The Intersection of Poetry and Jungian Analysis through the Metaphor: In Creation You are Created is a remarkable text that moves as freely through worlds and genres as its author. It is a psychology text that dives into poetry with passion and shares intimate stories of the clinical analyst’s clients. In the vein of Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ classic Women Who Run with the Wolves, here is a feminine and wholistic take on myth and metaphor in life and literature. –KFK
Regina Célia Colonia-Willner is a poet, neuroscientist, licensed clinical psychologist and singer. She holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience from The Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, US, and received a degree from the Carl Gustav Jung Institut Zurich, where she defended her thesis “In Creation, you are Created. The Intersection of Poetry and Jungian Analysis through the Metaphor,” the basis of this her latest book.
She is the author of four collections of poetry and short stories, including Canção para o Totem (Song for the Totem), which won the Jabuti Prize, Brazil’s Pulitzer. Her poems have appeared in Catamaran Literary Reader, The Cortland Review, and elsewhere in the US. Her fiction appears in the anthology Urban Voices— Contemporary Short Stories from Brazil, published by the University Press of America. She is now working on her new collection of poems, Into the Blooming Night.
KFK: You are someone who moves through many worlds that may seem separate, as a scientist, a clinical psychologist and as a poet. In the introduction of your new book, The Intersection of Poetry and Jungian Analysis through the Metaphor: In Creation You are Created, you write, “Jung was interested in poetry and the arts as opportunities to explore archetypal dimensions. He famously stated that ‘In creation, you are created.’”
You use this as the subheading for the title of your book. Can you elaborate on that idea?
RCW: I am, among other things, a poet, a neuroscientist and also a singer. I sing in a choir as a soprano coloratura. I love to sing. It helps me hear what I am singing. Carl Gustave Jung also loved to paint. There is a museum in Switzerland with his paintings. It helped him to recuperate after he and Freud parted company.
KFK: You have also lived in at least 3 different parts of the world. What qualities of mind allow you to do so with ease?
RCW: I have been writing since I was a very young child and started moving across the world even before I was a one year old. My father worked in the military. I believed it was “the normal way” of life for my family and me. My first birthday was celebrated in Santiago de Chile, although I was born in Brazil, as we were going to Quito, Ecuador, where my father was posted to supervise the new frontier between Chile and Ecuador.
I guess since the very beginning, the world looked like one continuous place, not different countries. I believed I was “trained” to do that since I was a little baby. And also for that reason, I speak five languages.
KFK: Where do you currently live and work?
RCW: Currently, I live and work in Atlanta, Georgia, in the United States, but I still travel a lot. For example, to graduate from the Carl Gustave Jung Institute I was going back and forth from Kusnacht, Switzerland, and the United States, several times a year.
KFK: Who or what creates your personal ecosystem?
RCW: My ecosystem included Rio de Janeiro beaches – when I had time – before the pandemic, but also the immense trees in Senegal, Africa, where I was representing Brazil in that country as a diplomat. I was serving there with the Brazilian writer Joao Cabral de Melo Neto, the Ambassador, and a very important Brazilian poet.
KFK: What inspired you to write this book?
RCW: I believe a Jungian analysis session resembles a trip discovering new places, suggesting how to put things together in a different order, and paying attention to different temperatures and animals, like the big llamas from the Andes mountains. I am moved by a sort of curiosity about the world – a curiosity similar to the one of a scientist.
Excerpt: Chapter 2: 11 Pages
Chapter 2 In Creation, You Are Created Carl Gustav Jung famously states in the book where his Zarathustra Seminars are collected that “In Creation, you are Created.”1 That affirmation is also the title Verena Kast has chosen for one of the Seminars she teaches at the C.G. Jung Institut in Küsnacht, Switzerland, attended by students who are Diploma candidates on their way to graduating as professional psychoanalysts. In his Zarathustra Seminars, Jung affirms that the creative impulse is forever the maker of personality. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary that, in the process of individuation, everybody should become aware of his creative instinct, no matter how small it is. He also says that “The human ego cannot live without creativity; it proves its existence by inventing something, by doing something on its own, out of the ordinary . . . And he alerts the reader that “I would not be able to give you any suitable definition of ‘creative power’ . . . we only know that it is, but how that is possible, we don’t know.”2 As the Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis says, a metaphor represents a powerful creative impulse.3 It can be found sometimes in the language of everyday life and, more frequently, in powerful poetry and psychoanalytical practice. On the other hand, a specific choice of words in a metaphor can point to a particular comparison, expressing a precise reality. Still, an alternative analogy can represent the same situation or emotion using different words. As an exercise in metaphor, the author proposes to think of the previous chapter—a prose narrative—and then presents a comparable situation as a poem. This will be an example of the personality of an individual working creatively with the specificities of their life. Although she was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, her family moved to Quito, Ecuador, when she was a few months old. Her father had been commissioned to supervise the geographic demarcation of a new boundary between Ecuador and Peru, as determined by the Rio de Janeiro treaty. Instead of learning Portuguese as her first language, the author learned Quechua and Spanish with those who worked in their house. These good C02 Page: 5 Stage: Draft 4/19/24 6 Chapter 2 people enjoyed teaching her about the world. Pointing to the sun, they would tell her its name is Inti. The mamacunas helped her learn how to walk. But also, she learned how to observe the llamas, listen to the flutes, and follow the movement of alert hands at the weave—and she was eager to follow the Inca intonations and warmth. When she was four, her family returned from Ecuador to Brazil, where she learned Portuguese, and almost immediately, the family went to Paris, where the author was raised. As young children usually do, she learned the new language rapidly in that third country. But, as a new student at school, she noticed that she was not making close friends. That’s when she discovered a social survival mode that came in handy: she could use her voice to sing to the other children. The vibration of their little chairs being brought around her at recess to listen to her singing stayed vivid in her memory. Some of these polite French kids would even say, “Mais c’est tout comme à la radio!” She was discovering the power of music. The author compares that situation— described in a prose narrative—to a poem. The reader will find below “Threshold of a Third Language,” a poem she composed about a critical situation at her aunt’s house in São Paulo just after her family came back from Quito and just before her family moved to Paris. In that poem, a similar metaphor as the one described to the reader as a new student at the school in France also happens. You will find below “Threshold of a Third Language,” a poem the author composed about that critical situation. Would you say you can intuit a similar tone of emotion in the new student at the foreign school in Paris and in the metaphors describing the event at her aunt’s house in São Paulo? Would the reader say it is possible to intuit a similar tone of emotion in the new student at the foreign school in Paris and in the metaphors describing the event at her aunt’s house in São Paulo? Threshold of a Third Language 1. The razor blade swift in his hand, father was shaving. I dashed to climb the steps carved into a hill behind my aunt’s house, to seek the fragrant signature of guava, to say once more goodbye to Brazil, the country I was born in but left—months old – for another, where three snow-crowned volcanoes like serene tigers slept not far from our porch. In the Andes, four years went by, and my parents assured me we would go back to a place even better than Quito—so I wouldn’t have to clasp my arms around my dog, C02 Page: 6 Stage: Draft 4/19/24 In Creation, You Are Created 7 my friends, both languages the Inca mothers had taught me—to never leave Ecuador, where the sky turns up submerged in stars. 2. Back in São Paulo, away from the mamacunas, as I climbed down from giving a kiss of attention to the guava trees, I saw flames. In a room behind the house, an iron had turned clothes into a field of blazing tulips. My aunt stood near the kitchen, talking to the parakeets, although she did not speak the languages I spoke. The iron is on fire! She smiled a “how-cute-you-are” and kept chatting with the birds. The iron. On fire! Quick! She didn’t move. I pulled, but one by one, she untangled my fingers from her skirt. That’s when I took off my sandal and slapped her legs to push them forward. Father appeared at the kitchen door, razor in hand, his face hidden behind a half mask of dragon foam. 3. My flower-sandal vibrant in mid-air, I turned to him: The iron is burning! As his blade struck the tiles, he yelled my words to my aunt, my words she had refused to hear—although now they sounded so different to me I could not understand, but she did and started screaming. Neighbors rushed with pans, ice buckets, hoses, and streams of water raged against tangerine flames licking, by now, the other face of the house. The parakeets stood still in awe. The poem offers a musicality and a rhythm absent in the prose. For example, in the passage “That’s when I took off one of my sandals/ and slapped her legs to push them forward,” the reader can hear the sandal slapping the legs, helped by the sound of the initial syllables of sandal and slapping. The rhythm is marked by the beats of the expression “to púsh thém fórward.” In addition, C02 Page: 7 Stage: Draft 4/19/24 8 Chapter 2 the metaphors in the poem describe the situation of a child who appears as “a new student” in São Paulo — given that the language spoken there is a new one to her. At that moment, the musicality of the words shapes the dramatic meaning further: (my father) yelled my words to my aunt, my words she had refused to hear—although now they sounded so different to me I could not understand, but she did and started screaming. The reader can hear, in the last verses of the stanza, how “she did” and “started screaming” sounds like a piercing scream, while “understánd” and “stárted” burst into artillery salvos through their pounding “a.” One can also notice that the poem, with all its images—unfolds a series of metaphors. Like a dream, like an active imagination. The iron is on fire! She smiled “How cute you are” and kept chatting with the birds. The iron. On fire! Quick! She didn’t move. I pulled, but one by one, she untangled my fingers from her skirt. That’s when I took off my sandal and slapped her legs to push them forward. Father appeared at the kitchen door, razor in hand, his face hidden behind a half mask of dragon foam. As one can see, the creativity and the “personality” brought together by that poem might manifest through large and small levels. Indeed, the discernment of metaphors is a regular part of the practice of good therapists. The capacity to connect with the client’s inner world depends on being open to the emotional, rhythmic, and sounding content of the metaphors they create and being capable of bringing them back to them in the therapist’s interventions. That way, the client, who may feel like “a new student in a foreign school” in many ways, can feel that they are “heard” by the psychoanalyst and that their communication is valued. The psychoanalyst can also be more effective when alerting the client to an unconscious new development in their analysis if the therapist takes advantage of the creative images and the sounds the client spontaneously brings to the room. When Jung alerts the reader that “I would not be able to give you any suitable definition of “creative power—we only know that it is, but how that C02 Page: 8 Stage: Draft 4/19/24 In Creation, You Are Created 9 is possible, we don’t know,” he is simply confirming what he has been saying all along in his work.4 In any arts pursuit, in any creative exercise. It is impossible to know intellectually how, in creation, you are created precisely because creativity (as another metaphor) is a product of the conscious and the unconscious! It results from conscious and unconscious impulses—the intellectual desire to “explain” it cannot untangle the two processes. Here’s another example from the author’s practice. One of her clients, who complained that it took him around two long hours to feel ready to start being active in the morning, told her that, this very day, he got up and immediately started doing what he had to do. “I was so surprised and delighted with this new turn,” he exclaimed. “I am curious about why this happened,” he added his body alert, sitting at the edge of the chair. “Why do you think this change has occurred?” In his sixties, this client—one could call him John—had been mostly a thinking type and brought almost no dreams to his therapy. An engineer, he had been highly positioned in a large international bank and served in several countries. Because he had just been talking about dreams before he spoke about the morning surprise, the author observed: Well, a dream could be helpful here. He then exclaimed: I just had a dream last week! To which the analyst responded: Let’s hear the dream. The dream he brought was short and similar to his previous ones: he was at the bank, talking with some colleagues. The author did not feel that the image and associations he made brought a path to answer his question, but she clearly heard new, fresh energy in his voice. “These colleagues were always contrariant to my good ideas of creating new solutions for the bank,” he associated with his dream. “And, despite their negative opinions, I always had obtained outstanding results.” He then described three instances of success in detail where, in one of them, his implemented idea saved the bank 600 million dollars. “You deserve warm congratulations, John,” – the author said in support of his decisive, successful action: Although the large sum of money could be a symbol of “energy” and the therapist could try to work the metaphor from there—she started pondering to herself whether, in their work, there was something that could be felt “contrariant” to his good ideas. As she held for a moment, there was a pause. Then, out of the silence, his voice appeared to show even greater alertness. “And then, of course, when I went to Buenos Aires, there was the kidnapping.” He had been her client for a while but had never mentioned any kidnapping. “What kidnapping?” she asked. He gestured towards an apparent distant time and explained: C02 Page: 9 Stage: Draft 4/19/24 10 Chapter 2 “I was visiting Argentina as vice-president of the international bank to implement a new platform there. At my arrival, at night, at Ezeiza International, the airport in Buenos Aires, one of the bank officers, Pepe, was waiting there for me.” “We met where the airplane arrived and went to gather my suitcase with documents and stuff from customs—he continued. As we were ready to leave the airport, three bandits—armed with machine guns—jumped in front of us and kidnapped us to a car that was waiting for them outside. John was now very animated, and his body clearly remembered how the bandits handled them through the night outside the airport. “They pushed us into the car, undressed us with nervous movements, and drove us around with our heads down, so we did not know where we were going. The bandits took all our belongings, including our clothes, shoes, and glasses. We were naked, at the bottom of the car, and the bandits drove us for what I believe was longer than one hour.” This was the Tupamaros’ time, and that client knew the bandits were planning to ask a big ramson for them. He did not want them to learn that they were high officers of an international bank. He started trying to be friendly with one of the bandits and told that person that he had worked in Argentina before loved the country and was there now to visit his grandmother. “And here’s my cousin, Pepe,” he said. These were the details he had invented at the moment. “We finally arrived at a deserted field,” – John continued—his arms describing a large, empty space. The bandits led us out of the car and discussed what to do next. For some reason, they went somewhere else and told us to stay there. That was around 3:00 am, and the darkened field was deserted. I looked around and saw a well. I told Pepe to jump into the well and be as still and silent as possible. I also jumped into that well—which had no water and was around 2 meters deep. When the bandits returned, they did not find us and did not have the idea to investigate the well.” “We waited there for a long hour or more—John told his analyst—and, believing the bandits were gone, we managed to get out of the well. We did not know where we were, had no clothes or shoes, and I had to guide Pepe by the hand because he could not see without his glasses.” “We walked for a long time until we saw a highway where cars were going in one direction—but not one of them stopped for us, naked fellows, late at night. So, we kept going in the same direction as the cars until we arrived at the modest house of a laborer, who was very kind to provide us with some old clothes. There, Pepe called his brother, who came to rescue us.” The next day, as planned, the author’s client was at the bank for the meeting and, that evening boarded the plane which would bring him to the country where he was going next. C02 Page: 10 Stage: Draft 4/19/24 In Creation, You Are Created 11 For the analyst, all this dramatic story about kidnapping appeared to start connecting with John’s question earlier in their session: where did the energy he had felt that morning—many years later—come from? What had changed? After testing his associations, the psychoanalyst said: The unconscious speaks to us through symbols, through metaphors. What your unconscious is now telling us, with that powerful story that you associated with the initial dream, is that the opportunity to discover just-released energy in yourself is at hand. I had thought—she offered—while I was listening to his story that he was coming out of challenging times. He had to close his business in his country (due to the world financial crisis) and, for years, had tried to reinvent himself in a foreign country with some success. “The new business you are creating now, the author said, and the positive results obtained from it recently appeared to me as you are feeling as ‘coming out of the well.’ And with that, you feel now aware of a type of energy you have missed for a long time.” With that intervention, based on Jungian literature on healing trauma, the analyst was bringing the well metaphor to the client’s attention—with the purpose of reconnecting the repressed energy in his inner world to his recent developments. She had in mind what Jung himself said in Modern Man in Search of a Soul: “We must follow nature as a guide. What the (therapist) then does is less a question of treatment than of developing the creative possibilities latent in the patient himself.”5 That “coming out of the well” metaphor not only represented a financial matter. Still, it told them about the energy that had been “sequestered” in the unconscious and guarded by “bandits with machine guns,” who took everything from John, even his clothes, shoes, and glasses. He felt like having to succeed “at night, with no orientation.” The author shared with her client that, as a protagonist of this vivid story he had just told her, he had accomplished just what needed to be accomplished in developing what she called his individuation. She suggested that the same incredible new energy he felt that morning, that stimulating emotion, could relate to his coming out of the well in his present life: a powerfully good prognostic. They continued their astonishing discovery and therapeutical work from there—reinvigorated by the metaphor John’s unconscious had offered them in that session. On the other hand, we could connect the situation experienced by John and Pepe that night—apparently lost from their points of reference—with the next chapter in this book, the Incas looking at the night sky on top of the Andes mountains. Like poets or other creators, the Incas could be trying to make sense of an unknown language—a discussion that could remind us of metaphors in poetry. C02 Page: 11 Stage: Draft 4/19/24 12 Chapter 2 Notes 1. Jung, C. G. Collected Works (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1944), 130, 148, 400. 2. Jung, C. G. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934–1939 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 667, 745, 937. 3. Samuels, Andrew, Bani Shorter and Fred Plaut. A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis, (New York, NY Routledge, 1987), 72, 93. 4. Jung, C. G. Collected Works (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1944), 130, 148, 400. 5. Jung, C. G. Collected Works (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1944), 130, 148, 400.