---

What good psychology is interested in is what lets confrontation lead to change?

---

The Monthly Aspectarian: Please give us a brief history of how you got to be who and where you are now.

Harry Fogarty: I came into the field of religion and psychiatry, psychoanalysis, Jungian analysis through several twistings and turnings. In my earliest work as a young person I did a fair amount of teaching, especially teaching individuals who were clearly on the margin, working in reform schools, prisons, those types of settings. But felt that I probably could make a better contribution if I were doing something directly in the hard social sciences, like economics. So I moved from teaching to exploring being an economist. Ironically enough, that just reinspired my sense that the place for me was in a more hands on type of social interaction, whether it was therapeutic, ministerial, teaching ... and moved to actually becoming a pastoral counselor, working in ministry.

In the midst of that, over and over I kept bumping up against how much of our behaviors, personality and beliefs are driven by beliefs that we are not particularly conscious of. That was certainly true in my own life. I became all too aware that places where I found difficulty were often the result of things that I simply was dramatically unconscious of. It seemed that my exploring of them yielded two fruits. It let me be more at one with myself, and it actually allowed me to be more beneficially of service to others, whether they were patients in a hospital setting, or people who were seeing me for some form of counseling, or even, in fact, to move in a different way in teaching.

Along the way, I did a Ph.D. in Psychiatry and Religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York, making my focus the differences and similarities between the spiritual exercises of Ignatius Loyola and Carl Jung’s method of active imagination. I also decided to advance beyond the pastoral training I had had and become a Jungian analyst. So I moved into this personally. I moved into it out of a sense that this would be a better way to be of service. My interest all along had moved towards something that was interactive, a type of teaching in which the teaching is not indoctrination, but really an opening up in the individual to what is within themselves that they’re not aware of. Of course, I think that is the mainspring of analytic work, helping us to become aware of the forces within us that we need to have some type of harmony with. The more I’m aware of—as above, the more I can really deal with—so below. So to relate to some of the interests of your readership ... the more I really discover what is natally foreordained, vis-à-vis when I’m born, the more I can work with my givens and really harness them in a meaningful way for the group.

TMA: In that sense, do you work astrologically?

HF: I am attuned to the issues that people have astrologically in the sense that I am curious when they were born. I don’t make very active use in my therapy work of a person’s chart or transits, but if they bring it in or if there’s an opening, I’ll explore it. It’s certainly a way that I’ve thought about some of my own concerns.

TMA: So you’ve put some time into the study of astrology?

HF: Yes, I have.

TMA: All of this must make for some very interesting work. Talk about some of the high points.

HF: I’d say that the most interesting part of my work professionally has been the sense of how, in particular cases, something really unexpectedly alive presents itself. I find that that if I can enter into the work and be open to myself and the other person, there are often very curious high points. I’ll give you just one current example. Earlier this week, the cherry blossoms and crab apple blossoms, which were quite splendid, basically all descended to the ground at the same time. All of a sudden I had this very funny thought, “what beautiful snow.” I was recounting this to a patient who has been struggling with tremendous levels of illness and incapacitation, and it provided us a chance to look at how, when one might feel despondent, our life is brief, beauty is brief, my existence is brief. But there’s another way of looking at things, one where we experience something as quite beautiful or transcendent—literally, in this instance, on the prima materia, on the dirt of the earth, here’s this very unusual snow.

So I find kind of a continuous high point every time there’s a surprising, fresh integration of things that seem irreconcilable. I have felt that repeatedly in terms of teaching. The teaching that has been interesting to me has been where, with the group or the class, something really happens and the material is alive. So, for instance, the topic of this upcoming weekend is working with what Jung calls Shadow Material, or material that we are unaware of, like the shadow that we cast when the sun is shining.

I find it very interesting to move beyond the ordinary awareness, instead of dealing with the beam in my own eye and attacking the speck in yours. Many of us know that we go after people because somehow they’re too close to the bone, but for all of that knowledge, there’s very little movement. So I’m very curious about what it is that would let us meaningfully encounter what is in us. As I’m kind of amused by that off and on, I think we also need to have the experience of feeling accepted or loved or embraced so that we can begin to look at what’s split off within ourselves and work with it in a fresh way.

G.S: There are examples of the Shadow everywhere.

H.F: There is a beautiful Mexican movie called Amores Perros, the Love of Dogs. It’s a long and complicated story. It’s about the transformation of a man who was an academician, who then became a liberation guerilla fighter, basically abandoned his family, and then became a kind of gun for hire, a hit man. In the story, something allows him to discover what he has become and to change: He adopts a dog and he doesn’t know the dog’s history. He nurses this dog that’s nearly been killed back to life, and while he’s out one day, the dog kills all of the rest of his dogs. He is stunned. He wants to kill the dog. He wants to shoot it. But he realizes that it’s just a helpless dog, and he begins to see how he had lost himself. From that moment on, he is unable to kill. It’s like the beautiful example in Victor Hugo’s book that became a musical, Les Miserables. The bishop’s love of the thief makes the thief change. So I’m interested in what it is that unleashes not just our awareness of our projection, but what lets us really change.

Here is another example of what I mean by Shadow. A few weeks ago there was a great, quite understandable, human outcry about the American workers in Iraq who were taken out of their cars, beaten, killed, burned and then strung up on the bridge. It was a terrible sight, clearly dreadful. Very evocative, however, of a series of picture postcards that were quite popular in this country through the 1930s. They became an exhibition called “Without Sanctuary,” lynching photographs, or photographs of people in this country that had been rightly or wrongly rounded up and then killed multitudinous times. I can’t think of the author but the collection is in a book called Without Sanctuary and the subtitle is Lynching Photography in America.

TMA: There were popular postcards of pictures of lynchings?

HF: These cards were hugely popular. There would be a crowd of maybe a thousand people outside a refinery or standing around a hanging tree. The cards would be sent with a kind of ‘wish you had been here for the big event’ message. So here we are, we have our people on the bridge in Iraq and we have these lynchings in our collective memory. Now, what’s very interesting is this week there were some other photographs released. These are photographs of young men and women who we’ve sent over to Iraq, to do something. We don’t like these pictures. So now we have to beat up Donald Rumsfeld and all of these other people because clearly we’re not bad, we’re good. We would never do such bad things. This is a fluke. I think that when we look at our Shadow, we begin to realize that we do all of the same bad things. Then what’s intolerable for us, which is why nothing ever changes, is being willing to look at our badness, their badness, and try to figure what are we going to do together? How are we going to engage this together? As long as the badness is out there, it’s awful. Then if it sneaks in and we see it in ourselves, we quickly have to deny it. So I’m very interested in the political place of Shadow, the interpersonal place and the place in oneself.

An example in oneself ... a person has a thought that they think is reprehensible, and they have to be punished for having this thought or this urge, rather than wrestling with what does this urging or thought mean? It’s as if a kind of Plutonic surge brings up everything that we have stuffed down in the sewers and asks us to confront it. What I’m interested in, and to my mind what good psychology is interested in, is what lets that confrontation lead to change? As opposed to, “Oh, yes, you’re right; I, too, am a racist or a sexist or whatever, and that’s further proof that I’m a bad person.” What will let me confront my cut off feelings and thoughts in such a way that I can change?

There’s a very popular movie right now in Tehran called The Lizard. This movie is about a criminal who escapes from prison disguised as a cleric. And in his adopted identity, of course, it has forced him into all kinds of roles that are unpopular, and the country just loves the movie. The president thinks it’s great. The clerics are totally embarrassed by it because it’s this odd thing. It’s like Les Miserables, it’s the opposites coming together. So I think high points for me have been moments where I have felt, either in myself or in others, that we’ve managed to catch hold of this and something seems to evolve, whether it’s an individual therapy, a teaching setting or in some other way.

TMA: I usually think in terms of choice, empowerment through deeper understanding and making better choices.

HF: In my mid-thirties, a kind of high point for me was recognizing that I needed to make a personal change. I really felt my work just in pastoral ministry wouldn’t serve the needs that I had. It drew me, then, to wanting to find a way to work with individuals. Psychologically, I was often in the position of counseling people to do things that the official lines would have disagreed with. I kind of felt that this wasn’t good. It would be better, instead of me serving the official line but counseling people against it, or supporting them if they went against it, if I just found another way. That transition was kind of difficult, but in its own way a real high point. If you ask me about high points professionally, it’s the kind of things that I’m saying to you. If you ask me personally, there’ve been two or three dramatic moments where things actually changed for me, and one of them would be this period in my mid-thirties when I realized that I needed to move out of pastoral ministry without indicting it in general, but just saying it wasn’t right for me, and move into more formal work as a therapist and a teacher.

TMA: I’ve always admired Jung for his willingness to explore, and make use of what most consider metaphysical and dismiss out of hand.

HF: Things metaphysical, whether it’s astrology or any of the other ways that we have of gaining a perspective on ourselves ... I think there’s a risk in a lot of esoteric knowledge. That risk, I think, and I certainly have been vulnerable with this, is there is a confusion between a kind of knowledge and the implication that knowledge must lead in some way to transformed action. In the mythology of Odin, he pursues, with the rune stones and other devices, knowledge ceaselessly, but almost with no morality associated with it ... no necessary implication for action. If I become aware of things from my birth chart about the issues or confrontations I’ll have, or if I become aware of the aspects that are presented in my transits, that’s very useful knowledge. The question is, does that lead to me living in any different way? I am particularly interested in what it is that would really let us live in a different way. Short of that, it is all kind of hot air. If we don’t find some way that it moves us in a different way, we just repeat.

I’ve been interested in the last few years on aspects of evil, and very interested in what it is that we seem doomed to never get. Two examples come to mind. One is a recent essay by Susan Sontag in which she’s talking about evil and photographs. Specifically she’s talking about suffering in photographs, and why seeing the most awful things leads to us gasping, but nothing changing. She explores that as an issue. A different essay a few years ago looked at the American record in the 20th century of our passivity around American involvement in countries where genocidal acts are taking place. Each time the same pattern was followed. First there was denial, then grudging acceptance, then a sense that there was a problem but not our problem, then there was a sense that it was our problem, but, oops, too late! It happened over and over. I’m interested as to whether it’s metaphysical knowledge, political knowledge, personal knowledge, interpersonal knowledge ... what will let us catch this in such a way that we have an inner transformation? In large measure, that’s what I intend to address in these workshops.

---

Next Article