On the Borderland

By Jerome Bernstein

Everything animate & inanimate has within it a spirit dimension and communicates in that dimension to those who can listen.

It was also a landmark year for American Indian tribes. Richard Nixon initiated what became the Indian Self-Determination Act. For the first time in the history of US/tribal relations, American Indians would be given the right to decide for themselves what was in their best interest, how to go about taking over the administration of selected programs from the federal government, and, like other Americans, to make their own mistakes and to live with and learn from them.

In the fall of 1971, within weeks of approval of this act, the newly elected chairman of the Navajo Nation called my business partner and said that he wanted to begin the process of restoring his tribe's culture, language, and dignity through the development of a tribal Division of Education. The plan was that henceforth Navajo children would be trained by Navajos in their own language by bilingual teachers who would teach Navajo culture and religion with pride. No such tribal-wide program had ever existed, and the chairman was well aware that starting this project on the Navajo Reservation (comprising a third of all tribal Indians in the United States, with a land base about the size of West Virginia) would set a precedent and establish a model for all Indian tribes and for the federal government as well. It was determined that I would go for a week's consultation.

I did know something about administration of school programs, but had never been on an Indian reservation and had never met a tribal Indian. The assignment was daunting. But something deep within me said there was a purpose in this calling. And so I went—full of trepidation.

When I arrived in Window Rock, Arizona, the capital of the Navajo Nation, the town was cold and lonely, even desolate. The desolation was accentuated by the ever-present dust which seemed to remind one of a silent, persistent history that demanded to be heard. I met with the Division of Education staff and staff of the newly established Navajo Community College to hear their ideas about priorities, resources, problems, and concerns. This required traveling virtually the whole of the reservation.

Early in my stay at Navajo I learned that for Navajos time is more circular than linear, more of a kairos than a kronos. It was not unusual when asking a Navajo the time to hear the response, "Skin time or White Man's time?" So the last day of my week, I was not too surprised when I arrived for a morning meeting, to find it was to take place in the afternoon. After the meeting I raced back to Window Rock in hopes of catching the Division of Education staff before they left at 5:00 pm. I was an hour and a half late. I knew that no one would be there when I returned, but I hoped the offices would not be locked. I had papers to pick up before leaving for Albuquerque to return to DC.

Over the next years I made many trips to Navajo, sometimes spending weeks at a time. In 1972 I met Carl Gorman, a Navajo native, who was an artist and teacher of art and Navajo history, culture, and religion. Carl had been a Navajo code talker during World War II.

Carl was the founding director of the newly established Office of Native Healing Sciences. In that position he worked cooperatively with the Navajo Medicine Man Association, a recently formed consortium. Carl's office and the association surveyed the Navajo medicine men in practice at that time and concluded that the youngest medicine man was somewhere between age sixty-eight and seventy-two. There were few, if any, younger Navajos in apprenticeship. It was obvious that if something were not done quickly, Navajo religion and healing would die out completely within fifteen to twenty years. Carl worked with the Medicine Man Association to recruit apprentices to work with individual medicine men to learn specific healing ceremonies.

Through these contacts, I was exposed to Navajo religion and healing over the next several years. This had a profound effect on me. I began to have healing dreams that involved Navajo and sometimes Hopi healers/medicine men. At the time I had been in Jungian analysis for more than two years, and I explored these dreams in my analysis. Over time, I realized that these dreams were leading me on a new path: I was to become a Jungian analyst myself. In 1974 I was accepted into training at the C. G. Jung Institute in New York, from which I graduated in 1980.

•••

From age twenty on, Hannah suffered from recurring nightmares with graphic images of a murderer coming after her. She had a history of suicide attempts as a teenager. Her five siblings suffered severe and chronic depression as well, and all had been sexually abused at some point in their lives. During our initial session she indicated that she again felt suicidal; the only thing stopping her was her care for her dog, who was dependent on her. Hannah's depression and despair were constant.

Hannah was an artist. She said of her painting: "I don't know how to bear the part of me that comes out." She painted animals almost exclusively. Sometimes she included human figures, but they were shadowy, usually considerably smaller than the animal figures. Her paintings were dark, the animals always in stages of stress, deprivation, mutilation, and torture. Hannah said that although these paintings did express suffering and pain, at the same time she had the hope that they expressed the possibility of transformation. She also stated: "I can't distinguish between my pain and the pain of other people. And it doesn't help when I do understand it."

Given Hannah's history, I began our work with a classical approach. I explored her family experiences and pursued in depth the issues of substance abuse, sexual abuse, and parental neglect. I employed the whole repertoire of techniques involved in a good psychoanalytic-psychotherapeutic approach, as we call it. This was helpful to some extent. But always during our sessions, I had the feeling that something was missing—something was not happening, some part of her was absent.

When Hannah brought her paintings into the sessions, things livened up considerably. I wasn't sure if this  resulted from relief that her painting offered her a way of dealing with her depression, isolation, and despair, or if it was more than that. Yet, noticeably, we both sensed relief.

One day, a year or so into the work, she arrived at my office very distressed. Driving home from our previous session, she had found herself behind a truck carrying two cows. Her feeling was that the cows were being taken to slaughter. I pursued the standard approach of suggesting that she was projecting onto the cows, that she saw her life circumstance in the plight of these cows. She went along with me for a time. But then she protested in frustration: "But it's the cows!" I interpreted her response as identification with animals she experienced as abused. She acknowledged the truth of my interpretations. She began to talk about all the animals in the world that exist only as domesticated beings, and their sadness. And again she burst out: "But it's the cows!" After that last protest—by now at the end of the session—I became aware in myself of Hannah's distress and her identification with the plight of these cows. And I also was aware of a different feeling in the room. The feeling was attached to Hannah, yet it was separate from her. It seemed of a different dimension. It was a new experience for me.

Over the next months Hannah struggled to wrench out of her unconscious the words to talk to me. Clearly she was extremely intelligent. Yet at times it seemed she was groping for a vocabulary that was beyond her reach —a vocabulary that perhaps didn't yet exist. Gradually, however, she did begin to communicate her feelings to me. And as she did, I was startled to realize that the things she was telling me I had heard once before.

During my analytical training I had also been learning from native elders and healers, particularly from my friend Carl Gorman, described earlier, from a Hopi elder whom I called Grandpa, and a Hopi medicine man, Homer. These men were teaching me a new way of looking at life. I realized that here were people whose involvement with Nature was completely different from the utilitarian, often adversarial if sometimes sentimental, attitude toward Nature that had characterized the Western mind for thousands of years. For the Navajo, religion and healing are the same. The psychic connection with Nature is the source of—and is inseparable from—spiritual and physical health. Illness is a "disconnection" with one's psychic roots. As I listened to Hannah struggle to articulate her emotions, I did "get it." It was indeed the cows. I realized that what Hannah was telling me was precisely the same message the native elders and healers were teaching me—and what my own unconscious was telling me through my dreams: Everything animate and inanimate has within it a spirit dimension and communicates in that dimension to those who can listen.

The Borderland" is what I call that psychic space where the overspecialized and overly rational Western ego is in the process of reconnecting with its split-off roots in Nature. Phrases such as "a reconnection to Nature" can conjure up the idealized image of Native Americans as portrayed in the movies, or "New Age" ideas and movements or vague allusions to ancient mysteries and the occult, many of which are perceived as "flaky" by the culture at large. Certainly, these ideas are indeed manifestations of a "reconnection with Nature" that is taking place in Western culture.

However, I am talking here of a profound, psychic process in which the very psychological nature and structure of the Western ego is evolving through dramatic changes. It is becoming something more and different from what we have known in the past.

Hannah is what I have come to call a "Borderland Personality." She lives in the Borderland. Hannah—as do many others—embodies and reflects an evolving psyche that is not only new unto itself, but one that in profound ways is strange and alien to her. Such people are the front line recipients of new psychic forms that are entering and impacting the Western psyche. They experience the tension resulting from split-off psychic material reconnecting with an ego that resists and is threatened by it.

These people personally experience, and must live out, the split from Nature on which the Western ego, as we know it, has been built. They feel (not feel about) the extinction of species; they feel (not feel about) the plight of animals that are no longer permitted to live by their own instincts, and which survive only in domesticated states to be used as pets or food. Such people are highly intuitive. Many, if not most, are psychic to some degree, whether they know it or not. They are deeply feeling, sometimes to such a degree that they find themselves in profound feeling states that seem irrational to them. Virtually all of them are highly sensitive on a bodily level. They experience the rape of the land in their bodies; they psychically, and sometimes physically, gasp at the poisoning of the atmosphere. Often they suffer from "environmental illness." This psychic identity with the objects of Nature, both animate and inanimate, is a phenomenon that anthropologist Lucien Levy-Bruhl recognized among native cultures, and which he called participation mystique. It is a psychic identification from which, up until recently, Westerners have been totally alienated. My experience working with Hannah brought into focus phenomena I had observed both inside and outside my practice over the past twenty years—phenomena that until now had made no sense.

The Borderland is a phenomenon of the collective unconscious. It is an evolutionary dynamic that is moving the Western psyche to reconnect our overspecialized ego to its natural psychic roots. It is my view that we are all in the grip of this unfolding. Indeed, our very survival as species Homo sapiens depends on many of these shifts that are taking place. The people I have dubbed Borderland personalities experience and incarnate these new psychic forms into their lives—and directly and indirectly into ours as members of the Western cultural collective. In the case of Hannah, I felt I was observing the impact of this evolutionary process on a specific individual.

A difference between Borderland personalities and non-Borderland personalities is that the former might be thought of as being three or more standard deviations out from the psychic norm. The rest of us, being closer to the Western rational norm at the center of the bell curve, still function in our preferred ignorance of Borderland phenomena. I say "preferred" ignorance because such phenomena do not readily fit our rational construct of the universe or of ourselves. Much of what might fall into the nonrational realm is perceived as irrational, that is, "counter-rational," and plays into a phobic abhorrence characteristic of the Western ego. More often than not, Borderland phenomena, if experienced at all, are simply dismissed out of hand.

•••

In recent years, physicists have been developing "field theory," wherein interactions between bodies are seen as the result of changes in space surrounding the bodies, as distinct from a concept of space as a vacuum in which forces external to the space determine the behavior of bodies. The study of weather patterns (for example, El Niρo, La Niρa) now reveals that storms and other meteorological phenomena are known to impact areas of the planet thousands of miles distant on a constant basis whether we perceive them or not. A popular conception of this phenomenon is the beating of a butterfly's wings at a distance of thousands of miles that is said to impact a "field," however immeasurably, on the other side of the Earth.

Ironically, this new direction in science, through the ideas of David Bohm and others, seems to be approaching a kind of "borderland realm" for the rational Western mind. It is in the field of quantum physics that an interface between nonrational and rational phenomena of the physical realm is studied and accepted to an increasing degree. Quantum physics posits that form—and form alone—is itself matter.

Most of us in the psychological professions are trained in the mold of the medical model of healing, that is, a rational model where all phenomena are made to fit logical/rational theories of psychological health (of cells, organs, personalities, behavior). Those phenomena that do not fit our theories are ipso facto labeled "pathological." The term as used is not only descriptive of a psychodynamic process, it is also a judgment. That which is pathological is "bad" and therefore must be "cured" (fixed, got rid of, cut out.) What I learned from my work with Hannah—and subsequently with other patients—is that the Borderland phenomena they experience are real. It is not just that these patients think these phenomena are real—they are real, however disquieting that notion may seem. Problems result from the fact that most often Borderland personalities themselves do not register their own experiences as real. They have been conditioned, like the rest of us with a Western ego, to identify with the negative bias against the nonrational realm of phenomenology. Thus they see their own Borderland experiences as "crazy"—as pathological. And because they do, they become more neurotic than would otherwise be the case.

Most Borderland people I have encountered have experienced early childhood trauma, often sexual trauma. Like Hannah, they carry deep wounds and neuroses which do fit standard rational psychological theories of mental health and do fit the medical model of healing. Great personal suffering often occurs when nonpathological Borderland experiences become fused with personal traumatic experiences and the neurotic layers of personality structure. This in turn amplifies and reinforces a person's neurosis. Hence the experiences are then labeled as pathological either by the individuals themselves or by the healing practitioner, by the family, or by others around them. This fusion of the personal with the nonpersonal makes it difficult to sort out which is which. This certainly was my problem in the first year or so of my work with Hannah.

Prior to our work together, Hannah could not distinguish between her own feelings and those of the Earth and the animals. When I first encouraged her to talk about the animals, she was reticent. She feared, understandably, that I would label her "crazy." And for a while, until I "got it," my insistence on relating her feelings exclusively to her personal history confused and exacerbated the situation.

However, Hannah and I were able to sort the psychopathology arising out of her upbringing from the Borderland phenomena. I was able to witness and authenticate her Borderland experiences as objective nonpersonal nonrational phenomena occurring in the natural universe for which she was not responsible. And as she came to understand this, she felt more sane and whole, and became dramatically healthier and more functional. This has also been the case with increasing numbers of patients who come into my office.

I have referred to the Borderland phenomenon as "sacred." Much of it is. By sacred I mean that which is transpersonal, beyond rational experience, and which carries a feeling of numinosity. It is a mystery connected to the source of life itself—that is, to the godhead. Indeed, the word "godhead" is a misnomer in that there is little of the rational mind that is connected with this dimension of the sacred. Here I am not talking about a personified godhead, a god after whom we are fashioned, but of a dimension that preexisted any concept of personified deity. I am talking about that dimension of the sacred that resides—consciously for tribal cultures—in Nature herself.

Navajo religion speaks to the source, the Mystery from which life in all its forms emerges, by calling upon the "Holy People." However, the Holy People are not so much personified creators as they are the purveyors of what is and what emerges from the Great Mystery. The various forms of the Holy People—Talking God, Calling God, First Man, First Woman, Changing Woman, Big Fly, Coyote, Wind, etc.—serve as mythological and symbolic messengers in a cosmology of all that is seen and unseen. They convey the knowledge of the way all things once were, and, in terms of basic order, the way that all things are intended to be. At the same time, each object, each symbol, each event has its own intrinsic spiritual form and purpose. We might take Wind as one example, as described in James K. McNeley's Holy Wind in Navajo Philosophy:

It was seen that in the creation of the world on Earth's surface, the Holy People, existing as inner forms of natural phenomena of the cardinal directions, were given the means of communicating with others by means of Winds. These Winds could be sent as their "messengers," their "means of knowing things" and of providing guidance to Earth Surface People. The Wind within and about the developing individual consists, in part, of such Messenger Winds conceived of as Little Winds or Wind's Child which exist within the Wind that is everywhere there is life. It is these Little Winds sent by the Holy Ones that are thought to provide the means of good Navajo thought and behavior.

This dimension of the sacred, as it is expressed here in the Navajo religion, was of necessity sacrificed to the development of what we have come to know as Western culture. It is to this dimension of the sacred that I believe evolution is now bringing us—to a reconnection in spite of our conscious intent. And it is a reconnection that is in process, a process that points forward, not backward, a process that is changing us profoundly. The nature of that change is the mystery that lies ahead.

I do not mean to idealize Nature or the dynamic I have called the Borderland personality. The process of evolution accepts, modifies, or rejects the forms through which an organism has passed—it does not revert to them. Hence my term "a reconnection to Nature" should not be confused with the idealized "back-to-nature" philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau or of the later nineteenth century writers and artists who followed him. Nor do I wish to idealize the suffering that Hannah and so many others experience. This would be cruel and completely missing the point. Environmental illness and dissociative states cannot be idealized.

Yet in many ways I do see Borderland personalities as heroic. In their struggles to survive and bring these sacred phenomena into our world—albeit in most cases unconsciously—they do work that benefits us all. Hannah does this through her painting; others write books; some do it in their consulting rooms, not only in the healing professions, but also even in the corporate world. Many, if not most, incarnate this sacred dimension in silent and unseen ways.

When I have the privilege of working with Borderland personalities, I am moved by their struggle to do not only their personal work, but our work for us, that is, for those of us who are much less connected to and in touch with the Borderland. I see the deeper thrust of this new phase in our psychic evolution as a pulling back from the brink of self-extinction. It is in this sense that Borderland people are the unrecognized heroes and heroines of our collective evolution toward growth, consciousness, and individuation. Theirs is a large and sacred work. To the extent this is true, we all will stand or fall with the outcome.

Jerome S. Bernstein is a Jungian analyst in Santa Fe. His works include Power and Politics: The Psychology of Soviet-American Partnership, and numerous articles on clinical issues and the psychology of the collective. This adaptation is from his forthcoming book, Listening in the Borderland: Differentiating the Pathological from the Sacred.