Newsletter 2012

Heartbreak: New Approaches to Healing: Recovering from lost love and mourning

Ginette Paris

Minneapolis: Mill City Press (World Books Collective), 2011, 297 pp.

Mind-brain issues are all the rage these days. Physical researchers scan and probe the brain and other parts of the anatomy in search of G-spots and God-spots. Within Jungian psychology and its offshoots, adepts debate the psychoid unconscious, the unus mundus and synchronicity, terms derived from C. G. Jung's fascination late in life with the idea that the psychic and physical worlds, the observer and observed, derive ultimately from the same source.

Heartbreak is a contribution to these discussions, informed by those who are writing from the cutting-edge of psychology and neurology, both inside and outside the Jungian-archetypal orbit.

It is the latest of around ten books written in English and French by Ginette Paris, a Montrealer whose friendship with the C. G. Jung Society of Montreal goes back for decades. When she reads the previous few sentences, that friendship may be slightly tested.

As a member of the core faculty of the Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, California, she no doubt gets to hobnob with many of the intellectual movers and shakers in the worlds of Jungian, archetypal and, God help her, Giegerichian psychology. She must be familiar with the sometimes convoluted and almost bitter debates that turn up in journals and colloquia in these circles.

But Heartbreak is no polemical pamphlet or ponderous tome. It is a book for just about anyone, or at least anyone with even rudimentary psychological knowledge. It can also be read with pleasure by those learned in the fields of depth psychology. Such luminaries as James Hillman, Michael Vannoy Adams, Jan Bauer and Stanton Marlan have written endorsements.

But it can also be read by, say, acolytes of Oprah Winfrey and Sarah Jessica Parker. I don't recall noticing the terms "psychoid" and unus mundus in this book, which has the clarity and accessibility one has come to expect from Ginette Paris.

And I do recall noticing the word "healing" in the title. She is not among those on the archetypal-interioristic cocktail circuit who see the soul as uninterested in the woes of mere people. Psychological babes in the woods who think psychologists ought to be interested in healing will find that Paris is of the same opinion.

Some might regard this as almost a self-help book, although it might better be described as a sort of antidote to such books. Heartbreak is about the healing of those suffering from the trauma of lost love, whether they have been dumped, betrayed or bereaved. In Paris' view, the heartbreak is much the same whether the lost lover is dead or alive.

One of her central points is that people in this situation cannot go back. There is no way of just making the pain stop. Although some may hope to recover a lost love, no one can achieve this. Even if there is a successful reconciliation between two separated partners, as occasionally happens, the new relationship will be different. Aside from stagnation or worse, the only way out is forward, Paris writes.

The mourner needs eventually to evolve–in other words, individuate.

Paris goes so far as to say that the loss of love through death or breakup is likely to turn out to be a great boon to the mourner. She coins the term “heartbreak-through” to denote the breakthrough to which heartbreak can lead. She quotes one of her patients, speaking of his broken relationship: "Breaking each other's heart was a necessity, a most valuable lesson about matters of the heart. I prefer the heart I have now, more than the heart I had then. Paradoxically, I am grateful for the heartbreak." (p. 236)

I suppose this could be a surprising and controversial view for someone unfamiliar with Jungian psychology. Neither I nor, I am sure, Paris would suggest that you turn up at funerals and congratulate the bereaved on their good fortune–or that you be too quick to congratulate the jilted and betrayed. She does use terms like betrayer and betrayed, by the way, but this strikes me as (at least partly almost a grammatical convenience;) Paris is not interested in the blame game.

Key ideas in Heartbreak–that therapy cannot just make the pain of heartbreak go away, that suffering a bereavement or breakup is likely to be a blessing in disguise–should not be surprising for anyone familiar with Jung and his ideas. This seems to me to be a particular case of the Jungian commonplace that a neurosis is likely be a stroke of good luck, spurring the neurotic on to psychological insights he would not have reached otherwise.

(This suggests that mourning is neurotic. I am not sure Paris would go that far, but her case material certainly makes the point that mourning often puts the spotlight on psychological difficulties that already existed, at least in a latent way, in the previous relationship.)

Paris' discussions of recent developments and writings by writers based outside Jungian thought and its heresies tend to be quite sympathetic and potentially helpful to readers unfamiliar with these writers. Paris does not seem interested in picking fights.

Exceptions would include some dissent from the writings of Alice Miller. Inevitably, she also has some problems with the Diagnostic Statistical Manual, (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association. But even in these two cases Paris’ views are nuanced.

There is a chapter on narcissism that I found particularly helpful, because I have never been sure what the word is supposed to mean. Paris reassures me that I am not alone. Basically, she says there are a few definitions around, they are not consistent with one another, and those who think their ex-lovers were narcissists can pick the definition that seems to work for them.

Her presentation of her central theme, the insights that modern neuroscience can offer to the mourner, also strikes me as remarkably, and classically, Jungian. For example, and especially, she draws on the work of Paul MacLean, who in 1952 suggested that the brain is really three brains in one, reflecting its evolution from the reptilian brain to the mammalian or limbic brain and finally to the development of the human neocortex. She suggests that the mourner needs to follow an evolutionary process from the reptilian crude crocodile to the mammalian "wimpy-puny-puppy" to the neocortical mature human, although always maintaining due regard for the earlier evolutionary stages.

Paris explicitly identifies this evolution with Jung's concept of individuation. So far as I can see, this puts her squarely on the side of classical Jungian thought, as distinguished from "archetypal" and other viewpoints that tend to regard emphasis on making the unconscious conscious as ego stuff and dubious.

Moreover, Paris' crocodile, puppy and mature human reminded me a lot of the "archetypal" Greek divinities she once wrote about in earlier books. But there are only three of these "archetypes" in MacLean's and Paris' scheme of things. (To be fair, I do not think Paris uses the word archetype with reference to MacLean's theory.) Here Paris strikes me as closer to Carl Jung, whose basic model includes a relatively small number of archetypes, than to "archetypal" psychologists who emphasize the possibility of many archetypes.

If I am right in reading Heartbreak as quite classically Jungian, I find this quite interesting, in view of the circles Paris moves in and her own evolution. But I hasten to add that whether this book is of a classical Jungian nature or not is of minor importance. What matters is whether this book is likely to provide help for mourners and contribute to soul-making, however defined. I think it is.

The state of publishing being what it is these days, it may not be easy to find copies of this book. I refer those interested to Paris's website at www.ginetteparis.com.

–Harvey Shepherd