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Preface
I was asked to serve on a panel as a respondent
to a presentation by Dr. Sue Grand, the author of
The Reproduction of Evil. She was to present a patient
who suffered from malignant trauma: a man who continued
to suffer an early annihilation, a man who, in spite
of multiple illnesses, dedicated his personal and
professional life for the health and welfare of
others while neglecting his own. Try as I might,
I could not find anything clever, informed, erudite
to say. I read the case and was immediately impacted
by the patient’s suffering. When snippets
of educated thought appeared on my inner screen,
they immediately evaporated. All that remained was
a felt sense of disqualification. Months of reflection,
reading and conference calls with my panel colleagues
did not resolve my impasse.
Having been informed the night before that the
man had just recently died, in the early hours of
the morning on the very day of the scheduled panel
at a national conference, I yielded to what I had
been compelled to say almost from my first reading
of the case. I wrote the following while in an active
meditation and it is what I spoke as a response.
Sometimes the inner world knows best.
The hall lights dim. The gathered quiet their voices.
The moderator taps the microphone at the lectern.
“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I am
the moderator for this panel. Our topic is malignant
attachment. The presenter will introduce us to her
client by reading her paper. The two panelists will
each respond and then participate in an open discussion.”
And so it went.
My Response
How does one survive malignant trauma: one that
perpetuates evil, one that distorts the capacity
to love and to work with the ethical strength on
behalf of the other and of oneself?
For the first time in my life, while reading Sue’s
book in 2002, I saw that EVIL was the opposite of
LIVE. And then I read Sue’s paper. Today,
I meet the man in Sue’s presentation through
her voice and passion.
I see the generational inheritance of Evil’s
cruelty, hardly dormant, eager to be awakened, present
in the genetic endowment of the pristine soul sowing
its seed of loneliness. I see that dissociative
contagion: a veil to be known, the impossibility
to be known the refusal to be known by self and
by others. The questions: Who are you? Who am I?
These are not sophomoric questions. They are poignantly
screamed by a barely audible voice that arises from
the residuals of a shattered sense of self. In the
face of demonic violence, the choice is not to be,
to remain unidentified, to be nameless, to be hidden,
to be beyond finding.
His illnesses are archetypal. His body screams what
his soul silences. He is a multifaceted illness.
He cups his diseases in the chalice caldron of his
body. He contains the contagion and the contagious.
He gives. That he knows how to do. He has no template
for receiving.
More and more, as I meet this man, I begin to experience
his larger than what appears reality; I feel the
immensity of the task ahead in therapy. Were I to
be his therapist, would I loose hope if I entered
into his world? What in me would be constellated?
Would my desire to be a vehicle and instrument of
healing and of wholeness making trick me into becoming
a mirror suffering servant? Would our attunement
find us both lost in our creative adjustments? He
would continue in his self-destructive dedication
to save others, to help them live; and I would draw
Evil out of him on to myself like a shaman sucking
venom out of the supplicant’s body. I felt
the realness. One mistake and we could both die.
I would give myself away, pump my blood into his
veins. He would be alarmed by the sudden surge of
life that, feeding the malignancy, would threaten
to unleash the imprisoned prisoner. He would have
to leave me for fear of destroying me. He would
have to renew his dedication to his sacrificial
life.
I think of the multiplicity of the mind, of his
multiplicity. I think of the findings of neuroscience,
of the sophisticated clinical approaches to treating
such an individual; but, most of all, I hear the
drums, see the dancing, smell the blood, tears,
sweat, dust as I inwardly witness the self-sacrifice
of the willing one at the Lakota Sundance. I catch
my breath and regain my courage. The archetypal
imagery of Isaiah’s suffering Servant resonates
within in quick succession. “He is a man of
sorrows acquainted with grief”, I say to myself.
“He bares our grief, … carries our sorrows.”
Part of me agrees with Job’s accusers. “We
esteem him stricken by God. We hide our face from
him. We do not esteem him.” Will I also hide
my face from him; withhold, recoil, or worst still,
impose, invade? “He was wounded for our transgressions,
… bruised for our iniquities.”
The Evil perpetrated upon this noble soul is also
my evil. Better him than me, I allow myself to think.
I want to heal him, fully headlong and unchecked,
to avoid my own healing work. He is dedicated to
healing others and avoids his own healing. I admire
him. I feel blinded and seduced by his heroism.
I forget his potential to harm.
Perhaps is it our lot, our calling, destiny, and
purpose to be selected and appointed. We are both
the goat led into the wilderness carrying the malignancy
away from the tribe and the good man leading the
goat.
I reorganize my body. I align my segments. Breathe.
Press my feet into the rug. Scan the room for here
and now grounding.
Our patient is the good man, the malignancy, and
the goat and the wilderness. Am I not that also?
He is more than what appears. He is a living archetype.
He is the face of Evil and Goodness. He is the battleground
of the ultimate opposites. He is Job reconciling,
on the dung heap, the forces of life and death beyond
my understanding. He is I. He is we.
He is unlike the contract killer I met years ago
in a maximum security prison who spoke of the sheer
pleasure of seeing his victims expire, and then
licked his lips at the prospect of doing it again
in the future. He is unlike the woman who, with
ice cold cruelty, declared that she would see her
husband ruined even if she had to destroy her own
children. Unlike these two soulless and selfless
individuals, this man holds the devouring serpent
within the fence of his skin and joins the ranks
of many throughout the ages. Those who chose, insanely
or heroically, to cut off their hand or poke out
their eye for fear of perpetrating onto others the
Evil that had befallen them.
And then, ad lib, I say the following to his therapist
and to the audience.
I am so grateful that he was led to and found Sue.
Had he knocked at my door, my resonance with him
would have eventually produced dissonance because
I recognize his life theme. It was, in a lesser
degree,
mine for years. It nearly killed me. I had swallowed
Paul’s motto unmetabolized. I can still recite
it from memory today. ‘I count my life as
nothing, nor do I count it as precious to myself
providing I bear witness to God’s Grace.’
I did not know in my early adult and professional
life that God’s Grace was Life in Abundance.
Today, I honor this man who lived his mystery,
sought to lead others to life in abundance, exiled
ravenous Evil in the desert of his body. I mourn
the loss of this good man on this earth.
I remember the prophet’s prayer: if only
there were one good person in the city, it could
be spared.
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