Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Maria K.
Carl Jung, someone I care a lot about, who lived a while ago,
said that, "The world today hangs by a thin thread
and that thread is the psyche of man."
Now the psyche isn't just the things we know about,
the decisions, the plans we make.
It's the whole of our mental and psychological life.
And particularly, the psyche is that part of ourselves which also isn't expressed;
it's the medium through which we play our lives.
So, here she is.
This is the only piece of art I've ever done.
I'm not going to carry on doing art, but I did this about ten years ago.
(Laughter)
It's a picture I drew that in some way or another captured my early life.
As a child, without going into the gory details,
because I don't know if my family is in the audience or not,
I suffered from a great deal of psychological and physical injury.
And it meant that my life unfolded in a particular way
that was quite complicated.
Forty years later, I'm standing here,
newly engaged - by the way I'm wearing the ring on this finger
because it doesn't quite fit, alright?
We have to, you know, stretch it.
And my life is no longer there.
My life is still difficult,
someone with my kind of history is never completely straightforward,
but my life is rich and full, and lots of wonderful things happen in it.
It's also difficult, but mostly it's okay.
There are two really important factors. The one is that it eventually got me here.
The one is that I was born as a white person
in a time where South Africa protected the privilege of white people.
So in the 1960s, I had access to privilege and resources
in a way that many South Africans still don't have access to resources.
That's the first thing.
The second thing, by the time of my early twenties,
I knew I wasn't alright.
I was quite unstable, I was extremely anxious,
I was having these quite odd and multiple relationships -
I won't give you the details here, but you can imagine.
Things were not going that well.
A friend of mine said to me, "Why don't you try therapy?"
I was desperate enough to try it.
And what happened is in my first few sessions of therapy,
I realized that I had very little memory of the first 14 years of my life.
And that was an amazing thing.
I didn't know that I didn't have those memories
until somebody started asking me.
It started a life-long fascination with the unconscious mind.
And, of course, I'm not the only person to care about the unconscious mind.
Somebody like St. Augustine said,
"Memory is a vast, immeasurable sanctuary" -
I practiced for weeks for this one -
"Who can plumb its depths? And yet it is a faculty of my soul.
Although it is part of my nature, I cannot totally grasp all that I am.
This means, then, that the mind is too narrow to contain itself entirely.
But where is that part of it which it does not itself contain?
I am lost in wonder when I consider this problem.
It bewilders me.
Men go out and gaze in astonishment at high mountains,
the huge waves of the sea, the broad reaches of rivers,
the ocean that encircles the world, or the stars in their courses,
but they pay no attention to themselves."
(Laughter)
"My mind is troubled, like a fountain stirr'd;
and I myself see not the bottom of it."
Okay, here she is.
As I started working with a therapist,
over the years -
I've spent seventeen years there, so it's been a bit of a long process,
but, if I keep going with the medication, we think I could leave soon -
(Laughter)
I started to recover my memories.
And that was an amazing thing.
I realized that it was not lost, that what had ever happened to me
had simply been stored in my mind somewhere.
And slowly but surely, it started coming back.
I discovered access to my unconscious mind.
Now, I'm not the first person to do that, of course.
A man called Sigmund Freud - and by the way, Freud has a lovely quote.
He says that, "Wherever I have been, a poet has been before me."
And that's a bit, kind of, you know, there was a poet here earlier ...
(Laughter)
And people like Sigmund Freud and his colleagues -
one thing about Freud and his colleagues,
they argued enormously.
But people like Carl Jung, and Melanie Klein,
and Alfred Adler, Otto Rank,
they got together and they developed a set of theories
that helped us understand why the unconscious mind exists.
And what it does - this is the one thing they did agree on -
that the unconscious mind gets produced because it is a mechanism for survival.
Anything that we can't survive with
starts to be put down there, in the psyche.
Freud is also responsible for talk therapy.
Many people have a sort of quite odd notion of it,
but it's a fundamentally important technique,
because it's the belief that if we talk about ourselves, our feelings,
our dreams - he was big on dreams, "The Royal Road to the Unconscious" -
then we can start healing ourselves.
Certainly, that's been my experience.
So, this is me in my twenties.
I was what was called a "tough cookie."
I was a strategy consultant. You know, you can spot it with an MBA.
And how do you know someone's got an MBA?
It's because they tell you.
(Laughter)
So, that tough cookie looked as if she was on top of everything,
but underneath she was exceptionally afraid
and exceptionally sad,
actually, a lot of the time.
Slowly, but surely, as I worked with my therapist,
I started discovering exactly how I was burying the very vulnerability
that Brené Brown spoke about this morning.
And one day I was working at UWC,
and I was teaching the idea of the unconscious,
and a man was sitting, watching me, very quietly.
And in the break he called me, and he said to me
he has a four-year old daughter, and when she's naughty, he hits her.
And he hits her a lot and often.
And I carried on listening, and he said, having just listened to me,
he wonders, because he's noticed that she's very violent in other ways.
She's starting to be violent with other people
and with dogs and whatever.
He said, well, he's wondered
whether that violence is connected to his violence.
But that was the bravest insight.
The fact that he could make that connection
and speak to me about it meant everything.
And as he carried on talking, he started saying, well,
he had a very lonely childhood himself.
He'd lost his father at a very young age, which was tricky for him,
and he made the connection with his own story.
And his daughter is going to have a different life because of that.
Two things about the theory.
The one is that the human mind, the psyche, is very logical -
not the overt, objective logic that we all can imagine everybody holds,
but there's a very deep, private logic -
and that every one of our experiences, or especially the repeated experiences,
lay themselves down as foundations for how we experience the world further,
and how we perceive the world, and for our behavior.
So, when anybody does something random, it's not, in fact, random.
If you got to know them well enough, you'd understand the history.
And this morning Shannon spoke about Descartes.
She talked about the Cartesian way.
There's a lovely story about Descartes.
Apparently, six months before he died, he wrote this letter to a friend of his
that he realized that his whole life he'd been interested in cross-eyed people.
He loved people with crossed eyes.
And he had made the connection -
now this is the man that brought us the Cartesian way -
he'd made the connection that as a child,
he'd had a girlfriend, a little friend, who was cross-eyed.
And for the rest of his life, cross-eyed people were special to him.
In the book, I am trying to talk about depth psychology
in a way that it doesn't have a psychological background.
For people who don't have a psychological background.
So, I've eventually had my own children.
They are not going to have the life I had.
I know that.
I know that they are able to explore their spirits in a way that I wasn't.
And that is, I think, some of the power of depth psychology.
Guy Claxton wrote a beautiful book called "The Wayward Mind,"
in which he looks at the history of the unconscious.
He says, "Whether a culture's 'folk psychology,' as it is called,
incorporates an image of the unconscious, and what kind of image it is,
makes a real difference to how life is lived."
The problem though, as Brené Brown spoke about it this morning,
is we don't really wonder about our unconscious minds a lot.
We spend our whole lives organizing the world so that it can stay buried.
We have various addictions: We get addicted to work,
we get addicted to drugs and alcohol, to being aggressive with one another,
to ...
shopping -
Stop, we don't need to lose that, that can continue -
but we get addicted to all of those things,
and then we keep what's under the surface buried.
And all the symptoms that indicate there are things under the surface,
we also find a way to suppress them.
We anaesthetize ourselves; somebody spoke about that earlier.
Recently, I was at a large leadership conference in Sweden -
this is the lake we overlooked at the conference, it's very beautiful -
and there were 300 people -
there's a lot more here, a bit daunting, in fact -
there were 300 people at that conference, from more than 50 countries,
and they had wonderful ideas.
There was a magnificent man they called Mr. Toilet.
Have you heard of Mr. Toilet? He's transforming sanitation in the world.
And many of these people had these marvelous ideas
about how we can better the world.
But while I was at the conference, I started having physical symptoms.
My neck, eventually,
by the end of the four days, was completely constricted;
I felt as if I was suffocating.
And I wasn't sure what was going on.
I was extremely uncomfortable,
but my body does do some strange things, so I kind of got used to it.
But when I came back, I had a dream three days later.
And the dream is as follows:
As I'm walking along the side of the road, I see something sticking out of the soil,
and I bend down and I realize it's a finger.
It's a child's finger.
And I realize, in the dream - it was a shocking dream -
I realize that there's a child buried alive.
And I realize that 300 of the children in the town,
the poor children of the town, had been buried by the rich people.
That's the dream.
Which, of course, must be related to the conference,
because of the 300 figure.
As I thought about this finger sticking up, I wondered what it was.
And then I realized, it's that.
That what was wanting to be spoken about
at that conference with all those wonderful ideas,
and maybe that needs to be spoken about, is the suffering of children.
It needs to be spoken about.
And the suffering that's inside all of us needs to be spoken about.
I'm just going to speed up a little bit.
This is Henry; Henry lives in Prince Albert.
He hangs out outside the local OK, and he asks for money and food.
He's there at times when he should be at school.
Now, I know Henry is suffering.
I don't know his full story, but I know one thing about Henry.
Henry never smiles.
My daughter painted his face at the Prince Albert Olive Festival,
and that is what he looked like, but Henry still didn't smile.
Unless we can contact the suffering inside ourselves,
and we can be in touch with the bits of ourselves that are not okay,
we are not going to be able to talk to somebody like Henry.
And if we do contact that bit, something remarkable happens.
This is my godchild, by the way.
What happens is, if we face our own suffering,
we're able to connect with the suffering of other people
in a way that evokes empathy.
The thing about empathy,
the thing about getting to know somebody else's suffering,
is that we identify with them.
And if we identify, we develop empathy.
And empathy makes us activists.
Empathy makes us use our privilege differently,
it makes us make the changes that might make a difference
to somebody like little Henry.
Thank you very much, everybody.
(Applause)