The Wounded Researcher:
Research with Soul in Mind
by Robert D. Romanyshyn
Spring Journal Books $24.95
In a 2005 interview, Romanyshyn
says: “As a phenomenologist, I
start with the notion that soul reveals and conceals itself in and through
the landscapes of experience we build individually and collectively.
A person says whom he or she is, for example, in the clothes that are
worn, in the books that are read, in the ways in which the house is furnished
and made into some kind of home.” He goes on to explain that “the
same is true on a collective level,” how “(a) fourteenth
century Gothic church sets in stone the psychological spirit of the age
in a way which is radically different from a Renaissance church.” (http://www.cgjungpage.org)
This phenomenologist is also a post-Jungian, that cabal of therapists,
artists and scholars who whose work extends C.G. Jung’s psychology into everyday
life, facing the Gods with the audacity to address them as symptoms of the
soul’s (their simile for psyche) metabolism, casting Jung’s insights
into this century’s aporia.
Romanyshyn’s vision is also philosophical, leading him to where words
slip away from their referent. “Green!,” he exclaims, is “a
word that is an insult to the richness that surrounds me.” (5) His is
not a deconstructive critique, nor an anthropocentric one. He is not saying
that the world is meaningless, or that we give it our meaning. On the contrary,
he is saying that meaning is like an alchemical process that raises one’s
awareness to “an internal temperature that is more about the work than
it is about me.”(3).
A Core Faculty Member in Clinical
Psychology and Depth Psychotherapy at Pacifica Graduate Institute,
near Santa
Barbara,
CA, Romanyshyn has
written a pedagogy with much larger applications. Anyone who reads more
than a few pages of this book is by default someone interested in doing “re-search,” as
Romanyshyn calls “the unfinished business in the soul of the work,
the unsaid weight of history in the work that waits to be said.” (63)
Artists, for example, are familiar with the call to create a work “beyond
reason,” a call from inside to contribute to the world something
that has never existed before.
The Wounded Researcher is
a book of grieving, a word that made a place for itself in Romanyshyn’s vocabulary after the sudden death of
his first wife, to whom he had been married for 25 years. In a dream
he had a few days after her death, a party at a friend’s house
he sees his wife flowing through the room of guests “as if not
weighted down by gravity.” Awake, he writes: “This is her
place, and in it I seem to have become invisible, as if I were the one
who had died.” (66) Gravity, gravitas, grieving, elegiac mourning, “a
sweetly bitter quality that comes from yearning for something that, while
never attained, is always with us.” (5)
It is better not to do research
methodologically, which Romanyshyn claims as been holding psychology,
for one, hostage,
but with a “poetics” which “does
not mean that research is poetry,” but that a researcher is attuned
to the gap between what is said and what is always left unsaid, the gap
between conscious and unconscious, which is bridged by the symbol as
the expression of the transcendent function.” (220) This gap is
mundus imaginalis, the imaginal region, mapped by the French philosopher
and scholar of Sufism and Iranian Shi’ism, Henri Corbin, “that
is intermediate between sense and intellect and that mediates between
them.” (81)
Meaning is born where we are
unbalanced, unsettled. Here the abyss opens, and “(t)o descend into that abyss requires a different way of seeing
and knowing.” (147) An imaginal approach to research also includes “former
ways of knowing,” such as alchemy, astrology, and I-Ching. It seems
to me that the spirit of this work is more European than American, more
life-affirming than wealth-gathering, more Eros than Logos, mysterious
than pragmatic, it dissolves fundamentalism into a Cloud of Unknowing.
In the Kabbalah it is said that every statement has six hundred thousand
interpretations.
Some of the most lyrical moments
in The Wounded Researcher are found in Romanyshyn’s generous quotes from and discussion of the problems
his students had finding a path into their dissertations. For example,
an Iranian student, Kiyanoosh Shamlu, wanted to explore to work of 12th
Century Iranian intellectual Sohrevardi, and how “an ancient Islamic
tradition and the modern Western of Jungian psychology converge and diverge
in their understanding and treatment of imagination and its relation
to the imaginal world.” (276)
During the initial stages
of his work, Kiyanoosh had a series of significant dreams. In the
first, “he is in a very dark forest, where he is
running away from an old man who is chasing him.” In the second, “he
finds himself on the top of a mountain with a book that has no writing
in it.” In the third, “he is riding in the sky on the back
of an enormous bird while looking down on a landscape that has no discernable
figures or objects.” (276)
Kiyanoosh could make no sense of these dreams, until he came across them
in Sohrevardi’s “descriptions of the soul’s spiritual journeys
of descent from and return to the imaginal world.” (276) He was stunned “that
he was led into this text of Sohrevardi’s through his dreams.” (277)
Kiyanoosh went on the explore “an unacknowledged metaphysics” in
Jung’s psychology, in which “the imaginal world is not so much
an underworld as the epiphany of an other world, which…Jung himself was
struggling to understand.” (277)
Romanyshyn goes on the say that Kiyannoosh’s experience indicates that
dreams “may know more about the work than the conscious researcher does.” (277)
It is not so much that Romanyshyn opens new territory by suggesting this, but
in the context of the book it becomes the long-nosed pliers in the toolbox
of the researcher who has soul in mind.
This toolbox also includes
elegiac writing, where “a researcher
dwells among the ruins because he or she knows that it is in the ruins
that the living spirit of the work waits to be remembered.” (314)
It is a style of writing that “resurrects the dead and transforms
them, as well as our relationship to them.” (314) Also discussed
at length is what Romanyshyn calls “alchemical hermeneutics,” a
process that “keeps stirring the work so that what would become
coagulated dissolves.” (327) There is also “creative repetition,” which
is “like falling in love again with the work, coming under its
spell, being claimed again by it. Creative repetition is a return to
the romance of the beginning.” (311)
Nowhere is the romance of
the beginning more lovingly handled than with his discussion of
the myth of Orpheus
and Eurydice.
Romanyshyn suggests
that this myth “is the archetypal background for how research becomes
psychological,” as it is “about this process of losing and
finding, about this work of transformation in which the other becomes
a psychological reality, a matter of soul.” (59) The part of the
myth that most intrigues him, as it has cast its spell over many other
writers, especially the poet H.D., and, most famously, Rainer Maria Rilke,
is when Orpheus travels to Hades to retrieve his wife, Eurydice. He is
granted his wish, but only if he doesn’t look back. (An interesting
echo between Greek and Hebrew mythologies.) As in so much mythology,
of course he violates this proviso. “Orpheus had to look back, “ writes
Romanyshyn, “because the underworld is Eurydice’s place,
and being there, not only is she freed from being Orpheus’s possession,
she is also freed into herself.” (53)
In his poem, “Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes,” Rilke
dwells on this pivotal moment, approaching it in several ways, including---
She was already loosened like long hair,
given out like fallen rain,
shared out like a hundredfold supply.
She was already root.
Which reminds me of Denise
Levertov’s poem, “A Tree Telling
of Orpheus” ---
Then as he sang
it was no longer sounds only that made the music:
he spoke, and as no tree listens I listened, and language
came into my roots
out of the earth,
into my bark
out of the air,
into the pores of my greenest shoots
gently as dew
and there was no word he sang but I knew its meaning.
Once we love into our roots,
there is no turning back. However, there can a turning away, as
when, in
Rilke’s poem, Hermes, “with
anguish in his voice,” says to Eurydice, “’He has turned
round.’” But, “she comprehended nothing and said softly: ‘Who?’”
“Who! Just this one word,” Romanyshyn writes, “which
the poet italicizes! We are meant to notice something here, some fundamental
change not only in Eurydice but also between her and Orpheus. (57) In
other words, this change in direction is possible only when one of the
couple lets go, as in Romanyshyn’s dream of his departed wife,
to whom he had become invisible. In that dream, if he had tried to speak
to her, had said to her, “Don’t you remember me, your husband?” I
think she would have replied, “Who?”
Adding the dimension of dreams
to the process of research, along with “metaphoric
sensibility,” “creative repetition,” and many other
techniques that are valuable not only to the work of psychologists, graduate
students, poets, and independent scholars, but to a deeper understanding
of what it means to be human, this seminal book is a primer for our species
if is to survive in a world driven by the whiles of change.
Notes: Denise Levertov, “A Tree Telling of Orpheus”:
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-tree-telling-of-orpheus-full-text/
R.M. Rilke, “Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes”:
http://www.tonykline.co.uk/PITBR/German/MoreRilke.htm#_Toc527606964
The translation I used is by A.S. Kline.
© Joel Weishaus 2008
© Rain Taxi 2008