to new information and to a survival intelligence attempting to reach us through experiences which are transrational and often appear to the one-sided ego as chaotic, when, in fact, they carry messages of a wider and deeper system of order.
The first section ends with the hopeful idea that human consciousness can change and can begin to cooperate with the larger systems of life intelligence speaking to us in Borderland experience. He writes, what holds hope for our species is a containing dynamic outside the ego. Reconnection with nature offers that since it does connect the ego “in spite of itself” to the transpersonal dimension the evolutionary thrust is to have a containing/ constraining dynamic outside the ego that can contain its inflation, arrogance, and hubris. (p. 62)
He offers an example of a life-saving decision made by Nikita Krushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, which moved him to back down in the face of imminent nuclear mutual annihilation by the United States and the Soviet Union. He was undoubtedly aware that it would cost him his political life, if not his physical survival. In essence, he placed the highest value on the preservation of life above and beyond the value placed on (geographical, political) power. I call this dynamic that gripped Khrushchev in that moment, moral consciousness. (pp. 62-63)
Such consciousness stems from a transcendent place, and we can choose to behave consonant with it or counter to it. If we can behave in ways consonant with it, we become co-evolutionary partners with the forces in the psyche and nature aimed at sustaining life.
All of this follows the outlines of individuation as it proceeds according to Jung’s discovery: the conscious ego, opening to the collective unconscious, inevitably comes to a confrontation with the greater intelligence and superior powers of the Self. The ego experiences a defeat as the forces of the deeper Self may overwhelm and fragment it but can as well offer new paths for life which are hidden from it. In my view, Bernstein is giving us fresh examples of this phenomenon as it plays out in both individual lives and in the greater dynamics of our current cultural crises.
In Part II, Bernstein takes pains to describe how Borderland consciousness develops out of three different portals: (1) evolutionary pressures whose source is the deep unconscious, (2) basic givens in personality structure, and (3) the effects of severe trauma. Rational prejudices of most psychotherapists lead them to deal with unconscious material in dreams and symbolic events in reductionistic, categorical and abstract terms. They fail to receive the messages being sent, and they translate them inadequately. This ends up hurting and pathologizing the experiences of Borderland patients. They are apt to resist psychotherapy because it can and often does injure them further. He makes a plea to therapists to be more open, to listen more deeply and empathically to the transrational phenomena that are described by patients. Borderland people are carrying grief for the destructive effects of our cultural-shadow and are knowingly and unknowingly doing psychological work toward the transformation of the Western ego. He shows that these people are not necessarily identified with utopian visions, or with a regressive return to a participation mystique with Nature. He differentiates the Borderland person from both the strongly dissociated trauma patient and from the patient who exhibits patterns of Borderline personality disorder.
Things come alive in Part III with the presentation of material relating to the Navajo world-view and ancient healing rituals. The Navajo recognize that a wound to the environment or the spirit in the natural world surrounding the patient can injure the body and spirit of the patient just as much as would a direct assault upon his body and psyche. This view provides a meaningful link to the Borderland phenomena Bernstein has discovered. Both views tell us that our vitality is interdependent with our surroundings at the levels of body, psyche and nature. Healing the individual restores order and brings healing to the environment and vice versa. He discusses the ways in which the mind/body split that we experience can be bridged and healed in depth psychotherapy and through Navajo healing practices. He draws parallels and emphasizes the use of witnessing as a clinical tool and the use of story to reflect new insights into the connection between psyche, body and environment.
Another chapter relates stories of synchronistic phenomena that seem to be attempts to prevent or intervene with untimely death or the onset of destructive diseases. In one impressive example, he tells about his own early detection of cancer in a woman patient using his sensitive reading of the strange qualities in her dreams and the gestalt inherent in a symbolic drawing she did in the course of her therapy. Other examples include stories showing that many people anticipated the World Trade Center attacks in their dreams and imaginative life before it happened. Bernstein also explores issues raised by treatment of Environmental Illness disorders and Attachment disorders. He makes the creative proposal that much could be gained by forming a fully cooperative team effort between Navajo medicine men, analytical psychologists, and environmental physicians to treat such difficult syndromes.
This description gives only the barest outline of the rich, thoughtfully and sensitively presented material in this fine book. It is scholarly as well as anecdotal. There is a wide-ranging bibliography, and there are pithy endnotes for each chapter which illuminate many of the questions that arise in the reader’s mind. There are useful diagrams as well as photos of Navajo medicine men in their native habitat. A sense of being with Bernstein in an intimate and elaborate conversation is created by this unusual balance between scholarly thinking, intuition, and passionate feeling. An Epilogue presents a poetic story, expressing from the Native American view how the world of the white man has been experienced. There is humor, and there are touching and refreshing images to be found here. It presents an imagined invitation to sit together on either side of a Borderland, to meet each other with respect and openness, to exchange and learn from the different ways and special skills each has developed.
It is deeply moving to read this and to remember Jung’s heartfelt wonder when he discovered the depths of spiritual sensibility in the sacred rituals of the Pueblo people and of other Native American cultures. He was moved to realize the close and vital connection with spirit-in-nature shining through all the life-ways of the native people. Jung knew the destructive, shadow aspects of his white mans mentality better than most men of his time. He opened himself to learn from and work with brown-skinned people of his dreams, of Africa, of Native America and eventually of many other early indigenous earth cultures. Such experiences were part of Jung’s own discovery of the Self and the defeat and transformation of his ego.
This book presents a challenge and a call to the rest of us to listen more deeply and openly and to see more clearly the dynamics between ego and Self. We need not fall victim to depression, panic or despair as we face the powerful forces at work fragmenting our present cultures and our rational views. Our blind and unconscious ways do need to be given up and sacrificed. We do have some hope of bringing ourselves through this terrifying crisis of unconsciousness that we face at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Bernstein has given us a great gift in the form of this book, to read, to discuss and to contemplate together. We can answer this call by paying more attention, using Bernstein’s cues and discriminating evaluations as a help to discern better the messages carried in our own transrational experiences. This is an exciting prospect that offers us the possibility to heal some of the many old wounds we carry as well as to take us into new life ways as of yet unimagined.