The Kissing Einsteins

A personal story of Jung's transcendent function and imagination's power to dissolve the tension of the opposites

When I first started studying psychology, I was fascinated but lost. I had joined a program that aimed to integrate depth psychology with somatic studies, following my longing to understand the mind-body connection and the unconscious, the mysterious entanglement of energy and matter. But I quickly realized how out of my depth I was. In classes we were being taught about psychological theories in language that was new to me, all of it confusing and intimidating, and also discussing impenetrable books and essays about these theories. I seriously questioned whether I was smart enough. Occasionally we were sitting in circles and practicing acknowledging our bodies. While the mind and body formally co-existed, and “embodiment” influenced the questions my professors were asking us, there was no synthesis, no integration. We were mostly re-enacting the mind-body split, but being asked to mend it. As I completed my first year of coursework, no further along in my understanding, I was in a state of low key panic, wondering WTF I was actually doing, and whether I was making a huge, expensive mistake.

My personal life was also at a crossroads. I was with someone I loved dearly, but I was also anxious about it. I had been given many warnings about how graduate school kills relationships. Right away I could see why. The time commitment was incredibly demanding, leaving no room for a romantic or social life. But that wasn’t even the hardest part. Studying depth psychology, even if I didn’t fully understand it yet, I could tell it was changing me. It was changing how I saw myself and my life. And I wanted it to change me, I wanted it to change my life. But could a relationship survive when just one partner in it changes? To add to that worry, we had been together long enough that the question was looming—would we take the next step and get married? I knew he wanted to get married; I was the one was the ambivalent hold-out. The time was approaching to either do it, or set each other free. The one other time I had taken the leap to marry someone, I had immediately regretted it. And my only models of long-lasting marriages were unhappy ones, marriages that only endured under the threat of hell-fire. Mostly I had seen divorces. I was a child of two people who should never have married. As the pressure of grad school mounted, so did the pressure to make a decision.

Then I had a dream.