March 24, 2022

In a banner across the top, my computer calendar announces to me my stay this weekend at “The Best View in Independence Square” in Kyiv, Ukraine. 

I don’t know how my email, apps, and calendar link up with each other when I make reservations for things, but this particular pink announcement is an unexpected and tender reminder. At the start of the invasion of Ukraine, I joined with thousands of others in an act of solidarity by booking Airbnbs somewhere in Ukraine. In addition to getting a little bit of cash straight into a Ukrainian’s bank account, it was also a one-to-one connection to say: You’ve not been forgotten. The whole world is watching and thinking of you. I wrote a short note along with my booking. I did not express that I/we feel helpless to do much of anything but watch, maybe fly a Ukrainian flag, and send some money.

A day or two later, I received this response.

“Hello. Thank you very much! Me with my family and cats spend every night on the subway at Kyiv. Thank you very much, I really appreciate your help. All the Ukrainians are fighting back to back, young and old. Our people are heroic and they’re never going to give in.”

Connecting with this one individual did not make me feel any less helpless. I have no idea how much the little bit of money and solidarity helped her, if at all. But there is something powerful even in tone in this small use of modern technology to be able to connect directly to someone in the middle of a war. It feels almost like reaching across time or into the multiverse: I am so sorry that you are where you are and that we cannot stop it. I could be you, but I am not. I am in my house, with my things and my loved ones, unharmed.

In last week’s newsletter, I shared a quote from Jung’s 1932 essay, “The Development of Personality” and said I’d share more this week. I spent far too long typing up more of that essay for the newsletter today until I realized that . . . well . . . it’s just not speaking to me anymore. Not at the moment.

What is speaking to me is the work with psyche that has been unfolding in my Friday morning class, Working with the Unconscious. Each week—and increasingly—we’re working to stay present with what arises from psyche and to then be in relationship with whatever that may be. It’s moving to hear people share their experiences and explore this material from such a curious and courageous place.

I’m also moved by a lecture that Marie-Louise von Franz gave in 1976, and which we read for class today. This is one of my favorite articles. It’s jam-packed with von Franz’s ideas on active imagination and psychedelics, Carlos Castaneda, and apocalypse dreams.

I thought I'd share one particular excerpt regarding psyche and World War II that resonates in this moment of history. I share it again here, without commentary. I don’t know that there are grand lessons to be drawn from this story. It is just a moment of witnessing psyche and war; the reality of the inner world and the outer.

von Franz recounts a story she heard from a German professor of art history who was in World War II:

“He was not a Nazi and therefore entered the military service very unwillingly. He was on the Russian front when the news arrived: He and the men in his troop were going to be sacrificed—all killed—as a way to hold one position when the Russians attacked so that the other troops could rearrange themselves in the back and survive. That was the strategy: Push one company forward for the Russians to attack; the men have to hold on till nobody is alive. The men all knew that it was so, and they were all lying there, waiting for the attack and their end, when suddenly in the blazing sun this man, our art history professor, saw a German soldier, but without helmet, with bare head, blond hair, saying to him, “Orders. Come quickly!” He was lying on the ground—but he got up in response to the German soldier’s word and stood there, in front of the Russians. Nobody shot at him. He following his comrade into the woods some hundred meters. In the meantime he heard how the Russians had attacked in the back, and suddenly that figure of the German soldier dissolved—it had been a hallucination. All the others in his troop were killed; he alone had survived. So I always say to myself, if the unconscious wants to save somebody, it can do the craziest, most unexpected thing. If that man had figured out that he was hallucinating, he would have never saved himself. . . . So I would say, if the unconscious wants to kill somebody, it can kill you in bed, and if it wants to save you, it can save you even in a global catastrophe. So it's not worth bothering about it too much or in the wrong way!”

XO, Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies